Sunday, April 6, 2014

BloggeRhythms

Jim Angle of FoxNews.com wrote an interesting column titled “Fuzzy math from administration over ObamaCare?”
 
Since the text contains considerable statistics, however, it’s quite likely most people probably won’t even read the details thereby missing the extent of the damage done via implementation of the incumbent’s health care tax. Therefore, the following recap covers some of the most important points regarding how much has been spent for a net gain of practically zero as far as “universal’ insurance is concerned.
 
Mr. Angle begins by noting that “Though officials are celebrating the 7 million mark, the White House once minimized numbers twice that large-- the 14 million people in the individual insurance market who were facing cancellations because their policies did not have all the required benefits of ObamaCare.”
 
Then, when a huge political backlash arose, “In part because the president had promised everyone could keep their plans and doctors "no matter what," –the incumbent and his aides played the numbers down as just a small group.
 
According to Mr. Angle, “Obama portrayed the individual market as a small portion of the insurance market, saying "Keep in mind that the individual market accounts for five percent of the population," while White House spokesman Jay Carney made the same statement repeatedly, saying "Five percent of the country (is) in the individual insurance market, a portion of that five.”
 
And now today, looking at the actual results, “Doug Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, says "if you look at the 7 million and you shave off the 20 percent who probably haven’t paid, you've got about 5 and a half million people and that's roughly the number of people that were in the individual market and started having their policies cancelled."
 
Add to that this comment from Dan Mendelson of Avalere Health, a non-partisan consulting and analysis firm: “You need to look at the 7 million in the context of the U.S. population, and that's about 330 million people. So, this, this program is going to insure about two percent of the total folks who live in the United States."
 
Jay Carney himself referred to the original 14 million target as a "sliver" of the population, even though it's double the number of current signups.
 
All of which led to Mr. Angle concluding, “So while the administration portrayed that two percent as victory, the five percent facing cancellations was minimized, leading Holtz-Eakin to observe that "it can’t be the case that, you know, five percent is no big deal and signing up two percent is a triumph, those two can’t stand simultaneously."
 
And now we come to my point for today which is really the crux of the matter, because what wasn’t mentioned were the costs involved to attain the obviously miserable results. 
 
As far as the health care system itself is concerned, it’s been damaged significantly. Individual doctors and care givers of all types are changing career paths. Millions have had their care disrupted, altered or cancelled while others can’t keep former practitioners. And the cost to taxpayer’s for the debacle to date has been $35.2 billion dollars, all to insure a mere 2% of the population.
 
Jimmy Fallon summed it up this way on the Tonight Show; “The White House said it surpassed its goal for people enrolled in Obamacare. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you make something mandatory and fine people if they don’t do it and keep extending the deadline for months,” Fallon quipped. “It’s like a Cinderella story. It’s just a beautiful thing.”
 
That's it for today folks.
 
Adios

No comments:

Post a Comment