Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Congress had to pass Obamacare so we could find out what’s in it. Now we have. And what’s inside those 2,733 pages is a job-killing, health care-destroying monstrosity. It can’t be reformed, salvaged, or fixed. It’s that bad. Obamacare has to be killed now before it grows into an even bigger mess, as it inevitably will. Obamacare takes full effect in 2014. If it’s not repealed before then, it will be more than just another failed government entitlement program-it will be the trillion-ton weight that finally takes down our economy forever.

Polls show that more than 80 percent of Americans are reasonably pleased with their current health insurance plan.¹ That’s an impressive number. Still, everyone agrees we need to take steps to reduce the rising costs of health care and make insurance more affordable. But socialized medicine is not the solution. That’s why the majority of Americans are against Obamacare. They know that giving our inept, bumbling federal government control over health care is an invitation to disaster. Obamacare is a heat-seeking missile that will destroy jobs and small businesses; it will explode health-care costs; and it will lead to health care that is far less innovative than it is today. Every argument that you’d make against socialism you can make against socialized health care, and any candidate who isn’t 100 percent committed to scrapping Obamacare is not someone America should elect president. Repealing Obamacare may be one of the most important and consequential actions our next president takes.

Obamacare Puts Small Businesses on Life Support

It’s sad to see just how many citizens-some of them smart people-got duped into believing Obama’s bait and switch sales pitch on Obamacare. Take, for instance, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Schultz did a terrific job of turning Starbucks around. But when it came to Obamacare, he took the bait hook, line, and sinker. “When I was invited to the White House prior to health care being reformed, I was very supportive of the president’s plan,” Schultz said. However, after Schultz and his team studied the massive bill more closely, he changed his tune. “As the bill is currently written and if it was going to land in 2014 under the current guidelines, the pressure on small businesses, because of the [individual] mandate, is too great.”²

That’s putting it mildly. A September 2011 report by UBS, the highly respected financial services company, said, “Arguably the biggest impediment to hiring (particularly hiring of less skilled workers) is healthcare reform, which has the added drawback of straining state and federal budgets.” ³ The report went on to explain in simple language why Obamacare is such a jobs killer:

The new law requires most businesses to provide a generous “essential” package of benefits, which is beyond what many small businesses provide today. It subjects businesses to highly complex rules that increase the cost, risk, and “hassle factor” of adding to payrolls. Companies that do offer insurance can be fined iflow-income employees take a government-subsidized plan. All firms with more than 50 workers must provide benefits, which creates an incentive for smaller firms to stay “under the limit” by expanding overseas, outsourcing, or dividing into two companies.⁴

And liberals scratch their heads and wonder why businesses don’t want to hire?

Simple: companies know Obama is anti-business, and his government-run health-care takeover has created a major disincentive to hire new workers. So business leaders aren’t hiring. Instead, they will just ship more jobs overseas or automate their systems with machines. Just do some simple math. If you have a business with fifty employees, would you hire that fatal fifty-first employee and instantly subject yourself to a $100,000+ penalty ($2,000 for every employee in your company) for having the audacity to create more jobs, enlarge your business, and stimulate the economy? No. You would either put a freeze on hiring (in the hopes Obamacare will be repealed or overturned by the Supreme Court), outsource jobs to other countries, or create a second company (which will grow more slowly than if you concentrated your resources) to avoid the penalty. That’s where we are today, and that’s why we have record unemployment. This isn’t rocket science.

Obamacare also slaps companies who already insure their employees with $3,000 fines per employee if the health-care benefits they offer aren’t up to Obama’s standards. The White Castle hamburger chain ran the numbers and discovered that these new regulations will eat up 55 percent of their net income after 2014.⁵ How in the world can anyone expect businesses to hire new workers under these kinds of insane requirements?

Not surprisingly, the instant businesses began crunching the numbers, thousands of businesses and states began asking for “waivers” from Obamacare. So far just under 1,500 waivers have been granted.⁶ And guess who the big winners have been? President Obama’s biggest backers who championed Obamacare! More than 50 percent of the waivers have gone to union members. And in the recent round of new waivers, 20 percent of them went to Nancy Pelosi’s district.⁷ You just can’t make this stuff up. How is it fair to let Obama’s pals off the hook and grant them waivers but force the rest of America to be stuck with Obamacare? Mr. President, you need to give all Americans a waiver!

Obamacare Passed, Premiums Skyrocketed

What’s incredible is that Obamacare hasn’t even kicked in yet and already it’s doing tremendous damage. During the health-care debate, Obama swore that passing Obamacare would “bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses, and for the federal government.” He also said that passing his plan would “lower premiums for the typical family by $2,500 a year.”⁸ In September 2011, the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks annual employer health insurance, released a study revealing that health insurance premiums leapt 9 percent in 2011. As Senator Orrin Hatch put it, “The president’s promise that his partisan health law would lower costs was just empty rhetoric.”⁹

Liberals could hardly believe it-they couldn’t understand how health-care costs could have risen so much when their hero Barack Obama had promised that they wouldn’t. Obama claimed his socialized medicine plan would immediately “bend the cost curve downward.” He said the bill’s pre-2014 requirements, such as forcing employers to cover millions of adult “children” up to twenty-six years old on their parents’ health plans, would push costs down. Well, the Kaiser report found that 2.3 million adult “kids” have been added so far in the wake of Obamacare passing. And guess what happened? Under Obama, the average family’s health insurance premiums have risen $2,393. That’s almost the exact opposite of what the president promised. How’s that for “hope and change”?¹⁰

As business and economics columnist Robert Samuelson concluded, “The study reminds us that runaway costs are the health system’s core problem; [Obamacare] does nothing to solve it-and would actually make it worse… If roughly 30 million or so Americans get insurance and no basic changes are made in the delivery system, then added demand will lead to higher costs, longer waiting periods, or both… [Obamacare] was also bound to raise the costs of hiring workers by compelling employers to provide expensive coverage. That prospect can’t be helping job creation.”¹¹

Looking back, it’s incredible that anyone believed Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s wild rhetoric. Remember when Pelosi promised us that passing Obamacare would magically create jobs? Her exact words were even bolder. Pelosi said, “It’s about jobs. In its life, it [Obamacare] will create four million jobs-400,000 jobs almost immediately.”¹² 400,000 jobs almost immediately… incredible, isn’t it? Liberals were fools to have believed such garbage, especially when there were so many small business owners pleading with the government not to crush their ability to create jobs.

Obamacare Is Killing Jobs

Instead of creating new jobs, Obamacare is destroying jobs. And the worst part is yet to come, since the truly painful provisions don’t kick in until 2014. Businesses like Boeing, Caterpillar, and Deere & Company are already tallying up the job-killing costs of Obamacare. The numbers are ugly. These companies will now have to find $150 million, $100 million, and $150 million respectively-and that’s just the cost to meet one provision in the new law.¹³ Where does Obama think these sums will come from? Does he not understand that businesses exist to make a profit? Every time government adds a cost to a business, that company either has to pass the cost along to consumers, fire or stop hiring workers, or both. These three companies are big enough to absorb Obamacare’s body blow and still survive. But what about small businesses that are struggling to grow and would love to hire more workers? Those are the companies that will suffer the most under Obamacare. And don’t forget, small businesses are our biggest jobs creators. In fact, over the last fifteen years, small businesses have been responsible for 64 percent of net new jobs.¹⁴

How many jobs will Obamacare kill? A study from the National Federation of Independent Business found that Obamacare could mean the loss of 1.6 million jobs, 66 percent of which would be from small businesses. ¹⁵ Obama will probably dismiss that study because it comes from an organization that has the word “business” in its name. Fine. Then maybe he should listen to the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, who said during congressional testimony that the bill would kill 800,000 full-time jobs in the first decade alone.¹⁶ Bottom line: as Minnesota Congressman John Kline put it, “To suggest [Obamacare] doesn’t undermine job creation is to deny reality.”¹⁷

Obamacare Will Destroy Patient Choice and Explode Spending

In addition to killing jobs, Obamacare also destroys a patient’s right to choose the insurance and doctor he wants. Whole books have been written about what’s wrong with Obamacare and how we can improve health care without wrecking our economy, like The Truth about Obamacare by Pacific Research Institute President Sally C. Pipes. But even a casual observer can see that Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t align with reality. Remember when Obama promised us that “if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you”?¹⁸ Yeah, well that was a flat out lie. Here’s why: once the law goes into full effect in 2014, one out of three employers plan to drop employee health benefits entirely and just pay the government penalty.¹⁹ That means those workers will be shoved into the government’s subsidized insurance exchanges. And nothing will make liberals happier.

As liberals see it, pushing businesses to dump their current health-care plans and funnel their workers into the government-run health-care plans is a backdoor way to drag America closer to a so-called “single payer system,” otherwise known as total government-run health care. As Howard Dean joyfully said, “Most small businesses are not going to be in the health insurance business anymore after this thing goes into effect.”²⁰ So the line Obama sold the country about everyone being able to keep the plan they have was a total con job. As the president knew all along, millions of workers’ current insurance plans will be scrapped entirely. Obamacare is nothing more than a lurch toward total government-controlled health care.

It’s crazy that this plan was even proposed-America is a debtor nation. How in the world does it make sense to create a budget-busting government program like Obamacare when the United States is already $15 trillion in the hole? It’s financial suicide.

The original price tag Obama and his liberal supporters quoted us was also a total sham. Not wanting to quote a price that used the word “trillion,” Obama and Pelosi made sure to jigger the numbers so that he could claim Obamacare would cost $940 billion over the decade. Yet as Dr. Jeffrey H. Anderson points out, “Even this colossal tally is like the introductory price quoted by a cell phone provider. It’s the price before you pay for minutes, fees, and overcharges-and before the price balloons after the introductory offer expires.” Using the CBO’s numbers, Anderson calculates that Obamacare’s actual cost from 2014 (when the plan fully kicks in) to 2023 will be $2.0 trillion, more than double what Obama and Pelosi claimed, in order to insure the 30 million Americans Obama says are uninsured.²¹ As usual, liberals play a shell game with how much they’re planning to screw taxpayers for. The Obama administration said they would pay for the program by slashing $ 575 billion from Medicare and make up the rest in tax hikes. I think we can count on tax hikes-lots of them.

Now take a closer look at that number of uninsured Americans-30 million. Throughout the health-care debate, Obama chronically talked about the “46 million uninsured Americans.” Over and over we had that number pounded into us like a nail. Then, all of a sudden, Obama decided that, no, the actual number of people who couldn’t get health-care coverage was 30 million. That’s quite a drop! But of course he used the smaller number after having blasted the inflated number far and wide.

But pretend for a moment that the 46 million was real. According to the ultra right-wing New York Times, here’s how that number breaks down “with the caveat that there is overlap in these numbers” (which is why they don’t exactly add up to 46 million). One out of five of the people he claimed were uninsured weren’t even U.S. citizens! Another 13.7 million have plenty of money to buy health care (they make more than $75,000 a year) but choose not to get it. Eleven million poorer Americans are Medicaid or SCHIP eligible but just haven’t enrolled yet. That leaves 13 million young people (ages nineteen to twenty-nine) who are either fresh out of college, can afford insurance but think they’re invincible, are in-between jobs, or who are searching for jobs.²² There’s no doubt some of these folks need a safety net under them until they start their careers. The question is, was it worth it to jeopardize the world’s greatest health-care system and shackle America with $2 trillion of additional debt to address the temporary health-care needs of 4 percent of the country? Or could we have devised a smarter, more efficient, less expensive solution that would have accomplished the same goal? Only a fool would choose the former over the latter.

We may get lucky and have the Supreme Court declare Obamacare unconstitutional. After all, there’s no doubt that the government forcing all citizens to buy a product is a direct violation of the Commerce Clause. That would set a very dangerous precedent. “If Congress may require that individuals purchase a particular good or service,” says Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, “we could simply require that Americans buy certain cars… For that matter, we could attack the obesity problem by requiring Americans to buy fruits and vegetables.”²³ Hatch is right. The individual mandate is a massive federal overreach and is clearly unconstitutional. But as every conservative knows, the Supreme Court tramples on the Constitution all the time. So it’s anyone’s guess what they will do.

Still, I think we’ve got an even chance that the Supreme Court may strike down Obamacare’s so-called “individual mandate” to buy health insurance. If that happens, even Obama’s supporters concede it will all but kill Obamacare, because the whole thing hinges on the government forcing everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not. But it’s anyone’s guess if the Supreme Court will rule properly.

Bring Down Costs through Competition

Regardless of what happens in the Supreme Court, and even if we elect a real president who will get tough and repeal Obamacare, we still need a plan to bring down health-care costs and make health-care insurance more affordable for everyone. It starts with increasing competition between insurance companies. Competition makes everything better and more affordable. When I build a building, I let various builders and architects compete for the contract. Why? Because it sharpens their game, makes them bid competitively on price, and encourages them to give me the best quality product possible. That’s true for any service or product. That’s why Americans need more options when it comes to purchasing health-care insurance.

One way to infuse more competition into the market is to let citizens purchase health-care plans across state lines. Health-care costs vary drastically from state to state. For example, a 25-year-old in California can buy an HMO plan that costs him $260 a month. But for a New Yorker to buy a similar plan with equivalent benefits, it will cost him $1,228 a month.²⁴ Why not allow people to buy health insurance across state lines and make companies compete to offer the best plans at the best rates?

This could be easily accomplished if Congress got some guts and did the right thing. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress control over interstate commerce. But for whatever reason, the Congress has never exercised this power regarding health insurance. Bills for interstate insurance compacts have been proposed for over six years. As usual, though, the politicians in Washington have done nothing about it. They need to. As former Florida Congressman Thomas Feeney points out, creating a national market for health-care plans would help bring costs down for lower-income Americans-such as those 19- to 29-year-olds without coverage-and give them more affordable options.²⁵

The reason prices vary so much from state to state is because states differ wildly on the kinds of mandates they require in their coverage plans. As Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, puts it: “If consumers do not want expensive ‘Cadillac’ health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits.”²⁶ Increasing competition is common sense. We need to pass laws that encourage it.

Real Tort Reform Right Now

The other way we can drive down costs is by recognizing that doctors today are practicing “defensive medicine.” In other words, doctors often order unnecessary tests and procedures to avoid being sued. Pricewaterhouse Coopers did a study to see how much defensive medicine adds to overall medical costs. They found that this phenomenon accounts for at least 10 percent of all medical costs.²⁷ That’s huge.

It’s not hard to understand why doctors engage in defensive medicine. Just look at disgraced Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards. In his former life, Edwards was a world-class ambulance chaser. In just twelve years, Edwards won $175 million in malpractice judgments by suing doctors, insurance companies, and hospitals for causing infant cerebral palsy. And this despite the fact that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has stated that the “vast majority” of cerebral palsy cases have nothing to do with the way a baby is delivered.²⁸ It’s just one more example of what a disgraceful human being John Edwards is.

“The courts are clogged up with these cases,” says Dr. Cecil Wilson of the American Medical Association. “Physicians are afraid of being hauled into court and as a result order tests they ordinarily would not order.”²⁹ With sleazy characters like Edwards lurking around every hospital corner, it’s no wonder doctors feel forced to add all those expensive tests to protect themselves. Doing so, however, jacks up our health-care costs by at least 10 percent. That’s why we need serious tort reform. Specifically, we need to cap damages for so-called “pain and suffering” at $100,000. We also need “loser pays” laws that make the loser pay the legal bills of the winner if the charges are deemed baseless-a system followed by almost all other western democracies. This will help cut down on frivolous suits that artificially raise health-care costs and clog up our courts. The state of Texas recently passed loser pays legislation. Other states should do the same.

There’s a reason most Americans oppose Obamacare: it’s a total disaster. Barack Obama has put us so deep in the debt hole that America can’t afford another one of his $2 trillion spending programs. Obamacare is already making health-care costs rise, and the thing hasn’t even gone into full effect yet. Worse, it’s absolutely slaughtering jobs. No businessperson with a brain would consider serious expansion with this regulatory nightmare hanging over them. Whether through a Supreme Court ruling or a presidential election, America must repeal Obamacare once and for all.

Destroying the world’s finest health-care system so that Obama can have his socialized medicine program is reckless and foolish. The proper way to bring the cost of health-care down is to make insurance companies compete nationally and get defensive medicine under control through serious tort reform that includes loser pays provisions.

We need a president who will get tough and repeal Obamacare on day one. When they do, they will have accomplished more with one stroke of the pen than Obama has accomplished in his abysmal presidency. 2012 can’t come soon enough.