COMMENTARY | In 2009, while the debate over health care reform was raging across the United States, President Barack Obama loudly proclaimed that under his proposed system, anyone who wanted to keep his private insurance can do so.
But as Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner, that particular promise, like so many others of Obama’s, has an expiration date. In this particular case that date is in 2014, when government run health care exchanges are due to be up and running.
Whether the president was less than prescient about the effects of Obamacare or whether he was being deliberately deceptive, the effects are the same. At least 10 percent of midsized to large companies are considering dropping employee health care plans, the theory being that paying the fine for not doing so under Obamacare is less than actually providing health care insurance. 20 percent of companies are “thinking about it.”
Unlike the situation before Obamacare, companies that end employer based health care insurance will not be tossing their people out into the outer darkness. People without employer based health care can just buy their own insurance at the government subsidized exchanges.
Is this a bug of Obamacare — or a feature?
The left, including Obama, have long favored the abolition of private health insurance in favor of a government run system as exists in Canada and Great Britain. The desire runs counter to the wishes of the American people who, despite certain flaws inherent in insurance based health care, are not very keen to have government bureaucrats decide who gets health care and how much. Big Government Health relates numerous horror stories of people under government health care systems who have been denied drugs or procedures by government bureaucrats, some of whom have been allowed to die. It is small wonder that Sarah Palin’s term for these health care bureaucrats, “death panels,” has had such resonance.
The incentive for companies to drop health insurance and dump people into the government exchanges would seem, to some people at least, to be a way to get government health care through the back door. The idea is that private health insurance would wither on the vine and, eventually, the government would pay for all health care and since it shells out the money it will call the shots. The government’s power over the lives of people grow, at the expense of the degradation of quality of health care, down to the level of Great Britain and Canada.
Sources: Plan to keep your health plan? Don’t count on it, Byron York, Washington Examiner, August 25, 2011
Big Gov Health