UnitedHealthcare and the ObamaCare Con
By: Allysia Finley
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Well, well. Progressives are at last acknowledging that ObamaCare is a failure. They aren’t doing so explicitly, of course, but their social-media screeds against insurers, triggered by last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggest as much. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers.
A Gallup survey released Friday affirms the sentiment, finding that only 44% of Americans rate U.S. healthcare good or excellent, down from 62% when Democrats passed ObamaCare in 2010. A mere 28% rate the country’s insurance coverage highly, an 11-point decline. ObamaCare may rank as the biggest political bait-and-switch in history.
Remember Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your health plan and doctor, you could keep them? Sorry. How about his claim that people with pre-existing conditions would be protected? Also not true. The biggest howler, however, was that healthcare would become more affordable.
Grant Democrats this: The law has advanced their political goal of expanding government control over insurers, in return for lavishing Americans with subsidies to buy overpriced, lousy products. (One might observe that Democrats are driving a similar Faustian bargain to induce automakers to produce more electric vehicles.)
At the same time, ObamaCare’s perverse effects are fueling public rage against insurers and support for a single-payer system that would eliminate them. Mr. Obama and Peter Orszag, the law’s chief architect, must be smiling. Mr. Orszag, now CEO of the financial-services firm Lazard, has dined out on advising health insurers on mergers he says were spurred by the law’s regulations. How convenient.
The U.S. is spending $2 trillion more on healthcare than in 2010. Yet Americans aren’t healthier, as a new paper by the Paragon Health Institute observes. Mortality rates for 25- to 64-year-olds from major medical causes, such as hypertensive diseases, diabetes and neurologic conditions, climbed between 2009 and 2019.
Frustration that the U.S. is spending more for worse outcomes—a similar phenomenon exists in K-12 education—is helping to drive the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Bigger government has benefited the health-industrial complex but not Americans.
One problem is that simply having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior. It does, however, cause them to use more care. This is a particular problem in Medicaid, since beneficiaries often rush to the emergency room for nonemergencies because they don’t have deductibles or co-pays.
Another problem: The nearly 100 million Americans on Medicaid or tightly regulated and generously subsidized exchange plans struggle to find doctors to treat them. Physician access for Medicaid patients has long been limited owing to the program’s low reimbursement rates.
It has gotten worse since ObamaCare expanded eligibility, as states have tried to hold down Medicaid costs by reducing reimbursements. A 2019 study found that patients were only half as likely to get an appointment with a doctor compared with privately insured patients before the law passed. Post-ObamaCare, they were less than one-third as likely. Medicaid is insurance in name only.
Patients with exchange plans hardly fare better. Affordable Care Act plan networks include on average only 40% of local physicians and 21% of those employed by hospitals. Patients must pay significantly more out of pocket to see out-of-network doctors. If you find a doctor in network, there’s no guarantee he’ll continue to be. Insurers are narrowing coverage to keep down costs.
They are also hiking deductibles, which this year averaged $5,241 for a typical plan. That’s up from $2,425 in 2014. Although subsidies reduce how much people with ObamaCare plans pay toward their premiums, they are stuck paying out of pocket until they hit their deductible.
Most healthy young people never do. That means their insurance is worthless except in the event of a catastrophic emergency, which was the gist of recent rants against insurers. Perhaps they should take up their grievances with Mr. Obama, since his law’s mandates and regulations are to blame.
ObamaCare requires plans to cover myriad government-determined “essential benefits” regardless of whether people need them. It also prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums based on a patient’s health-risk factors and limits their ability to do so for older people. The young and healthy are thus required to subsidize their elders, while taxpayers are required to subsidize everyone on the exchanges.
If the goal were to help Americans with costly health conditions, it would have been far simpler and less expensive to boost subsidies for state high-risk pools. But that wouldn’t have accomplished Democrats’ actual goal, which is to turn insurers into de facto public utilities and jerry-rig a halfway house to single-payer healthcare. What a con.
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For a good plan with the ACA, $350 - $600/month? In that ballpark. I had private insurance in 2001, cost? $950.00/month. From what I am reading, $600/month for private ins. today is an absolute bargain, but it's probably shit.
The ACA is much cheaper than most, "public" healthcare plans. Look it up. Also, in 2009, 62% of all bankruptcies in the USA were caused by medical issues.
The article is a bit dated, but it hasn't changed much over the years.
The study people cite for this classifies any bankruptcy with any medical debt as a " medical bankruptcy". So if you owe $2million on a business loan and $100 on an old copay, they pretend the copay caused the bankruptcy.
It was written by a political lobby bucking for single payer healthcare.
I have VA ins so I don't have a dog in this fight, but I had 9 surgeries in two years; a bowel resection that went bad resulting in a loop illiostomy, (that was reversed in 2008), total cost? 1.5 million. The cost of healthcare in the USA is off the charts high.
This presumes that the political goal wasn't making affluent white people "feel better" about "doing something" about the uninsured.
Republicans have done everything they can to sabotage healthcare since the ACA was passed. And now they have the gall to claim it was a failure all along. Not that is some gaslighting.