Five years ago, President Obama signed his signature healthcare bill into law. At the time, he presented it as a plan that would lower the cost of health care in America, get everyone on an insurance plan, and improve the quality of the care we received. Unfortunately, none of those promises have come to fruition. Instead, we’ve added 1.2 trillion dollars to the federal budget, increased premiums for the majority of Americans, and made life exceedingly difficult for business owners.
And this is only the beginning.
When we ask ourselves if we can take another five years of this law, it’s important to realize the damage the ACA has already caused. If you ask the Obama administration or its parrots in the press, everything is hunky-dory. And for some, that’s true. But when it comes to the big picture, Obamacare has done more harm than good. And when you take into consideration that the individual tax penalties haven’t even been felt by the majority of uninsured Americans yet, that harm is only going to grow.
A Pack of Lies
In addition to the promise of universal coverage, Obamacare’s biggest selling point was that it would bring down the cost of health insurance. But there is no indication that it has done that. Premiums for those who shop for insurance through the non-group marketplace were 24 percent higher in 2014 than they would have been without the law. Increasingly, insurance companies are putting the cost of medicine back on their customers. Those who opt out of insurance altogether must now pay a toll to the federal government. After all, that 1.2 trillion dollar price tag has to be paid one way or the other.
This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether or not to strike down federal subsidies in those states that declined to set up their own Obamacare exchanges. If they do, millions of people who are only able to afford insurance because of those subsidies will find themselves out in the cold. It’s hard to see how the law could survive such a ruling, which means we could be living in the last days of Obama’s signature legislation.
If that happens, it could be a short-term disaster. But if it saves us from another five years of this abomination, it might well be worth it. Our economy can’t stand up to much more of this. Obamacare is keeping our job growth from flourishing the way it should, putting us in danger of another recession. Employers are handcuffed, forced to scale back staff due to the ACA mandate. We are becoming a nation of part-time workers, even as liberals fight tooth and nail for minimum wage increases. We don’t need minimum wage increases; we need to let the free market work the way it’s supposed to.
And that, of course, is the big problem with Obamacare. It is a massive federal intrusion on the free market, and nothing good ever comes from that. The faster we repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with a sustainable, private alternative, the faster we can get this country booming again.
