Black Man Thinkin'

“I just see a huge train wreck coming down“

That is what Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) told Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in April 2013, about the Obamacare rollout, then less than six months away.

Baucus would later say, some two weeks before the rollout, that he longer expected a debacle and that his April statement was a wake-up call to the administration, “That was the whole point of it and we got their attention and worked to try to straighten things out.”

It will be a train wreck…It won’t be a train wreck…Senator, as the old folks say, “Always go with your first mind.”

Obamacare’s problems are now myriad, with more, different, and more devastating items than most imagined. In May 2013, Institute for Policy Innovation resident scholar Merrill Matthews saw not one, but four impending train wrecks for Obamacare:

• Overstating the readiness, and the potential cost savings, of Electronic Health Records (EHR),
• A lack of support from health insurers and from the public,
• Ignoring health insurance experts to draft a law that explodes health insurance premiums, and
• Underfunding the high risk pools for the “uninsurables” with pre-existing conditions, thereby leaving people the law intended to help with no help at all.

So far, two of those wrecks have occurred; does anyone seriously consider a problem with EHR and with insuring those with pre-existing conditions unlikely? Everyone should have seen these problems coming; the Obama administration certainly did.

Candidate Obama repeatedly promised Americans that his health care reform would lower health insurance premiums for American families: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66bgpRRSDD4[/youtube]

Obamacare in hand and seeking re-election, the promise of premium reductions became a story of reducing total health care costs.

Then, four months after the 2012 election, HHS Secretary Sebelius let the cat out of the bag: insurance premiums could rise and not fall at all. Recently, the Manhattan Institute predicted rates would double for young men and increase 62 percent for young women. By then, Obama had changed his tack to taking credit for the slowest rate of increase in 50 years.

So much for the exciting promises of dramatic decreases in premiums. Does anyone else see a problem with that one?

Then there is the HealthCare.gov website, which the administration promised to have ready on October 1, 2013: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRxNx1r6DGw[/youtube]

However, by that date, the website was neither fully built nor tested: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WzE3naHcq4[/youtube]

The president said he did not think himself “stupid enough to go around saying this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.” He then stated, “Clearly we, and I, did not have enough awareness about the problems with the website.”

Yet, multiple reports show that the administration, including the White House, was aware of website problems, months in advance. Is the president being truthful when he denies knowing anything was wrong, or does this fall into the category of his “Like it…Keep it” promise?

Regarding that, the president did apologize for the millions of health insurance cancellations, but did not call them unanticipated. That may be because the administration published, in June 2010, that 40% – 67% of individual health insurance policies would not have the promised “grandfather” status. We are to believe the president did not know what his administration predicted, not 90 days after Obamacare became law? No one told him? Really?

(Something is greatly amiss, as touching this man’s veracity, intelligence, competence, or any combination of the foregoing.)

Unfortunately, the carnage will not stop with the private health insurance market, estimated to eventually see some 16 million policies go away. That’s small potatoes; the next wave of cancellations will wash through the beaches of the employer-provided health insurance market and erode 68% of those policies, leaving 129 million Americans without the insurance they liked and hoped to keep.

If that was not enough, we now see people losing access to the doctors they trust, beginning in Connecticut, and beginning with Medicare Advantage patients, with UnitedHealthCare firing thousands of doctors.

As Vice President Joe Biden said: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2yBRucRe7c[/youtube]

So big, in fact, that the administration is looking for other folks to take the fall. They are blaming insurance companies for the millions of cancellation forced by their regulations; they are blaming the GOP for not helping them fix a mess with which Republicans had nothing to do; and blaming the media for not telling Americans how good Obamacare is. CNN is even blaming Christians for Obamacare’s woes.

But CNN also blames Christians for homosexual teen suicides, for homosexuals getting beaten on the street…CNN blames Christians for a number of things, but CNN is not officially part of the administration, and I digress.

The administration, and its supporters, are in full bunker mentality mode. The troubles with Obamacare are hurting more than the president. After the government “shut down”, Democrats held a significant lead over Republicans in the generic Congressional ballot; a more recent poll saw the GOP in the lead. Expect that lead to grow as more people lose their health insurance because of a law for which only Democrats voted.

Much is made of Republican in-fighting and disarray. Even more is made of the Republican Congress being less popular than the president. But that static picture ignores some important facts.

One is that it does not matter what people think of Congress; it only matters what they think of their individual Congressman. Who cares if they hate John Boehner in California, when the people who determine if he stays in Congress live in Ohio. The second fact is Obamacare will continue to be the gift that keeps on giving problems to everyone who voted for it…which includes not a single Republican. Which means Democrats, and not Republicans, may have the worsening problem.

How much worse can it get? Well, if 129 million Americans lose their health coverage before November 2014, then Max Baucus’ Obamacare rollout concern will be midterm election prophecy, and Democrats may, after the pools close in 2014, call 2010 “the good ol’ days”.