Chelsea Clinton’s mom hasn’t come up with a coherent answer to how she would curb the increasing cost of healthcare under the new Obamacare regime. She’s waffled between advising her audiences to double check the Obamacare website in case they missed a cheaper plan, to claiming credit for the entire thing, noting that before everyone hated Obamacare, those exact same people hated her plan.
But it’s hard to escape the idea, especially lately, that Obamacare isn’t the cost-cutting measure for most Americans that it was promised to be. Sure, it does some good things, but health costs are rising, not falling, and out-of-pocket maximums for people who buy insurance on the exchange hover around $10,000 – not exactly affordable. So what does the Democratic frontrunner have to say? Well, according to her daughter, that she’d take unilateral action to fix the ACA by instiuting even more regulation.
According to Chelsea, her mom would:
“…cap on out of pocket expenses. This was part of my mom’s original plan back in ’93 and ’94, as well as premium costs. We can either do that directly or through tax credits. And, kind of figuring out whether she could do that through executive action, or she would need to do that through tax credits working with Congress. She thinks either of those will help slove the challenge of kind of the crushing costs that still exist for too many people, who even are part of the Affordable Care Act and buying insurance…”
But the problem is, of course, that such a scheme misses the point of why Obamacare is failing in the first place: such stringent price controls and inescapable mandates require huge investments, from individuals and from insurance companies. The greater the burden on insurance, the more burden they pass on to consumers. When they can’t pass along the cost any longer, they’ll limit what they can offer. You’ll lose coverage on expensive treatments, non-essential drugs, and things that the insurance companies don’t deem absolutely essential to prolonging your life.
Obamacare doesn’t work because it forces too much, not too little.
