ObamaCare Forces Retailers to Drop Coverage

Four years into ObamaCare, taxpayers are still discovering ways the ACA is expensive in both tax dollars and damage to the healthcare system.

Isn’t it ironic you can sue a doctor for negligence when he damages your health, but you can’t sue politicians for negligence when they damage a healthcare system? Trial lawyers could perform a useful public service if they found a way to make politicians pay, although it would be akin to cannibalism since you’d have Democrat donors eating Democrat donation recipients. You may recall lugubrious MSM reporters bewailing the plight of the estimated 40 million uninsured that ObamaCare would miraculously cover after courageous Democrats, fighting on the right side of history, defeated resistance led by hard-hearted Republicans. Personally, I thought a ban on tattoos for anyone under 35 would’ve freed up enough money to buy insurance for those able to speak English, but my solution was too simple. Instead, politicians used a combination of coercion — a requirement forcing the uninsured to buy insurance — and subsidized pricing.

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That way Obama could take credit for covering the uninsured by using tax dollars to make up the difference between what the consumer paid and what the policy really cost. But like so many Obama claims, the use of the word “affordable” is false, much like the use of the word “sage” to describe Joe Biden. According to figures obtained by the L.A. Times, federal health insurance subsidies have lowered individual premiums by 76 percent. “Premiums that normally would have cost $346 a month on average instead cost consumers just $82, with the federal government picking up the balance of the bill.” But even that price is too much for some of the newly insured that can’t understand why they’re paying a premium if they aren’t in the emergency room being treated for a cold. Wait until they find out owning life insurance requires payment before you die! The total cost of subsidies for 2014 alone is around $16.5 billion. This subsidized insurance is only “affordable” in the sense that food for the homeless would be “affordable” if Obama gave out all the groceries in your pantry. It’s “affordable” until the cupboard is bare. Yet instead of reducing the number of uninsured, ObamaCare is actually expanding the pool of non-covered through a combination of waivers and price increases — exactly the opposite of what was promised. It’s as if a patient entered the Barack Obama Memorial Hospital to be fitted for prosthesis and came out a quadruple amputee. The latest to lose coverage are Walmart’s part-time employees. Walmart offered health insurance to part-timers long before passage of ObamaCare, but that wasn’t good enough for Democrats. They made it mandatory to provide insurance for employees working 30 or more hours per week. This was a stupidity twofer: Thousands had their hours and paychecks cut to avoid the 30-hour threshold and many companies that previously offered coverage, including Home Depot and Target, dropped it. The Associated Press reports that before passage of ObamaCare 56 percent of large retail chains did not offer coverage, now the number has increased to 62 percent. But Walmart grandfathered the under 30-hour group and continued coverage, until now. In 2015 any Walmart employee working fewer than the magic 30 hours will lose coverage, because the company’s insurance cost under the “affordable” act has jumped $170 million in only eight months, bringing Walmart’s total increase for just 2014 to $500 million. Walmart employees who still have coverage will see their premiums jump 20 percent next year for even the least expensive coverage. The total losing coverage, thanks to the benevolent Democrats that voted for ObamaCare, is 30,000. Newly bare Walmart employees may be fine after all, because the Obama administration is busy undermining the main reason for ObamaCare by issuing exemption waivers. AP estimates 20 million uninsured may qualify for continued uninsurance. Both HealthCare.dud and the IRS websites have lists of situations that qualify for a waiver (the IRS list is located just below the advice on how to archive email on the homepage), so don’t rush to the post office to pay your CVS bill. Exempt situations include the homeless, those facing potential eviction or foreclosure, people with unpaid medical bills, individuals that don’t pay income tax and Janay Rice, although she will need a copy of the police report. ObamaCare now joins the War on Poverty as another program that wasted billions and made no progress. The estimate for the cost to taxpayers of the first decade of ObamaCare is now $2.6 trillion. And what do we have to show for all the money spent to date? Essentially nothing, because we still have 30 to 40 million uninsured!