The Affordable Care Act turned four years old last Sunday. So how’s it working out for you? If you’re one of the millions who lost, or risk losing, the insurance you already had, your answer is probably “not so great.”
If you’re a young person who realizes that ObamaCare wants you to pay much higher insurance premiums to subsidize older and sicker Americans, your answer is probably “not so great” also.
Not even considering the HealthCare.gov website disaster, and the totally dysfunctional Cover Oregon website debacle, it appears there may be more people losing their health insurance coverage than have gained new coverage under this deeply flawed law.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law will cause the equivalent of two million jobs to be lost by 2017.
The 2013 PolitiFact Lie of the Year was President Obama’s oft told fib that “If you like your health care plan you can keep it.”
When the first ObamaCare open enrollment period ends on March 31, its flaws will be hard to gloss over. Rather than carve out even more exemptions to the law, the administration should admit that they got it wrong. Then we can have an honest discussion about how to move toward real insurance reform using market principles that offer true affordable alternatives to the Affordable Care Act, which has proven anything but.
Steve Buckstein is founder and Senior Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.
