Arnold Kling’s Obamacare Notice

Saturday, November 5th, 2016

Arnold Kling just got mugged by reality, when his Obamacare notice arrived:

Yesterday in the mail, my wife and I got our premium notice from the health care exchange. Our monthly premium is going up 70 percent, and our deductible is going up also.

I wonder if any of the pundits who claim that Obamacare is working are actually getting their health insurance through an exchange.

I wonder how many of us who have not supported Donald Trump are feeling mugged by reality.

Comments

  1. Bomag says:

    Obamacare struck me as being analogous to the battle of Ypres: a huge effort for a questionable amount of real estate.

    Any serious reform needs cost controls. Obamacare has none, except some vague hand-waving about market forces, so we just got marginally more people enjoying the ever rising cost of health care. In a way it made things worse by assuring those invested in the status quo that it is okay to keep adding more procedures and more specialists to the system, who all get a feeding slot at the carcass.

  2. Slovenian Guest says:

    I’m shocked, that adding 20,000 pages (or 20 bibles) of law, on top of an already messed up system, didn’t simplify or make things cheaper, shocked i tell you! But just wait until your government meets reality, from an expired market ticker post:

    The talking heads have been out claiming that Medicare and Medicaid spending has “gone down” – some of them have claimed this on a “per-capita” basis, others just generally. That’s a lie, it’s a documented lie, and yet no member of the media has challenged these bald-faced lies despite the numerical facts being available to literally anyone with no more than 30 seconds of effort. In the most-recent Treasury Statement (which is canonically correct when it comes to government spending) this fiscal year to date Medicare and Medicaid have spent $1,034,867 (millions); that is, $1.035 trillion. The entire government spent $2,869,374, so this amounts to more than one-third of the total, 36% to be exact.

    Last year to the same point in the fiscal year these two programs consumed $950,861.

    That is, this fiscal year spending increased 8.83% on a comparable period basis.

    Last full fiscal year (September 2014-2015) said spending rose 9.25%.

    The prior fiscal (September 2013-2014) said spending rose 6.63% and the year prior to that it rose 5.74%.

    There has been no “decrease”; in point of fact it has accelerated by approximately one third in the last two years over the previous two!

    This could have been determined in literally 30 seconds by any “journalist” that cared to look.

    Nobody cared from either side of the political and media aisle.

    This rate of acceleration will, as I have repeatedly pointed out, bankrupt the Federal Government within the next administration’s term. It will in fact exceed all current federal spending within the next 10 years. Neither of these events will actually come to pass because you cannot have a government when you can’t pay the light bill in Washington DC.

    PS: Socializing medicine will not fix any of this; it will simply shift all of it to the federal government which will be driven into either fiscal insolvency or cut off services to tens of millions of Americans who will then, as a consequence, die. It will be interesting to see this unravel.

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