Lawmakers are out of touch with the lower-income class. There’s a shocker. So to the masses of Obama drones who think they are seeing to your every whim, you must be dreaming. These guys can’t facilitate those tasks they are Constitutionally charged with doing. And you think they can micromanage your healthcare, let alone your life?
Monday, 03 Feb 2014 11:19 AM
By Melanie Batley | Newsmax
The designers of Obamacare made wholly inaccurate assumptions about how uninsured and lower income people would respond to new healthcare options, and evidence from the troubled program’s start-up should provide a lesson on the pitfalls of governing a socially and economically diverse nation, says Michael Barone.
“The evidence is not all in. But it seems that Americans are not behaving as Obamacare’s architects — and many critics — expected,” the syndicated columnist writes in The Wall Street Journal.
Barone, the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, highlights three misguided assumptions at the heart of the president’s signature healthcare law.
For a start, he says, the authors of the legislation incorrectly assumed that everyone wants health insurance, and that if low-cost coverage was available for those with modest incomes, the uninsured would overwhelmingly take advantage of it.
The evidence so far, Barone says, does not bear that out. He cites low enrollment rates among the uninsured and a recent Kaiser poll indicating the program’s unpopularity among that group.
“One reason may be that Obamacare requires policies to cover not just the expenses of catastrophic illness — the sort of thing auto and home insurance policies cover — but routine medical expenses and procedures that many individuals will not need,” Barone writes.
“Apparently many of the uninsured aren’t interested in prepaying for health insurance any more than they are interested in prepaying their credit cards.”
Barone says a second assumption was that health insurance would make people healthier. He points to evidence from a two-year Oregon health study that showed there was no significant difference between the health of those who received Medicaid compared to those who were eligible and didn’t have Medicaid coverage.
Barone adds that the Oregon study also debunks the assumption that those with health insurance are more likely to go to the doctor rather than the emergency room: in the study, those with Medicaid were 40 percent more likely to go to emergency rooms than those without insurance.
None of these three assumptions has been conclusively disproved, Barone says. But, he contends that the discrepancies between what policymakers expected and the behavior of Obamacare’s intended beneficiaries highlight evidence of sharp differences in behavior between the bottom 30 percent of white Americans and the upper 20 percent.
Lawmakers, he says, tend to come from the latter group, and the failures of Obamacare suggest that they are out of touch with the desires and behavior of those in the lowest income classes, the very group the policy was intended to help.
“The trouble that has resulted — from the architects’ apparent failures to anticipate the behavior of fellow citizens who don’t share their approach to the world, and the architects’ determination to impose their mores, such as contraception coverage, on a multicultural nation — is a lesson to national policymakers, conservative as well as liberal,” Barone writes.
“Govern lightly if you want to govern this culturally diverse nation well.”
H/T to Dave for the article.
And speaking of “judgement”, the elite ruling class, elected show some keen judgement in all this absentee oversight of things like the IRS, Geengate, Benghazi, Fast and Furious gun running, our borders, or even their own spending bonanza in Stimugate. Except where they do get ambitious and even make it worse. Or how about the VA and its backlog?
You forever “believers” are finally starting to smell the coffee burning, aren’t you? Obamacare is not just an indictment on Obama, its a conviction on the entire Big-Government apparatus and its legislative “process”. Did you miss how IRS has been used? Maybe you will give all that a smidgeon of thought at the next election. Hint, don’t listen to those voices in your head – they were lying the last time.
Friday, 31 Jan 2014 | Newsmax
By Melanie Batley
Almost half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Obamacare, according to a new poll, but an even higher percentage believe that opponents of the new healthcare law should work to improve it rather than repeal it.
According to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted Jan. 14-21, 50 percent of the 1,506 adults surveyed have an unfavorable view of Obamacare, compared to 34 percent who have a favorable view.
At the same time, 55 percent of those surveyed — including three in 10 of those who view the law unfavorably — say opponents should accept the law and work on fixing it. Fewer than four in 10 want opponents to keep up the repeal fight.
Among the survey respondents were 173 who identified themselves as presently uninsured, the main group the healthcare law is supposed to help the most. The poll found that 47 percent of the uninsured respondents had a negative view of the law, even though half of them said they were unfamiliar with the law’s mandate provision and the exchanges set up to help the uninsured find coverage.
Still, the survey revealed that the percentage of those uninsured with a favorable view of the law has decreased significantly since a December Kaiser poll, when 36 percent of uninsured respondents had a positive view compared to 43 percent who had a negative view.
Just 24 percent of the uninsured respondents now have a favorable view.
“Among the uninsured — a key group for outreach under the law — unfavorable views now outnumber favorable views by roughly a 2-to-1 margin,” the Kaiser survey report noted.
The poll also shows that more of those without coverage say the law has made the uninsured, as a group, worse off than better off by a margin of 39 percent to 26 percent.
“Despite these views, large shares of the uninsured see health insurance as ‘very important’ and say they need it, while four in 10 say they’ve tried to get coverage in the past six months, and half expect to get it this year,” the report said.
H/T to Dave for the articles
RightRing | Bullright
Like this:
Like Loading...
Remember, it was even NYT’ David Brooks, who said Obama has a manhood problem.
Right Ring 