Free from Obamacare

            The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is a question: Will Americans ever throw off the shackles of Obamacare with real health care reform? Republicans have promised a full repeal of Obamacare for seven years. They have voted numerous times to repeal it and even sent repeal bills to Barack Obama. Now we have a President who is asking for a repeal bill to be placed on his desk, but the Republicans are backtracking on their promises.

            The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) consistently reports that more than 22 million people will lose health insurance if Obamacare is repealed. It seems that whatever question is asked, the answer is nearly the same, and liberals are only too happy to keep repeating the figure. However, Avik Roy at The National Review reports that a congressional staffer recently leaked the real answer to him.

Thanks to information that was leaked to me by a congressional staffer, we now have the answer. Nearly three-fourths of the difference in coverage between Obamacare and the various GOP plans derives from a single feature of the Republican bills: their repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate. But the CBO has never published a year-by-year breakout of the impact of the individual mandate on its coverage estimates.

But the CBO has developed its own estimates of that impact, during work it did last December to estimate the effects of repealing the individual mandate as a standalone measure. Based on those estimates, of the 22 million fewer people who will have health insurance in 2026 under the Senate bill, 16 million will voluntarily drop out of the market because they will no longer face a financial penalty for doing so: 73 percent of the total.

            Roy suggests that moderate Republicans answer this question: “Do you support Obamacare’s individual mandate?” He says that no GOP replacement plan will satisfy anyone who supports the mandate. He also says that anyone who opposes the mandate “should ignore at least three-fourths of the CBO’s coverage score.”

            Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal claims that the CBO has a transparency problem. He says that facts and figures put out by the CBFO have been accepted as non-partisan for more than four decades. 

This important fact has been mostly left out of the debate, as the CBO has not been entirely transparent with how its numbers are calculated. So far, the CBO has essentially refused to explain the primary reason so many Americans will go uninsured….

The American people deserve an open debate on one of the most important policy issues of our generation.

It is a debate over the priorities and outcomes of a health care system that favors the individual and the family over the collective – one that throws vast decision-making power to government and bureaucracies, or is limited and placed closest to the hands of the people.

This is why transparency over potential policy outcomes is so essential.

            Transparency is a good thing. It allows people the opportunity to see the truth and base decisions upon truth rather than falsehoods. The fact is that Obamacare is bad for individuals and does not do what its supporters claim. Fred Lucas at The Daily Signal reported that a group of families with Obamacare horror stories recently gathered at the White House. One victim of Obamacare is Melissa Ackison of Ohio, who has a rare bone disease. Lucas gives the following quote from Ackison. 

My family was first introduced to Obamacare through the co-op that shortly went bankrupt, leaving us to hold the bag with a lot of those bills, then throwing us back into the marketplace again where we were sold another faulty insurance plan with an extremely high deductible that didn’t cover the vast majority of our pre-existing conditions…. Despite what you’re hearing about the [Affordable Care Act], the pre-existing conditions are not guaranteed to be covered.

            Lucas also reports that Ackison and other victims of Obamacare are threatening the Republicans that they will either sit out the 2018 election or take their votes elsewhere. I can see the reason for the threats. That reason is the Republicans are not keeping their promises.

            I am of the opinion that Americans will never see the real truths about Obamacare if Democrats and some Republicans have their way.  Some Republicans – such as my own Senator Liza Murkowski – are not really interested in repealing Obamacare because they are afraid of the political fallout. In other words, they do not have the courage to do the right thing for the right reasons. They are cowards and have no place in running the people’s business.

            I have heard two different suggestions that may provide the only way to freedom from Obamacare. The first suggestion is from President Trump who says to let Obamacare fail and then pick up the pieces. The second suggestion is for President Trump to sign an Executive Order that takes away the health care provided by the government to members of Congress and make them live under the health care laws that they pass. If this were to happen, Congress would most likely repeal Obamacare immediately!