Obamacare: Still Killing People 13 Years In
On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed his namesake legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) colloquially Obamacare, into law. On March 23, 2023, the Biden-Harris administration celebrated the ACA's thirteenth anniversary. They should be holding a funeral, not a celebration party.
The ACA has caused countless avoidable American deaths. They are due to Washington's conflation of a piece of paper (an insurance policy) with a professional service: medical care.
Xavier Becerra, the Health and Human Services secretary, astonishingly missing during the entire COVID health crisis, declared the following: "As we celebrate the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act today ... this law has lived up to its name, providing a way for Americans to access quality, affordable health coverage."
The ACA did indeed expand medical insurance to more Americans. In 2000, Medicaid enrollment was 15.6 percent of the U.S. population. In 2022, that number has nearly doubled: 27.7 percent of Americans — 92,340,585 individuals — were enrolled in the taxpayer-funded, no-charge-to-enrollees program. Thus, nearly one third of the country has medical insurance and, according to Secretary Becerra, "have the peace of mind that comes with high-quality health care."
Note the conflation of care with insurance. Washington wants you to think having the latter means you get the former, presumably when you need it. Otherwise, what good is insurance? Having insurance does not mean getting timely care. In fact, there is a seesaw effect: as the number of people with government-provided insurance increases, access to care decreases.
Before the ACA, average maximum wait time to see a primary care physician was a unconscionable: 92 days. With ACA expansion of government-provided, no-charge Medicaid insurance, maximum wait times increased to 120 days and produced death-by-queue.
Death by queue is a phrase coined in the United Kingdom, meaning dying while waiting in line for care that is technically possible but unavailable in time to save lives. Death by queue has long been a feature of the vaunted British National Health Service (NHS) and has now become noticeable in the U.S.
In Illinois over three years, 752 Medicaid enrollees died waiting for desperately needed medical treatment. An internal Veterans' Affairs Department audit concluded that "47,000 veterans may have died" waiting in line for care that was technically possible but unavailable. Veterans are covered by federal Tricare insurance.
An accurate estimate of death by queue in the U.S. is not available. In Great Britain, at least "117,000 die[d] on waiting lists for NHS" in 2020 and 2021.
My wife may have been a victim of death-by-queue. She waited seven months before she could see her primary physician for her abdominal pain. The diagnosis was inoperable pancreatic cancer. She died 22 months later. Her case is certainly not unique. Numerous studies prove that delay in diagnosis of life-threatening conditions such as cancer leads to deaths that could be prevented. What is killing these patients is excessive wait times.
The reason for the long wait times and death-by-queue is Washington's repeated fixes applied to healthcare. First there are federal regulations. Physician time that should be spent on patients is consumed by regulatory and administrative burdens.
Second, there is "bureaucratic diversion," when money is taken from clinical care to pay for bureaucracy, administration, rules, regulations, compliance, and oversight. Each dollar spent on these non-clinical activities is a dollar that cannot be spent on patients. Estimates of this outlay range from 31 percent to 50 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending. In 2021, the U.S. expended $4.3 trillion on its healthcare system. Thus, Washington took roughly $2 trillion away from patients to pay federal (and state) activities that provide no care. Imagine how short wait times could be — can you say 48 hours?! — with an additional $2 trillion available to pay providers! Possibly my wife would be alive today.
For decades, Washington has been fixing health care with federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid (both created in 1965), the Emergency Medical Transport and Labor Act of 1986 (which created health care's unfunded mandate), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and the ACA (2010). Prior to 1965, the U.S. expended 6.5 percent of GDP on health care. Last year, it was 19.7 percent.
The end result of federal over-regulation and all that spending is what we have today: death-by-queue and impending bankruptcy of both Medicare and possibly the U.S.
Biden's "celebration" of Washington's healthcare achievements is a travesty. By constantly increasing government-provided insurance, Democrats increase the number of Americans who die waiting too long for life-saving care.
If we want to shrink wait times, see the doctor before it's too late, and save American lives, kick Washington out of healthcare (the system), stop budget-focused bureaucrats from dictating our health (medical) care, and reconnect patients directly with their doctors with no third-party decision maker in between.
Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is professor emeritus of pediatrics, pathology, and decision science at the University of New Mexico. He is the former director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation and author of multi-award-winning book Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine.
Image via Max Pixel.
NOW WATCH CALIFORNIA ! NOT ! CUT ILLEGALS FROM 'FREE' HEALTHCARE!
'CREDIT CARD' Joe Biden Moves to Cut Medicare Advantage
President Joe Biden’s administration announced that it would cut Medicare Advantage, after the president has frequently claimed that Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced this week that they would cut Medicare Advantage by 1.12 percent in 2024, which is not as significant a cut as what the administration proposed two months ago.
Bloomberg reported:
The agency will also phase in controversial changes that determine payments based on the severity of patients’ health problems. That policy will take effect over three years instead of one year, after the proposal drew fierce criticism from the industry.The changes add up to a near-term victory for the industry, which had argued that the Biden administration went too far in its initial proposal. But the policy may mark the start of a period of slower growth for a market that has doubled in size in the last decade, driving growth and profits at major insurers.
Biden has proposed these cuts to Medicare Advantage as he has frequently accused Republicans of wanting to slash Social Security and Medicare as part of a potential compromise to address the coming debt ceiling deadline.
Republicans such as Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), have called out Biden’s apparently hypocrisy.
Breitbart News reported that Biden sponsored a bill in 1975 that would sunset and reauthorize all federal programs, which includes Social Security and Medicare.
“We must… begin reviewing existing programs to determine whether they are still effective, and whether they are worth the money that we are putting in them. We must eliminate the wasteful ones,” Biden said when introducing the 1975 legislation.
“One thing that we have all observed is that once a federal program gets started, it is very difficult to stop it, or even change its emphasis, regardless of its performance in the past,” then-Sen. Biden continued. “It is time for us to require, on a regular and continuing basis, that both the administrators of these programs and we legislators who adopt the programs, examine their operations with care and detail.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Josh Hawley: Biden’s ‘Concierge Service’ for Illegal Aliens Comes at Expense of Americans’ Jobs, Wages
President Joe Biden’s “concierge service” for illegal aliens comes at the expense of Americans’ jobs and wages, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said this week.
In a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Hawley blasted the administration’s migrant mobile app — known as CBP One — that has released more than 30,000 foreign nationals into the United States since early January by allowing them to schedule appointments at the southern border.
Specifically, the migrant mobile app allows foreign nationals who are pregnant, mentally ill, elderly, disabled, homeless, or crime victims living in Mexico to schedule appointments at the border for release into the U.S. interior.
Hawley writes that the migrant mobile app is in effect “like making a restaurant reservation” and will have dire effects on Americans’ jobs and wages:
Under your leadership, the Department is marketing a new phone app, called CBP One, that allows unauthorized migrants to reserve a time to cross the border, like making a restaurant reservation. How convenient. I gather the app is meant to expedite asylum claims, or so your Department’s promotional material says. But I noticed you said nothing about asylum when I asked you at the hearing. And the Texas Monthly has recently reported that “[a]t no point does the app ask users ‘Are you seeking asylum?’” Worse, when migrants show up at the border to enter the country, they “are given no interviews and asked no questions about vulnerabilities they listed in the app or about why they’re seeking asylum in the U.S.—they’re simply released into the country on official parole.” [Emphasis added]
…I imagine there are plenty of Americans who would appreciate this level of service from their government. Your choice to spend untold sums of taxpayer money—you said you had no idea what it cost—on concierge service for illegals is baffling. It is also revealing. It demonstrates your priorities: open borders, no matter the cost to Americans; no matter the jobs lost, the wages lost, the drugs flooding our schools. [Emphasis added]
Hawley calls the migrant mobile app “a full-on institutionalization of an open border and the abuse” of U.S. asylum laws, pressing Mayorkas to disclose how many foreign nationals have used the app since its inception, how many are expected to use the app after border controls end in May, and if the app will be updated to ask applicants if they have legitimate asylum claims.
The tech companies involved in the migrant mobile app’s creation, Hawley writes, should also be disclosed to the public and Congress along with the taxpayer costs associated with the app.
Biden’s expansive Catch and Release network at the border is pumping hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, often illegal, into working- and middle-class American jobs. At the same time, fewer Americans are working.
As Breitbart News reported, at the end of 2022, there were nearly two million fewer native-born Americans working compared to the same time in 2019, while two million foreign-born workers have been added to the workforce compared to the same time period.
In particular, the decline in the labor participation rate among working-class native-born Americans has dropped to 70.3 percent at the end of last year compared to 71.4 percent in 2019, 74.8 percent in 2006, and 76.4 percent in 2000.
Working-class native-born American men, those without a bachelor’s degree between 25 to 54 years old, had only an 83.7 percent labor participation rate at the end of 2022 — declining consistently since the year 2000.
The Biden administration has largely ignored efforts to get native-born Americans back into the workforce, instead adding millions of foreign workers to the labor market which adds downward pressure, particularly for working-class Americans in terms of finding jobs and securing higher wages.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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