Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (13 page)

If George Washington could say it, why can’t we? Why can’t our policy makers come to grips with the simple fact, illustrated
in social science data and throughout our history, that strong families and strong churches make a strong nation? Reality, after all, is the most reliable guide for policy.

CHAPTER SEVEN

REPLACE OBAMACARE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

T
he government should provide a safety net for the aged, infirm, and disabled. As we know, almost half of our population now receives some sort of government benefit. That wasn’t good enough for President Obama and his power-hungry cronies. They simply do not trust free markets and capitalism to create wealth efficiently and effectively and to allocate it fairly. So the progressives have been on a march for a century to replace capitalism with a command-and-control economic model according to which the government designs and heavily regulates the marketplace.

They have enjoyed conspicuous success in the field of healthcare. Prior to President Obama’s taking office in 2009, nearly half of the payments for medical care in this country were already made by either federal, state, or local government.
¹
The dominant player in the market, government, had a huge effect on cost, quality, and access to care. In spite of this heavy hand, the private side of the healthcare system still managed to be innovative in delivering healthcare more efficiently and effectively, though it was hobbled compared with other industries. Then Barack Obama burst onto the scene and forced through the ironically named “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” a law that most Americans now realize is threatening patients and making care less affordable. This law brings private health insurance directly under the command of the federal government. In a 2,500-plus-page bill, followed by thousands upon thousands of pages of regulations, the government now is going to design all insurance policies and the market in which they are sold. It is going to impose mandates on employers to provide coverage and penalties on individuals and businesses if they don’t buy government-approved coverage. Government-appointed oversight boards will attempt to keep a lid on prices and limit the overhead costs of insurance companies. And that’s just the beginning.

Obamacare will reshape the relationship between government and the people to resemble that in Western Europe, where the vast majority depend on the government for their
healthcare. Like any dependency, it is painful and indeed almost impossible to break. The promise of healthcare for all provided by the largesse of the federal government will not make us stronger. It will lead to less innovation and fewer cures. For all but the wealthiest, it will result in less choice of caregivers, longer lines, higher costs, and lower-quality medicine than a private system.

Worst of all, it will give the government more power than it has ever had over all but the wealthiest Americans. Government will control who lives and who dies, who gets care, how much he gets, and when he gets it. We are about to hand to our children a country less free than we found it, and for what?

When President Obama was elected, there were approximately forty-five million uninsured persons in this country, yet everyone in America was guaranteed the best medical care in the world at any hospital in the country.
²
If you believe the optimistic projections by the Congressional Budget Office, which so far has underestimated costs and overestimated the number of people insured under Obamacare, in ten years the government will spend an additional $1.36 trillion on healthcare, but there will still be thirty million uninsured, and many people will be receiving inferior coverage and care.
³

As we all know, the Obamacare rollout was an embarrassing disaster. People trying to buy plans on the new government exchanges spent frustrating hours at the computer—in some cases, they had to keep coming back for days and even
weeks—and many gave up altogether. Weeks after the launch, it was revealed that 40 percent of the system, including the crucial part needed to process payments to insurance companies, hadn’t even been built.
⁴
But it gets worse. As January 2014 arrived, hundreds of thousands of Americans who thought they had enrolled arrived at a doctor’s office only to learn that even after all they had endured, they had no coverage. Perhaps worst of all, more and more Americans who have successfully enrolled are discovering that many of our country’s best doctors and hospitals simply do not participate in these Obamacare health plans.
⁵

Despite President Obama’s now infamous promise, millions of Americans are losing the insurance plans they liked.
⁶
According to the Obama administration’s own 2010 estimate (back when the president was still disingenuously promising that you could keep your current insurance), upward of 5.6 million Americans who bought their policies on the individual market would have them canceled because of Obamacare regulations. And sure enough, in 2013, millions of people received letters telling them their plans were canceled because they weren’t in compliance with Obamacare’s new standards.

Even the
Washington Post
’s “Fact Checker,” which bends over backward to defend Obamacare, concedes that 4.7 million Americans had their plans canceled.
⁷
Another wave of cancellations, hitting people who work for small businesses, is on deck.

On January 24, 2014, the administration announced that three million people had signed up for plans on the Obamacare exchanges. Only a tiny percentage of the total signups, however—possibly as little as 10 percent—were people who had been uninsured before Obamacare. So on top of breaking an insurance system that was working for millions of Americans, Obamacare has done pathetically little to solve the problems of the uninsured. According to Gallup, a bigger percentage of Americans say they’re uninsured now than when President Obama was elected in 2008.
⁸

To understand the true damage inflicted by Obamacare, though, you have to hear some of the stories of the millions it has affected. The story of Ken and Melissa Davert of Bangor Township, Michigan, was reported by their local television news.
⁹
They are married with fifteen-year-old twins, Austin and Michaela. All four family members have serious medical problems. Ken has cerebral palsy, and his wife and children suffer from osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes severe bone and lung problems.

The Davert parents had been covered by Medicare, and they had a private insurance policy they liked for their children. Despite the president’s promise, they lost their Blue Cross policy to Obamacare. They tried to buy a new policy on the exchange, but their application was first lost and then denied. And then they were left for months to hear the result of their appeal of the denial. Meanwhile, they need coverage for their twins. So they have bought a new Blue Cross policy
that complies with Obamacare—quadrupling their exposure to out-of-pocket costs to a frightening $10,200 per person.

The Daverts asked their senators and congressman for help. An employee of the Department of Health and Human Services who heard their story called to let them know that their problems might be due to a computer “glitch” causing “applicants who potentially may be eligible for Medicaid to be denied coverage.”
A computer glitch
.

The Daverts thought they were not eligible for Medicaid because they had jobs. But Obamacare is going to push lots of people who used to be able to pay for private insurance onto Medicaid. According to Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “The system will automatically sign them up for Medicaid, even if they don’t want to be on Medicaid. . . . [A] lot of people are getting signed up for Medicaid just by virtue of what their income is.”
¹⁰

In November 2013, Nicole Hopkins reported in the
Wall Street Journal
that her mother, Charlene Hopkins, of Pierce County, Washington, had her insurance canceled. The Obamacare-compliant plan her insurer offered in its place was more expensive, because it included coverage the fifty-two-year-old woman didn’t need: “maternity needs, newborn wellness and pediatric dental care.” So she tried to buy a plan on the state’s insurance exchange. The one and only option she was offered was enrollment in Medicaid. And “offered” is a polite way of putting what actually happened to her. While she thought she
was still just exploring her options on the website, Charlene Hopkins was automatically signed up for Medicaid.

That was hard for Charlene to take: “‘I just don’t expect anything positive out of getting free health care,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why other people should have to pay for my care.’ In paying for health insurance herself—she won’t accept help from her family, either—she was safeguarding her dignity and independence.” As her daughter pointed out, Charlene Hopkins “has been forced to join the government-reliant poor, though she would prefer to contribute her two mites. The authorities behind ‘affordable care’ had erased her right to calculate what she was willing to spend to preserve her dignity—to determine what
she
thinks is affordable. . . . The Affordable Care Act is at risk of systematizing learned helplessness by telling individuals like my mother that they cannot afford to care for themselves in the way they could before the law was enacted. ‘This makes me feel poorer than ever,’ she said.”
¹¹

Our federal government should not be forcing independent citizens like Charlene Hopkins into welfare programs. It should not be yanking affordable, dependable private insurance out from under struggling families with serious medical problems like the Daverts. Americans want a hand up, not a handout. But instead of lifting people up, Obamacare is pushing countless Americans down into a state of dependency, uncertainty, and reliance on the whims of bureaucrats.

There’s no shame in relying on the government’s safety net in cases of true need. But it is an outrage for government artificially to create that “need” by forcing the cancellation of private insurance policies.

Obamacare is more than the ultimate expression of the Washington-knows-best mentality; it includes a direct assault on the freedom of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment. The president has gone so far as to tell the Little Sisters of the Poor that they have to buy coverage for contraception and abortion in violation of their consciences.

Having asserted control over practically every aspect of healthcare in America, the Obama administration should be held responsible for the shameful results we’ve already seen—and for the worse that is to come. But the president continues to make excuses for the Obamacare debacle. He blames Republicans, suggesting that we have proposed no alternative, that we’re denying the very real problems that afflicted the healthcare system
before
Obamacare. That’s simply not accurate.

In 1992, when I was a freshman congressman, John Kasich and I introduced the first health savings account bill. HSAs put consumers in charge of their routine care and gave them the incentive to be wise purchasers of services. If you spend your money and time to stay healthy,
you
receive the financial benefit, not the insurance company. Although the
idea has never been fully implemented in Washington, in states that have passed it, costs have gone down, and satisfaction up. When this patient-centered approach has been tried with Medicaid recipients, whom the Left believes are incapable of making wise healthcare choices, the results have been encouraging.

One of the key problems with Obamacare is that it doubles down on the idea that Washington can impose a one-size-fits-all solution in healthcare. The reality is that states have developed the most effective healthcare policies. The demographics of the uninsured and the conditions affecting healthcare costs and access are simply different in South Carolina than in New York or Colorado or Alaska. And because of their different political climates and cultures, the citizens of those states are likely to respond to different incentives and develop different approaches. This fundamental truth is why I support changing the current Medicaid program to more of a block-grant system that would provide states much more flexibility than they have today to design innovative programs to address the problems of the uninsured.

We can also help our fellow citizens burdened with preexisting conditions without disrupting the insurance market for the vast majority of those who are happy with their current plan. “High-risk pools” are programs that provide a mechanism for extending coverage to those facing these chronic health conditions. The traditional problem with state high-risk pools, however, is that the premiums are unaffordable.
Furthermore, these pools usually provide only an insurance card, with no education or guidance to patients on how best to take care of themselves to achieve better health and a longer, more fruitful life. Another way to help the uninsurable is to provide states the opportunity to access federal funds in addition to their Medicaid block grant to create state-based programs. For a state’s program to qualify, it would have to meet a limited set of criteria designed to maximize state flexibility, while addressing the problems of high premiums and education and ensuring accountability to patients and taxpayers: