Our View

Our View

The continued carelessness of Obamacare

While tens of thousands of additional Arkansans are signing up for the state’s free or subsidized health care (now reaching nearly 325,000), major insurance companies participating in the program are leaving and rates for those Arkansans forced to pay for coverage are skyrocketing. These bureaucratic clowns promoting this scam are still trying to brainwash us into believing that Obamacare and the state’s version are such a success.

Just the other day, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, the bureaucratic mouthpiece for this total failure, enthusiastically announced Medicaid expansion has been a success in Arkansas, and predicted the enrollment in the federal Health Insurance Marketplace will climb to 13.8 million in 2017, up by 1.1 million.

Oh yes, Ms. Burwell is correct – the numbers of poor people jumping on board this government subsidized wagon-train are increasing but what she’s not making known, or wanting to admit, is that the cost to taxpayers to deal with providing all this free health care to the hundreds of thousands of poor people is also skyrocketing, and Obamacare is proving to be unsustainable.

Not only is this being proven to be a total failure but it is imploding on itself.

The claims Burwell and this radical, leftist Obama administration are saying are nothing short of delusional based on report after report showing that premiums are increasing by more than 50 percent as insurers flee the exchanges.

The fact of the matter is that Obamacare and these spin-off exchanges, such as what Arkansas has in place, aren’t working based on fewer than expected health young people not enrolling and those who do sign up tend to be sicker, older and require more medical services, visits to the expensive emergency room and more likely to have chronic and costly conditions.

What Burwell and her bureaucratic cohorts don’t want us to hear is such news as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona wants to raise its health exchange rates by 51 percent and that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina announced that it would increase its rates by 24.3 percent.

Also, Arkansas also is seeing higher rates. Last month, government officials approved an 11 percent rate increase for QualChoice Health Insurance.

Furthermore, a 9.7 percent increase for Arkansas blue Cross and Blue Shied was approved in August.

We suspect Burwell would certainly like us to ignore what former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, said about Obamacare during one of his recent stump speeches trying to persuade people to believe his wife, Hillary, needs to replace Obama this November.

For those who haven’t heard what Clinton said allow us to repeat what he said.

“The people that are getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies. So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.

What more can we say after that brilliant observation folks?