An excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal notes that the White House is celebrating the six-month anniversary of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, widely known as ObamaCare, by touting all the freebies you’ll get:
Insurers, we are being told, will no longer be able to impose annual limits or lifetime caps on benefits, and they will face a higher standard before than can drop anyone's coverage. Children will be guaranteed access to insurance, regardless of health condition. And there is more to come in the future.
Yet the administration is strangely silent about who will bear the cost of these benefits. Search the government's own health-reform website and you'll get the idea that the whole thing is one big free lunch.
But it is an illusion that these things don't cost money.
Quoting from a new study by Robert Book at the Heritage Foundation and James Capretta at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, John C. Goodman, CEO and a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, writes that by 2017, many residents of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio will see their premiums rise more than $5,000 a year. For some in New York, the cost of premiums will go up $6,000 a year, while for residents of one unfortunate town in Louisiana the figure is estimated at $9,000.
Who will foot the bill for these exorbitant cost increases? Somebody will pay, you can be sure of that. If you’re an older American, it will be you. And it’s not just the wealthy among our older citizens who’ll be affected:
Who are these people? Are they the rich and the comfortable—the folks presidential candidate Barack Obama told us could afford to pay for health reform? Are they people who have excessively profited during a recession that's caused hardships for so many? Are they the ones who gained the most from the Bush tax cuts?
None of the above. According to the Book/Capretta study, the people getting hit with these very expensive tabs live in predominately low-income households. They are disproportionately minorities. They have trouble paying their own medical bills.