Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse Blog
August 4, 2013
Everybody in America wants health care – but most Americans seem to want someone else to pay for it. In the United States today, the way that our system works is that the hard working, productive members of society pay for the health care of everyone else. At least under socialism everyone gets the same benefits. Our system of health care is a very twisted version of socialism where millions upon millions of very hard working people are forced to pay for the health care of others, but often can’t afford to purchase decent health insurance for themselves. Personally, I don’t have a big employer paying for my health care so I have to buy it myself, and I just got a letter from my health insurance company telling me that I have another massive rate increase coming up. Have you gotten a similar letter? Health insurance premiums are going up all over America, and this is just the beginning. In fact, the CEO of Aetna says that health insurance rates for many Americans will double when the major provisions of Obamacare kick in next year.
It would be bad enough if hard working Americans just had to pay for their own health insurance. But no, they are also expected to pay for the health care of members of Congress, employees of the IRS and other federal agencies, state and local government employees, their adult kids (because they can’t afford health insurance), the elderly, the poor, and now under Obamacare they will also be expected to subsidize the health plans of tens of millions of other Americans that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
When you add it all up, the hard working, productive members of society are at least partially subsidizing the health care of well over half of all Americans while having to pay for their own health care at the same time.
Needless to say, it isn’t too hard to see who is getting the raw end of the deal.
Members of Congress certainly don’t want to pay for their own health care. There was panic in the halls of Congress recently when they started realizing that due to certain provisions in Obamacare they may soon be forced to pay for their own health insurance plans. There was widespread moaning and complaining about how they would be facing “thousands of dollars in additional premium payments” every year.
Things got so bad that Barack Obama got personally involved in the effort to find a solution. Thankfully, members of Congress can relaxbecause a ruling is being issued that will allow the federal government to continue to subsidize 75 percent of the cost of their health plans…
Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy — their health care tab is not going to soar next year.
The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue a ruling that says the government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides, according to several Hill sources.
A White House official confirmed the deal and said the proposed regulations will be issued next week.
And the IRS, which has been put in charge of imposing the rules of Obamacare on all the rest of us, is freaking out about the fact that some members of Congress would like to force them to personally participate in Obamacare…
The union that represents IRS employees is urging its members to write to their congressmen to help get the union out of Obamacare.
The following are some excerpts from a letter that the union that represents IRS employees sent to members of Congress…
“H.R. 1780 would put federal employees in a special class where they would be prohibited from receiving health insurance through their employer. It would treat federal employees differently from state and local government employees and most employees of large private sector companies who receive health insurance benefits through their employer. The primary purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to provide a marketplace for the sale and purchase of health insurance for those who do not have such coverage – not to take coverage away from employees who already receive it through their employers,” the letter reads.
“I work hard and am proud of the services that I provide to your constituents every day. One of the main benefits I receive as a federal employee is the ability to purchase health insurance coverage through the FEHBP with an employer contribution towards those benefits. Please let me know your views on this legislation. I look forward to hearing back from you,” the letter concludes.
This is just shameful. If the IRS is going to impose Obamacare on the rest of America, then it should be good enough for them too.
Just check out acting IRS chief Danny Werfel begging for employees of his agency not to have to go on Obamacare…
But we have always had to at least partially subsidize the health plans of federal, state and local government workers.
The big change under Obamacare is that we will soon be subsidizing the health plans of tens of millions of our fellow Americans.
CNN says that 26 million Americans will be eligible for health insurance subsidies, but others believe that the true number is far, far higher than that.
For example, according to CNBC, a family of three in New York that earns $ 78,120 a year would be eligible for a subsidy of more than five thousand dollars…
In New York, a family of three whose annual income totals $ 78,120, would pay $ 12,784 for the second-lower-priced silver plan on that state’s insurance exchange. After getting a $ 5,363 tax credit, the family’s net cost for the insurance would be $ 7,421.
So who pays for that?
You and I do through our tax dollars.
And if you can believe it, Obamacare actually provides an incentive to not work too hard, because if you make too much money you could lose your health insurance subsidy…
Working more could ultimately mean thousands of dollars less for you under a quirk in the new health-care law going into effect this fall. This could prompt some people to cut back on their hours to avoid losing money.
“Working more can actually leave you worse off,” the price-comparison site ValuePenguin.com notes in anew analysis.
“It’s sort of an absurd scenario,” said Jonathan Wu, ValuePenguin.com’s co-founder. “It’s something for people to be aware of.”
In that scenario, an individual or family whose annual income surpasses maximums set by the federal government—if only by $ 1—will totally lose subsidies available to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
What a perverse system.
And of course Obamacare will allow young adults to stay on the health insurance policies of their parents until they reach 26 years of age. As I mentioned the other day, 36 percent of all young adults in the 18 to 31 age bracket are currently living with their folks. In most of those cases, the parents have to end up footing the bill for health care because the kids simply cannot afford it.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Medicaid continues to expand as well. Certainly helping the poor is a very good thing, but unfortunately the number of poor just continues to explode.
Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse.
Right now, there are more than 56 million Americans on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americansto the Medicaid rolls.
It is going to take a whole lot of money to support 72 million Medicaid patients.
And then of course there is Medicare.
When Medicare was first established, we were told that it would cost about $ 12 billion a year by the time 1990 rolled around.
Instead, it actually cost the federal government $ 110 billion in 1990, and it will cost the federal government close to $ 600 billion this year.
But if you think this is bad, just wait until all of the Baby Boomers retire. It is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025. By then, we would be spending well over a trillion dollars a year on Medicare.
As you can see, under Obamacare the vast majority of all Americans will have their health care at least partially subsidized.
And it expected that our tax dollars will somehow be enough to pay for all of this.
The truth is that we have a deeply broken system. Costs are spiraling out of control and nobody is quite sure how to fix things. The following statistics come from one of my previous articles entitled “50 Signs That The U.S. Health Care System Is A Gigantic Money Making Scam“…
-This year the American people will spend approximately 2.8 trillion dollars on health care, and it is being projected that Americans will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019.
-The United States spends more on health care than Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia combined.
-If the U.S. health care system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.
-Back in 1960, an average of $ 147 was spent per person on health care in the United States. By 2009, that number had skyrocketed to $ 8,086.
The sad thing is that many hard working Americans in the private sector are being forced to subsidize the health care of others, but they can’t even afford decent health care for themselves.
For example, I know of one hard working couple that has a health plan that has a $ 1,000 deductible. Even with that deductible, their health insurance premiums are absolutely ridiculous. Their health care strategy is simply to avoid going to the hospital or visiting a doctor as much as possible.
And of course health insurance companies make money by providing as little health care as possible. Many Americans have discovered that when you need them the most, some health insurance companies will try to get out of covering you any way that they possibly can.
The reality is that just because you have health insurance that does not mean that you are “covered”.
According to a study that was published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved people that actually did have health insurance.
So what is the bottom line?
The bottom line is the system stinks, and Obamacare is going to make things a whole lot worse.
This article was posted: Sunday, August 4, 2013 at 4:31 am
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