The Unaffordable Care Act: Why conservatives will win the health-care debates of the future

NRO2Three articles from National Review regarding Obamacare:

The Unaffordable Care Act

By Yuval Levin

As Obamacare begins to roll out, its champions are beginning to have to confront reality. But because they’re getting a lot of leeway and protection from the political press, the results of this confrontation with the consequences of the law’s poor design and misguided economic assumptions often take the form of little nuggets of truth buried in mountains of frantic, wishful obfuscation. Such was the little nugget buried in the middle of a story that was itself buried in the back of the A section of last Friday’s New York Times.

The story was about the enormous challenges of implementing the law, and while it was careful to inform us (in the mouths of unnamed “supporters of the law”) that a lot of these problems are surely functions of the fact that “President Obama has done little to trumpet its benefits, educate the public or answer the critics,” …

[…]

Obamacare doesn’t really offer any serious mechanism to achieve [low] costs — in fact, it’s actively hostile to the kind of consumer incentives and competitive pressures it would take to achieve it.

These are just a few of the many increasingly evident reasons why Obamacare in its current form has no future. For now, you’ve got to dig pretty deep in your newspaper to see it. But it’s going to become clearer and clearer to real voters as implementation proceeds.

Read the entire article…

Three Years of Broken Promises

The president’s health-care law has done almost none of what he suggested it would.

By Michael TannerThe Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, turned three years old this week. But unlike fine wine, the ACA is not getting better with age. A torrent of recent studies and reports has provided new evidence — as if we needed more confirmation — that nearly everything we were told about this law was untrue.

Compare these promises to what we’ve found out about the law in just the past two months:

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.

— President Obama, June 15, 2009

People are finding it increasingly difficult to do what the president promised.

Continue reading…

Year Four of the Obamacare Era

Why conservatives will win the health-care debates of the future.

By Avik Roy

[W]hile Obamacare will subsidize health insurance for tens of millions of currently uninsured voters, the law will impose significant — and visible — costs on the rest of the population. It will impose steep fines on medium-sized and large employers that do not provide health insurance to every full-time employee. It will dramatically raise the cost of health insurance for young people who aren’t insured through their employer — by as much as 100 percent — and it will make coverage costlier for every American, through an array of taxes and benefit mandates. It will force many seniors out of the popular Medicare Advantage program. Most infamously, it will require that most Americans purchase government-certified health insurance or pay a fine: the “individual mandate.”

So, the question that repeal advocates must unsentimentally and rigorously answer is whether the constituency of people most harmed by Obamacare will be larger, and more passionate, than the constituency of people who most benefit.

Read the entire article…