Today I’ll be writing about the true intentions and purpose of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. I hope you will all find this long-ish presentation informative!

What is Obamacare?

Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a 20,000+ page piece of legislation that is basically incomprehensible to everybody working in the healthcare industry. It comprises often contradictory rules and regulations that hospital administrators, healthcare consultants, health insurers, employers, doctors and patients will all have a tough time figuring out and understanding in its entirety for what may be decades to come.

The Affordable Care Act in a nutshell

It’s a piece of work. And like it or not, just like the Federal Reserve Act, it’s here to stay. This baby is not going anywhere any time soon.

When one understands Obamacare in its proper historical context, as part of an ongoing, often-misunderstood yet incredibly forceful and resilient trend, it is actually incredibly easy to understand what this ‘Affordable Care Act’ is.

I think it can best be summed up as Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor.

So it’s really nothing new to the great US of A.

So what is this piece of legislation really?

Essentially, the ACA is a new way for the private insurance companies to line their pockets with untold profits through their newly acquired access to public-funds, made available to them through new government subsidies.

It also gives these private insurance companies carte-blanche to charge higher premiums for private health plans from their existing customers. Here’s how it works:

Under Obamacare, private insurance companies will be adding poor people and high-risk people to their list of privately-insured payees thanks to government subsidies that the Obama Administration has made available to them.

This will have a myriad of consequences over the next decades, but one thing is for sure: in the long run its going to make health care in America much more inaccessible than it has ever been.

Let me bring those who’re unfamiliar with the context of all this ‘health care reform’ up to speed with the events that led to Obamacare, and continue to affect this new health system in America today.

The Build-up to Obamacare

In 2007, According to the US Census Bureau, almost 46 million people in America didn't have any health insurance. To make matters worse, studies such as those published in the American Journal of Medicine began to demonstrate that the biggest reason for bankruptcy in America was medical debt. One study even found that 62% of all bankruptcies in America were caused by medical debt.

This led to what the media started widely reporting on, what they termed:

'The Healthcare Crisis'

In the run-up to the 2008 election, after 2 costly illegal invasions and occupations, unconstitutional governmental encroachment on citizen’s civil liberties, and some of Eminem’s best songs, rising medical costs and insurance premiums became (some) of the major talking points of the young Illinois Senator who campaigned on the promise of ‘Hope and Change’. (Boy did we fall for that one, I included!)

He spoke incessantly about America’s need for health care reform, and who could deny back then that such reform was direly needed? Surely after the monstrous presidency of Bush, it was clear that America could use some Hope, and definitely needed some Change. The American public decided to give Obama a shot.

Fast forward past all the tears of joy and victory celebrations and Obama was beginning to deliver on his promise to the American people of reforming the health care industry, thereby making it more accessible to everyone.

The Hope

The bill he was proposing was said to aim to provide 32 million Americans - most of them poor or sick – with access to health insurance. It was going to outlaw the practice of companies denying health coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions, to also allow people under the age of 26 to stay under their parent’s insurance, force employers to insurance 95% of their full-time workers, amongst a whole host of incredibly popular measures.

It really was a great pitch coming from the man who had promised everybody Hope and Change, and even though every single Republican in Congress voted against the bill, it still somehow miraculously got through.

‘‘Great!’’, people thought! ‘‘Now ‘Hope and Change’ is on its way!’’

The liberal media rejoiced at the idea of correcting one of America’s most disparate inequalities: access to quality healthcare. The conservative media scowled! ‘How dare they socialize medicine, those commie bastards! I’m not paying for no broke ass Negro bums to get access to a flu-shot!’ (Pardon my French, but you get the picture…)

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The Fraud

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Here is what the (dinosaur) media failed to mention to the American public :

In 2014, following the roll-out of the ACA website and the beginning of its enrolment period, the US Census Bureau changed its definition of what it means to be ‘uninsured’, as a brilliant Forbes article explained when it broke the story a week later.

When the Obama Administration fiddled with the Bureau’s definition of what it means to be ‘uninsured’, this created the impression that Obamacare ‘is working’. The astonishing truth is that this was a blatant attempt at cooking the books, no different than what the Soviets were doing in the run-up to the collapse of the USSR.

Today, the Census Bureau’s legal definition of ‘uninsured’ is people who have had no form of health plan for a full calendar year.

In other words, this means people who have lost their jobs on the 2nd of January, people who got divorced and lost their insurance through their spouse’s work, and a whole host of other people such as those who saw the price of their premiums go up, the price of their prescription drugs go up, or their private insurance plans be cancelled on them, are all still considered ‘insured’, even though if they were in need of emergency hospital treatment, they would be out-of-pocket for tens of thousands of dollars.

Yet the liberal media in America often espouses these phoney statistics as a sign of Obamacare’s success. The reality on the ground couldn’t be more disparate with the reporting that is put forward as ‘facts’.

I enjoy Trevor Noah and John Oliver’s tirades as much as the next guy, but they are painting a seriously erroneous picture. Politico, which they so often reference, uses these cooked-up statistics, and you can see signs everywhere of this reality in the media’s ongoing crusade against ‘Fake-News’.

With these new definition and parameters, the fundamental rules of math used to come up with these phoney statistics changed, making it virtually impossible to compare pre-Obama ‘insured rates’ and post-Obama ‘insured rates’.

To add insult to injury, the Obama administration also started to exclude uninsured illegal immigrants from the national tally. These individuals used to be included in the Census Bureau’s figures before Obamacare, inflating the figures.

They still don’t receive insurance under Obamacare, but for some obscure reason, they also don’t count anymore among the ‘uninsured’. That’s a nice double-whammy that is being used to paint a very different picture on American’s TV screens than what is actually being experienced in the lives of everyday people who need access to health care.

In America today, one of the key questions surrounding Obamacare is just how many people have been newly insured under the law?

On the Obamacarefacts.com website, they state: ‘‘As for how many are covered under Obamacare here in 2017? “20 million plus” is a good answer to how many are currently covered between all coverage provisions.’’

As the website states, that is ‘supposedly’ between:

• The Marketplace’s 10.3 million, who receive Advance Premium Tax Credits (APTCs) to purchase their health insurance plans.
• Medicaid expansion’s 11 million or so, in the States that voted to expand Medicaid.
• About 2.6 million young adults staying on their parents plan
• The ‘‘many’’ newly covered via the employer mandate (no numbers are provided for this figure.)
• And ‘those covered under other coverage provisions created by the ACA’ (also no numbers are provided for this figure).

But how many people have actually signed up on the infamous official ACA website?

By the end of 2016, CNN reported that ‘6.4 million Americans had signed up to Obamacare through the government website.’

That’s hardly the 20 million that is often purported to have been newly insured thanks to this revolutionary website, and more reporting has shown that enrolment rates have steadily decreased in the wake of Trump’s promise to ‘repeal Obamacare since day one’, something I wouldn’t hold my breath for, since the Republicans in power have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to come up with any viable plan that wouldn’t result in kicking half of America off of the healthcare system entirely.

But who knows, maybe they are keeping that option open for a later date when the American public is more vulnerable and susceptible to falling for it.

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So what exactly is going on?

If the wool is so clearly being pulled over everybody’s eyes? What is Obamacare really all about? Here’s the nuts and bolts of what it was designed to do, and how it currently works:

Under Obamacare, private insurance companies will be adding poor people and high-risk people to their list of privately-insured payees through government subsidies that the Obama Administration has made available to them to insure these previously 'uninsurable' people who can’t afford private insurance: through either Medicare for the super poor or Advance Premium Tax Credits for the ‘Middle Class’ (The working-poor).

This means that people who cannot afford healthcare, as well as people who are very likely to need expensive medical intervention in their lives due to pre-existing conditions, are going to be added to the pool of healthy, low-risk individuals.

In a for-profit insurance environment, where the bottom line is a flat growth-rate, and a decrease in the profit margin is unacceptable, what does this translate to? How do you insure all this extra risk, billions of dollars worth of liabilities, while all the while increasing your profits?

There is only one logical answer to that: you raise prices. Pure and simple.

These private insurance companies are simply not going to bleed a single penny because of this legislation, and indeed, the legislation was designed to ensure that these companies will be able to charge whatever the hell they want to make sure that at the end of the day, they can squeeze more money out of America’s health care industry, not less.

Now, those people who could not be privately-insured before, the ‘uninsurables’ who were just not worth the bother to ensure because you couldn’t make a profit ensuring them, because of their pre-existing conditions, other high-risk factors and bad financial conditions, must now be privately-insured by law, or risk paying the infamous Obamacare fine! That’s right; non-compliance with this system is against the law now, and you can be fined for being uninsured.

The incredibly baffling mechanism of this new healthcare system can be broken down to two essential slaps to the face:

A) Under this system, people who are financially able to pay for their own private insurance will be charged higher premiums in order to pay for ensuring people who were previously considered ‘uninsurable’, because by law private insurance companies must now add to the pool of insurees those with pre-existing conditions and other high-risk factors.
This means that if you are a healthy, hard-working person who takes great care not to fall sick, you will have to pay more money for your insurance to pay for people who are not as hard-working as you and take a much less greater care in maintaining optimal health. That’s not a very fair-system to be mandated by law…

B) those who are financially unable to insure themselves because they are too poor or too sick will receive expensive insurance through Medicare, funded by the tax-payers’ dollar, and those who are too poor or too sick to afford health insurance but not poor enough or not sick enough to qualify for Medicare will be given Advance Premium Tax Credits, in order to ‘help them along’ to getting their top-dollar expensive insurance they also would not be able to afford. These ‘APTCs’ will also be funded through the tax payer’s dollar.

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So basically, this is what Obamacare proposes to do:

The government is going to throw oodles of tax-payers’ money at the private insurance companies to 'convince' them that the poor and sick people who the private insurance companies have always considered 'not-profitable' to insure, will now be profitable because the middle class will be picking up the tab for it.

What does this mean?

A) Higher taxes for the Middle Class to pay for all this ‘socialized medicine’.

B) Higher premiums for private health plans to balance the risk of people who cannot actually afford healthcare, and must now be insured by law.

C) The healthcare industry and drug companies can still charge whatever the hell they want for their overly-priced services, so it's going to cost everybody more to receive the same or less amount of care.

D) Class-tensions are going to be exacerbated as the Conservative media like Fox tries to scapegoat poor and sick people for ‘mooching’, creating xenophobic sentiment, while the Liberal media is going to try to spin this issue as conservatives not wanting poor and sick people to have access to health care.

E) Ideas such as Bernie Sander’s ‘Single Payer System’ and the desire to have ‘Universal Health Care’, though not ideal but certainly far better than the current system, will never come to pass, and the standard of quality and delivery of health care in America is going to continue to degrade, accelerating the growing trends of poverty and widening the wealth distribution gap in America.

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And they called this the:

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I’ve got to say.

I wasn’t here 100 years ago. But from what I can tell, this is the biggest swindle that has ever been pulled on the American people since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, when private interests took over the issuance of credit in America and turned debt-creation into one of the most profitable, cartel-like industries in the world.

This is essentially the exact same thing. Today, private interests have taken over the issuance of healthcare and have used the power of the government to legally create a cartel for themselves, whereby they will be able to extort untold finances from America’s poor, sick, and hard-working citizens for generations to come.

Obamacare is just a way to funnel more public money, tax-payer dollars, into the hands of private, wealthy interests.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor: 101

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Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy piece, and upvoting, following and resteeming if you found this article compelling and interesting.
I hope now, this whole ‘healthcare debacle’ will make a bit more sense in everybody’s mind, and we will be less likely to have our judgment clouded by all the real fake-news that the mainstream media puts out every day.

Next time in this healthcare series, I’ll be writing about who actually came up with this legislation. Who was behind the drafting of such an evil bill, and also be warning about some of the pitfalls and risks that people should be wary of in the next few years, as we enter this ‘Republican’ era of cutbacks and gutting the parts of the system that actually do some good. Hopefully, I’ll dispel some more myths about the health care industry and how it actually works, and add a few other pearls to this body of knowledge.

Peace and Love,
Hae-Joo

Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/10067521/how-does-us-healthcare-work
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19501347
http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-93430900404-5/abstract
http://www.obamacarefacts.com
https://www2.census.gov/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2014/04/21/if-the-facts-dont-fit-change-the-facts-how-the-obama-administration-undercuts-public-confidence-in-government-statistics/#2426cf575838
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2015/05/14/how-many-people-has-obamacare-really-insured/#64635b9e788a