If there is at least one benefit of ObamaCare it is watching those who supported nationalizing the purchase of mandated health insurance get their comeuppance. The New York Times reports that “many in New York’s professional and cultural elite” who supported Obama and ObamaCare, and carved themselves out a sweet little health insurance pool “to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market,” are now out in the cold with the rest of us:
[U]nder the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.
The anguish these elite Obama supporters are going through is no different than those 5.9 million in the real world victimized by insurance cancelations: Stress, sleepless nights, financial burden, and the loss of familiar doctors and hospitals. “We are Obama’s people,” said one author. Today her insurance has been canceled and her doctors are not available through the exchanges. And she is not alone. Take Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan. “I couldn’t sleep because of it,” she said.
Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications.
Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state’s health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. “It’s like you’re blindfolded and you’re told that you have to buy something,” she said. …
Meinwald now says that had she known this would happen, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.
[M]any professionals make too much money to qualify for the subsidies, and even if they are able to find comparably priced insurance, the new policies do not have the coverage they are accustomed to.
According to the Kaiser Foundation, these people were intentionally screwed. Although their policies did meet the minimum ObamaCare coverage standards, The Times reports, the policies were still canceled as a way “to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.”
If only the same thing would happen to the elite media, we might actually get somewhere in repealing a boondoggle that is victimizing millions in the working and middle class only to benefit a few thousand.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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