Tag Archives: Affordable Care Act (ACA)

Whenever The Government Gets Involved The Price Goes Up

Posted on by

On Saturday, Pirate’s Cove posted an article about rising health insurance costs. The article quotes a recent article from The New York Times:

Obamacare Dealt Yet Another Blow as Premiums Rise Again

Millions of Americans who depend on Obamacare for their health insurance face another double-digit price increase next year, adding to the financial toll that has already driven millions of others to drop coverage since last year.

The price increases largely reflect higher medical costs across the country. But they also are a signal of the latest blow to Obamacare under the Trump administration, which has overseen the expiration of tax credits that helped Americans pay for coverage and has erected new barriers to enrollment in an effort to root out what it describes as widespread fraud.

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.

The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.

The article notes:

I’m old enough to remember when Obama said “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.” And then Dems passed it, but, set it up for implementation after the 2012 election to avoid exposing the true costs to voter.

The article concludes with a response to The New York Times claim that the increases in premiums have been driven by rising hospital prices, high payments under a consumer protection law that changed how some doctors are compensated, and the growing use of artificial intelligence in doctors’ offices:

While I’m sure they play some part, involving the government heavily in paying for healthcare will always mean the costs skyrocket. Just like ACA opponents stated.

Many of the opponents of Obamacare believe that it was designed to fail–collapse under its own weight–in order to usher in socialized medicine. I believe that. It will be interesting to see if the Congress that is elected in the mid-terms will be able to stop the progress toward socialized medicine in America. I wonder if American voters understand what the consequences will be if the Democrats take Congress in the mid-terms.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Posted on by

On Wednesday, American Greatness posted an article about the amount of fraud discovered in the Affordable Care Act.

The article reports:

The Trump administration is canceling Affordable Care Act enrollments covering more than 760,000 people as part of a sweeping effort to combat fraud and improper taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that approximately 315,000 enrollments covering more than 760,000 individuals were canceled after officials determined they were unauthorized. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimates the action will return roughly $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” Vance said.

The administration also plans additional eligibility verification for hundreds of thousands of other enrollments and has imposed a six-month suspension on new agents and brokers signing people up for coverage.

Eligibility verification should be required on every federal program.

The article concludes:

CMS said it has identified unauthorized enrollments and suspicious activity involving agents and brokers. Since January, the agency has sent termination notices to more than 200 agents and brokers it deemed noncompliant.

Democrats criticized the administration’s action. Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, accused Republicans of worsening the nation’s health care problems.

The enforcement push comes as Americans continue to face high health care costs and as affordability remains a major issue heading into the fall midterm elections.

The administration says its broader anti-fraud campaign is intended to protect taxpayers and ensure federal health care benefits go only to people who qualify.

The major provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect on January 1, 2014. That was more than twelve years ago. Why is it that the Trump administration is the first administration to deal with the level of fraud that has been building over those twelve years? I am beginning to think that the taxpayers should withhold all money from Washington until Washington shows us that they can spend it responsibly!

Learning From Past Mistakes

Posted on by

On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about the work requirements added to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The article reports:

President Ronald Reagan famously embraced the Russian proverb “Trust, but verify” during negotiations with the Soviet Union over nuclear arms reductions. Reagan understood that when there are incentives to cheat, verification is essential.

That same principle applies to government welfare programs, including the forthcoming Medicaid work requirements. In the Working Families Tax Cut Act — also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — Congress required able-bodied, working-age adults to work, volunteer, or participate in job training to receive Medicaid unless they qualify for an exemption. More than 80 percent of Americans support such requirements.

…Unfortunately, some states are gearing up to permit applicants (or intermediaries enrolling them on their behalf) to self-attest to meeting the requirements or qualifying for an exemption. These states would permit applicants to simply check a box without verification.

Failing to verify applicant information has led to widespread improper enrollment and fraud in other programs. The massive improper enrollment in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) proves that when the government weakens verification standards, including through self-attestation, improper enrollment rises dramatically.

The article concludes:

This year, the Trump administration has rightly targeted fraud and reversed Biden policies that enabled improper ACA enrollment to skyrocket. Allowing self-attestation in Medicaid would return us to the Biden administration’s policy failures. The American people overwhelmingly support commonsense work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving welfare benefits, not policies that can be so easily gamed. When spending other people’s money on other people, verification — not blind trust — is the prudent policy.

It does no good to pass a law with a work requirement if you don’t enforce the work requirement. Not verifying the work requirement will simply open the door for more of the massive fraud that has been uncovered by Vice-President J.D. Vance’s anti-fraud task force.

The Numbers Just Keep Growing

Posted on by

On Saturday, Just the News posted an article about the number of people who were enrolled in ObamaCare without their knowledge.

The article reports:

In exchange for gift cards, millions of Americans were unwittingly signed up for Obamacare by brokers who scalped their vital information and enrolled them in plans where premiums were paid by the American people, a research group says.  

“The government was sending massive checks to insurance companies who were making windfall profits on behalf of people who didn’t use any health care,” Brian Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute, a healthcare policy group told Just The News.

A 2021-2022 expansion of Affordable Care Act subsidies, passed through budget reconciliation, made coverage fully subsidized for individuals claiming incomes in a specific range. Paragon Health Institute investigated and estimated that by 2025, at least 6.4 million more people were enrolled in these zero-premium plans than were actually eligible.

Zero premium means the enrollee did not pay for the plan — it was paid via subsidies funded by taxpayers.

The money went to the insurance companies who never had to deal with claims from people who didn’t know they were signed up!

The article notes:

Many of the enrollees never realized they had coverage because the government paid the full premium directly to insurers, which in turn paid substantial commissions to the enrolling entities. In 2024, 40% of people in fully subsidized plans used no healthcare services at all—2.5 times higher than typical rates—resulting in significant government payments to insurers for largely unused coverage.

Making matters worse, the insurance companies aren’t even providing value, says Blase. “85% of all the [insurance company] revenue now comes from the taxpayer, so they don’t have incentives to offer products that are low-priced, that appeal to patients.”

“Their primary client now is the United States Treasury, and they’re so dependent on the federal government for their revenue source, that’s why insurance companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to continue this gravy train of these enhanced Obamacare subsidies.”

The article concludes:

One remedy for Medicaid, as well as other programs, is to shut off the federal spigot. According to Blase, “It’s the essential step. The federal government is bankrolling the fraud, waste and abuse in the states, and as long as states can draw on an open checkbook from Washington, they don’t have incentives to make sure that dollars are appropriately spent.”

Referencing the daycare fraud unfolding in Minnesota, Blase criticized the federal government’s lack of oversight. “We shouldn’t have to rely on amateur investigators going into daycare finding out that there’s no children there. The government has access to this data, they know where there are areas that have seen explosive spending.” 

Blase also sounded the alarm on states like New York and California. In New York, there has been an unprecedented spike in Medicaid-funded home health aides, who are often family members taking care of relatives, which, Blase says, also creates fertile ground for fraud. In California, fraud has found a home within the hospice care industry. 

We need a thorough audit on every dollar the federal government sends to the states and to insurance companies.

The Real Purpose

Posted on by

On Monday, Newsbusters posted an article about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which has turned out to be anything but affordable.

The article reports:

Hold on to your britches because you’re not going to believe this one. The Washington Post Editorial Board just admitted that the so-called “Affordable Care Act,” one the most notorious pieces of Obama-era legislation foisted upon consumers by legislators and the liberal media as the saving grace of American health care, turned out to be an expensive mess.

The Post tried to play both sides of the fence in the ongoing government shutdown stand off with Republicans and Democrats, the latter of which demanded “Republicans agree to extend the Covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it.” Then The Post ran one of the biggest plot twists ever to hit American politics in the last 15 years: “The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] was never actually affordable.”

Nope, your eyes didn’t deceive you. The architects of former President Barack Obama’s 2010 “signature achievement,” wrote The Post, “assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.”

Gee, that’s an awfully different tone than the liberal rag was striking in 2024 when the editorial board celebrated how “Obamacare is working brilliantly — for now.” That’s despite the fact that premiums for individual market plans doubled in costs and “the per enrollee cost of Medicaid expansion is nearly 60 percent greater than what experts projected,” as the Paragon Health Institute summarized in an October 2024 study.

The article concludes:

But now, the years of nonstop pro-Obamacare gaslighting and narrative-twisting that got spewed out of The Post’s printers seems to have been undone by, er, The Post itself:

This is how entitlement programs work. Once you habituate people to some generous government handout, they grow dependent on it. And it becomes politically perilous, if not impossible, to fully claw it back.”

That is how the Democrat Party works. Install entitlement, blame Republicans when anyone tries to limit it in any way.

Obamacare was never supposed to work–its purpose was to bring America closer to government-controlled (and allocated) healthcare. Why should Americans be able to get surgery quickly when needed when Britain and Canada wait months and sometimes years for necessary surgery. We knew someone in Britain that died during his second year of waiting for heart surgery. We don’t want that in America.

What Has Happened To Health Care Costs?

Posted on by

Economist Milton Friedman once said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.” We have seen what the government takeover of the student loan program did to the cost of college tuition. Now we are seeing what the government takeover of healthcare has done to healthcare and healthcare insurance costs.

On September 29th, The American Thinker reported:

In 2009, when the average cost of an individual health policy was under $100 and family coverage was under $400, democrats decided that health insurance cost too much, and too many didn’t have coverage.

Therefore, without any Republican support, they wrote a 1,000-page bill. They called the bill the “Affordable Care Act,” a misnomer intended to mislead the American people into supporting the bill. The mostly compliant media went along and chastised those who dared question the bill.

…In fact, the bill took away freedom of choice and reduced competition. It got rid of lifetime and annual limits, so small and medium-sized companies couldn’t afford the risk. There was also no incentive for medical providers to control costs.

As prices soared, instead of limiting the scope of their promises about how the government would fix healthcare costs, the Democrats have instead worked to increase subsidies and increase the income levels of individuals and families who can get the subsidies. They needed more people to sign up to make it seem as if the ACA is popular and necessary. This just increased premiums even more and made insurance more unaffordable.

Something the Democrats intentionally left out of the bill that could have potentially reduced premiums and medical costs was any limits on punitive, not compensatory, damages in lawsuits. They left it out because Democrats receive significant sums of money from trial lawyers. Consider that Democrats put severe limits on profit margins for insurers, reducing the number of competitors, but they refuse to put any limits on lawsuits. The potential of unlimited lawsuit damages clearly raises prices.

The article notes the results of this law:

After 15 years of the ACA or Obamacare, the average cost of individual coverage is over $600 per month, up over 500% and family coverage is up to over $2,000 per month, which is up over 400%. Meanwhile, overall inflation was 41.60% for this time period, even including the disastrous Biden years.

Please follow the link to the article for further details. It’s time to get the government out of healthcare and let doctors do their jobs.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Posted on by

On Saturday, Townhall reported that the Biden administration has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on dental and healthcare for illegal immigrants.

The article reports:

In an annual report released by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Biden Administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure illegal immigrants were well taken care of. 

The ICE Health Service Corps’ budget was about $324 million, which was an $8 million increase from the year prior. 

According to the report, the money was spent on providing “direct care – including medical and dental health services – to over 118,000 non-citizens housed at 19 IHSC-operated facilities throughout the United States, which exceeded 1.1 million visits over the course of the fiscal year.”

At taxpayers’ expense, illegal migrants are treated to “an initial medical screening, including for mental health needs, as well as all necessary follow-up care” once they have illegally entered the U.S. 

Even migrants flagged as “public safety” are still given these cushy services. 

Last month, the Biden Administration approved Washington state’s request to offer health care insurance to undocumented immigrants, thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The state will expand access to qualified health plans as well as dental care regardless of immigration status. 

No wonder illegals are forcing their way into our country when Biden gives out cushy incentives. 

The Federation for American Immigration Reform published a study that shows that for the U.S. to provide the so-called “necessary” needs for illegal migrants, American citizens must burden an additional $20.4 billion every year.

This comes as Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, announced he was suing the Biden Administration over a rule that punishes taxpayers to pay for the cost of illegal immigration. 

How many Americans are foregoing dental care because they cannot afford it? At some point, we need to stop the gravy trail for illegals and begin taking care of American citizens. How many veterans are living on the streets of America? Where is the help that they need?