Contrary to what Barack Obama and Co. want Americans to believe, ObamaCare’s benefits are anything but free.American Enterprise Institute’s Jim Capretta told Fox News, “There’s going to be taxes on insurance. Taxes on drugs. Taxes on medical devices. All of that is getting passed through to the prices people have to pay either for direct services or their insurance premiums.
Helen Daring, CEO of the National Business Group on Health, added, “I know of at least one employer that gained eight-thousand people [on the insurance rolls]. Now even if they’re not the most expensive, eight-thousand people — that’s a lot of people.”
Dr. Ramin Oskoui of Sibley Hospital in Washington said, “The actual reimbursement for the physician is below the actual cost of providing the service. So while it’s great for patients, it doesn’t work for doctors.” He made an analogy to a restaurant selling hamburgers, saying, “Let’s say you told them they can only charge $10.95 for that burger. But the cost of the beef, the bun, the vegetables, keeps rising. That squeezes their profit margins. Eventually they have no profit and they’re losing money on producing that burger.” No burgers, no medicine.
Avik Roy, of the Manhattan Institute, summed it up: “P. J. O’Rourke famously said that if you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free. Once you lard on all these additional things, all these extras that insurers must provide, you have to pay for that.”
Ask Delta Airlines, which has said it will lose an additional $8 million from the added healthcare costs next year.
Yet Obama said last year, “That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations and other basic services.” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has stated, “people now have preventive services as part of their health plan without co-pays and coinsurance. So everything from cancer screenings to children’s immunizations have to be covered.”
But John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas pointed out that doctors simply won’t have the time to treat the truly ill. He said, “economists at Duke University estimated that if we all went every year and got all of the free tests we’re supposed to have, that this will take 7.5 hours of every doctor’s time, every working day.”
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