Friday, January 27th, 2012 | By

Why Obamacare will fail

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Zachary Janowski, investigative reporter for the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, addresses the Connecticut Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society on January 18, 2012. Dr. Roger Pilon, a Cato Institute Scholar, spoke earlier in the morning about whether the individual mandate will hold up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

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  • Mitchell Young

    The focus on the mandate and also on it’s constitutionality may have been a smart idea to stir libertarian juices. It is not the real problem with “Obamacare” and in Massachusetts which does not have a similar program to Obamacare the mandate never rose to the issue in the public that the Seat Beltl law did years ago.

    Why, 95% of the people had insurance and they were ….. tired of paying for those that didn’t, especially those they knew could afford it.

    If you are against a mandate fine, are you willing to wear a wrist band that says call my family not 911 when you’re on the ground by the side of the road and you don’t have insurance.

    Why should I have to pay for your healthcare when you choose to spend your money elsewhere.

    Mandate or not there can be techniques, tax policy that can appear less onerous than a direct mandate that still force the issue for people and that’s what you’ll get if the mandate is struck down, which is fine.

    The problems of Obamacare are not mandates or tax penalties.

    Massachusetts went into its reform with the highest percentage of insured people in the country. That is in part why it was the most expensive health care market before reform and remains the highest.

    More demand, higher prices.

    The ability of Massachusetts taxpayers to pay for the healthcare costs of subsidizing the uninsured was not a problem. Please don’t say they needed federal money, federal money is more than 50% of all heatlh care spending now and that needs to be reformed.

    Overall taxes are lower in Massachusetts than Connecticut and Massachusetts has a far lower unemployment rate and is nearly out of recession levels in greater Boston.

    The Massachusetts plan was effectively, “you have to buy insurance, if you can’t afford it we’ll help you pay for it?.

    Romney did try to keep mandates down in the plan, and today, there are fewer in Massachusetts with their reform than in Connecticut without it.

    What Massachusetts has done is not the same as the Obamacare plan, and conservatives have made a strategic error in tying them together.

    The problem is numbers, Mass, had 7.5 % uninsured, and still has 2.5% uninsured. A lot of hoopla for 5% of the population.

    Texas may have 30% or more uninsured, Indeed six states have nearly 60% of all the uninsured in the country

    The numbers didn’t work for support of Long Term Care in Obamacare, and they don’t work in the state’s with the biggest uninsured population.

    Massachusetts is not closer to a single payer, or union dominated healthcare system because of it’s reform, but Connecticut is on its way to a system dominated by the state’s unions.

    Conservatives have created this problem here and nationally, by attacking the wrong issues. The mandate may well fall, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be replaced by another tactic that does pass muster.

    Look at the other issues, and the ability of state’s to design a system that works, maintains, innovation, free enterprise and can pay for the uninsured or you will be faced with a bigger problem especially here in Connecticut.