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Guest Post: Is Obamacare The Final Nail In The Coffin Of The Middle Class?
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
If there were any shreds of hope left that the stunning decline of the middle class could be turned around, Obamacare has absolutely destroyed them. Over the past decade or so, the middle class in the United States has been absolutely eviscerated. The number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, median household income in the U.S. has fallen for five years in a row, and the poverty numbers in this country are spiraling out of control. And now here comes Obamacare. As you will see below, Obamacare is causing millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance policies, it is causing health insurance premiums to explode to absolutely ridiculous levels, and it is systematically killing jobs even though the employer mandate has been delayed for a while.
All of this is creating a tremendous amount of stress for millions of middle class families that are already stretched extremely thin financially. According to CNN, a survey that was conducted earlier this year found that 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most of those families simply cannot afford to pay much higher health insurance premiums for new policies that also come with much larger deductibles and significantly increased out-of-pocket costs. Millions of those families will ultimately end up choosing to do without health insurance altogether, and that will create a whole host of new problems. This is a disaster that is so enormous that it is really hard to put into words. If the U.S. health care system was a separate country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire globe all by itself. And now Obamacare is going to bring the entire U.S. health care system to its knees.
Obamacare: Since October 1st, The Number Of Americans With Health Insurance Has Fallen By Nearly 4 Million
Last week, Barack Obama decided to allow Americans to keep their current health insurance plans for one more year.
Isn't that generous of him? Especially considering the fact that he promised us over and over that if we liked our current health insurance policies that we would be able to keep them permanently.
The funny thing is that Obama is not actually changing the law. So if your health insurance company allows you to stay on your current health insurance plan that does not meet the requirements of Obamacare, it is technically breaking the law.
And if you continue to stay on that current health insurance plan that does not meet the requirements of Obamacare, you are technically breaking the law.
It is just that Obama has promised not to enforce what the law says for one year.
For a president to just blatantly disregard the rule of law is a very dangerous precedent. Do we really want the president to have the power to decide what laws are going to be enforced and what laws are not going to be enforced?
That sounds dangerously close to a dictatorship to me.
And in any event, there are many Americans that are not going to be able to keep their current policies no matter what Obama says. For example, just two hours after Obama announced his plan last week, the state of Washington announced that they would not be allowing insurance companies to extend their old health insurance plans if they don't comply with Obamacare under any circumstances...
State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler has rejected President Obama’s proposal to allow insurance companies to extend health insurance policies for people who have received notices that their policies will be cancelled at the end of the year.
Within two hours of President Obama’s news conference announcing the proposed administrative fix for Americans upset by their policy cancellations, Kreidler issued a statement rejecting the proposal.
“I understand that many people are upset by the notices they have recently received from their health plans and they may not need the new benefits [in the Affordable Care Act] today,” he said. “But I have serious concerns about how President Obama’s proposal would be implemented and more significantly, its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market.”
“I do not believe his proposal is a good deal for the state of Washington,” Kreidler’s statement continued. “We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies.”
How do you think the people of the state of Washington will respond to that?
Things are getting crazy out there, and the number of people that are losing their health insurance policies is absolutely stunning.
According to the Wall Street Journal, so far 106,185 Americans have enrolled in Obamacare since October 1st. Most of those that have successfully enrolled have done so through the state insurance exchanges. So far, only 26,794 Americans have signed up for health insurance using the federally run exchanges on HealthCare.gov.
Meanwhile, during that same time frame, 4.02 million Americans have had their health insurance policies cancelled.
So that means that the number of Americans with health insurance has actually decreased by 3,918,205 since October 1st.
Wasn't Obamacare supposed to result in more Americans being covered?
And according to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, Obama not only knew that this would happen, he actually wrote the regulation that caused this to happen...
"I’m still learning about it. It’s 20,000 pages of regulations. The Bill was 2,000 pages and I didn’t realize this until this week, the whole idea of you losing or getting your insurance cancelled wasn’t in the original Obamacare. It was a regulation WRITTEN BY PRESIDENT OBAMA, three months later. So we had a vote, this is before I got up there. The Republicans had a vote to try to cancel that regulation so you COULDN’T BE CANCELLED, to grandfather everybody in. You know what the vote was? Straight party line. EVERY DEMOCRAT VOTED TO KEEP THE RULE THAT CANCELS YOUR INSURANCE."
So now millions of Americans, including women battling cancer, are losing health insurance plans that they were depending upon.
Thanks Obama?
Obamacare: Skyrocketing Health Insurance Premiums
How much more are you willing to pay for health insurance than you are paying right now?
10 percent?
20 percent?
30 percent?
Well, according to one study health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.
And of course some groups are going to see increases that are much larger than that. For example, it is being projected that health insurance premiums for healthy 30-year-old men will rise by an average of 260 percent.
Ouch.
And there are some families out there that have already been hit with health insurance premium increases that are absolutely jaw-dropping. In a previous article, I included the example of one family down in Texas that has been hit with a 539% rate increase...
Obamacare is named the "Affordable Care Act," after all, and the President promised the rates would be "as low as a phone bill." But I just received a confirmed letter from a friend in Texas showing a 539% rate increase on an existing policy that's been in good standing for years.
As the letter reveals (see below), the cost for this couple's policy under Humana is increasing from $212.10 per month to $1,356.60 per month. This is for a couple in good health whose combined income is less than $70K -- a middle-class family, in other words.
Obamacare: Enormous Deductibles And Huge Out-Of-Pocket Expenses For All
It isn't just health insurance premiums that are going up either. Deductibles are going up too. In fact, just check out what one survey of Americans living in seven different states recently discovered...
Expenses for some policies can reach $6,350 for a single person and $12,700 per family, the most allowed by the health-care law, according to a survey by HealthPocket Inc. of seven states, including California and Ohio. That’s 26 percent higher than the average deductible in the seven states, and a scenario likely repeated across the country, said Kev Coleman, head of research and data at Sunnyvale, California-based HealthPocket.
That same article has a great quote from an elderly New Jersey resident. 82-year-old Larry Saphire thinks that if you have to pay a $5,000 deductible up front, "you might as well not have any insurance at all"...
“If you have to pay $5,000 upfront” when illness hits, “you might as well not have any insurance at all,” said Larry Saphire, 82, of West Orange, New Jersey, who shopped for coverage for his wife and two children, ages 16 and 21. “That’s not insurance.”
On California’s state-run exchange site, the standard low-premium “bronze” plan carries a $5,000 deductible per person, a $60 co-pay to see a doctor and a 30 percent fee, known as coinsurance, on hospital care. In Rhode Island, Blue Cross Blue Shield’s bronze plan has a $5,800 deductible while Missouri’s U.S.-run exchange offers plans by Anthem Blue Cross with the maximum-allowable $6,350 in out-of-pocket costs.
Obamacare: The Quality Of Care Is Going To Go Into The Toilet
A lot of Americans that are signing up for Obamacare are going to be in for a huge shock. Many of the best hospitals and many of the best doctors are not covered by their plans...
Meanwhile, sometime between March and June, the other shoe drops: People who bought exchange policies realize that the restricted networks insurers created to keep the premium costs low cut out the best hospitals and doctors. A newly insured child with cancer cannot get into a top pediatric hospital because her insurance has zero coverage for out-of-network emergency care. Tearful Mom goes on the evening news and says that she thought when they went on Obamacare, that meant they were safe, and why can’t I take my baby to Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, Mr. President?
Can you imagine being a parent in that situation?
In response, some hospitals are already filing suit over this. For instance, check out what is happening over in Seattle...
Seattle Children’s Hospital filed suit against Washington State’s Office of the Insurance Commissioner this week, after Obamacare implementation caused the hospital to be cut from four of the six insurance plans offered by the new Washington Health Benefit Exchange.
And even if you are on Medicare that does not mean that the quality of your care is going to stay the same either. As Reuters just reported, UnitedHealth is dumping "thousands of doctors" from their Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly because of Obamacare...
UnitedHealth Group dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks, leaving many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to continue seeing their doctors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The insurer said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly could not be fully offset by the company's other healthcare business. The company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare Advantage services.
In the United States, we already pay much more for health care than everyone else in the world, and we typically have to wait longer to see a doctor than most of the rest of the industrialized world does.
Now Obamacare is going to make all of this even worse, and the quality of the care that we receive is going to go downhill fast.
Obamacare: The Jobs Killer
A while back, Obama unilaterally made the decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate until 2015.
That was probably a good political decision, because it would have been a huge political issue in the 2014 elections.
But the truth is that we won't have to wait until 2015 for Obamacare to start killing jobs. In fact, according to CNBC it is already happening...
Approximately one-third of business decision-makers at companies with between 40 and 500 employees, say the health-care law has already increased their costs due to hikes in both the cost of insurance and compliance, according to a recent report from political-research firm Public Opinion Strategies. As a result, many business leaders say they are already making personnel decisions based on the Affordable Care Act.
Among franchised businesses, 27 percent report their company has replaced full-time workers with part-time workers and 31 percent have reduced worker hours. Among non-franchised businesses, 12 percent are replacing full-time workers with part-time workers or reducing hours. This is happening now, with more than a year before the mandate goes into effect; and undoubtedly, these numbers will rise as we approach next July's "look back" period for tabulating workers' hours.
It is kind of startling that we are already seeing employers make such big changes even though the employer mandate does not come into effect until 2015. You can find a very long list of some of the employers that have already either eliminated jobs or cut hours because of Obamacare right here.
Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once we get closer to the deadline things are going to get much, much worse.
At a time when the middle class desperately needs jobs, Obamacare is going to slaughter them.
And even if you are able to keep your current job, that does not mean that your health plan will remain the same. In fact, Forbes is projecting that a staggering 51 percent of all employment-based health insurance plans will be canceled and replaced with new ones.
Overall, Forbes is projecting that an astounding 93 million Americans will eventually lose their current health insurance policies due to Obamacare.
Obamacare: Providing Huge Incentives For Many Americans To Work Less And Make Less Money
Did you know that Obamacare is going to cause millions of Americans to want to keep their incomes under certain levels?
If you make too much money under Obamacare, you will miss out on some absolutely massive health care subsidies. The following is an excerpt from one of my previous articles...
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The figures that you are about to see were calculated using the Kaiser Family Foundation subsidy calculator. These numbers apply to a husband and a wife that are both 62 years old.
A non-smoking, married couple living in San Francisco, California earning $63,000 a year will have to pay $20,318 a year for a silver plan under Obamacare and $12,647 a year for a bronze plan.
At $63,000, that couple would be making too much money to be eligible for a subsidy, so that couple will have to pay the total cost of whatever plan they choose by themselves.
But if that couple only made $62,000 a year, things would dramatically change.
The plans would still cost the same, but the couple would now be eligible for an Obamacare subsidy of $14,428.
So a silver plan would end up costing them only $5,890, and they would ultimately pay nothing for a bronze plan.
In other words, by reducing their income by $1,000, that couple would save $14,428 if they got a silver plan or they would save $12,647 if they got a bronze plan.
Isn’t that bizarre?
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In the end, millions upon millions of middle class families will decide to go without health insurance entirely for one reason or another.
This will work great until they get into an accident or become seriously ill.
As I have discussed previously, approximately 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are related to medical bills. And most of those bankruptcies actually happen to people that are supposedly "covered" by health insurance.
Obamacare is going to make all of this so much worse. Millions of middle class families will end up with no health insurance at all, and because so many of them are living paycheck to paycheck a single health emergency will be enough to send them hurtling down the path to financial oblivion.
If you get into an accident, a visit to the emergency room and a single night in the hospital can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars in many areas of the country.
If you get a serious illness such as cancer, the medical bills can be absolutely astronomical. For instance, there are many cancer patients that rack up medical bills well in excess of a million dollars by the time that they die.
Something desperately needs to be done about our horrible health care system. Unfortunately, Obamacare is going to make just about everything that is bad about our current system much, much worse.
And the American people are becoming increasingly disgusted and frustrated with Obamacare. According to Real Clear Politics, an average of recent opinion polls shows that the American people are opposed to Obamacare by an average margin of 14.2 percentage points.
So what do you think about Obamacare?
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But, but . . . all my liberal friends have told me that there ARE NO DEATH PANELS [such as the Independent Payment Advisory Board]!
I guess we will see; won't we.
Grandma is shovel ready.
If You Liked ObamaCare, You'll Love ObamaCar
That's a great site, thanks.
Oh yea! I heard it has unusual looking phallic devices in the middle of the seats. And comes with factory remote controlled humane self destruct device for dissidents. Can't wait!
Impeach them all
Prosecute them all
Hang them all
Yes.
The facts of Middle Class collapse are real and trace back 30 years, the 2008 crisis just forced it out into the open. Obama has not presided over a recovery from the Bush collapse. When all the jobs went to China, and more go abroad every day. When illegal and legall immigration drives wages into the cellar. No ,jobs are not coming back. There is no economic reason that they would.
Now, as for Obama's health reforms. I dare say they are doing little to eliminate jobs that were not already on the way out. Most of the policies that were not up to the laws standards, and there were several million of them, are those fake health plans you saw advertized on TV. The few real plans that are cancelled can be quickly replaced on the exchanges.
I am sorry, the the hype surrounding this health insurance law is just that, hype. Why not concentrate on what is killing the middle class. I suspect all the hype over mandated private health insurance, a law private insurance companies lobbied for and wrote. is to blow smoke up our asses over the transfer of wealth to the rich and the transfer of jobs to China, and the total destruction of small business by large corporate crony capitalism that owns Washington.
I am not buying these stories. Health care bill is a pimple on the ass of the economy. Let's visit this issue in 2 years. I stand by what I said, the economic impact is no worse than the present non-system. We all pay for the uninsured with hikes in our bills and premiums. If these smucks buy insurance, then they will no longer be tacking their care onto my bill or premium. Romney set up the exact same system, and it functioned well. So this is a head fake in my opinion. SOmeone wants to blame Obama Care for a collapse of the Middle Class that has more to do with the Clinto Trade Bills and the Bush decade of tax cuts, borrow and spend. Plus corporations going abroad to boost the bottom lines. WHo is it wants us to forget that and many other issues and focus instead on a marginal Health Insurnce bill? I feel like someone is trying to play me with false hysteria.
Nothing said above has a sound backing. Long run? The net effect on economic growth will be more affected by corporate control of congress than a private health insurance mandate.
Who is selling this hype? I smell a rat.
It's not that the middle class wouldn't collapse without Obamacare, it's that Obamacare is going to make that collapse happen much more rapidly if it is allowed to stand. There is so much corporate-government interference in all faucets of commerce and our lives in general that it is not really possible for the middle class to see a resurgence. We need a lot more in the way of local economies, but try to shift towards that and you will be met with a number of rules and regulations that the big guys can afford to follow or ignore, but a lot of the little guys cannot. Obamacare is just the latest incarnation of this, and it is also one of the worst instances (if not the worst) of government-corporate meddling in commerce and our lives.
Instead of being forced to take a long hard look at our way of life and its future, we wound up with our problems getting papered over and free handouts. The problem is what happens when reality reasserts itself, and that reassertion is either going to be brought on much faster by Obamacare, or Obamacare will be heavily modified or completely killed, which could leave us in limbo for a few more years.
Just wait, TPP is gonna make the jobs grow!
Just like NAFTA did...LOL!
The official TPP site: http://www.ustr.gov/tpp
Ladies and Gentlemen, let us return to the halcyon days of the fall of the Wall when the Heritage Foundation came up with Obama Care. Heritage Foundation originally came up with the idea for universal healthcare with an individual mandate. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
- To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. Oxford Revised Translation (at Project Gutenberg) [3]
http://www.greanvillepost.com/2013/11/16/yes-it-was-a-republican-idea-th...I had a health plan that was 100% paid by my employer and it was an HMO. This plan ended. Unable to find a decent replacement plan my firm chose Blue Cross. I was offered a plan that cost me a $5,000 deductible and $500 per month. Within one month of having this plan I was laid off due to a merger. I have a Cal-Cobra plan that has not yet kicked in and it is $900 per month. Note, I have a tumor in my pancreas and diabetes. Blue Cross is dragging it's feet about enrolling me despite taking my premium check and I have a doctor visit. Blue Cross has been dragging it's feet for 45 days. As a male over 55 who formerly made a very good income I now am on unemployment and earning substanitally less in a job market that has no interest in men over 30 who don't play ping pong or fussball at work or enjoy kegger parties with the other members of the team. The savage class war will trigger an insurrection and that in turn will be put down by force ala Tianamen Square. While the American may love the American armed forces, i rather doubt that love extends to them in return. Or if it does, then key elements of 'omeland Security will do the job instead. This will be the KGB solution.
I am horribly sorry about your medical situation, and your insurance situation. Please try not to think about class war stuff; just stay alive and as healthy as possible.
If people took half the time they waste in talking about this, and put that energy towards either impeaching the head puppet criminal, or just repealing this audacious tax on the nation, it might actually get done.
LET THE NATION WIDE CAMPAIGN TO REPEAL THIS HORRID LAW BEGIN HERE NOW!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!!!!!
***
The middle-class is basically an historical term now. Only government jobs are now comfortable and stable middle-class salaried positions. Manufacturing is fled. IT jobs are middle-class, but only paying half today what they paid twenty years ago, and sinking fast.
Entrepreneurship is more open than ever and stands to get you into the top 1% if you're basicaly competent, but it is still not the answer for most people.
Obamacare is just another nail in the coffin, or more like a machine-gunning of the coffin.
If they told you wolverines would make good house pets, would you believe them?
http://youtu.be/Qm4ViK0E0jM
Why yes, yes I would. I'd feed my wolverine a steady diet of bankers.
A cure for cancer: http://phoenixtears.ca/
A biochemist, Dennis Hill, who has used it explains how it works.
It would be nice to see some studies on this
The National Cancer institute has animal studies.
Forcing americans to spend more individually on health care and businesses to spend less on health care (dropped policies) nets out as positive for GDP (more money spent by individuals than saved by comanies) and positive for corporate profits (lower corporate expenses). Sucks bad for the werkin man but good for corporate and insurance profits - Obamanation hits another homerun by inefficiency in forcing increasing money spent on insurance and health care generally. A better way to control medical costs would be to have people be more responsible for health care costs by getting private insurance and creating pools for high risk patients wanting to lay off risk. Silver lining in this fiasco/pwer grab is I predict high health care costs will drive americans to start taking better care of themselves to avoid going to the doctor to avoid the cost.
Barry is playing the long game. Some time soon the Democrats are going to "realise" that the only solution is to lower the excess profits made by suppliers of medical services and products. The only way they'll be able to think of doing that will be ... mass immigration of "qualified" medical practicioners from Latin America, Africa and Asia! A panicked middle class will have no option but to pass enabling laws, and quickly.
maybe, whatever happens, if they can't change this the republicans will certainly have ammo to campaign on.
AND WHERE’S THERE A FUNDING? http://youtu.be/EYa_fhLkg5c?t=10s
I look at it this way: at least he didn't set off the nukes yet.
Maybe it is the "final nail", but I can assure you it's mostly the middle class responsible for the ALL TIME RECORD gun and ammo sales this year... and therein lies a genuine hedge against tyrrany.
N A T I O N W R E C K E R S
I like the Repubican plan... NO. Wingers crack me up.
It is not true that the Republicans have not offered alternatives. Here is the best, from Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), who is an orthopedic surgeon: H.R 3400 the Empowering Patients First Act
http://rsc.scalise.house.gov/solutions/empoweringpatientsfirstact.htm
“If the Administration could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” GO 1984
Collectivists hate the middle class as all communists do.