Will Obamacare Survive?

In the last few weeks, the Government Accountability Office has just released a report highlighting the uncertainties about the law’s budget projections.  Obamacare-friendly states have warned about the potential for health premium “rate shock,” and the Government Budget Office has expressed skepticism about the law’s implementation prospects.  To me, at least, this sounds less like a law that is winning and more like a law that is simply surviving.

Peter Suderman, “Polls Show Opposition to Obamacare Is on the Rise Again,”  Reason.com, March 2, 2013

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been called the most important piece of health-related legislation in U.S. history.  And yet today, most Americans have many practical questions how it is likely to affect their lives, pocketbooks, and health.

·         Will ACA’s provisions raise insurance costs and premiums?

·         How is it going to change the way doctors, hospitals, and insurers do business?

·         Are the law’s requirements likely to improve the nation’s health as a whole?

·         How will it affect uninsured  Americans? Employers? Working families?  Those on Medicare and Medicaid? Young people? Seniors and nursing home residents? 

Nick J. Tate,  Obamacare Survival Guide, Huminix Books, 2013

Liberals hate Obamacare because it is not single-payer, and fees millions of newly insured Americans to what they revile as a money-grubbing, profit-obsessed health insurance dragon. Conservatives hate Obamacare because it is the heavy, stupid hand of Big Government choking whatever air is left in the current dysfunctional health insurance market… Obamacare, which will affect to some unknown degree nearly one-sixth of the U.S, economy, has been reduced to a botrken political piñata.

J. D. Kleinke,  “Obamacare in Pictures,” The Health Care Blog, March 2, 2013

Will Obamacare survive?

Will it arrive Dead or Alive?

These questions haunt Americans’ minds.

As they seek to protect their mutual behinds.

Some say if it survived the Supreme Court,

It will survive almost any political retort.

Still, some very big questions remain,

What will be the “rate shock” pain?

How big will the budget deficit get?

What adverse consequences will it beget?

Does our nation’s health and our survival,

Depend on its final departure or arrival?

Tweet:   Obamacare’s survival remains in doubt: Americans in general are skeptical about its value and the costs it generates.