A Fool and Your Money
ObamaCare to cost billions more than thought — unexpectedly!
President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.
The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.
Up to 3 million more people could qualify for Medicaid in 2014 as a result of the anomaly. That’s because, in a major change from today, most of their Social Security benefits would no longer be counted as income for determining eligibility. It might be compared to allowing middle-class people to qualify for food stamps.
Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster says the situation keeps him up at night.
It’s almost as if nobody read or understood the thing before voting on it.
Unexpectedly? Unfortunately, I am not so sure. It almost appears as though the architects of this law knew that the deficit was unsustainable so they intentionally ramped up spending as high as possible in order to max out the credit card before the big default hits. It’s not a bug but a feature.
If you see Obamacare not as an insurance reform measure but merely a planned step towards government-controlled and “paid”-for health care, it all makes sense.
These “unexpected costs aren’t unexpected at all, but a step on that path to get more and more people on the taxpayer funded program, drive the insurance companies out of the market and creating a mandatory single-payer regime.