By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 22, 2013
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Three years, two elections, and one Supreme Court decision after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, its promise of health care for the uninsured may be delayed or undercut in much of the country because of entrenched opposition from many Republican state leaders. In half the states, mainly led by Democrats, officials are racing deadlines to connect uninsured residents to coverage now only months away. In others it's as if "Obamacare" - signed Mar. 23, 2010 - had never passed.
Make no mistake, the federal government will step in and create new insurance markets in the 26 mostly red states declining to run their own. Just like the state-run markets in mostly Democratic-led states, the feds will start signing up customers Oct. 1 for coverage effective Jan. 1. But they need a broad cross-section of people, or else the pool will be stuck with what the government calls the "sick and worried" - the costliest patients. Insurance markets, or exchanges, are one prong of Obama's law, providing subsidized private coverage for middle-class households who currently can't get their own. The other major piece is a Medicaid expansion to serve more low-income people. And at least 13 states have already indicated they will not agree to that.A central tenet of ObamaCare has always been the forcing of healthy people into the exchanges, whether they want in or not. Including healthy people in the insurance pool - and lots of them - is the only way to make the forced coverage of pre-existing conditions plausible. But participation in the exchanges is a bad deal for most healthy people, especially younger ones, most of whom end up paying far more for "coverage" than they would ever pay out of pocket for medical care. But that's necessary for ObamaCare to function, because those young, healthy people subsidize the coverage of those who come into the pool with pre-existing conditions that virtually guarantee their care will cost more than they pay into the pool. Governors who understand this is a bad deal for their constituents, especially Texas Gov. Rick Perry, come in for particular scorn on Zaldivar's part:
Texas residents are entitled to the same benefits as Vermonters, but in the state with the highest proportion of its population uninsured, Gov. Rick Perry will not be promoting the federal insurance exchange, a spokeswoman said. Nor does Perry plan to expand Medicaid. The result is a communications void that civic and political groups, mayors, insurers and hospitals will try to fill. "You have people who aren't really charged up about it because they don't even know that they would qualify," said Durrel Douglas, spokesman for the Texas Organizing Project, an activist group. A national poll this week by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that two of every three uninsured people don't know enough about the law to understand how it will affect them. Supporters of Obama's law in Texas say the federal government hasn't shown up yet to launch the state's insurance exchange and no one is sure when that will happen. "It is a much bigger lift here," said Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income people. "The sooner the federal exchange can get engaged and working with all the folks here who want to promote enrollment, the better."Of course, Zaldivar fails to accurately label the Center for Public Policy Priorities as a left-wing organization, but that's what it is. ObamaCare's biggest flaw is that it tries to force people into behavior that people would never choose on their own. On the road to full implementation, ObamaCare depends at many points on people to do things they would obviously prefer not to do. Then, when the law fails to fulfill its promises, Obama's pet propagandists at the AP report it as if the plan was brilliant all along, but dumb people like Republican governors are ruining it by refusing to cooperate. And of course, the American people themselves are to blame because they just don't understand the brilliance that is ObamaCare. Pay attention because this will all be set up as a rationalization for a single-payer system that gives no one a choice, since we obviously can't be trusted to make the "right" choices.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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