Obamacare: A Deception
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/02/03/obamacare-a-primer/
For those of you liberals who think that Obamacare is the greatest thing since sliced bread (you are totally wrong) and for those conservatives that think Obamacare is a socialist gift to the poor (ditto), here is the dish on the reality. As I have said a number of times, Obamacare (which is indistinguishable from Romneycare and for all intents and purposes _exactly_ the same thing that the GOP pushed when Clinton was trying to do universal health care) is nothing more than a MASSIVE gift to the health insurance industry, a transfer of taxpayer dollars from the pockets of the poor into the pockets of the rich, no different at all than the transfer of taxpayer dollars to pockets of Wall Street, agriculture, oil, etc. Oh, to you conservatives out there railing against that damn socialist in office, first, look up the definition of socialist and stop using that term and second, there is no way the insurance industry is going to let the GOP take away their new candy, not without a fight that will no doubt cost the GOP the house. This is a quote from the beginning of the article (which is down a bit from the introduction) that sort of says it all:
The ACA was not selflessly designed with the intent of providing affordable and equitable medical services to those in need, but rather to acquire taxpayer money for the private insurance companies under the seemingly helpful guise of health care and the ideological excuse of personal responsibility. It takes money from ordinary people and gives it to a medical insurance industry that profits handsomely from this legally-enforced corporate welfare – all while keeping Americans locked in the same broken system that puts profit before patients. The law was essentially written by business executives from the industry so that special interests would not be upset and profits assured.
For those of you who think that Obamacare is the first step to socialized medicine (i.e., universal health care via Medicaid), you need to learn about the cute topic of “estate recovery”. If you use Medicaid (ever!), when you die the state has the ‘option’ (who thinks that that option won’t be exercised?) to recover what it spent on you from your estate when you die. So really, this is a way to get around that pesky estate tax exemption for poor people (‘poor’ being relative, of course, since the exemption is currently $5 million) which allows the state to go after the assets of the poor people forced (yes, you heard that right; read the article!) on to Medicaid. Of course, a lot of poor people won’t have any assets left, so really this is yet another ding against the middle class (who often become poor with few assets by the time they kick off, due to escalating medical costs, etc.) and will target that vast swath of humanity that has estates less than $5 million.
I am pretty much in the camp of Obamacare being worse than nothing. People are forced into paying for a product they have no control over, it is essentially put in place to fleece them (look at the deductibles!) and ultimately (in my mind) is nothing more than a regressive tax on poor (where ‘poor’ is at our median income or less; really! median income! half of our population is now ‘poor’!) with the proceeds going (via the wonderful IRS) _prepaid_(!) to the healthcare insurance industry. There is fine print that allows the health care insurance exchanges to dump people who have pre-existing conditions (you can, btw, pretty much ignore _anything_ you have heard about Obamacare from any politician or anyone inside the beltway (good or bad)), so basically only healthy people will be allowed to be insured. It is a great scam! The government mandating that you pay money to a for-profit entity. Socialism for capitalistic companies, no different than the bank bailouts! Don’t give no stinkin money to those devastated from the crisis fabricated by Wall Street titans, give that money instead to those ‘titans’ so they can do this all over again in just a few years.