If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.
Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.
My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.
As I noted last week, in 2010, the Obama administration estimated that 93 million Americans would be unable to keep their prior health coverage under the narrow grandfathering provisions issued by the administration in June 2010. My colleague Chris Conover estimates that the number is 129 million. And we are here only talking about disruptions to private health plans, and not counting the law’s $716 billion in cuts to Medicare.
Obamacare forcibly increases the premiums paid by healthy people in order to correct this perceived inequity. And most people are healthy rather than sick, which is why our recent Manhattan Institute analysis of individual-market insurance premiums found that the average state faces a 41 percent increase in rates relative to the old system.
Some of these people—especially older individuals—will benefit from taxpayer-funded subsidies marshaled by the law. But our analysis shows that most Americans will face premium increases, despite the application of subsidies.
Obamacare was explicitly intended to abolish the old market for individually-purchased health coverage, and replace it with a new, more heavily-regulated one that forces healthier and younger individuals to pay more, whether they want to or not.
What makes Obamacare such a deeply flawed piece of work is not that it disrupts our existing arrangements, but that it disrupts those arrangements by forcing people to buy costlier coverage.
And not only does Obamacare force people to buy costlier coverage, it most significantly punishes a population that is already disadvantaged in our current system: people of average income who buy coverage on their own, and don’t benefit from the heavy subsidies enjoyed by people with government- or employer-sponsored insurance.