OPINION:
The sad Obamacare saga continues, like a particularly weepy soap opera. The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to open debate on the latest Republican attempt to repeal and replace, which was a procedural victory for the Republicans, and even that required the vice president to break a tie vote. Meanwhile, a badly broken health care system continues to leak dollars by the billions.
Since the federal government has no money that it doesn’t exact from taxpayers, the rising costs will show up in higher health insurance premiums and heftier tax bills.
With uncertainty about what will become of the ruins, insurance companies are emboldened to creep back into the corridors of Congress to ask for more bailouts. Why not? The Democrats’ offer to work with the Grumpy Old Party to fix Obamacare is no more than a play for more taxpayer money to distribute to keep remaining insurers in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. In the Washington formula, there’s no case of bureaucratic blues that more green can’t cure.
Competition for business means better products at lower costs, but 41 percent of U.S. counties will have only one company offering Obamacare-compliant policies in 2018. Consequently, insurers are asking for average premium increases of 18 percent next year for medium-priced silver plans, according to health care consulting firm Avalere. Insurers further want Congress to pony up $7 billion in annual “cost-sharing reductions,” dollars they would redistribute to subsidize out-of-pocket costs like co-payments and deductions for lower-income policyholders.
In a less profligate era, the late Sen. Everett Dirksen observed that “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” A mere billion dollars isn’t that impressive any longer. Now, real money is more like the $60 billion in improper payments the Government Accountability Office found that government-run Medicare made to providers in fiscal 2016. Of that amount, $16.2 billion was improperly spent on Medicare Advantage programs run by private insurance companies, according to a GAO report provided last week to the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight.
Medicare pays insurers at a rate based on the medical condition of each policyholder, and audits conclude the government has a tendency to err on the side of generosity. The program attempts to recover overpayments but is more proficient at dispensing taxpayer funds than clawing them back.
Even more incredible, the GAO found in 2015 that 22 federal agencies approved improper Medicare, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit payments the previous years totaling $124.7 billion. That’s only slightly south of the 2016 gross domestic product of Hungary. Government-regulated health care and unbridled government waste are a dangerous combination. Both militate against the healthy effects of the free market to improve social and economic well-being through innovation.
If a new health care law is ever to overcome the insolvency problem that Obamacare created, it must include some form of choice like that of the Consumer Freedom Option proposed by Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. A government that demands endless taxpayer subsidies while frittering away hundreds of billions every year with little regard for the well-being of citizens is unworthy of anyone’s respect.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.