A month after passage, ObamaCare is already failing.
“A little more than a month after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s trillion-dollar overhaul of the nation’s health care system, the administration has already begun to tout its successes. On his weekly radio address, the president argued that it was already providing Americans with “real benefits,” while Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released a four-page memo laying out the “significant progress” she claims her department has already made in implementing the law. “Over the coming weeks, our team across government will continue to work diligently to produce the regulations and guidance necessary to implement this landmark new law,” she concludes.
The prospect of adding new regulations to the books may be what passes for excitement in Washington these days, but it’s hardly a ringing endorsement. So while ObamaCare might qualify as victory for Washington’s army of bureaucrats and rulemakers, for the rest of us, there isn’t much to cheer.
Since the law’s passage, the news about it has been been unrelentingly bad. With each passing it day, it looks more likely that costs will go up, businesses will face new bureaucratic burdens, and many individuals will lose their current health care plans—just as the law’s critics predicted before its passage.
…At the same time, cost projections continue to spiral upwards. The Congressional Budget Office now reports that the law will require an additional $115 billion in previously unreported (and yet unpaid-for) discretionary spending. Medicare’s actuary has reported that total medical spending in the U.S. will actually go up and that crucial cuts to Medicare—cuts being used to pay for the law’s new entitlement spending—aren’t likely to happen, but that Medicare benefits are likely to be reduced. And in Massachusetts, the state whose 2006 health care overhaul served as the model for ObamaCare, insurers have gone to war with the governor, and the state treasurer is warning that the program could drive the state into bankruptcy.
Thanks to the pace of modern medical progress, it’s no longer true that, as Jean Baptiste Moliere quipped in 1673, “nearly all men die of their medicines, not their diseases.” But when it comes to health care, it may be that governments die of their reforms.”
