Last week Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber told Americans that Barack Obama’s health care law was working just as it was designed – jacking up premiums and deductibles, and limiting choices for its customers.
“The main goal of Obamacare was two-fold,” Gruber, an MIT economics professor, said on CNN. He continued:
One was to cover the uninsured, of which we’ve covered 20 million, the largest expansion in American history. The other was to fix broken insurance markets where insurers could deny people insurance just because they were sick or they had been sick. Those have been fixed, and for the vast majority of Americans, costs in those markets have come down, thanks to the subsidies made available under Obamacare.
But doctors who value the private decision-making process between physician and patient without government intrusion say Gruber’s comments underscore for them that Obamacare was never about health care, but about achieving another Progressive goal of massive wealth redistribution.
“Jonathan Gruber exposed himself as not credible and simply a propaganda minister of Obamacare when he was exposed explaining the grand deception perpetrated on the American public,” Dr. Gerard Gianoli, a specialist in neuro-otology and skull base surgery, tells Breitbart News. “To claim that Obamacare is working is almost too ridiculous to comment upon, unless the purpose of Obamacare was to drive up insurance premiums, while providing less options for health care and destroying the best medical care system in the world.”
In 2014, Gruber testified before the House Oversight Committee that Obamacare’s designers took advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter.” Now, Gruber says the law is working just fine since most Obamacare customers won’t be paying the higher premiums because they qualify for subsidies.
“85% of people buying insurance on the exchanges get subsidies,” Gruber said. “And for those people, this premium increase doesn’t affect them.”
What he didn’t say is that other people will be paying for those subsidies through higher taxes.
Gianoli explains:
Gruber’s comment of insurance coverage for those who were uninsured is utter nonsense. The vast majority – 85 percent – of those who have signed up for insurance through the Obamacare exchanges are individuals who would have previously qualified for Medicaid but hadn’t applied. Why? Because they simply didn’t need it. They weren’t sick. So, to claim that this is some huge accomplishment to have these folks sign up for insurance and forcing the taxpayers to foot the bill is a travesty. It is simply sending money to the insurance companies for no purpose other than to improve their bottom line at the expense of the taxpayer.
Dr. Jane Orient, a specialist in internal medicine, tells Breitbart News she is “surprised” Gruber agreed to another interview, given the fact he finally revealed the deceptions he used to achieve the adoption of Obamacare.
“If Obamacare is working as intended, then it was intended to destroy medical insurance and private medicine,” Orient says, referring to the notion that Obamacare was designed to fail so that a single-payer, totally government-controlled health care system would then replace it.
“How can an economist say a product is affordable when 85% of exchange subscribers get a taxpayer subsidy?” she asks. “And lots of people refuse to buy it because it is so overpriced – so harsher punishment is needed to get them to ‘participate’ in being ripped off.”
Gruber said Obamacare could “work better” if the individual mandate “penalty” were larger.
“We have individuals who are essentially free-riding on the system; they’re essentially waiting until they get sick and then getting health insurance,” he said. “The whole idea of this plan, which was pioneered in Massachusetts, was that the individual mandate penalty would bring those people into the system and have them participate. The penalty right now is probably too low, and that’s something I think ideally we would fix.”
To many doctors, however, “larger penalties” to induce compliance doesn’t translate into health care.
“Obamacare-compliant plans are not really insurance, and they violate all the principles of insurance, as an MIT economist surely knows,” Orient says. “They are a wealth redistribution scheme. Insurance is voluntary, and premiums are priced according to risk.”
Orient would like to see Americans purchase their own health insurance.
She explains:
Most medical care should be paid for at the time of service by the person receiving the service. Health insurance should be like casualty insurance (auto, homeowner’s, life), which is affordable – you hope you never have to use it, instead of expecting to use it constantly. If we replaced managed-care plans pretending to be insurance with true insurance, medical prices would drop like a rock, instead of inflating like a bubble – and some say “health care,” which is mostly not medical care, is indeed a bubble.
Dr. Lee Vliet, a preventive medicine physician, tells Breitbart News Gruber’s admitted deceptions to the American people have led to destruction in the daily lives of Americans – and some of them are not even customers of Obamacare.
“Patients and physicians are struggling daily with the rising cost of health insurance, reduced coverage and benefits, high deductibles, and long delays for access to treatment,” she explains. “Many patients can’t afford to pay for the medical care until they reach their deductible so they’re putting off going to the doctors and their health problems are getting worse.”
“Obamacare has been a nightmare of draconian regulations and interferences with physician and patient decision-making,” Vliet adds. “It has been a disaster for the economy and one of the leading causes of the loss of jobs in the United States since 2010.”
However, Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services Sylvia Burwell says Obamacare cannot be repealed.
“Why I believe that repeal is not an option is because this is in the fabric,” Burwell told Politico in July.
She continued:
The idea that you are going to pull out the thread of insurers not being able to deny over preexisting conditions? Don’t think so. The idea that you are going to pull out the thread of 20 million people who have coverage? The idea that you are going to pull out that thread of, “Oh, you’re going to go back to paying for your contraception, and you’re going to go back to paying for your flu shot, and I’m going to pay for my kids’ wellness visits?” No.
But Gianoli says if Obamacare is allowed to remain its costs will continue to soar and there will be fewer and fewer options for consumers.
“Until there will be no insurance option at any price,” he stresses. “When only sick people sign up for health insurance, it’s not insurance.”
“Obamacare is in a death spiral and no amount of propaganda or raising the penalty/tax will save it,” he adds. “The question on the table is what will replace it once the collapse is complete.”