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Health & Fitness

Affordable Care Act: Ineffective, Unfair and Dangerous

As tens of thousands of Americans tried in good faith to meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act and sign up for health care coverage, the federal website was not operational.  Though the Obama Administration has called in a new chief to sort out the mess, and he has promised to get the federal website fully functional by November 30th, this would leave Americans only two weeks to comply with the law.  Therefore the Administration pushed the mandate deadline to March 31st. 

As hundreds of thousands of people are having their coverage cancelled by private insurance plans, it is now apparent to the American people that Obamacare is going to raise the rates on millions of Americans.  Health plans are cancelling hundreds of thousands of policies for people who buy their own coverage because their existing policies don’t meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.  Kaiser Health News reports that many policies being canceled are for people with pre-existing conditions.

The individual health insurance market is currently about 19 million people, but about 85 percent of them cannot be grandfathered in because of the stringent Obamacare regulations.  To comply with Obamacare at their next renewal, an estimated 16 million Americans will lose their current plans.  The cancellation letters, which started to arrive in August, were shocking to many people who believed the President’s promise that people could keep their insurance plans.

Our seniors will be hurt the most by the Affordable Care Act as the Administration is talking about cutting Social Security benefits to help fund this mess of a law.  Furthermore, seniors will face health care rationing where an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) consisting of 15 presidentially appointed "experts" will have the authority to make arbitrary Medicare spending-cut decisions with virtually no congressional oversight.  While the Board’s decisions will not be made on an individual patient level, it will decide what treatments and therapies are cost-effective and therefore covered, affecting and possibly costing the lives of those in need of those procedures.

For years it has been reported to us how socialized medicine around the world makes centralized decisions based on cost effectiveness rather than medical necessity and how this approach has led to rationing and denial of services (e.g. Britain's National Health Service).  People literally die while on waiting lists and ObamaCare tries to apply the same approach to Medicare through IPAB.  A panel of government appointees controlling the availability or withholding of treatment based on cost-effectiveness is a grim reality in other countries and if not stopped, it will happen in the United States.

Another disturbing fact with Obamacare is the "performance" criteria which rewards health care providers for the quality of outcomes. Such a system will lead to doctors and hospitals not treating patients with poor prognosis to keep their statistics favorable. This puts cancer patients at risk of being left with very limited hospital and treatment options.
It is clear to me and it is becoming clear to the American people that Obamacare is a bad health care policy and needs to be repealed.  It is not wrong just because it is unfair, and distributes the burden unevenly.  Nor is it wrong just because its implementation has been botched, requiring people to do things that they almost certainly cannot do on a dysfunctional website.  Obamacare is fundamentally flawed because it was conceived in error and will diminish the quality of American health care.

We face a critical problem of controlling the costs of our existing healthcare system.  Obviously, the Affordable Care Act will make our health care neither affordable nor accessible.  Free market solutions must be implemented to lower the cost of health care delivery for all Americans.  And the states rather than Washington DC are the best places to work out the solutions that best meet peoples' needs.

There is a clear alternative in the 5th Congressional District special election on December 10th. One candidate offers unwavering support of Obamacare, warts and all.  I offer common sense solutions and will put the interests of constituents first.  Washington has let people down while exempting themselves and special interest groups from flawed, unfair and ineffective laws they enact.  I am asking Massachusetts 5th Congressional District voters to send me to Congress so I can protect their interests and wellbeing from the politicians that don’t understand and don’t care.



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