The Truth About ObamaCare is Now Becoming Apparent

© David Burton 2013

     In spite of continuing White House and Democratic attempts to hide the real facts and to deny what’s becoming obvious to everyone, the inconvenient truths about ObamaCare are finally becoming apparent. The disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare computerized sign-up process has begun to awaken Americans to what is about to engulf them.

     “The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster - - - They had 3-1/2 years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! - - - So you’d think it would sort of work. And it didn’t. Which is a disaster.” (Ref. 1) If the federal government can't successfully run a website, how can we ever expect it to manage the massively complicated Affordable Care Act?

     Let's see what ObamaCare, aka the Affordable Care Act, looks like as 2013 comes to an end and ObamaCare struggles to go into effect.

     “The Affordable Care Act will not affect most traditional employer-based plans, but many of those who purchased insurance policies on their own will see higher premiums. This is in part due to the 10 essential health benefits insurance providers are now required to include. [Emphasis mine] NBC’s Peter Alexander reports.” (Ref. 2)

     In a frenzied attempt at damage control, “Several White House officials are speaking out against an NBC News report that said up to 75 percent of Americans who currently buy private health insurance will lose their plans under Obamacare. [Emphasis mine]
     “On Monday, a ‘NBC Nightly News’ segment said that a large swath of Americans will not be able to keep their current health insurance policies because the plans do not meet Obamacare standards. It said that the White House knew this as far back as 2010, even though President Obama had said that people can choose to keep their current plans.” [Emphasis mine] (Ref. 3)

     “According to Kaiser Health News, Pittsburgh’s Highmark Insurance and Philadelphia’s Independence Blue Cross are cancelling ‘guaranteed issue’ policies, mainly for those with pre-existing conditions. In California, Blue Shield ended coverage for 119,000 individuals, and Kaiser Permanente tossed 160,000 people. Florida Blue terminated 300,000 men and women or 80 percent of its individual market.
     “Sixteen million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage.” [Emphasis mine] Why is this happening? It’s happening because “Obamacare mandates that all individual and small group plans feature ‘essential health benefits,’ including services for substance abuse, mental health, and maternity. Plans lacking such features will be illegal and are being jettisoned.” (Ref. 4) This can’t be true - President Obama promised that everyone could keep his health insurance if he wanted to! This must be the fault of those obstructionist Republicans and Tea Partyers who have been trying to stop, repeal, delay or scale back Obamacare since 2008.

     What about President Obama’s promise that Americans would not have to pay more for health care coverage? Well – “Many Americans should expect to pay lots more for coverage.
     “- - - women in the individual market can expect premiums to soar 62 percent next year. A 99 percent hike awaits men. [Emphasis mine]
     “{It is forecast} that nongroup premiums will fall in Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Rhode Island. Virtually everywhere else, however, Americans will suffer.
     “A family of four Texans can expect to pay 29.5 percent more for an average Obamacare plan, versus today’s typical coverage. A 50-year old Vermonter will face 61 percent higher premiums, while a Floridian that age will pay 75 percent more. And a 27-year-old Arizonan paying 157 percent extra for Obamacare will cry for a similar Virginian whose coverage will climb 252.5 percent.
     “For taxpayers, Obamacare’s 10-year cost has ballooned from $900 billion at enactment in March 2010 to $2.6 trillion today. This ever-expanding outlay will swell the national debt, now at $17 trillion, and growing.
     “This entire juggernaut needs some 2.7 million generally younger lower-income young people (who usually need little medicine) to subsidize older people (who tend to have more money and need more care). When young Americans weigh this ‘deal,’ many and probably most will remain on their parents’ plans until age 26 (which the immeasurably brilliant Obama foolishly demanded) or pay modest noncoverage penalties and savor their presumed immortality.” (Ref. 4)

     The impact of the misnamed “Affordable Care Act” is beginning to be felt here in Massachusetts, the home of Romneycare, which supposedly was the model upon which ObamaCare is based. “Some Bay State residents who though their individual health insurance policies wouldn’t be affected by the Affordable Care Act are getting a surprise - their plans are no longer available even in this state that has had minimum standards similar to Obamacare for the past six years. - - - {This, in spite of} the president’s 2009 promise that ‘if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.’ {This comes} after a wave of cancellation notices started hitting 14 million people nationwide that buy individual policies.” (Ref. 5)

     “’All we’ve been hearing for the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it. … I’m infuriated because I was lied to,’ one woman told the Los Angeles Times as part of a story on how some middle-class Californians have been stunned to learn the real costs of Obamacare.
      - - -
     “. . . As many as 16 million Americans on the individual health-insurance market may lose their insurance policies. Just in the last month, hundreds of thousands have been notified by their insurers that their policies will be canceled. In fact, it appears that more Americans may have lost coverage than gotten it since Healthcare.gov went ‘live’ (a term one must use advisedly). And when the business mandate finally kicks in, tens of millions more probably will lose their plans.” (Ref. 6)

     If all this sounds bad, just wait. The original Affordable Care Act that was passed in 2010 needed 2,700 pages with 381,24 words to simply outline the program. The actual details were to be left to be worked out and administered by an unelected army of bureaucrats. That it was an incomprehensible monstrosity at that time was acknowledged by then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – Just pass it now and try to figure out what’s in it later, and by Supreme Court Justice Scalia - You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? ObamaCare was a regulatory atrocity then, but now it has exploded from almost 400,000 original words to more than 11 million words! ObamaCare regulations have now grown by a factor of 30 since the Affordable Care Act was passed! And this is just the beginning. ObamaCare calls for more and more detailed rules and regulations to be written and implemented as the program expands in the coming years. What was simply incomprehensible in 2010 has morphed into a regulatory overkill in 2013 and will become a bureaucratic horror for all Americans in the years to come.

    “If you thought the size of the original Obamacare legislation was excessive at nearly 2,700 pages, you ain't seen nothing yet. When all of the law's new regulations and rules are written and finalized, it will take a national forest's worth of trees to make all the paper on which to print them. [Emphasis mine]
     “According to an analysis of the rules so far, CNSNews.com reports:
     “Bureaucracies in the Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588,500 words of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,24 words in the Obamacare law itself. That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law. [Emphasis mine]
     “And they're essentially just getting started. It could be years before all of the initial rules are written - and that doesn't include all of the subsequent regulations this massive new bureaucracy will churn out in coming years. [Emphasis mine]
      - - -
     “{So far} various agencies in the administration have published 109 {supposedly} final regulations.
     “In sum, these final 109 regulations account for a combined 10,43 pages in the Federal Register, where they must be officially published by law. And yet, expecting the average citizen (or any lawmaker) to read (and then understand) these excessive, complex rules is laughable - or it would be, if they didn't so seriously impact our lives. [Emphasis mine]
      - - -
     “In the end, for every word that is actually contained in the Obamacare law, the Executive Branch's bureaucracies have written 30 more in regulations detailing how the law is to be enforced.
      - - -
     “In an analysis of the regulations thus far, Frontpage Magazine wrote that, in order to read the more than 11 million words of regulations thus far, you'd have to sit down and read 24 hours a day for a month, without pause.
      - - -
     “The thing to keep in mind is that all of this ridiculously complex regulation will not only have consequences in terms of how healthcare will be delivered and ‘managed,’ but they carry huge compliance costs as well - costs that will, like all mandated regulatory costs, necessarily be transferred to patients or taxpayers - or more likely both. [Emphasis mine]
      - - -
     “Remember when Obama said his signature health reform law was going to reduce healthcare expenditures?” (Ref. 7).

In 2009 I wrote what is in italics below (Ref. 8, 9, 10 ) or quoted from the indicated references.

     Mr. President, stop trying to ram your health care program down the throats of American citizens! No one yet knows what is in your program. There are reportedly close to 1,000 pages in the plan that is still being debated in Congress and it is also reported that nearly 400 amendments have already been filed. It would seem that haste is uncalled for. Your rush to enactment appears to be solely for the purpose of putting the plan in effect before there can be any meaningful evaluation of the plan and to avoid having to face criticism for those parts of the program that are not in the best interests of the majority of Americans. Rushing to pass a slapdash package that costs Americans jobs, widens the budget deficit and still doesn’t achieve its stated goals is destructive. There are health care reforms that make sense, that are supported by the majority of Americans. Put these reforms into effect now. Give up your grandiose scheme. Do what makes sense now and attack the overall problem one battle at a time.

     “Do we want the government to design another product that they will make me buy? If we refuse it, that’s too bad because the government will decide what we want and what we will buy. If we can’t afford the product, the government will send in investigators to check and if they conclude that we cannot indeed afford it, they will tax our neighbors and make them subsidize us. More than likely, we will be the ones subsidizing our neighbors. If big brother discovers that we haven’t purchased the product, they will go to our employer and garnish our wages. Is that part of the health care program that we want? Do we really want an all-inclusive government mandated program in which the government will regulate health care, define acceptable health insurance and force every American to buy a plan based on the government established standard"? (Ref. 11)

     “ObamaCare is taking everything that is wrong with government’s meddling in healthcare and making it worse … much worse. This is not reform. [Emphasis mine] It is idiocy … and it may eventually kill all of us.” (Ref. 12 )

     The first estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s version of ObamaCare came in at a staggering “$1.6 trillion over 10 years, according to the {nonpartisan} Congressional Budget Office {CBO}.” In fact, it was so staggering that “the committee immediately set about revising its plan.” Included in the CBO report was the conclusion that, out of the estimated 50 million Americans that are currently uninsured, this $1.6 trillion monstrosity “will still leave 37 million uninsured.” (Ref. 13 )

     The House-passed plan runs to some 1,990 pages, which the Democratic leadership forced through in only three days, raising the question of how Congressmen could possibly have had enough time to thoroughly read though and understand what they voted on. The "Republican Study Committee warned of "higher taxes, job-killing employer mandates, choice-restricting individual mandates, government-run insurance, budget-busting entitlement expansions, and countless provisions that set Washington bureaucrats firmly between you and your doctor. - - - House leaders touted the bill's $894 billion net price tag, but the gross cost of expanding Medicaid, subsidizing insurance for low and middle-income people and providing tax credits to small businesses would exceed $1 trillion over 10 years. - - - The House bill would be financed through new taxes and more than $400 billion in cuts to government health programs, primarily Medicare." (Ref. 14)

     The President is . . . being less than honest when he claims that there will be no new taxes on middle and lower income Americans. It is a new tax when people are forced to pay for coverage they didn't have before or when they're fined for not having it.

     ”The Senate Finance Committee proposes a brand new tax on medical devices." (Ref. 15) The Senate plan calls for $40 billion in these new taxes while the House passed plan calls for only $20 billion. Now just a minute - it’s senior citizens like me who are the major recipients of medical devices like pacemakers and implanted defibrillators and "Obamacare foolishly would hike taxes on companies that generate health-advancing, life saving mechanisms"? (Ref. 15) I thought the President promised no new taxes or increased health care costs for senior citizens and the middle and lower economic classes. Just what does he and his Democratic followers think the medical device companies will do if they are faced with added taxes? Answer: They will raise the price of their product and all of us who use their product will pay more. I call that a tax increase and an increase in the cost of health care for seniors, middle class America, and lower income Americans.

     From where I sit, the health care reform that President Obama and the Democratic leadership are trying to ram down the throats of American citizens is too expensive, too intrusive and too socialistic! When one considers the bottom line, it should be clear that everyone will end up paying more because of all the new costs that will be incurred. Someone has to pay for those unable to pay for health coverage themselves; someone has to pay for the increased cost to insurers of not denying coverage for pre-existing conditions; someone has to pay for the higher costs of coverage for senior citizens when the Democrats' health care plan prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums to seniors; someone has to pay for drug coverage costs when the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D is closed. Obama and the Democrats say they want to pay for the massive health care reform program with taxes - initially from the wealthiest few percent of the population, (simply known as rob the rich and give to the poor), but we all know that, over time, everyone in America will end up paying higher health care costs.

     We don’t need a 1900 plus page hodge-podge monstrosity rushed through for political expediency.

     Was Nikita Kruschev right when in the mid-1950's he said, "We do not have to worry about the United States. They will spend themselves out of existence." (Ref. 16)

     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why was it necessary amend the Senate health care legislation to provide Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska (a crucial 60th vote for the bill) with a number of benefits for his home state of Nebraska that are not available to the other 49 states in the Union?
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why was it necessary to buy the vote of Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida by exempting roughly 800,000 seniors in Florida from potential benefit cuts by private Medicare Advantage plans? In other states, Medicare Advantage patients risk losing benefits because the private plans are a major target of planned cuts to Medicare.
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why was it necessary to bribe the American Medical Association (AMA) with some last-minute changes to please the doctors?
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why was it necessary to have Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat from Connecticut., who is facing a difficult re-election next year, add an item making $100 million available for construction of a hospital at a public university?
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why was Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont allowed to negotiate $600 million in additional Medicaid benefits for his state over 10 years?
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why was it necessary for doctors and hospitals in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming to get paid more than providers in other states under formulas in the bill designed to help the so-called Frontier States?
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why were longshoremen specifically added to the list of high-risk professions shielded from the full impact of a new tax on high-value health insurance plans?
     Why was language included in the Senate health care bill that will exclude all but the very smallest construction industry companies from the bill's small business exemption?
     Why did makers of brand-name biotech drugs win 12 years of protection against would-be generic competitors and why were drug-makers successful in defeating proposals to allow importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries, and to let the government negotiate drug prices for Medicare recipients? Who does this benefit - American citizens or the pharmaceutical companies?
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why are there different deals for different states? Heath care reform should be the same across the country and not a special deal for any specific state.
     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why are the Democrats shoving this pork-barrel healthcare bill down the throats of Americans in the face of nearly 60% opposition in virtually every poll in America? "Make no mistake, if the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn't be forcing this vote in the dead of night." (Ref. 17)

     If ObamaCare is such a good deal for all Americans, why did Democratic Senator Harry Reid have to use a pay-to-play approach for buying the votes of senators whose understanding of the duties of representation does not rise above looting the nation for local benefits?

In 2010 I wrote what is in italics below (Ref. 18, 19, 20 ) or quoted from the indicated references.

     On Tuesday, March 23, 2010, the American people witnessed the death of American democracy. On that day, President Barack Obama signed into law the massive health-care reform bill. If unchanged, the consequences of the reform will be felt by the nation and its people for decades, if not centuries to come. The reform’s pros and cons will continue to be debated and argued for years to come.

     The American people overwhelmingly indicated their opposition to the health-care bill. Still, the President and the Democratic leadership rammed the massive $1 trillion bill through the House and Senate. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid forced through an agenda that was clearly rejected by the majority of the American people.

     The American people have witnessed and been repulsed by a flood of falsehoods, misrepresentations and out-and-out lies. Does anyone with half a brain actually believe that adding 32 million people to the health care rolls will reduce the deficit?

     President Obama’s health care reform is supposed to improve America’s health care system. Instead, it is creating a blizzard of new paperwork for America’s businesses while requiring more government jobs and bureaucracy to oversee the implementation of the reform.

     This new law [ObamaCare] spans 2,562 tree-killing pages. Far worse, it will force Americans to spend countless hours completing, transmitting, and filing endless reams of federal paperwork.

     As usual, the devil is in the details when it comes to what ObamaCare will ultimately cost in terms of money, red tape, still more government, and overall inconvenience and public frustration. {Here is} one more example of the many snake pits in the plan that are just now coming to light. “Come 2014, ObamaCare requires the creation of 50 American Health Benefit Exchanges, one per state. The exchanges will be government entities . . . This is a massive waste of time and money. Private enterprise already offers this service at no taxpayer cost.
     “The simple Internet address ehealth.com, for instance will link any American to an incredibly useful Web site. This private company claims that its customers actually have secured coverage in just 11 minutes.
     “This site asks just five question: Zip Code, gender birth date, and whether one uses tobacco, or is in college.” {In 2013, after the government got in the game, it was taking days and weeks to sign up for ObamaCare. Many simply gave up in frustration!}
     “So, what does Obama bring to this party? Nothing other than a massive budget, suffocating new rules, and a brand new cadre of government workers.
     “Rather than encourage, and sometimes help, the uninsured {to} buy coverage via eHealth.com and its competitors, ObamaCare mandates 50 copies of this fully functioning private infrastructure, staffs them with government employees, slathers them with stultifying new regulations and finances them with other people’s confiscated money.“ (Ref. 21 )

     The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that Obama’s health care program will cost $216 billion by 2019 and then increase by 8% every year thereafter. The CBO also said that government will have to spend an additional $115 billion to bring the cost to over $1 trillion. Unfortunately, every government controlled entitlement program has grown to cost far more than even the most pessimistic predictions. Obama’s promise that his health care plan would ameliorate medical costs (and help to control the federal deficit) would “be the first time in the nation’s history when government promises of cost containment are accurate.” . . . “If history is any judge, the 10-year cost estimate of $1.3 trillion {for ObamaCare} will be twice or three times that.” (Ref. 22)

     When a $14.3 billion annual tax on health insurance goes into effect in 2014, the cost of job-based private coverage for an average family of 4 will increase by $1,000 a year.

     Mr. President, you said that if we liked our health care insurance, we could keep it.

     In April, 2010, The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that about 14 million people now covered through their jobs will lose their insurance and be forced into the new exchanges. In addition, about 15% of seniors with Medicare Advantage will be forced out of the program because of cuts in Medicare.

     “As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest {health care} insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals. [emphasis mine] “More Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of keeping their own doctors [Emphasis mine] if they are outside the new {health care} networks.” (Ref. 23)

     Mr. President, you said that under your health insurance plan, we could chose and keep our doctors.

     Mr. President, under your health care plan, the existing supply of primary care physicians will be unable to keep up with the increased demand caused by millions of newly covered patients. In recent years, the U.S. has had a growing shortage of physicians and this will only worsen under ObamaCare. Under your plan, doctor workload will increase while reimbursement rates are cut. Work more for less won’t attract more health care workers nor increase the quality of care. Medicare payment cuts are predicted to induce about 20% of participating doctors and other providers to cease serving Medicare patients, and, there is already a shortage of Medicare providers.

In 2011 I wrote what is in italics below (Ref. 24, 25 ) or quoted from the indicated references.

     “’Medicare as we know it’ has already changed – radically – with the passage of Obamacare. That law makes record-breaking payment cuts to Medicare providers to ‘save’ an estimated $575 billion in the first 10 years.
     “The problem: Those Medicare ‘savings’ won’t be used to shore up the {Medicare} program. {Instead}, they are going to fund Obamacare’s other big expenses. Meanwhile, the Medicare actuary estimates these cuts will leave 15 percent of Medicare providers operating in the red within 10 years. Losing money on Medicare will force providers to refuse to take new Medicare patients or drop out of the program altogether [Emphasis mine]. Then where will seniors get the medical care they need?
     “It gets worse. To meet the law’s new spending targets, Obamacare’s powerful 15-member board is charged with making ‘specific and detailed’ recommendations for even deeper cuts. Well you can’t get more of anything by paying less for it" [Emphasis mine]. (Ref. 26)

     The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act will soon impose more federal tax paperwork and significant new reporting burdens on all businesses.

     “The new health care law will impose new compliance regulations, employer mandate taxes, taxes on business ‘flow-through’ and investment income, and numerous indirect costs on small- and medium-size companies. Altogether, these constraints will dramatically affect companies’ per-employee costs, firm-level allocation of labor, desire to take on health coverage, and motivation to grow both in terms of income and employment.” (Ref. 27)

     “The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health recently held a hearing to review how Obamacare regulations will affect employers’ ability to maintain health coverage.
     “To illustrate the magnitude of the new regulatory burdens on businesses, subcommittee chairman Joe Pitts (R–PA) displayed a stack of over 3,500 pages of Obamacare rules, notices, and regulatory guidance issued so far by the Administration. This additional burden, the hearing highlighted, will harm employers’ ability to offer health coverage and disrupt coverage for Americans across the country.” (Ref. 28)

In 2012 I wrote what is in italics below (Ref. 29 )

     The problem with Obamacare has always been that it is too broad, too complex, too vague, and places too much power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. Nancy Pelosi knew this and basically said as much when she, Obama and Reid were railroading the health care monstrosity through the Democratic controlled House and Senate. She essentially told Congress to pass the plan and afterwards try to understand what it contained - it is doubtful if they (or anyone else) understand the entire bill to this day. The Supreme Court intimated the same when Justice Scalia exclaimed, “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” when faced with trying to read through and comprehend the full meaning and impact of the plan that defined the program.

     Since Obamacare passed, the Administration has released over 6,000 pages of new regulations – and there are hundreds if not thousands more regulations coming. The paperwork will be crippling, the associated costs enormous, with the likely result being countless jobs in the private sector being lost. BUT, there will be more federal hiring – to interpret, revise, and enforce the regulations – big government begets more big government. As I said, Big government is destructive to the American way of life!

In 2013 I wrote what is in italics below (Ref. 30, 31, 32 ) or quoted from the indicated references.

     The more ObamaCare is analyzed and as its 2700 pages of unintelligibility are analyzed in detail, it becomes increasingly more apparent that its implementation will create enormous harm to the U.S. economy and to many of the people it is supposed to benefit. The fallacies in the arguments put forward for its passage in 2010 become evident as the maze of rules, regulations and provisions are unraveled. It is becoming increasingly clear that many of the promises made in favor of the passage of ObamaCare were false, misleading, unsubstantiated or outright lies. ObamaCare needs to be done away with as soon as possible – or, it may make many Americans much sicker than they now are!

     “And the biggest, coldest power play of all in ObamaCare came at the expense of the elderly. You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with the new law and new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn't have enough money; they needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So they just took it all away from Medicare, $716 billion funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.
      - - -
     “Obamacare cost about $1 trillion dollars over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office {CBO}. . . . roughly half of that money {comes} through new taxes, and the other half was ‘raised’ from cuts in Medicare.
     “{Under the rules of the CBO, Obamacare was allowed to call the money taken from Medicare an} ‘offset’ to the new spending. So, Obamacare looked deficit neutral on paper, when in fact half of it was paid for with borrowed money.
     “The $500 {More likely $716} billion in cuts to Medicare do not amount to cuts in benefits to patients, at least nominally. . . . Obamacare imposes efficiency requirements on doctors and hospitals that, over time, {they will be virtually impossible to maintain. The} government’s chief accountant for Medicare, estimates that 15 percent of all hospitals will fall into the red because of these cuts. Thus, seniors will have the same benefits on paper – but, much like those in the Medicaid program, they will find it difficult to find a doctor or hospital willing to provide the service.
     “{In summary, to fund ObamaCare, President Obama and the Democrats} cut $500 {$716?} billion from the {Medicare} program; {they} used that money to cover the cost of ObamaCare; the cuts are likely going to result in barriers to access for seniors.” (Ref. 33)

     Realistically, the real cost of ObamaCare is unknown. But, based upon the cost growth history of nearly all major federal government programs, what is almost certain is that current cost estimates for the unaffordable ObamaCare program are grossly underestimated. The cost escalation process for ObamaCare has already begun.

     “Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.” (Ref. 34 )

     This cost increase comes in spite of the repeated claim by President Obama that ObamaCare would not increase health care costs to individuals – a claim that drew justified derision in 2009 and 2010 in view of the number of previously uninsured people that would be added to the health care rolls at public expense.

     In his 2013 State of the Union speech, president Obama continued to advocate for his health care program with a series of falsehoods and misrepresentations. With respect to his promise to reduce the cost of health care, we have the following:

     “The president claimed his national health insurance is driving down medical costs. It’s actually the reverse. [Emphasis mine] ABC News reported on the conclusion of the nonpartisan Health Care Institute: ‘Spending on health care rose 4.6 percent in 2011 – up $4,500 per person on average.’ The network also noted a Kaiser Family Foundation report that said: ‘Health insurance premiums for individuals and families also climbed year-over-year, up 3 percent ($186) on average for an individual and 4 percent ($672) on average for a family.’” (Ref. 35)

     ObamaCare was touted as a health care plan that would incur no new tax increases. Such is clearly not the case. “According the U.S. Supreme Court, on 23 March of 2010, the largest tax increase in the history of the United States was signed into law - The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), more commonly referred to as ObamaCare.
     “In addition to the overall plan itself, he PPACA actually contains several new taxes, including:

”A 3.8% tax on some capital gains
”A 10% tax on indoor tanning booths
”A 0.9% tax on filers making more than $200,000 per year
”A new tax levied on insurers who market luxury-level health care plans whose premiums cost more than $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for families
”A 2.3% tax on sales of medical machinery
”A tax on pharmaceutical manufacturers
”A new tax on insurers, scaled to their market share.

“In addition to new taxes, the PPACA will also place limitations on some previous tax breaks:

”People will only be able to put $2,500 of pre-tax income into their flexible spending accounts. (This isn't really a new tax, so much as a limit on an earlier tax break).
”A reduced deduction for healthcare expenses.”