Obamacare is the final nail in the coffin for the disappearing American middle class

Monday, January 27, 2014 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Obamacare, middle class, American economy

(NaturalNews) If you are still fortunate enough to call yourself "middle class," enjoy it while you can, because thanks to the ravages of Obamacare, you're liable to lose that status at some point in the future.

Since Oct. 1, when the individual mandate kicked in and health insurance plans were required to include minimal coverage standards, millions of Americans have lost their insurance or will be losing it soon when policies come up for renewal, because their plans do not meet the mandates of the imperial ruling class.

Now granted, the middle class has been shrinking for some time. The damage to the middle class has truly been bipartisan; middle class families have been disappearing under both Republican and Democratic administrations. But this is mostly due to the fact that the massive federal bureaucracy is infested with career statists who impose rules and regulations on the American public and American industry relentlessly (these are increasing at a massive pace under Obama). And each of these rules carries a price for compliance - a price which must be paid by us.

Economic life support

The number of working-age Americans who either can't find a job or are underemployed has increased by millions. U.S. median household income has fallen consistently for years. The poverty rate is increasing. And while crony corporations and Wall Street are hopping in bed with the leviathan federal government, the rest of us are taking it in the shorts, working harder and longer to make ends meet.

And now, we've just been slapped with Obamacare, a horrible law that has already begun chipping away at what's left of the middle class. As I said, millions have lost their health plans - plans that President Obama promised repeatedly that they could keep.

The law is also causing dramatic rises in premiums for many people (even though Obama promised plans for American families would fall by $2,500 under Obamacare). The reason for this is simple: Obamacare's minimum coverage mandates much more than most Americans had otherwise chosen (and these requirements include ridiculous coverage mandates like forcing young men to buy maternity coverage). So, as coverage requirements grow, so do premiums.

And finally, Obamacare has already begun to have an effect on employment, even though the president illegally waived the employer mandate for one year (this waiver expires about a month before the 2014 elections - think the president will waive the requirement again, to help Democrats?). Many private sector and public sector employers have either trimmed their workforces to fall below the law's 50-employee coverage requirement or have cut employees' hours to part-time. Both of these measures are socking it to the middle class.

Paycheck to paycheck is the new normal for millions

As noted by the blog The Economic Collapse:

According to CNN, a survey that was conducted earlier this year found that 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most of those families simply cannot afford to pay much higher health insurance premiums for new policies that also come with much larger deductibles and significantly increased out-of-pocket costs. Millions of those families will ultimately end up choosing to do without health insurance altogether, and that will create a whole host of new problems. This is a disaster that is so enormous that it is really hard to put into words. If the U.S. health care system was a separate country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire globe all by itself. And now Obamacare is going to bring the entire U.S. health care system to its knees.

And who will be harmed the most? The middle class.

The poorest Americans are already covered under a variety of state and federal government entitlement programs. Their coverage is being subsidized by the middle (and upper) class. And, of course, the very lawmakers responsible for this terribly destructive law are having 75 percent of their premiums subsidized by taxpayers as well.

Obama has talked often about how he and his Democrat Party care so much for "the middle class." Based on what he's done to the middle class, how can you believe him?

Sources:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

http://www.policymic.com

http://freebeacon.com