Hey, Sandra—ObamaCare will ‘fluke’ all women
Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 8:56AM 
Sandra Fluke’s advocacy for faith-based institutions to cover birth control for employees and students in insurance policies distracted Americans—with help from axis media—from the conversation we should be having. The reality is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, will ‘fluke’ all women and men too.
For starters, Fluke’s advocacy will be rendered irrelevant.
Most employers, especially large corporations, will simply pay the fine and drop healthcare policies for employees. That is the point because it will expand the government’s control over healthcare standards. Furthermore, the government is counting on revenue from those ‘penalties’ to help cover expansions in programs like Medicaid and children’s health insurance.
The government is also counting on revenue from non-compliance. Those who earn too much for government programs but too little to purchase a pricey policy will pay a penalty.
Because more people will either be eligible for or seek insurance through a government program, cost-shifting will lead to increased premiums for those of us in the private sector.
A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office not only confirms that numbers in the private insurance consumer sector will decrease, the same report acknowledges ObamaCare will cost more than the original estimates.
In 2010 CBO actually pointed out they couldn’t come up with a total cost because of ‘discretionary spending.’
It’s doubtful the latest CBO projection really includes all the costs anyway. What will the Internal Revenue Service cops cost in terms of salaries and benefits? I have never seen a single estimate related to the costs for those thousands of new federal employees who will see to it the diktat in ObamaCare is carried out.
Fluke may be unaware her generation will bear the cost of this debt even more painfully than her parents’ generation. This may not be a concern for the Flukes of the world, however, because those who earn a living or derive benefits from the economic sector we call politics are usually insulated from the programs they saddle the rest of us with.
That, by the way, is one reason labor unions received the lion's share of waivers from ObamaCare requirements despite the fact those unions lobbied frenetically for the bill’s passage.
ObamaCare will eventually erode healthcare for all of us. Physicians are already refusing to see Medicare and Medicaid patients, and this practice will increase in the future.
Care for the elderly will be curtailed because those who created this bill believed it necessary to erode individual interests for the benefit of the state. The bill has already had an impact—next time you have a chance to talk to a healthcare worker, ask them about longevity versus quality of life. The thinking is that if you don’t have a certain level of quality in your life as determined by government standards rather than your own standards, it’s lights out.
Who will be harmed worst of all? The vulnerable. Rationing will impact the lower economic class, the lower middle economic class and the elderly more harshly than others.
When a government committee sets price controls and standards for healthcare, you can bet you will be impacted.
The bill is also anti-marriage, just like the tax code was before President George W. Bush corrected the injustice in that 'tax cuts for the wealthy' bill he got passed. By that standard, all married people are 'wealthy.' In an eye-opening essay ‘The Ten Terrible Provisions of ObamaCare You May Not Have Heard Of’, Heritage points this out:
“Obamacare creates new taxpayer-funded subsidies for the low and middle classes to purchase health coverage, but the structure of the subsidies allows two individuals to claim more in subsidies alone than if married.”
Higher premiums, less quality care and standards determined by a bunch of unelected government bureaucrats—this is our future under ObamaCare.
In fact ObamaCare ‘flukes’ us all. We’re nattering about birth control pills when we ought to be talking about what really matters. The Flukes of the world assist in preventing the debate we really should have.
(Commentary by Kay B. Day/March 15, 2012)
~~Read archived articles about ObamaCare and other healthcare topics at The US Report.