Genevieve Wood advances policy priorities of The Heritage Foundation as senior contributor to The Daily Signal. Send an email to Genevieve.
Liberals are notorious for caring
about “groups” of people, but when it gets down to individual persons, not so
much. You’re about to see this play out in spades as Democrats cry crocodile
tears over the coming repeal of Obamacare.
You hear it over and over again:
“This will be catastrophic for the 20 million people who were previously
uninsured but now have coverage! You can’t take away their health care!”
First of all, no one is talking
about doing that. Any repeal legislation will have a transition period for
those who got coverage through Obamacare to move to new plans. And second, they
will have more choices and better options. Win. Win.
But liberals would rather focus on
quantity, how many millions we’ve given something to, versus quality, what does
that “gift” mean for individual people.
The Obama administration claims 20
million more Americans today have health care due to Obamacare. The reality is
that when you look at the actual net gains over the past two years since the
program was fully implemented, the number is
14 million, and of that, 11.8 million (84 percent) were people given the “gift”
of Medicaid.
And
new research shows that even fewer people will be left without insurance after
the repeal of Obamacare. Numbers are still being crunched, but between
statistics released by the Congressional Budget Office and one of the infamous
architects of Obamacare, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jonathan
Gruber, it’s estimated that anywhere from 2 to 7 million people now
on Medicaid would have qualified for the program even without Obamacare.
That further discredits the
administration’s claim of 20 million more Americans having health insurance
because of Obamacare.
Multiple studies have also shown
that even those who are uninsured often have better outcomes than those with
Medicaid. A University of Virginia study found
that for eight different surgical procedures, Medicaid patients were more
likely to die than privately insured or uninsured patients. They were also more
likely to suffer complications.
And it is important to note that
this study focused on procedures done from 2003-2007, prior to the geniuses in
Washington deciding it was a good idea to put even more people on the already
overburdened Medicaid system.
Additionally, despite what
proponents of the law promised, there is little evidence to show that the use
of emergency rooms, which have a higher level of
medical errors, has decreased due to Obamacare.
Then there is this reality: While
Obamacare has handed out millions of new Medicaid cards, that does not mean the
recipients now have quality health care. In fact, it doesn’t ensure they have
health care at all. That’s because increasing numbers
of doctors aren’t accepting Medicaid.
As a Louisiana woman told The
New York Times, “My Medicaid card is useless for me right now. It’s a useless
piece of plastic. I can’t find an orthopedic surgeon or a pain management
doctor who will accept Medicaid.”
Keep that in mind every time liberal
Democratic senators pull out the Kleenex boxes bemoaning the fact Republicans
are the ones trying to take people’s health care away.
Speaking of which, a much
underreported fact of
Obamacare is how many truly needy and disabled Americans are NOT getting the
services they need because of the expansion of Medicaid for able-bodied adults
(aka healthy) of prime working age, 19-54.
So while the left talks about all
the new people Obamacare is helping, it neglects to mention that over half a
million disabled people, from those with developmental disabilities to
traumatic brain injuries, are on waiting lists for care.
And many of them are on waiting
lists because Obamacare gives states more money to enroll able-bodied adults
than it does to take care of disabled children and adults who qualified for
Medicaid prior to Obamacare.
If you think that doesn’t have a
real-world perverse impact, note this. Since Arkansas expanded its Medicaid
program under Obamacare, it’s rolls have grown by 25 percent. During that same
time, 79 people on the Medicaid waiting list who suffered from developmental
disabilities have died. I would encourage you to read my former Heritage
Foundation colleague Chris Jacob’s full piece on
this.
Finally, it’s not just those
enrolled in Medicaid that are finding fewer health care provider options. For
people who now have health plans through the Obamacare exchanges, new Heritage
Foundation research shows that this year, in 70 percent of counties across the
country, those consumers will have only one or two insurers to choose from.
Add to that the millions of people
who lost the doctors and health plans they liked and are now paying higher
premiums for less coverage, and you can see that quality health care and
anything resembling “choice” has quickly disappeared for an increasing number
of Americans due to Obamacare.
So the next time a defender of
Obamacare tries to take the moral high ground about the millions of people the
law has helped, ask them to define what “help” looks like.
Genevieve Wood advances policy
priorities of The Heritage Foundation as senior contributor to The Daily
Signal. Send an
email to Genevieve.
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