This article from National Review provides a simple overview of a few of the main problems with Obamacare.

I’ll just highlight a few of the points in the article.

Higher health care costs, higher health insurance costs, higher taxes:

Under ACA, health-care spending is expected to rise significantly, even beyond the usual inflation in medical prices. President Obama’s economic advisers originally had calculated that the bill would reduce health-care spending by $200 billion a year, from whence the president derived his intellectually indefensible conclusion that the bill would save the average family of four some $2,500 a year. Recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services calculated that ACA will not reduce health-care spending at all and will instead add about $70 billion per year in the immediate future. Estimates of the program’s expense keep growing. It will spend more than originally estimated, it will tax more than originally estimated, and its vaunted deficit-reduction benefits have been evaporating at a pace suggesting that, as many predicted, they will never come to pass. In 2010, CBO projected that ACA would reduce the deficit by $140 billion through 2019; today that projection is a mere $4 billion. The estimated tax increases in the bill have doubled.

It discriminates against men by forcing them to subsidize women’s health care:

The difference between the increase in men’s rates and those in women’s rates is one of the more naked bits of ideology apparent in the bill. Women spend considerably more on health care than men do, and hence have paid higher health-insurance premiums. The architects of the ACA decided that this was not permissible, and so by fiat eliminated the difference, meaning a disproportionate increase in men’s rates. Likewise, because there can be only so much difference permitted in prices paid by the young and the old, the young will pay much higher rates.

Employers are forced to make full-time employees work part-time:

[The employer mandate creates a] powerful economic preferences for part-time workers. By mandating coverage for those working 30 hours or more, the employer mandate makes part-time workers that much more attractive to businesses, a fact not lost on President Obama’s erstwhile supporters in organized  labor. “The ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class,” reads a joint letter from the major labor unions.

It creates incentives to not marry and to not work:

And in an especially clumsy move, the program’s architects have designed the income limits on its subsidies as hard cutoffs rather than gradual phaseouts. For example, as Ed Driscoll points out, a married couple earning $62,040 would face a $10,000 penalty for earning $1 extra — unless they get divorced. That’s a very high effective marginal tax rate. Likewise, a married couple with two children with $93,000 in joint income would pay far more for insurance than they would if they divorced and custody were granted to the lower-earning spouse. So while the employer mandate creates a disincentive to hire, the high penalties for extra income create a disincentive to work — hardly the thing that’s called for in a period of high joblessness and record welfare dependency.

That’s enough – read the article for many, many more. And the article doesn’t even cover all the problems, although some of my previous posts (like this one) have talked about these other problems that weren’t mentioned in the National Review article. And there are even ethical problems, like the abortion drugs coverage mandate and the fact that pro-life taxpayers will be subsidizing abortions from day one. I could go on, but I’ll try to keep this post short.

So what is Obama doing about the problems in his policy? The Republicans have asked him to delay the individual mandate for a year, and to make Congress give up their exemption from Obamacare – a law they passed themselves!

The Wall Street Journal explains Obama’s response to the problems in his health care policy.

Excerpt:

President Obama is sitting out one of the most important policy struggles since he entered the White House. With the government shutdown, it has reached the crisis stage. His statement about the shutdown on Tuesday from the White House Rose Garden was more a case of kibitzing than leading. He still refuses to take charge. He won’t negotiate with Republicans, though the fate of ObamaCare, funding of the government and the future of the economic recovery are at stake. He insists on staying on the sidelines—well, almost.

Mr. Obama has rejected conciliation and compromise with Republicans. Instead, he attacks them in sharp, partisan language in speech after speech. His approach—dealing with a deadlock by not dealing with it—is unprecedented. He has gone where no president has gone before.

[…][A]s he was predicting widespread suffering, Mr. Obama steadfastly refused to negotiate with Republicans. He told House Speaker John Boehner in a phone call that he wouldn’t be talking to him anymore. With the shutdown hours away, he called Mr. Boehner again. He still didn’t negotiate and said he wouldn’t on the debt limit either.

Mr. Obama has made Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid his surrogate in the conflict with Republicans. Mr. Reid has also declined to negotiate. In fact, Politico reported that when the president considered meeting with Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell, along with the two Democratic congressional leaders, Mr. Reid said he wouldn’t attend and urged Mr. Obama to abandon the idea. The president did just that.

[…]The president’s tactic of attacking Republicans during a crisis while spurning negotiations bodes for a season of discord and animosity in the final three-and-one-quarter years of the Obama presidency. That he has alienated Republicans doesn’t seem to trouble Mr. Obama.

The important lesson we must all learn from this is that Barack Obama had no experience in health care policy. He didn’t surround himself with people who understood health care policy, either. The next time that we have the opportunity to elect a President, we need to realize that we are not picking a favorite celebrity or an American Idol. The President’s job is not to dance and sing and act to amuse us. The President’s job is to solve problems. Part of being a problem solver is also being a good negotiator. We need to pick someone who has experience successfully solving the problems that are facing us as a nation. Speeches are no substitute for past performance.

Related posts

• Obamacare health insurance exchanges impose massive penalties on married couples
• Nancy Pelosi: forcing workers to work fewer hours gives them “freedom”
• Senator David Vitter’s amendment to revoke Obamacare exemption for Congress
• Obamacare will increase average individual-market premiums by 99% for men
• Obamacare in action: 301 employers cut employee hours and/or jobs
• Surprise! New Stanford University study finds costs of Obamacare higher than estimated
• Stephen Moore: Obama’s failing economy has hit his supporters the hardest
• New study finds that many young people won’t purchase Obamacare plans
• Unionized UPS to drop health insurance for 15,000 spouses because of Obamacare
• Harry Reid: Obamacare is “absolutely” a step towards single payer health care system
• Blue Cross, Aetna, United, Humana opt out of Obamacare exchanges
• President Obama intervenes to exempt Congress from Obamacare
• Aetna pulls out of Obamacare exchanges in Maryland – can’t operate at a loss
• IRS employee union opposes making Obamacare apply to themselves

I’m just kidding. I’m not surprised. Here’s the story from Reason magazine.

Excerpt:

Obamacare could cost a lot more than the official estimates, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University.

That’s because the law will create big incentives for employers to drop worker health coverage so that employees can get health insurance through the law’s insurance exchanges. Anyone who buys insurance through an exchange and has a household income between 133 and 400 percent of the poverty line is eligible for publicly funded subsidies. So if a lot more people than expected end up in the exchanges, that means a lot more subsidies — and a much higher total cost for the law.

The study, published this week in the journal Health Affairs, estimates that some 37 million people would benefit from shifting out of employer coverage and into exchanges. What “benefit” means, in this case, is that those people would be better off getting cash from their employer instead of coverage, and then buying subsidized coverage on the exchanges.

If all 37 million people in this category were to switch into exchange-based coverage, it would result in a dramatic increase in the law’s cost: about $132 billion annually in additional federal outlays, according to the study.

[…]The paper concludes with a warning: policy makers “should plan for the possibility that the exchange subsidies may end up costing the federal government much more than currently projected.”

It’s a warning they should take seriously. It’s also one they ought to have heard before. Former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center have been sounding this alarm for years. Back in 2010, they estimated that, because of the law’s incentives to drop coverage, 35 million more Americans than expected could end up in subsidized coverage through the exchanges.

On election day in 2012, I wrote this post that quoted Investors Business Daily’s warning about Obamacare:

Despite repeated promises that the more we knew about ObamaCare, the more we’d like it, the law has never been less popular. Just 38% now approve of it, down from 46% when it passed in March 2010, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

But unless voters defeat Obama on Tuesday, they’ll never get rid of his disastrous “reform.” Even before ObamaCare takes full effect, its damage is evident.

Insurance premiums, which Obama promised to slash $2,500 by the end of his first term, have climbed 14% since the law went into effect. Nearly six in 10 doctors say ObamaCare has made them less positive about the future of health care in America, and almost two-thirds say they’d retire today if they could, according to a Physicians Foundation survey.

Businesses are holding back on hiring, or are shifting workers to part time because of ObamaCare’s looming coverage mandate. Darden Restaurants, for example, has stopped offering full-time schedules at several of its popular eateries “to help us address the cost implications of health care reform.”

This is only one of the horrors ObamaCare will unleash if fully implemented in 2014. Among others:

• ObamaCare will force as many as 20 million workers into government-run insurance exchanges after their employers drop coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
• More companies will follow Darden’s example, refusing to schedule workers more than 30 hours wherever they can to avoid the coverage mandate.
• Insurance costs will explode. Even ObamaCare’s fans admit that its benefit mandates, marketplace rules and bans on coverage caps will force premiums to skyrocket. Jonathan Gruber, who helped design ObamaCare, says the law will add 30% to premiums in the individual market in the states he’s studied.
• Doctor shortages will reach 90,000 in about a decade, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
• Seniors will find it increasingly difficult to get treatments, as ObamaCare’s deep Medicare payment cuts cause one in six hospitals to become unprofitable and still more doctors to refuse to see Medicare patients.
• Even when a patient does get to see a doctor, ObamaCare will intrude, using the law’s “Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute” to create top-down rules for what doctors can prescribe for any given ailment.
• ObamaCare’s vast new taxes — including a crippling $20 billion surtax on the medical device industry and a $123 billion surtax on investors — will slow down medical innovation.
• And when these and dozens of other new taxes fail to cover ObamaCare’s massive 10-year $1.76 trillion price tag, everyone will suffer a bigger tax bite.

Not to mention the fact that ObamaCare will, for the first time in our nation’s history, force people to buy a government-approved product, setting a frightening new precedent for federal intrusiveness.

That’s a warning that we should have heeded as voters in the 2012 election. But we didn’t. And 2014 is almost here.

Look, even when a person means well and wants to help others, if they don’t know what to do to help others, then we shouldn’t put them in charge. The best way to tell if someone knows how to do what they say they want to do is to look at their record and see if they have been able to do what they say they want to do in the past. That’s what a job interview is – it’s when the people doing the hiring look at the candidate’s record – not his rhetoric – and decide whether to hire him to do certain specific tasks. The requirements of the job should be key to the decision of whether to hire or not. Obama had no experience passing health care laws that lowered costs, improved access, and so on. He had never done anything remotely like that in all of his life. If we wanted to fix health care, then we should hire people like Bobby Jindal. People who know how to do the work because they’ve actually done the work before.