10 Reasons Why Obamacare Is Going to Ruin Your Medical Care and Your LifeElizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D Health insurance exchanges are the basket of qualified insurance policies that meet the new healthcare law requirements for expanded coverage. These may be set up by the states (many are refusing to do so, due to high cost and fear of bankrupting the state) or the federal government. The Exchanges are supposed to be fully operational by October 1, 2013, but it is questionable whether they will actually be in place by that deadline. The individual mandate requires that individuals purchase health insurance that meets the new, expanded federal requirements. Individuals who do not comply face a financial penalty. Individuals who fall below minimum income levels will be eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies to buy health insurance. Selective EnforcementWhy delay one component of Obamacare and not the others? More specifically, why delay the employer mandate but not the individual mandate? To answer that question, we must first understand this fact: Obama wants a single-payer healthcare system in the US. This is not a secret: These quotes are not taken out of context. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that transitioning to a single-payer system has been Obamas and his cohorts ultimate goal all along: Here, Rep. Schakowsky is suggesting that the public option will lead to their desired goal of a single-payer healthcare system. Single-payer proponents no longer use this term, since the public has clearly and consistently opposed it. The public option has been renamed Medicaid expansion, which serves the public-relations purpose of confusing the public and avoiding calling taxpayer-funded healthcare single payer. Hacker nicely sums up the underlying goals of Obamacare: not to increase competition or patient choice, but to drive people out of private insurance as a stepping stone to a government-run, single-payer system. Stepping Stone to Single-PayerKnowingObama and his cohorts goals, the purpose behind the delay of the employer mandate seems clearer: to hurry the transition time away from employer-based health insurance and to a single-payer system. This represents a doubling of the number of workers forced to get health insurance on the exchanges. Now that businesses will not be required to offer health insurance until 2015, workers and their dependents will be eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies to purchase health insurance on the exchanges. This will cost taxpayers an estimated $60 billion dollars in 2014 alone to cover the increased costs of subsidiesand the loss of revenue from employer penalties. This $60 billion figure is before we take into account the liar subsidies that will invariably occur now that the administration has quietly removed eligibility verification for taxpayer-funded subsidies. It is set up for disaster, much like the liar loans that helped topple the mortgage industry when people were not required to verify their income to qualify for a mortgage. Remember, by enacting the dual mandates, Obamacare ostensibly was designed to ensure that its costs were borne by businesses, not taxpayers. But when the president decided to enforce only certain portions of the healthcare law and delay others, he shifted the cost of health insurance onto the backs of taxpayers. This is all on top of the burdensome costs Obamacare has already created. Various studies have projected that private insurance premiums will rise between 20 to 60% in 2014, and some as much as 100%. How long will the private-insurance market survive with such exploding costs? People will not be able to afford such massive premium increases. That seems to be the point: drive up costs and drive everyone into the arms of government-controlled medical care. Jeff Smith from Seattle summed it up nicely in a Wall Street Journal letter on June 12: If you are denied treatment, you have no appeal of IPAB decisions; you are simply out of luck, and possibly out of life. This is a radical departure from the appeals process required for all private health insurance plans. Further, the IPAB is accountable only to President Obama, and cannot be overridden by Congress or the courts. IPAB is designed to have the final word on your health. The bottom line is that Americans are losing more and more of their medical freedom. By 2015, so many workers will be trapped in the government-run health insurance exchanges that there will be no going back to the private plans we have today. At this rate, single-payer proponents will drive private insurance companies out of business, which has been their intention all along. Americans need to become far more proactive about taking charge of their health. The healthier you are, the less vulnerable you are to our degrading healthcare system. Its also wise to consider proactively planning for medical treatment options outside the US. Dr. Vliet will share her thoughts on what Obamacare will do to medical freedom and privacyand the steps Americans can take now to preserve bothat the upcoming Casey Research Summit 3 Days with Casey, October 4-6 in Tucson, Arizona. This article first appeared at Casey Research linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 