Armageddon (19 page)

Can't Hillary just attack the deal and disavow it? No way. This agreement is the most important foreign policy “achievement” of the Obama administration. Virtually all the Democratic senators and congressmen backed it. For the nominee of the party to abandon it or attack it would produce a giant schism in Hillary's ranks.
She is stuck with this horrible deal and it will help to drag her down to defeat.

Already Trump is all over the issue. Trump even wondered if there was some ulterior motive for Obama to OK the deal. “It's almost like there has to be something else going on,” he said. “I don't think there is, I just don't think they're competent.”

“Who would make that deal?” Trump asked, suggesting Tehran was celebrating as the agreement was being negotiated. And of Secretary of State John Kerry, he added, “I can't believe they didn't walk from that negotiation.”
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Even during the treaty negotiations, Iran's leaders were avowing and reaffirming their intention to obliterate Israel. Iranian commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of the Basij paramilitary forces, came out and stated: “The destruction of Israel is non-negotiable.” Even as Congress was voting on the deal, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted that “God willing” there would be no Israel in 25 years.
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Whether the issue is the proliferation of ISIS, the erosion of Israeli security, the increased terror threat to Americans in their daily lives, the admission of Syrian refugees (which could let terrorists into the United States), or containing Iran's nuclear ambitions, Hillary is vulnerable. Her tenure as secretary of state, rather than reinforcing her ability to govern, kindles serious doubts about her capacity for making sound policy choices.

Iran, Terrorism, and Obamacare are the three most potent issues we can use to win in 2016. Hillary is, of course, intimately tied to all three. She cannot escape blame for the first two since they metastasized on her watch as secretary of state. And she is the true mother of Obamacare, having spent all of 1993 and 1994 pushing its antecedent and close relative, Hillarycare.

Obamacare has gone from being the poster child for the Obama administration, its chief legacy, to standing as a prime example of
what is wrong with the government taking over every aspect of medical care. The program is such a disaster, so terribly conceived, that it has become an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party.

With each piece of bad news, approval of the program wanes. According to the
New York Times
/CBS survey, approval of Obamacare dropped from 47% support and 44% oppose in June of 2015 to only 40% support and 52% oppose in December, six months later. The most recent poll—at this writing—was completed by Rasmussen on March 1, 2016, and found Obamacare still underwater with support down to 43% and disapproval up to 54%.
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And remember, before there was Obamacare, there was Hillarycare, her 1993 version of the program. So deeply is Hillary identified with mandatory government health insurance that we can beat her on this issue alone. We don't even need the Benghazi issue. Or the e-mails. Or even the speeches-for-favors deals. Forget her and Bill raking in over $100 million for speeches. Obamacare, Hillarycare, are enough to defeat her. Who ever would have imagined that Obamacare would collapse under its own weight—that before the Republicans could take the presidency and repeal this obnoxious statute, its own inherent flaws are bringing about its demise?

Obamacare is in a death spiral. The president's socialistic/bureaucratic insistence that everyone get full health care coverage for every possible service, whether they want it or not or need it or not, has driven costs so high that young, healthy people are refusing to buy policies. After all, why should a man get covered for maternity costs? Why do we all need to cover sex change surgery? Substance abuse therapy? Psychotherapy costs? By loading the insurance policies you have to get under Obamacare with all these goodies, the cost of premiums became astronomical. And when the Obama administration found the high premiums embarrassing, they got the insurance companies to hold them down by charging outrageous deductibles of $7,000 or more and by demanding onerous copayments.

Obamacare was such a bad deal that the target audience—healthy young people—spurned it. When young people rejected his program, Obama tried to force them to get covered by fining those who refused up to 2% of their income or $325 per year. But even so, 34 million Americans still have refused to buy insurance.

Obamacare has come to be only for the sick, needy, and older patients (still under 65) making the risk pool unsustainable. Of course, insurance companies passed on these high costs to the consumer, fanning their rebellion against the program. Obama's solution was to guarantee insurance company profits with federal tax money, in effect, making them public utilities.

It was the opposition of the insurance industry that killed Hillary's health care program in 1993. To sign up their support this time Obama bought their backing for his plan by inserting the “risk corridors” provision that provided for government subsidies should insurance profits fall from their projected levels. In 2014, the government paid almost $1 billion to insurance companies, making them America's newest and richest welfare recipients.

But for once, Congress acted to rein in Obama's largesse and insurance company greed. Faced with rising subsidies triggered by diminishing insurance company profits, Republicans, led by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, capped the amount of subsidy the insurers could get, terminating the open-ended commitment to company profits Obama had made.

The result was that insurance companies pulled out of Obamacare entirely. UnitedHealth, the nation's largest health insurer, announced that it would not cover people in most Obamacare exchanges, leaving half a million without coverage. The company suspended marketing of its Obamacare exchange plans for 2016, saying, “We see no data pointing to improvement”
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in the financial performance of public-exchange plans. Other companies are also reassessing their participation in the program. Cigna Insurance appears likely to follow UnitedHealth's lead. Soon, all the others will follow as their stockholders come to demand an end to the bleeding.

Even as the insurance companies are abandoning the shipwreck that Obamacare has become, doctors are voting with their feet to leave the discredited program as fast as they can. Already, about a quarter of all doctors in America have refused to participate. By mid-2014, 214,524 of America's 893,851 doctors won't allow Obamacare health exchanges to offer their services. Seventy percent of California's doctors have turned their backs and refused to enroll in the program
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(only 1% of doctors refuse to participate in Medicare).

In the ultimate insult to Obamacare, one-third of the uninsured have said they have no intention of purchasing Obamacare coverage despite the fines they may face for not doing so. Treasury officials estimate that between three and six million Americans will have to pay a tax penalty for not having insurance in 2014. While the fine was modest—$95 or 1% of income, whichever is higher—it rose to $325 or 2% of income in 2015. Still tens of millions think so badly of Obamacare that they'd rather pay the fine than get covered. Another 15 million to 30 million people requested and got exemptions from having to pay the fine. These included illegal immigrants, low-income people, and those for whom insurance premiums were more than 8% of their household income.

Bankrate's latest health insurance Pulse survey found that 34% of the uninsured “have no intention of buying insurance.” Forty-one percent cited cost as the reason, 17% said they oppose Obamacare, and 13% said they are healthy and don't need it.
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To try to counter this avalanche of negative publicity, the Obama administration has called attention to the fact that a net of 16.9 million people who were uninsured have become insured since the program started.

But the stat is deceiving.

• • More than half of them got insurance through employer-sponsored health plans that have nothing at all to do with
  Obamacare. (Remember that the employer mandate to provide coverage has not yet kicked in).
  
• • Another 6.5 million (20%) got their coverage through Medicaid, a welfare program that predates Obamacare by some 50 years. (Obamacare did raise the income level at which one could be eligible for Medicaid, but it's the same old program).
  
• • And 1.2 million (3%) got individual plans that have nothing to do with Obamacare.
  

That leaves a net of 9.1 million people whom Obama says have gotten coverage through the Obamacare exchanges. But half of them previously had insurance that the government made them cancel.

So all told, only 4.1 million people who were previously uninsured got coverage through Obamacare's exchanges, a minuscule number in a nation of 320 million people.

Nor is the situation likely to get much better. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that only one million new people will sign up for Obamacare during the 2015–2016 enrollment period—way short of the hopes and projections of the program's sponsors.

Obamacare is dying.

As fewer young and healthy people apply for coverage, the risk pool that insurers must cover becomes older and sicker, forcing premiums up. And the more premiums rise, the more young and healthy people see no reason to buy. Obamacare premiums are projected to rise by 20.3% in 2016, instead of the 7.5% the government had predicted.

Now reports are coming in that those who are currently signing up for Obamacare are sicker than those who have already signed up—which means even higher premiums for everybody. The
New York Times
reported that “people newly insured under the Affordable
Care Act were sicker, used more medical care and had higher medical costs than those who already had coverage.” The paper noted that “because insurers' premiums have to cover their medical expenses, the new report helps explain why Blue Cross plans have sought, and insurance commissioners have approved, substantial rate increases in many states.”
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Healthy and young people are being forced into the health insurance boat with older and sicker patients, driving up their cost just as they face the financial pressures of starting a family and paying off student loans. So a great many are choosing not to buy insurance at all and pay the fine instead. And the premiums were plenty high before these rate increases.

In his weekly address on January 22, 2016, President Obama said, “Most folks buying a plan on the marketplace can find an option that costs less than $75 a month.”
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$75 a month? What planet has he been living on? $840 a month is more like it. That's the average premium for a family of four. For a single person, the premiums run about $240 a month!

Hillary, too, seems not to realize how heavy the cost of insurance has become under her pet program. At a town hall meeting in Ohio, she came face-to-face with a real person—Teresa O'Donnell, an office manager—who told Hillary that her insurance premiums for her family had risen from $490 to $1,081 per month.

“I know Obama told us that we'd be paying a little more,” O'Donnell said. “But doubling, over doubling, my health insurance cost has not been ‘a little more.' It has been difficult to come up with that kind of payment every month. I would like to vote Democratic, but it's cost me a lot of money, and I'm just wondering if Democrats really realize how difficult it's been on working-class Americans to finance Obamacare?”
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Incredulous, Hillary asked O'Donnell: “So you were going to a broker and buying a health insurance policy? And in effect, it nearly tripled after you went onto the exchange and bought a policy under the Affordable Care Act? Is that right?” Clinton asked.

O'Donnell answered, “We could not do that. It was much more expensive than just purchasing private insurance from an insurance company.”

“So you're still buying the private insurance directly?” Clinton said.

“Yes,” O'Donnell said.

Hillary swung into her speech about how much she wanted to get the cost down and then, in a moment Marie Antoinette (who said, “Let them eat cake”) would envy, Hillary recommended to O'Donnell to keep shopping. “And one thing that I would like you to do, and I'm not saying it's going to make a difference, but I would like you to just go shopping on that exchange,” Clinton said.
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Welcome to the planet Earth, Hillary!

(Actually, Obama promised to cut premiums when he first ran for president. He said, “We will start, by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 per family.”
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)

Part of the problem is that about a quarter of those who need a federal subsidy to afford Obamacare can't get it. They fall into the cracks in between coverage. They are too rich for Medicaid and too poor for Obamacare subsidies. The gap was created when the Supreme Court ruled that states do not have to expand their Medicaid program as required by Obamacare. As a result, 21 states have taken advantage of the Court ruling and refused to do so.

Obamacare's subsidies were meant to come on top of Medicaid. Medicaid was supposed to cover people up to about $25,000 of income and the Obamacare subsidies kicked in for those with incomes above $25,000. But in the states that refused to expand their Medicaid program, Medicaid may only be available for people making less than $10,000, leaving those earning between $10,000 and $25,000 uncovered.

But higher premiums are only part of the story. The real kicker is the high deductibles on most plans. They are a total disaster.

The New York Times
noted that “for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.”
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