Obamacare Is Just Medicaid for Everyone

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Published : January 26th, 2015
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Category : Crisis Watch

Baby Boomers should be rooting with all their might for the repeal of Obamacare, since it’s going to be Medicaid for everyone if the widely despised law is allowed to become entrenched. Medicaid was designed for the poor and provides reimbursement rates so low that many doctors have come to shun Medicaid patients.  They are going to start shunning Medicare patients as well, since an implicit goal of the Affordable Care Act is to squeeze physician and hospital payments down to Medicaid levels. As this change takes place, the healthcare system in general will increasingly resemble its Medicaid poor cousin, with the following consequences:

  • Doctors will become increasingly choosy about whom they accept as patients.
  • Concierge care will divide the patient population into haves and have-nots.
  • We’ll all wait much longer to see a specialist.
  • Certain procedures, such as hip and knee replacements and bypass surgeries, will become drastically rationed.
  • New doctors will be in critically short supply, since medicine as practiced under ruthlessly intrusive Government control has already stopped attracting the best and brightest students. Why would they want to spend half their lives training for a job, and going hundreds of thousands of dollars into hock, just to work for The Government?
  • Hospitals, on the other hand, are loving Obamacare, since it has turned their emergency rooms into profit centers where every patient that comes in the door is guaranteed to have a ‘sponsor.’ A predictable result is that emergency rooms, particularly in urban hospital, will become increasingly crowded and crazy.
  • Doctors and physician groups that have signed on with hospitals will discover they’ve made a deal with the devil. While this may have helped them claw back some of the pay they lost when The Government arbitrarily cut reimbursements to private practitioners, the hospitals will eventually be cut back as well.
  • Members of the Greatest Generation enjoyed excellent Medicare benefits during a time when America was relatively prosperous, but that’s about to end. The nation’s retirement ledger is headed toward certain bankruptcy, and this makes it inconceivable that Baby Boomers will receive the level of benefits their parents got.
  • If you doubt the foregoing, consider who will be paying for the Baby Boomers’ healthcare and Social Security benefits: a cohort of twenty-  and thirty-somethings with college degrees that are mostly useless, six-figure debt and abysmal job prospects.

Something’s got to give, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves in the meantime into thinking there are easy political remedies.  Imposing Obamacare on a healthcare system in which prices were already out-of-control crazy has put us on a path that can lead only to severe rationing of healthcare services, federal bankruptcy, or both. Keep in mind that the problem cannot be “monetized” in the fraudulent way that has keep the U.S. and global banking system nominally afloat. Unlike the financial system’s smoke-and-mirrors economics, healthcare’s costs are both real and immediate. As such, the Fed cannot “bail out” the healthcare or retirement systems, even if so drastic an attempt at inflation were politically feasible.

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Rick Ackerman is the editor of Rick’s Picks, a daily trading newsletter and intraday advisory packed with detailed strategies, fresh ideas and plain old horse sense.
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I am sure you are correct, but it is different than Medicaid in few other few key areas, as well - namely in the costs. Medicaid costs recipients next to nothing. This cannot be said for Obamacare. I now have Obamacare, which I signed up for to avoid the punitive taxation, not as a matter of personal choice. Now when I go for a doctor visit (something I avoid if at all possible), I pay $60 up front for the visit and am later billed at least $30 more. This is just for the office visit. If the doctor sends me to the lab or for an x-ray I pay $60 to the lab and $60 to radiology for the x-ray. I pay far more for medication through Obamacare than I would pay if I went to the local CVS and paid cash for it, sans insurance. Lab tests are similarly costly. I ALWAYS later receive a bill with additional costs for every visit I pay to a doctor, which also includes additional costs for the lab work and sometimes for pharmaceuticals. This brings the up-front costs of using the system to the level of those paid by the uninsured, if not greater. This is in addition to the ever-increasing monthly premiums and the vague, byzantine threats of escalating tax consequences for either avoiding and/or being in anyway involved in the system. My general view of Obamacare at the moment is that it amounts to political extortion and is just another way to bleed and successfully impoverish the middle class - the fast track to 3rd world conditions within the US, as you describe.

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I am sure you are correct, but it is different than Medicaid in few other few key areas, as well - namely in the costs. Medicaid costs recipients next to nothing. This cannot be said for Obamacare. I now have Obamacare, which I signed up for to avoid  Read more
pacanon - 2/7/2015 at 7:48 AM GMT
Rating :  6  0
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