Obamacare working as planned

The revelation that Obamacare premiums will jump an average of 25 percent next year seemed to catch many by surprise. Critics claim Obamacare is imploding. The reality is it’s working just as it was planned.

A Fox News story stated “about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from.” That, my friends, is the plan. I’ve been warning since Obamacare was first debated in Congress that the end goal is single-payer health insurance. Now we’re seeing that plan come to fruition. Major insurers like UnitedHealth Group, Humana, and Aetna have drastically scaled back their roles in many states. This is all by design.

The economics of Obamacare are pretty simple. They herded the riskiest consumers into one exchange. Instead of spreading risk, they’ve concentrated it. That means that premiums have to go up and/or coverage has to go down. Insurance companies gleefully lined up behind President Obama when he signed the legislation into law. They loved the idea that everyone would now be required to buy insurance. How they couldn’t see that the model was unworkable is a mystery.

Obama lured them into the trap with promises the government would back the payments. Now the government is in arrears to insurance companies to the tune of billions of dollars. The companies have sued the government, and Obama is trying to use the little-know ‘Judgement Fund’ from the Treasury Department to pay them off. In other words, Obamacare has become just another welfare program, despite being sold to the American people as a way to cut healthcare costs.

Then there are the unintended consequences of Obamacare. Employers with more than 50 employees are now required by law to provide health insurance. This has, naturally, forced many companies to reclassify certain positions as part-time. Part-time workers are defined under Obamacare as logging less than 30 hours per week. It’s not just the work week requirements. If an employee works more than 120 days in the year they’re considered full-time! That’s less than half the days a full-time employee works, but they’re considered full-time.

In my line of work—and I’ve seen it in all sorts of other businesses—part-time workers’ hours and days are closely monitored. Even when we need part-timers, like when workers go on vacation, we don’t have adequate staff because of Obamacare rules. There’s no telling how much productivity has been depressed in this country as a result. Not to mention all these people who would have more hours and more money but don’t because the government has seen fit to run their businesses.

The single biggest mistake of those opposing Obamacare was not challenging the employer mandate in court. They, instead, chose to fight the individual mandate. Those numbers were so small as to be insignificant. The real trouble with Obamacare was how it would affect businesses. I brought that point up to an “expert” at the Heritage Foundation and was told that employers providing health insurance has become expected, that they didn’t see the sense in challenging it. Expected and required are two entirely different things.

My having health insurance has nothing whatsoever to do with my job. Employers started offering health insurance as an incentive. The liberals have now turned a gift into a right enforced by the IRS.

We can’t count on the Republicans in Congress to do anything about Obamacare. That’s why we gave them control of both houses and they’ve done nothing. I’m afraid if Hillary Clinton is elected that single-payer health insurance is inevitable.

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