The top 10 things every Illinoisan should know about ObamaCare and Medicaid
The Affordable Care Act, or ACA, commonly known as ObamaCare, is failing to deliver on its promises to provide health-care access and affordability. While some Illinoisans now have coverage, it has come at the expense of people like Michéle who lost her employer-based coverage as a result of the law and now struggles to find...
The Affordable Care Act, or ACA, commonly known as ObamaCare, is failing to deliver on its promises to provide health-care access and affordability. While some Illinoisans now have coverage, it has come at the expense of people like Michéle who lost her employer-based coverage as a result of the law and now struggles to find needed care for her sick child.
As the state gears up for the second ObamaCare open enrollment period that will begin in November, here are the top 10 things that every Illinoisan should know about ObamaCare and Medicaid:
1) It’s time for the Obama administration to come clean on enrollment numbers. Instead of counting people who have actually paid for a plan, the administration is counting anyone who put a plan in his shopping cart, but has not necessarily paid, as being enrolled.
2) The ACA threatens to run roughshod over Americans’ most personal financial and health-care information. There will always be vulnerabilities in any system, but the federal government failed to take the same security steps that any Fortune 500 company would take to protect customers’ most sensitive information.
3) Contrary to popular belief, ObamaCare was never designed to dramatically expand private health-care coverage; it has always been a massive Medicaid expansion scheme. In Illinois, the state reported 405,000 Medicaid enrollments compared to 217,ooo health insurance exchange “enrollments.”
4) Even though the ACA requires members of Congress to enroll in the program, they have managed to avoid the ObamaCare experience almost entirely. Apparently, many members are perfectly comfortable living by a different set of rules than the people they represent.
Despite the law’s failure on so many levels, some lawmakers in Springfield would still like to further expand ObamaCare’s reach into the state.
That’s why we’re asking Illinoisans to sign the “Another Broken Promise” petition. The petition calls on state lawmakers who continue to support ObamaCare to forgo their generous, taxpayer-funded health insurance benefits and voluntarily enter the ObamaCare insurance exchange.
5) According to the state’s own auditor, state workers had consistently failed to verify eligibility under the Medicaid program. Verifying program eligibility will be increasingly important as the state moves patients to managed care, where payments will be based on the number of program enrollees – eligible or ineligible.
6) ACA enrollments are falling far short of stated goals and have only reduced the number of uninsured by only half of the 2014 goal in Illinois.
7) Work hours in Illinois have dropped since ObamaCare was signed into law. ObamaCare is likely to cost more jobs and work hours in an already-frail economy. The evidence from Illinois shows that employers, particularly those with the lowest-wage workers and lowest average hours, have been dramatically cutting labor hours since 2011. This trend is highly suggestive and points to employers cutting employees’ hours to avoid ObamaCare’s harshest penalties.
8) The ACA has provisions to bail out insurers that lose money in the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. Americans could be forced to write a blank check to the health insurance industry.
9) Recent polling shows that opposition to the health-care law remains strong, especially among the uninsured.
10) If you like your health insurance, you can’t necessarily keep it. Bureaucrats in the Obama administration wrote regulations that deemed millions of policies substandard. These regulations were intended to throw large numbers into the ACA exchanges.