A Quote by Stephen Colbert
Obamacare needs the premiums of healthier people to cover the costs of sicker people. It's a devious con that can only be described as insurance.
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President Obama said, oh, we want to make insurance perfect for people, but he added all these regulatory mandates, made it too expensive. Young, healthy people didn't buy it, and the people remaining in the insurance pool were sicker and sicker. That's the adverse selection and the death spiral of Obamacare. And so really we do need to discuss the intricacies of what worked and what didn't work in Obamacare. And I think the better way to do this is to let individuals have the freedom to choose what kind of insurance is best for them. The government doesn't always know best.
Right now in the insurance markets, we have sort of a disaster unfolding, a downward spiral, adverse selection, premiums in the individual market going through the roof. People can't afford insurance and insurance companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars. If you repeal part of Obamacare to get rid of the individual mandate but keep some of the ideas, that people can still buy insurance after they're sick, the situation gets extraordinarily worse. And so what we're seeing now could be tenfold greater if you only repeal part of Obamacare.
Obamacare's not imploding. The main goal of Obamacare was two-fold. One was to cover the uninsured, of which we've covered 20 million, the largest expansion in American history. The other was to fix broken insurance markets where insurers could deny people insurance just because they were sick or they had been sick. Those have been fixed, and for the vast majority of Americans, costs in those markets have come down, thanks to the subsidies made available under Obamacare.
The basic premise of insurance is the pooling of funds from many to cover the costs of some. There are complicated methods for how to do this, but one fact remains consistent: For insurance to work well, people need to be in and stay in the insurance pool.
What is problematic about Obamacare is that it is killing millions of jobs in this country and has killed millions of jobs. It has forced millions of people into part time work. It has caused millions of people to lose their insurance, to lose their doctors, and to face skyrocketing insurance premiums. That is unacceptable.
I oppose Obamacare and believe it has failed. It drove up premiums, took insurance away from people who were promised otherwise, and usurped state programs.
Obamacare has burdened New York families with unaffordable premiums, rendered some insurance plans unusable because of high deductibles, and caused people to lose their doctors.
Only if everyone buys insurance can insurers afford to cover people with preexisting conditions or pay the costs of catastrophic diseases.
I think people forget that when people lose Medicaid coverage, they still show up at the hospital when they have a chronic illness or a traumatic impact on their health. And those bills are paid by the hospital who then passes those costs on. They do not have a magic fairy paying the bills for people who show up without insurance. Those bills are passed on to all the people in our country that do have insurance. That's why this bill is not going to break the cycle of higher premiums - because we're going to have fewer people insured.
Remember what Obamacare gave you. Obamacare gave you insurance but not health care. A lot of folks who were technically insured either couldn't afford the premiums or couldn't afford the copay.
Obamacare's costly regulations mean that the mix of people who sign up are tending to be older and sicker. Many young and otherwise healthy individuals continue to be priced out of the exchanges, even after the benefit of federal subsidies are baked into their costs.
We know that Congress must find ways to reduce the cost of health insurance, including premiums and out-of-pocket costs, as well as to lower the actual costs of health care.
Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous.
Obamacare is dead. Obamacare right now, all the insurance companies are fleeing. Places like Tennessee have already lost half of their state with the insurance companies. They're all going. Obamacare, John, is dead. Okay, because we're being - we're being compared to Obamacare. Just, so. Obamacare doesn't work.
Obamacare imposed an unprecedented level of regulation and standardization on individual-market health insurance all across America. This has left many consumers in an intolerable predicament - in some cases, having to spend up to a third or even half of their income on premiums and deductibles before insurance kicks in.
In order for Obamacare's cost structure to work, millions of Americans must sign up to pay inflated prices; that would help pay for the subsidies to cover insurance company costs on those with pre-existing conditions.
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