The red pill of Obamacare

 By Monica Showalter

Joe Biden is flailing in the polls, trailing President Trump in all the swing states, and likely to lose in November.

Inflation, illegals, crime and wokesterism are among the best-known reasons for the shift.

But how many are aware that the nightmare of Obamacare is still with us, too, and likely driving Biden's poll numbers down?

As the man in this video below notes, the soaring cost and inflexibility of the mandate has made him say 'goodbye' to voting Democrat:

 

According to RealClearPolitics, which has the beginning transcript of the video, the man lays out his personal situation and how bad it is because of Obamacare:

VOTER: I thought I would share why I am no longer a Democrat... I was a two-time bone cancer survivor, still am. That's how I lost my arm. Having healthcare was extremely important to me. I heard all the talking points of "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, "the average family is going to save $1,500 a year," "it's not a tax." All of this stuff makes sense to me, how this was being pushed. And then the Democrats were saying Republicans don't want you to have health insurance if you have pre-existing conditions. Well I was a walking pre-existing condition having cancer twice.

My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. Now fast forward to 2010 when Obamacare was implemented. Everything that they said was not true. The Supreme Court ruled that it was a tax if you didn't have insurance, that penalty. So that was a lie. Insurance premiums went up instead of down. That was a lie. The insurance policy that I had specifically that I had going through 2 bouts of cancer -- chemotherapy, amputation, all of this stuff. It was great insurance. The insurance company canceled it because under the new Obamacare guidelines that policy wasn't good enough so they no longer offered it. They came up with a new offer and said this is what your new plan will be or you can go through the marketplace. And when I looked at it, the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.
Remember, $185/month with a $1,000 deductible is now $1,200/month with a $6,000 deductible. No additional income. So I had to make a choice. Do I keep a roof over my children's head or do I get health insurance and struggle? And I choose to just keep a roof over my children's head. And then I was penalized every year. I didn't have insurance for 10 years after that. I couldn't afford it.

For ten years I was penalized every single year because I could no longer afford the insurance that I was required to get through law through Obamacare. I voted for that shit. And it did nothing but hurt me and my family.

It's not just the inflation, which is nightmarish enough. It's the sense of being gaslit, lied to, and deceived, and there's no way out.

After that intro, he grows intense and passionate, attempting to persuade young people through reason to vote responsibly, based on their own personal situations in this coming election, as he is in his. He points out the lies and the constant unfairness of Obamacare -- penalizing the middle class voters who cannot afford Obamacare, whose costs keep rising in a death spiral that he believes has "destroyed" the middle class.

A look at actual statistics on health care indicates that he's not wrong.

According to an article in SHRM, a trade journal for those in the corporate human resources field, published late last year:

A pair of new surveys finds that U.S. health costs will jump in the new year, which may have significant implications for organizations.

According to WTW’s Global Medical Trends Survey, the cost of medical care benefits in the U.S. is projected to increase about 8.9 percent in 2024, compared with 8.2 percent in 2023. Globally, though, the cost increase will ease slightly to 9.9 percent after hitting a record high of 10.7 percent in 2023, although analysts predict it will increase again in the coming few years. Nearly three-fifths of insurers (58 percent) anticipate higher or significantly higher increases over the subsequent three years following 2024.

Meanwhile, a survey of nearly 100 health insurers and health plan administrators by benefits consulting firm Buck also found that medical costs for employer-sponsored plans continue to outpace inflation, rising on average between 6.8 percent and 7.3 percent. That’s up from Bucks’s previous survey in May 2023, when insurers found medical trend factors were averaging 6.2 percent to 6.8 percent.

The costs rise in corporate health insurance for those with jobs, and certainly in the individual exchanges for those who buy health care individually, and those rises are for big expenses and they outpace inflation. An 8% rise for a $1,000 monthly cost is going to be a lot bigger an amount in absolute terms than an 8% rise on a bunch of carrots, which in any case isn't happening. Health care costs are rising higher than other kinds of inflation, meaning, those who pay for health care costs and cannot get out of it, are socked hard by inflation.

The Washington Examiner, citing research from health care expert Sally Pipes, explained why this was happening.

A big driver of costs, under Obamacare as a whole and due to Biden’s regulations, is the nearly indiscriminate use of government subsidies. Biden keeps trying to force unnecessary coverage onto people who don’t want or need it, such as requiring elderly men to buy insurance that covers pregnancy services. Both Obama and Biden ration the supply of care by deterring innovation that otherwise would occur through research and development.

Higher subsidies chasing rationed services is a recipe for what always happens when expanded demand chases limited supply: price hikes.

Meanwhile, Biden is pushing rules changes, reversing President Donald Trump’s, that make things even worse. Using a “government knows best” approach, Biden wants to outlaw inexpensive plans that young, healthier people choose, on the theory that ordinary people don’t know what’s good for them.

So instead of just garden-variety inflation hitting ordinary people, including the man in the video, voters are getting socked with supercharged Obamacare inflation which is rising much faster than other kinds of inflation.

And like the man in the video, I suspect a lot of voters are looking at this and asking the biggest question in politics, which is whether or not they are better off under Joe Biden. With Obamacare still being touted by Joe Biden instead of thrown onto the scrap heap where it belongs, it's pretty obvious that nothing is going to be done about it to lower costs.

And that has to have a lot of voters worried. How that couldn't be affecting the voting decisions of many of them seems impossible. So while the left touts Obamacare as the law of the land and Joe Biden throws out this or that dog biscuit supposedly lowering costs for some special interest group, the nightmare looms large for the battered middle class. Inflation may be bad but Obamacare inflation is super-bad. And the man in the video shows that it's so bad it might just be changing how people vote.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/the_red_pill_of_obamacare.html