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Twila Brase, RN, president and co-founder of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom. (CCHF)
The first reason is that “the higher cost of coverage and the high deductible, due to new taxes and mandates, are unaffordable for many, even with the federal taxpayer-funded subsidy,” says Twila Brase, president and co-founder of the Minnesota-based non-profit group, whose mission is to “protect health care choices and patient privacy”.
As a result, some federally qualified health care clinics are “running out of money” because even with the subsidy, some Obamacare enrollees can’t afford their high deductibles and are going to the clinics for free care, she told CNSNews.com.
People who sign up on the Obamacare exchanges will also find a limited choice of coverage and a reduced list of approved physicians and hospitals, she added.
“We just let people know they’re not getting a private policy. It doesn’t matter if it says Cigna, or Kaiser or WellPoint. People on Medicaid have cards that say Cigna, Kaiser, WellPoint. What Obamacare really is is Medicaid on a sliding-fee scale, so it’s a Medicaid-for-the-middle-class type of coverage,” Brase told CNSNews.com.
“You have to apply to the federal government. This is not private coverage, because you have to go through the government and you have to use only the plans that are available through the government. So we just like to let people know that one of the other risks is they have a policy that’s up for discussion by politicians, so it may go away.
“Because Obamacare has so much administration and so much bureaucracy, there are already health plans that have said ‘no’ and are no longer providing Obamacare coverage, such as one in Minnesota that dropped 32,000 people,” she told CNSNews.com. “And all those people are going to have to get double-digit [premium] increases to get policies on the exchange, the ones that are left.”
Another reason not to sign up for Obamacare is the fact that federal government collects and stores personal data on all enrollees. “There is no privacy,” Brase points out, adding that most people are also “unaware that they may be subject to expensive repayments to the IRS or ‘clawbacks’ if their status changes during the coverage year.”
Brace noted that administration officials have already significantly scaled back the number of enrollees they predicted would sign up for Obamacare, which increases the possibility the system could enter a “death spiral”.
”With the risk stratification that has to happen in insurance, you need to have a certain number of healthy people for the number of sick people who flooded the exchanges to get coverage. Otherwise the prices just skyrocket and healthy people leave, and you’re left with the sick people and really astronomical premiums,” Brase explained.
“The Congressional Budget Office expected more than 13 million people to be enrolled by the end of this second enrollment period, at the end of 2015. And now the Obama administration is saying that it’s only going to be 9 to 9.9 million people enrolled,” she pointed out.
But that’s only about half of the number that Obamacare-approved health care plans need to sign up before their reinsurance – essentially insurance for the insurers – expires at the end of 2016.
“So in 2017, there’s no more protection, which means that the [Obamacare] policies are going to be announced right around the [presidential] election of 2016. And if they don’t have the 17 million [enrollees] that they’re going to need to have the right risk stratification, then the Obamacare premiums are just going to skyrocket.”
And since individual subsidies “only go so far,” Brase said, “what’s going to happen then is that people are going to leave the exchanges in droves, imploding the system. Health plans are going to leave, exchanges are going to shut down, and the system to impose Obamacare will no longer be viable.”
CNSNews.com asked Brase for her reaction to comments made by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, who said that the Affordable Care Act was only passed because of Americans’ “stupidity”.
M.I.T. economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped write The Affordable Care Act.
“The American public is not ignorant, and the fact that they felt they had to hide it means that they know the American public is not ignorant… He actually says in his tape that had they been transparent about the fact that they were going to take money from the healthy and give it to the sick, that that was the basis of the program, it would have died,” she replied. “So he contradicts himself.”
“He doesn’t think it could ever be repealed probably, which is why he’s okay saying these sorts of things. But the fact of the matter is, it’s just all more ammunition to get it repealed.”
“There was life without Obamacare. There’s no reason not to repeal it,” Brase added. “It’s unconstitutional, it’s causing people to lose their jobs, to lose their income, to lose their coverage, to potentially pay penalties to the IRS, to have clawbacks from the IRS. It’s providing us with worse coverage, it’s outlawed traditional insurance. It’s done all these things. Why wouldn’t you just repeal it?”
In fact, she predicts that the unpopular law will be repealed within the next two years.
“It could be repealed sooner depending on the pain that people already feel over Obamacare, with more to come. But most likely the biggest pain is going to come at the end of 2016 when all the insurance for the insurers goes away and the premiums are skyrocketing and the loss of options becomes more real to everyone, not only insurance options, but hospital options, doctor options,” she said.
“This law is 2,700 pages, and the regulations are more than 20,000 pages…. All those words in the law and the rules are requirements across the country for employers, health plans, individuals, data companies, the government and everyone else to impose every facet of this system. So the entire law, every word of it, has to be repealed.
”My concern is that the Republicans will hem and haw their way around repeal even though the American people have clearly spoken through the last election and through poll after poll after poll that they don’t like Obamacare and all the new Republicans that got in campaigned on repealing Obamacare.
"It’ll be very difficult to get all Republicans together on a replacement, which means if they’re really going to wait for a replacement to put repeal on the table, we could be waiting forever," Brase told CNSNews.com.
“This should be very simple,” she continued. “The Republicans should be putting lots of bills on the president’s desk and... put him to the test to sign or veto. And if he chooses to veto all of these bills, it just shows how he’s not listening to the voice of the American people.”
In the meantime, Brase’s group is urging Americans to take advantage of the nine legal exemptions and 14 hardship waivers available, reminding them: “No one by law is required to be insured under Obamacare. “
The 14th hardship waiver, which states that the applicant “experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance,” is so vague that it “in essence allows anyone who says they have a ‘hardship’ to not be required to purchase health insurances under the exchanges – and avoid the penalty,” CCHF pointed out in January.
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