On February 11, 2011, the New York Times reported that according to the Obama administration, four states had been given waivers for Obamacare-- Florida, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee. On Monday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that Nevada had been given a partial waiver to Obamacare.
I have a question. If the Congressmen from these states voted to pass Obamacare, why are their states now seeking (and getting) waivers from the healthcare program?
The article in the Las Vegas Sun reports:
"The change is less the feds giving underperforming insurance agencies a free pass than buying time for providers to shape up, or policyholders to ship out with reasonable warning time: Nevada has no law that says if you lose insurance because your insurer shuts down, another company has to pick you up. To prevent that, Health and Human Services determined it had to "provide the opportunity for plans with low 'medical loss ratios' to adjust their business models to reach 80 percent" with the reduced, 75 percent mandate for the rest of 2011 -- that being the average medical loss ratio that the state's top 10 insurers currently post.
"For Republicans, the waiver is proof of what they've been arguing all along -- that Obama's health care law was never going to work and has to go.
""It is becoming increasingly clear how flawed this law really is," Nevada Sen. Dean Heller said in a statement Monday. "Not only did it cut a half trillion dollars from Medicare, impacting thousands of Nevada's seniors, now the law would have driven health insurers out of our state if a reprieve had not been granted.
""This is why 'Obamacare' will not work for Nevada," Heller said."
Obamacare was not designed to help Americans become insured at more reasonable rates--it was designed to create government-run health insurance. Unless it is totally repealed before it has a chance to be fully instituted, we will lose the health insurance infrastructure that we currently have, and the quality and availability of heathcare in America will drop drastically. Right now waivers are being given to those organizations that helped put Obamacare in place as a reward for their support, but if Obamacare was really that good, would its supporters be given waivers?
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