The media are doing a good job covering the ObamaCare launch problems. But like their coverage of President Obama’s disastrous performance in his first presidential debate with Mitt Romney, there is a partisan motive at work here. The media want ObamaCare to succeed and believe that pounding away at the site problems will motivate the White House to get the site fixed.
While the tech problems are real and worth covering, so are five other ObamaCare catastrophes. But the media won’t cover those because to do so might further undermine the program:
1. Millions are Losing Their Health Insurance
About 14 million Americans (not enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid) purchase their health insurance privately as opposed to through an employer. Because a large percentage of these plans do not cover everything ObamaCare mandates a policy cover — among other things: birth control, mental health, maternity, vision, dental — these plans are being cancelled — no matter how happy people might be with them. We learned today that in just one state just one provider dropped 300,000 customers.
Now these 300,000 (and millions more, including spouses being dropped by UPS and other organizations) have not only lost the health insurance they were happy with, they have also been thrown into the nightmare of these ObamaCare exchanges. Moreover, because their old insurance plans were dumped for not covering everything the government now demands be covered, you can bet that the new plans will be more expensive.
And let’s not forget that with a new health insurance plan, you can lose the doctor you had and liked under the old one. Repeatedly, President Obama promised the American people that his health care reforms would not cost people their doctors or force them off the health insurance plans they like. Now we know that was nothing more than a bald-faced lie.
2. Premium Increases on Working and Middle Class
President Obama hosted a Rose Garden event Monday where he incessantly repeated a talking point about health care now being more affordable. Certainly, for some, it will be, especially those joining the expanded Medicaid rolls.
But for many more millions among the working and middle class, premiums are going up, sometimes by as much as 50% to 150%. We are not talking about taxing the wealthy here, we are talking about everyday people, families, and small businesses.
Millions are about to have their standard of living hit and their ability to save for college and retirement undermined — mostly because the government is forcing them to give up a health care premium they were happy with, and purchase another loaded with services they neither need nor want.
Keep in mind that all of this is happening to these families in a no-growth economy.
3. Obama’s One-Year Delay On Business Mandate Strands the Middle and Working Class
In 2015, and in an anemic job growth-era that is entering year five of creating mostly part-time jobs, ObamaCare will sock small business owners with a massive tax. If a company has more than 50 full-time employees, they are either required to provide them with ObamaCare or pay a fine of $2000 a year per employee.
Why would a small business owner add another full-time employee if it means being socked with the kinds of costs associated with paying for health insurance or paying the fine?
Obviously, these fledgling businesses are going to either hire part-time workers or go to a temp agency.
The most cynical part of this mandate, though, is that this is the employer mandate Obama delayed for a year. But he didn’t delay it to help business as much as he did it to increase the number of people who would be forced to enroll for ObamaCare during this crucial first year.
With no carrot or stick, businesses already at or above the 50 employee threshold are a lot less likely to offer their employees health insurance until the mandate kicks in the following year. This leaves who-knows-how-many employees stranded for a year without health insurance and facing a penalty if they don’t sign up for ObamaCare.
This was a ruthless move by Obama to artificially bump his all-important first-year numbers by removing the incentive for employers to offer health insurance, which cornered employees into enrolling in ObamaCare.
4. ObamaCare’s Effect On the Unemployed and Under-Employed
While it is a sad thing that ObamaCare means that who-knows-how-many small businesses can’t expand their workforce in a way that benefits everyone, the real victims are the who-knows-how-many unemployed and under-employed who won’t be hired for full-time jobs by these companies.
ObamaCare has been the law of the land for three-plus years , and for just as long our economy has been adding 7 part-time jobs for every full-time job. This can’t be a coincidence. As soon as ObamaCare was passed, employers saw the writing on the wall and planned accordingly.
5. The Working Poor are Getting Hammered
The stories of the hundreds of thousands among the working poor losing their employer-based health insurance and having their hours cut, all due to ObamaCare, are everywhere. But the media intentionally refuse to do anything other than dutifully cover these individual stories. Were they to focus on this horrific consequence that is disproportionately affecting the working poor, it would likely turn even more people against ObamaCare — something the media just aren’t going to allow to happen.
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While the media’s coverage of the rolling disaster that is the ObamaCare launch is both welcome and appropriate, what the media will not cover is what is now and is always going to be the real ObamaCare disaster: the economic chaos ObamaCare is forcing millions upon millions of everyday Americans to needlessly pay for and deal with.
And the people callously being thrown into this maelstrom aren’t The Wealthy, aren’t Mitt Romney, aren’t the Top 1%, aren’t even Tea Partiers — they are the very people Obama repeatedly promised could keep their insurance and that he would never tax: the working poor and the middle class.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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