Brief and Direct: The Benefits of Obamacare

April 30, 2013--Washington, DC--The White House

In a news conference this morning, President Obama was asked a question about the Affordable Health Care Act by reporter Chuck Todd: "Why does Senator [Max] Baucus... believe that this is going to be [a train wreck], and why do you believe he's wrong?"  The President's answer is enlightening.

"...A huge chunk of it's already been implemented. And for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they're already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don't know it. Their insurance is more secure, insurance companies can't drop them, uh, for bad reasons, their kids are able to stay on their health insurance until they're 26 years old, ahh, they're getting free preventive care. ...this thing's already happened, and their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before. Full stop. That's it. Now, they don't have to worry about anything else."

That's all?  He forgot these "benefits":

• Many workers are in danger of losing their existing insurance as it becomes too expensive for their employers to carry.
• Premium costs for the self-insured are already much higher
• The government is the 'decider' about what is a 'bad reason' for termination or a good enough one
• We get to pay extra for those 25-year-old 'children'
• The 'free' preventive care comes with strings, and surely somebody is paying for it
• A real unmentioned impact is that the cost of all health insurance is already skyrocketing
• People are being forced to carry insurance they don't want, or with more coverage than they want
• Payments to health care providers are being drastically cut to help offset the higher cost of administration of the new bureaucracy
• Taxes will go up to pay for the rest of the new bureaucracy and increased use of medical facilities
• One result: Doctors are already leaving their practices (I received a letter from mine today informing me she is retiring) which will mean a scarcity of care, whether there is 'coverage' or not
• Taxes will have to go up to pay premiums for all the newly covered indigent patients
• The 85 to 90 percent figure is made up out of whole cloth; there is no basis for it in reality
• Insurance premium costs are forecast to rise in future years to an unsustainable figure; the eventual result will be lower quality care, from less-qualified providers, less innovation in treatments, equipment, and medicine, and long waiting periods for much care
• The Administration is already talking about withholding certain treatments for patients beyond certain cutoff ages
• The AHCA is so onerous that businesses by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, are asking for exemptions to be excluded from it
• Even unions, Obama supporters, who wanted it before it passed are calling it a disaster in the making, as does Senator Baucus--"a train wreck." They have the resources to study, understand, and reject it
• Workers in some industries are having their hours cut back to keep businesses under the 50 full-time employee threshold
• Perhaps worst of all, it does nothing it was promised to do--it doesn't reduce or hold down costs, it will not end up with more people able to receive care in the end, and the quality of the care they do receive will be compromised

They might be worrying about those issues. They're already experiencing that "benefit," too.

Does the President not know these facts, or does he simply think that we don't know them? And why does it have to be reported in a blog, rather than in the MSM?

Originally published at RedState.com