ObamaCare: Year-end review
It is not uncommon for a president’s signature policy to unanimously make every news outlet’s top stories of the year list. But when that policy provides late-night talk show fodder and comedy sketch parody material for the same policy would be. Beating out the George Zimmerman trial, the birth of a royal baby and the...
It is not uncommon for a president’s signature policy to unanimously make every news outlet’s top stories of the year list. But when that policy provides late-night talk show fodder and comedy sketch parody material for the same policy would be.
Beating out the George Zimmerman trial, the birth of a royal baby and the Boston Marathon bombing, the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, was both celebrated for the promise of expanding health insurance coverage to millions of uninsured and scorned for its big government approach. This year, however, the vast majority of attention is being paid to its calamitous rollout.
At the end of 2013, it appears that ObamaCare will result in more people losing coverage than gaining it. More than 5 million policyholders have received notices that their health insurance coverage was being canceled. The reason? Their plans do not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act to provide a specific set of health coverages and benefits under the new law.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that 365,000 people have “enrolled” in ObamaCare through the end of November, with another 800,000 eligible for Medicaid.
In Illinois, about 185,000 policyholders have lost their individual market health insurance coverage as of November. Only about 7,000 have been enrolled in private coverage through ObamaCare. Both nationally and in Illinois, more people are now uninsured than insured thanks to ObamaCare.
The numerous failures of the healthcare.gov website, the broken promise that “if you like you health insurance, you can keep it” and the low enrollment in ObamaCare are not the result of the president’s grand political strategy. These harmful outcomes are the unintended consequences of a law that is based on the fundamental idea that government knows better.
The ObamaCare promises were duplicitous – and the defense of its failings, up to this point, has only served to reinforce this view. Lost in the political shuffle surrounding the president’s health coverage overhaul are millions of Americans who deserve better.
The goal for health care reform should always be to restore a truly free market in health care that also provides accessible, high-quality and affordable health care to Illinois’ most vulnerable residents. At the starting point of any reform proposal should be converting the current bureaucratic, government-controlled health insurance system in the state into one that is based on a “true” insurance system – and relies on the free market as the primary mechanism to deliver services. That is a New Year’s resolution worth keeping in 2014.