The big healthcare con: 87% of Obamacare enrollees have premiums subsidized by bankrupt government

Monday, January 11, 2016 by: Daniel Barker
Tags: Obamacare, insurance premiums, US government

---

(NaturalNews) The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has just released figures indicating that, of those people who signed up for Obamacare in the latest enrollment period, 87 percent will receive financial assistance to lower their monthly premiums.

This figure has jumped from 80 percent during the previous open enrollment period. The agency did not furnish details regarding how much new enrollees would receive or how much it will cost taxpayers in the long run.

From the HHS report:

[M]ore than 4 million people in both the state and federal Marketplaces signed up for the first time or reenrolled in coverage for 2015 during the first month of open enrollment. That includes more than 3.4 million people who selected a plan in the 37 states that are using the HealthCare.gov platform for 2015, and more than 600,000 consumers who selected plans in the 14 states that are operating their own Marketplace platform for 2015.

The Obama Administration has been doing its best to convince Americans that the Affordable Care Act has been a success. Supporters of Obamacare will certainly try to get all the mileage they can out of the recent announcement regarding the drop in the uninsured rate, but there's a lot more to the story.

Let's not forget how the administration attempted to add 380,000 dental-plan subscribers that should not have been counted to the list of insured, while trying to hide the amount of people who lost their coverage because of Obamacare.

Most of the promises made about the cost to individuals and taxpayers have turned out to be just that: empty promises.

We were told that the cost of premiums would drop once the ACA went into effect, when in fact, they have risen sharply. One study found that the cost of individual market premiums rose on average nearly 50 percent in 2014 (based on an analysis of data from more than 3,000 counties).

The "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" pledge has also proven to be a fantasy, if not an outright lie. In the real world, cuts in Medicaid payments to primary-care doctors will effectively reduce patient access -- four out of five doctors say that they are "either overextended or at full capacity."

The direct cost of Obamacare over the next decade has been estimated to be $2 trillion, and that figure doesn't take into account the burden on the economy created by the regulations on businesses, which will force employers to cut hours for their workers.

In addition to all this, there are new surprises for taxpayers filing their returns for 2014. The complexities of filing for those receiving subsidies means that millions of people will be forced to employ tax preparation companies to figure out their returns.

And to add injury to insult, millions of Americans -- as many as half of the 6.8 million who received premium subsidies in 2014 -- are likely to find themselves owing money to the federal government, due to the fact that the subsidies are based on estimates of yearly income.

The bottom line is this: Whether you're a fan of socialized healthcare or not, someone still has to pay for it. And Americans, individually and collectively, will be paying the costs of the ill-conceived and poorly implemented Affordable Care Act for many years to come.

Unless the Republican-controlled Congress can come up with a workable plan to undo some of the damage, we are stuck with a very expensive healthcare program that appears to hurt more people than it helps -- and at a cost spiraling into trillions of dollars.

Sources:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com

http://dailycaller.com