Everyone agrees that health care costs were skyrocketing and set to take over an even greater share of the national budget. That is not in dispute. The CBO, an independent watchdog agency, has scored the Affordable Care Act ("ACA" or "ObamaCare"), and it actually decreases the effect of health care on the national budget deficit over time. "The law is expected to reduce the deficit by $127 billion from 2012 to 2021." But there's more.
How About Cash Back From Your Insurance Company? Ironically, like a credit card, you will receive cash back from your insurance carrier under the ACA if your carrier spends too much on administrative costs such as exorbitant CEO bonuses or upper-management salaries. This is what President Obama's official site reports:
Before health care reform, insurance companies routinely spent up to 40% of premiums on overhead and administrative costs. Today, thanks to Obamacare, insurance companies are required to spend at least 80% of your premium on your health care—and if they don’t, you get a rebate. This summer, nearly 12.8 million Americans will start receiving their rebate checks, averaging $151 per household—and totaling more than $1.1 billion.
What About Your Sons and Daughters Staying on Your Policy Until They Can Afford Their Own? Your kids can stay on your policy until they reach the age of 26. On top of the 12,800,000 of your fellow Americans who'll receive a cash rebate from their insurance company, there's another 3,100,000 of your fellow younger Americans who have been able to stay on their parent's or parents' policies while they go to school or learn a trade:
Before the Affordable Care Act, young people could be kicked off their parents' health insurance as soon as they turned 18. But thanks to health care reform, 3.1 million young Americans who would otherwise be uninsured have been able to stay on their family's coverage until age 26—coverage that often includes free preventive care, like checkups and flu shots.
The Affordable Care Act is Constitutional! The United States Supreme Court has ruled that ObamaCare is Constitutional. Included in the majority was Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed to his post by President Bush. But even before that, three of the four United States Circuit Courts that considered the new law found it to be Constitutional. One of those included the Sixth Circuit, and Judge Jeffrey Sutton cast the deciding vote in that instance. Judge Sutton was another
Bush appointee to the bench.
Can We Get an Additional 34,000,000 Americans Health Insurance? You bet we can! "Because of the new law, 34 million more Americans will gain coverage—many who will be able to afford insurance for the first time. Once the law is fully implemented, about 95 percent of Americans under age 65 will have insurance." That means millions of families in the future will not face bankruptcy just because a family member, a wife, mother, daughter, father, son, sister or brother became severly ill.
Is It a Mandate or a Tax? No and no! Well, it is a mandate if you can afford health insurance, but shouldn't you have health insurance if you can afford it? Even for those individuals, it isn't a true mandate because one can opt out by paying a penalty. (Moreover, with millions of additional individuals entering into the health care marketplace, rates will go down, so that you won't be paying the price that health insurance companies are quoting you now. And the government has the right to question any increase in insurance rates in the future.). If you cannot afford a health insurance policy, you are not mandated to pay anything. As for the tax issue, before answering your question, let me ask one of you: What do you call a traffic ticket? Is that a "tax" or a "penalty." Let me just say that most people not named Ron Paul would call a traffic ticket a "penalty" -- for violating the law -- and the law is just the standard of behavior that makes a society capable of living together.
What About My Pre-Existing Condition? For the first time in history ... umm ... American history ... you won't have to worry about pre-existing conditions. You can safely change jobs and get accepted by a new carrier. Also, the insurance company can't go back and re-read your policy after you've been paying in for 15 years, and say, "You lied about smoking cigarettes" or "We didn't know you had the measles as a child so your policy is VOID!" Moreover, before ObamaCare, carriers could refuse to cover children who had pre-existing conditions. "[A]s many as 17 million children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied health insurance." Here's what President Obama has to say about that:
Fact: The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) provides insurance to people with health conditions who have been uninsured for six months, helping those with cancer or other serious conditions to get the treatment they need.
The Republican Plan: NO! Yes, that's the Republican plan for health care. Actually, they had a four-page "plan" to replace health care laws. Four freaking pages. An honest letter to Santa should be at least four pages long!
Joan McCarter, quoting an analysis from the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which evaluated Mitt Romney's budget, discovered his dirty little secret:
For the most part, Governor Romney has not outlined cuts in specific programs. But if policymakers exempted Social Security from the cuts, as Romney has suggested, and cut Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlement and discretionary programs by the same percentage — to meet Romney’s spending cap, defense spending target, and balanced budget requirement — then non-defense programs other than Social Security would have to be cut 29 percent in 2016 and 59 percent in 2022 (see Figure 1). Without the balanced budget requirement, the cuts would be smaller but still massive, reaching 40 percent in 2022.
The cuts that would be required under the Romney budget proposals in programs such as veterans’ disability compensation, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for poor elderly and disabled individuals, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and child nutrition programs would move millions of households below the poverty line or drive them deeper into poverty. The cuts in Medicare and Medicaid would make health insurance unaffordable (or unavailable) to tens of millions of people.
(emphasis added).
Finally, Can the Insurance Company Hit Me With a Life-time Limit of Coverage? Nope. Nuh-huh. Never again. It's been estimated that 20,000 American families hit their life-time limit of coverage every year. After that, they were forced into bankruptcy or did not receive life-saving treatment (that should've been available to them under a just system). Now, life-time limits are an endangered species.