By Brandon Moseley
Alabama Political Reporter
Monday, March 23 marked the fifth anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known popularly as “Obamacare.” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R from Alabama) and U.S. Representatives Gary Palmer (R from Hoover) and Martha Roby (R from Montgomery) issued statements to reaffirm their commitments to repealing the controversial healthcare reform legislation.
Senator Shelby wrote in a statement, “Today marks the five-year anniversary of ObamaCare being signed into law. Over the past five years, I have heard from thousands of Alabamians, like Chad from Prattville, about the negative impacts of ObamaCare. This damaging law has not only caused Alabamians to see rising health care costs and to lose their preferred insurance, it also has several negative effects on our economy and job creation.”
Sen. Shelby said, “I have voted multiple times to repeal this deeply flawed law and I will continue to fight against it in the 114th Congress.”
Congressman Gary Palmer notes the five year anniversary the Affordable Care Act with his own statement: “The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, was passed on a strictly partisan vote over the clear and obvious objections of the American people, who continue to oppose this government takeover of the health care industry. It was a mistake of historic proportions.”
U.S. Representative Palmer continued, “Five years later, the ACA has not lived up to its promises. People are losing their health care plans, are seeing their premiums rise rapidly, being forced to buy coverage they cannot afford, and being penalized if they don’t. It is also adding billions to the deficit. Unfortunately, this is just the start of the problems it will create.”
Congresswoman Martha Roby wrote on Facebook, “It’s been five years since Obamacare became law, and Americans are still reeling from its effects. President Obama promised that under the Affordable Care Act families could keep their health plans if they wanted. He promised that premiums would decrease, allowing more people to get insured. He promised that the ACA would make getting health insurance easier than ever before. But five years later, we’re seeing quite the opposite.”
Representative Palmer wrote, “Congress should continue the fight to replace the ACA with free market reforms like buying insurance across state lines and ensuring people can take their health care plans from one job to another. Doing so will remain a priority for me until the goal is accomplished.”
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner (R from Ohio) echoed their concerns: “Five years after ramming ObamaCare into law, the president continues to mislead Americans about its legacy of broken promises. The president says his law is working ‘better than expected,’ even as premiums and deductibles rise, the website remains a mess, and workers across America have had their hours and wages slashed. Every week, new stories pour in from Ohio families, seniors and small businesses struggling to deal with canceled plans and losing access to doctors. If ObamaCare is truly working better than the president expected, it only shows the extent to which he hid the truth about the law while selling it.”
Speaker Boehner said, “In the House, Republicans are listening to the American people and putting their priorities first. This year the House passed a commonsense bill to restore the 40-hour work week by scrapping rules in ObamaCare that have become a significant barrier to job growth and higher wages, and once again we’ve put forward a responsible, balanced budget that repeals the president’s fundamentally-flawed law and paves the way for real solutions to lower costs and protect jobs.”
The conservative grassroots group Freedomworks wrote,
“Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act – AKA ObamaCare – being signed into law. Since that fateful day, Americans have been faced with fewer health care choices, higher prices, and burdensome mandates that have made an already tangled health care bureaucracy exponentially worse.”
Freedomworks continued, “While the Supreme Court deliberates on the King v. Burwell lawsuit that will decide the fate of many of ObamaCare’s subsidies, it’s more important than ever that we keep the conversation alive, educating people on why government-run health care doesn’t – and can’t – work, and what conservatives can do to fight for real reform.” “Five years of ObamaCare has already been much too much. Families are hurting, and the longer we wait the more entrenched the government-run health care system becomes. We can’t afford another five years like this. It’s time for a change.”
Repealing Obamacare will not be an easy task. In order to keep insurance affordable, private insurers eliminated covering the obese, those with chronic conditions, and those with healthcare challenges. Private insurers offered pricing advantages to those with ideal body weight who never had very little history of using healthcare. Obamacare eliminated ‘pre-existing conditions’ making the cost of the insurance ‘pool’ much more expensive. To try to keep the cost of insuring the pool less, Obamacare uses government force to make persons pay the premium. To help the poor pay the expensive premiums, Obamacare has a sliding scale of costly government subsidies. Obamacare also added massive price controls on what doctors and hospitals can charge. If you take away the subsidies and the threat of force millions will flee the coverage leaving a much sicker more costly pool. If you take away more of the price fixing healthcare costs will likely rise further causing healthcare insurance costs to rise. If the government allows insurers to offer preferred rates to the young and the healthy, they will leave the existing pool en masse to get the better rate, leaving the persons with pre-existing conditions trapped in a dwindling pool of increasingly old and sick persons and their rates will soar.
