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Life Health > Health Insurance > Health Insurance

PPACA: Built to fail

By Tom Koziol

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I believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was built to fail from day one.

I base this on a mound of information that has been published about PPACA as well as my fundamental knowledge of the political mind.

Let’s start with the political mind.

No citizens like to believe they are second class. They like to believe they are the boss and the politician serves them.

Nice belief, but totally out of focus.

If you have not been paying attention, then you missed the toppling of citizen as sovereign. You don’t have to believe me; you simply have to look at Congress. They exempt themselves from every law they pass.

You can argue that this practice alone is not proof. I ask what more proof do you need than the people’s agents telling the people to obey laws they pass while they exempt themselves? Do you really believe that is how a fair and just legal system should exist?

What does this have to do with PPACA? It gives you the tone of the political mind. They are after total control. Fortunately, they realize they cannot just grab it all at once.

If they can’t grab it all once, then how will they grab it? Easy. Look at the three stages of a crisis.

The first stage of any crisis is when a potential crisis becomes apparent. Health care is a great example. Obama isn’t the first president to tell us we have a health care crisis. Harry Truman started the ball rolling.

Can you remember a time when the health care “scenario” as we experienced it hasn’t been in the news?

Can you remember the number of crises that happened in Obama’s first term? Can you remember who rode in on a stallion and saved the day?

The second stage of a crisis is the unfolding of the crisis itself. If you can tell me the unfolding of the health care crisis didn’t happen when Obama introduced PPACA, I will be shocked.

The third stage is the post-crisis phase. This is where the government rides in and saves all of us from the crisis. How do they save us from PPACA? They nationalize our system.

Let me offer Britain and Canada as just two of the many nations with nationalized health care. That way you can’t say it cannot happen.

I say PPACA is the “linchpin” in this crisis. I say that because the Act is crumbling under its own weight. Yes, we read about how the government planted cheery news regarding the success of the health exchanges and how people’s premiums will be lowered.

I say bull bleep to those stories. My son has a private health plan and was notified that he is not grandfathered under PPACA and will lose his coverage on Jan 1, 2014. He isn’t the only person to receive such news. PPACA has put him in crisis mode.

More evidence of why PPACA was built to fail comes directly from its architect.

At a 2003 AFL-CIO meeting, President Obama said:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.”

I don’t believe anyone can seriously say PPACA is a single-payer health plan. I mentioned linchpin above. I don’t know how many linchpins are built into PPACA but I do know the individual mandate is probably the most prominent.

The mandate supposedly will force the young and healthy into the program. Their premiums will soften the blow for the old and sick.

One minor problem exists with this forced entry provision. The young and healthy have expressed no desire to enter the system. They will pay the fine if indeed one is levied.

They resist because they can do math. It is generalized by those who study the published rates that a healthy 26-year-old will pay approximately $6,000 a year under PPACA. Today they can buy the same type of coverage for approximately $1,200 a year.

These are general numbers but they are in the ball park. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the built-in linchpin at work.

My last point is funding. In an article about a woman with breast cancer, you can read more proof that the president has plans to be the savior of the crisis he created.

It seems the subject of the article is facing higher bills as Obama’s pre-existing condition plan runs low on cash. It seems part of the problem with the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) program stems from a decision by the president and Congress more than three years ago to cap funding at $5 billion.

Read that last sentence again. It is important on three levels but I will only mention funding. Funding is the mechanism that spins all of the linchpins. Without that mechanism, there’s no program, and both Congress and the president understand this very well.

Once you’ve been forced into the program and it disappears, you are automatically in stage three of a crisis. The great architect understands this too.

PPACA was built to fail.

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