The number of people who enrolled in Obamacare has grown to
around 365,000 through November.
This includes those who signed up in state exchanges and federal
exchanges. Some Obamacare
advocates are actually touting this as good news.
I saw one headline on a newspaper that read “Obamacare
Enrollments Quadruple”. This is
not an inaccurate statement. The
number of people who enrolled in November was about 4 times larger than the
number who enrolled in October.
If you take almost nothing and multiply it by 4, you get a
little bit bigger than almost nothing.
365,000 people is a significant number if you are talking
about a gathering of people in one location. 365,000 people is a drop in the bucket when you are talking
about a country of over 310 million people.
One of the reasons given for passing Obamacare was because
of the alleged crisis in the number of Americans without health insurance. We would always hear about how many
tens of millions of people don’t have access to medical care (even though
people without insurance still have access to medical care).
If there are 40 million Americans without health insurance,
then less than 1% has signed up through the exchanges.
But here’s the big problem. There are more people uninsured now, or soon to be
uninsured, than before Obamacare went into effect. Even though 365,00 people have signed up, there were
individual states that saw about that many people lose their insurance because
of Obamacare.
If this is considered success by the Obamacare advocates,
then I will hate to see a failure.
We are facing a major crisis in this country. This is having a huge effect on the
lives of most Americans. Even
Americans with insurance through employers are seeing huge hikes in their
premiums.
While premiums were already rising before Obama ever became
president, there is no question that Obamacare has just exacerbated the
problem. And this is one
government program where it is easy to pin the blame.
I really believe we are hitting a major turning point in
this country and it will likely happen in the next few years. The prices for medical care and
insurance are simply unsustainable.
We are likely to face one of two options.
The first option is to go to a single-payer system. That single-payer will be the
government. The government will
get this money through more taxes and inflation.
While a nationalized healthcare system sounds disastrous,
the system we have now is already disastrous. I am just not sure if it will be that much worse. I think it will be worse for sick
people, but nationalized healthcare may actually be better for you if you are
healthy and you can avoid seeing doctors.
The second option is to repeal Obamacare and then continue
to remove government from virtually every facet of medical care. While I don’t expect a fully free
market, I think small steps in removing government funding and government
regulations could help free up the market enough that we might one day see
prices decline and care get better.
Ultimately, I would like to one day see a medical care
system that is completely free from the government and we get results similar
to what we see with computers and electronics. We could get greater medical care every year, while watching
prices go down.
Regardless of what happens with the medical care system in America, your best bet is to do your best to get healthy and stay healthy.