More Obamacare surprises

Just when we thought we knew everything about Obamacare up pops another little surprise. The Weekly Standard reported that there’s a great reason insurance companies were so eager to jump on the bandwagon. Aside from compulsory customers, The Weekly Standard reported that we - the taxpayers - are on the hook for 80 percent of the expenses over $45,000. In other words, if someone has a catastrophic illness the government will pick up the tab for four-fifths of the cost.

This is one of the many paths laid down by Obamacare to a single payer healthcare system. You probably hear that term a lot. What it basically means is there will be one insurance

payer - the government. The insurance companies will essentially be administrators. They’ll handle the claims. What they don’t see coming is once the government assumes all of the risk they won’t need dozens of companies writing policies. They’ll just need one.

To make it more palatable the government will essentially absorb one of the big names you’re familiar with. Maybe Blue Cross. Perhaps United Healthcare. It won’t really matter. They won’t be insuring you any longer. The government will.

Now, you may not see the danger in that so let me open your eyes. A recent survey showed that Medicare denied more claims than your average insurance company. That’s counterintuitive to most people. They think the insurance companies are just sitting around waiting for claims to come in so they can deny them. Maybe they’d like to deny more than they do but what keeps them honest is the market. Yes, competition makes them better at servicing the patient than the government.

Eventually the reality of too many people and too few dollars to pay for their care will catch up with our new health insurance benefactor. In order to keep the program solvent they are going to have to start denying people healthcare. That’s just a fact. The program will be upside down from day one and the only way to keep it from eating us alive will be to cut services.

By then so many doctors will have left the profession that getting in to see your primary care physician will take weeks, if not months.

The free market makes healthcare better. It makes health insurance better. Insurance companies compete for business, especially with corporate accounts, and if too many people complain about the lousy insurance the company finds someone else. Once the government takes over there will be no one else. And by then the free market insurance companies will be just a memory.

I don’t mean to harp on this because there’s nothing we can do now but the House Republicans held all the cards during the last budget fight. Going along with a budget that fully funded Obamacare amounted to political malpractice. Now these same Republicans are back telling us how we need to stop Obamacare. You had your chance and you blew it.

The only thing that could save us now are the myriad lawsuits making their way through the court system. If just one of those finds light we still have some hope. Otherwise we need to begin preparing ourselves for the post-Obamacare world. Many will find physicians or physicians assistants who take cash and circumvent the entire mess. That’s great for day-to-day healthcare needs but God forbid you need to be hospitalized.

I guess Nancy Pelosi was right when she said we’d have to pass Obamacare to see what was in it. We’ve seen. We’d have been better off to burn it rather than pass it. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.