3 Negative ObamaCare Stories That Have Been Buried By Other Headline Grabbing News

In the last three weeks, the news cycle has been consumed with Hamas/Israeli fighting, the Islamic State in Iraq, and the rioting/looting in Ferguson, Missouri.  But, in just the last three weeks some very disturbing reports regarding ObamaCare were released.  All of which were largely ignored by the national media.

The first negative ObamaCare report came from Fox News on August 7th.  According to a Congressional study, as many as 25 million uninsured may escape being forced to buy insurance under threat of penalty because of a series of hardship exemptions that were implemented by an Obama executive order.  To put that into perspective, that's more than half the 30 million Americans who currently don't have insurance which seriously negates the primary goal of ObamaCare, which was to get every American insured.  It also means that the projected tax revenue for not having insurance is greatly overstated; resulting in higher deficit spending and a further breaking of the President's promise that ObamaCare wouldn't add one penny to the national debt.  Additionally, the uninsured are typically the so-called invincibles:  A younger and healthier group of individuals who typically think they won't get sick and don't need insurance.  Now, if these people aren't in the exchanges, then the cost of everyone's rates will go up because there won't be enough young and healthy insured to offset the higher cost of covering the older and sicker patients.

In another report, Aetna -- our third largest health insurer -- stated that they expected to lose 30% of those who first signed up for ObamaCare by the end of this year. This is because those enrollees have either never paid for their insurance in the first place or have just stopped paying.  If this is indicative of a national trend then, the 8 million signup number -- that Obama so proudly claimed -- is actually closer to 5-1/2 million.  And, remember.  5 million lost their insurance last fall because of ObamaCare.  So, net-net, this means that there was only a 1/2 million increase in the number of truly insured.

Lastly, there was this story from Forbes. The accounting firm of PriceWaterhouseCooper looked at the projected 2015 rate increases for the exchanges in 29 states and found that the average increase is 7.5%.  In about a third of those 29 states, the rate increases are all in the double digits; with highest being Indiana at 15.4%.   In another study, the Wall Street Journal reported that 10 states were seeing rate hikes of between 8.5% to as much as 22.8%.  Then, too, a National Bureau of Economic Research report said that ObamaCare has pushed premiums up by 28% this year and, in another study by the Manhattan Institute, the jump in insurance rates was calculated to be 49%.  The bottom line is simply that ObamaCare is not slowing the cost increases of insurance as our President has claimed.  Even if the average rate increases are only 7.5%, that's almost 4 times the 2% rate of inflation so far this year.

All together, the above paragraphs paint a disastrous picture for ObamaCare.  One that probably won't be told because it is being buried by so much other bad news in the world.

References:

Millions of uninsured Americans exempt from ObamaCare penalties in 2016, report finds: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/07/millions-uninsured-americans-exempt-from-obamacare-penalties-in-2016-watchdog/

ObamaCare Enrollment Is Shrinking, Top Insurers Say: http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/081114-712602-obamacare-enrollment-falling-aetna-says.htm

Obamacare's Death of a Thousand Rate Hikes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2014/08/25/obamacares-death-of-a-thousand-rate-hikes/

Current US Inflation Rates: 2004-2014: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/