On Tuesday, Congressman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) of the House Ways and Means Committee had the chance to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about President Obama’s infamous promise that “if you like your existing health care coverage, you can keep it.” Roskam noted that that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case under ObamaCare, where a rising tide of businesses have chosen not to offer medical coverage to their employees. You can’t keep a plan that no longer exists, no matter how much you might have liked it.
Sebelius replied, “Well again, congressman, what you’re seeing… It wouldn’t have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not. The private market is in a death spiral.”
This is objectively untrue, as studies show the number of employers dropping medical insurance is steadily growing in the wake of ObamaCare. A recent study showed 30 percent of employers would “definitely” or “probably” stop offering coverage after 2014, when ObamaCare’s “public exchanges” are up and running.
Katheleen Sebelius is a fine one to talk about “death spirals,” because ObamaCare is one of the best examples around. It’s been falling apart since the day it was passed. Key funding mechanisms have already been repealed, including the 1099 reporting requirements designed to squeeze $17 billion out of small businesses, and the CLASS Act -- a ridiculous accounting trick that made ObamaCare look cheaper by front-loading the premiums for a long-term care program that even Sebelius herself admitted was unsustainable. A bill to abolish ObamaCare’s rationing mechanism, the infamous “death panels,” just cleared the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee. All of these repeal measures have bipartisan support.
Sebelius also had to admit, in Congressional testimony, that half a trillion dollars was double-counted for both ObamaCare and Medicare. In fairness to the HHS secretary, that sort of accounting trickery is fairly common in the cobwebbed halls of the Big Government haunted house. It becomes more common as the government grows. ObamaCare is just part of an exploding debt portfolio that the Congressional Budget Office predicts will “shut down” the U.S. economy by 2027. Now that’s what I call adeath spiral!
—John Hayward |
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