ObamaCare Self-Immolates, but Heavily Taxes Middle Income People

The signature achievement of Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party, the fraudulently named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is undergoing an immediate self-destruction brought on by the unbelievable hubris of party hacks in believing that they could better direct the massive medical and health insurance efforts than the private sector can.  The problems run much deeper than health insurance exchanges whose website portals do not work.  That is an unsurprising problem given the nature of those in charge of setting them up, but it is only the start of the tsunami of problems being unleashed upon the American People by these preternaturally bloated Progressive Elitist's egos.

Obama told us on Tuesday, 22 October, that thousands of people are signing up for ObamaCare and saving money.  Actually, it turns out that most of those who have signed up are really signing up for expanded Medicaid benefits.  It also turns out that many who have struggled with the website problems long enough to sign up are those with pre-existing conditions who will often save money under ObamaCare.  In addition, a few states are already so heavily regulated by the state with consequent health insurance costs being forced skyhigh, that even the ObamaCare costs are lower.  Yet, the costs for all but five states are generally up and often are up by factors of two or more.  A Heritage Foundation study by Drew Gonshorowski produced these results:

Only in Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island can you find cost savings under ObamaCare.  The rest of the nation is screwed.

For 27 year olds, their rates are going up by 100% or more in the following 10 states:

Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas, and Vermont.  Nobody actually knows the rates for Virginia because it appears that the ObamaCare website is giving out a number that must be wrong.

Again for 27 year olds, insurance premium rates are going up by more than 50%, but less than 100%, in the following 15 states:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Of course, ObamaCare is design to milk the healthy young to pay for the sick and older population.  Nonetheless, for adults aged 50 the rates are also generally going up.  In the following 13 states and DC, they are going up more than 50%:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

An adult aged 50 will see rates go up by more than 25%, but less than 50%, in the following 15 states:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.

So, a 27 year old will see his premium rates going up by more than 50% in 25 states.  A 50 year old will see rates going up by more than 25% in 28 states and the District of Columbia.  Somehow, I suspect the claims of the Democrat Socialist Party and Obama that ObamaCare was just going to be Hunky-Dorry are ringing, or will soon ring, very hollow.  No, they will even be regarded as the lies that I have always said they were.

When ObamaCare was being pushed through Congress, the claim was that there were 47 million uninsured in the USA and desperately in need of affordable health insurance.  They said it was everyone's responsibility to see that the uninsured had their medical needs assured by ObamaCare.  Now mind you, they did not point out as I did (discussing this here, here, here, and here) that about 10 million Americans do not need insurance since they or a family member are so wealthy that they can readily be self-insured.  Maybe 12 million of that number were then illegal aliens.  Most of the remainder were healthy young people who even at the lower rates available before ObamaCare did not see a reason to insure themselves.  Clearly, ObamaCare does not address any of the needs of the wealthy, the illegal alien, and the healthy young person.  It is only addressing the needs of those who are already sick and do not have health insurance and it is doing so at incredible cost to everyone else.

Let us examine how ObamaCare is doing if thousands had actually signed up as Obama says in the first 22 days of the program.  Since it has been sold recently as covering 50 million people without insurance and since it is now estimated that about 16 million people who had insurance are losing it due to cancellations saying their policies do not meet ObamaCare mandates, there would be 66 million people who have to sign up for ObamaCare by 31 March 2014.  In that 182 day period, 362,637 people a day must sign up, despite Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, and Valentine's Day!  More refined recent claims were that ObamaCare hoped to sign up 30 million of the uninsured.  So, that makes the total number of sign-ups a mere 46 million by 31 March 2014, or a mere 252,747 a day.  In the 22 days to Obama's speech last week, the total number of sign-ups for insurance was not anywhere near even the one-day necessary average of 252,747.  In fact, so few have signed up to date that one can just as well say that 46 million sign-ups have to occur in the remaining 156 days from today, at an average rate of 294,872 a day.

Now stop and think about this.  Is it at all likely that 294,872 people a day will sign-up for ObamaCare before 31 March 2014 given the website problems, the high costs, and the high deductibles?  There is no way this will happen.  No Way!  In fact, it was never a likely development from the beginning.

I have been sure that ObamaCare was designed to fail so that a single-payer system would soon replace it.  But the facts discussed above now make it clear that the Democrat Socialist Party that is always pushing for new taxes was also trying to create a system almost no one would want a part of so they could charge tens of millions of people the penalty tax for not obtaining the prohibitively expensive ObamaCare with its low quality health care service.  This was always primarily a new and massive tax!  By clever, insidious design.

One can even understand that Obama paid no attention to the problems of launching ObamaCare because its immediate failure was the equivalent of a huge additional tax increase.  It was designed to fail either immediately or in a few years.  But the faster it failed, the bigger the tax increase!  Obama was either setting up a future single-payer completely nationalized medical care system or he was getting out of the corner he had painted himself into with his pledge not to increase taxes on the Middle Class.  It was a win-win situation for him.

ObamaCare was a pretense for an incredible and massive tax increase, which was mostly aimed at the middle class even as the Democrat Socialist Party was pledging no tax increase for the middle class and pretending to care about all the millions suffering without health insurance.  ObamaCare was directly a massive power grab over 16 to 18% of the economy and it was also a heavy tax increase to pay for the program.  People understood that some people would be hit by the penalty tax, but few understood that it was designed to be a massive tax increase to soak tens of millions of people with middle incomes.

Obama is counting on his abilities as a great con man to keep Americans from understanding this.  Eventually, the pain will be so great for so many Americans that I think enough will come to understand the perfidy that fell upon them.  They will finally see Obama and the Democrat Socialists as the malevolent liars that they are.  They will soon no longer control the Senate and in 2016 they will lose the Presidential election.  At last!

I am now reading that the ObamaCare mandated insurance has to be purchased by 31 March 2014, not by 15 March as I had earlier seen reported.  I have recalculated the necessary daily average rates of sign-up for everyone to meet the ObamaCare requirement for its approved insurance plans on 30 October.  Of course, the actual daily sign-ups since I originally posted this remain vastly lower than the necessary daily average.