Ready for some weird ♡bamaCare!!! factoids? Of course you are! Because, habit, I suppose. Scott Paulson has them for you:
Both Gallup and RAND are saying that the decrease in the number of uninsured Americans in recent times has not been because of the Obamacare health care exchange enrollments. Instead, the increase in the number of uninsured Americans is for two other reasons. First and foremost, unemployed Americans are signing up for Medicaid – the government program which gives unemployed or financial-flailing Americans health care coverage. Secondly, more and more persons are getting health care insurance from their employers.
We need to break this habit — media and Administration indoctrination, really — of calling Medicaid expansion “increased coverage.” Because it isn’t. Medicaid expansion means increased welfare cases who add nothing to ♡bamaCare!!!’s solvency and subtract from the nation’s fiscal health. We can debate whether doing so was morally or politically correct, but those benefits-gobbling folks have zero to do with insurance, per se.
And it’s curious, isn’t it, that workplace coverage has increased? ♡bamaCare!!! was designed (implicitly if not explicitly) to eliminate employer-based coverage and throw everybody onto the four-sizes-fit-all exchanges. But instead it’s achieved the opposite result, at least in the short term. What’s that mean? Hell if I know, except that people getting insurance at work aren’t busting the Medicaid budget or receiving subsidies on our dime. So we have that going for us, which is nice.
If we were designing a system from scratch, as they say, we never would have had employer insurance in the first place. But that’s a bad and unintended result of WWII wage controls, enshrined by unions and by Washington — two institutions where bad ideas go to live forever and ever and ever.
The real problem is that ♡bamaCare!!! attempts to design a new system from scratch, without having courage enough to actually come right out and destroy the old system. Worse of course is this Progressive itch to design any human system “from scratch.” People willing to throw out the bathwater with no concern for the baby are at heart Jacobins or Communists. And if not, then their successors will prove to be.
What we can say for sure is that while the exchange websites might be patched well enough to appear to function, the train wreck continues to unfold in unknowable ways.
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