1) 1 In 4 Voters Already Know Someone Who Has Lost Insurance because of Obamacare: One in four Americans have either lost their health insurance because of Obamacare or know someone who has, according to a new poll shared first with The Daily Caller.The YG Network Congressional District Poll of 1,652 likely voters in 11 competitive U.S. House districts indicates Obamacare will be a powerful issue that motivates voters in important races in 2014.
Twenty-seven percent of respondents claimed knowing someone or personally receiving a health-insurance cancellation notice.
2) Almost all of the people signing up for Obamacare lost their coverage because of Obamacare: Then there are the roughly three million people said to have signed up for private insurance. In mid-January, the Wall Street Journal reported that a relatively small percentage of the new sign-ups were previously uninsured Americans gaining coverage through Obamacare. The rest were people who were covered and lost that coverage in the market disruptions largely caused by Obamacare.A McKinsey and Co. survey cited by the Journal found that just 11 percent of private insurance signups were people who previously had no coverage. Other surveys found that about one-quarter of new sign-ups were previously uninsured.
Whatever the precise number, it appears that a large majority of the activity in Obamacare private coverage sign-ups is essentially a churn operation: The system throws people out of their coverage, and then those people come to the system to sign up for new coverage, and that is reported as a gain for Obamacare.
3) The uninsured HATE Obamacare: The January Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll shows that just 24% of the uninsured approve of ObamaCare. That's down from 40% the month before the reform officially launched in October, and it's a full 10 points below the public's overall favorable rating.Incredibly, more than twice as many uninsured say they're worse off because of ObamaCare than say it's helped. What's more, just 7% of the uninsured say they tried to get coverage through an ObamaCare exchange. Nearly 60% say they hadn't done anything to get coverage over the previous six months.
4) Another 25-80 million people are going to lose their insurance when the employer mandate kicks in: There’s a reason Barack Obama delayed the employer mandate and will probably delay it again next year. Depending on the estimates you believe, somewhere between 25-80 million Americans are going to lose the health insurance they have through their employer once it goes into effect.
5) More than 30 million Americans STILL won't be covered: (According to a CBO report) “About 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents.”
6) Lie of the year: PolitiFact has named (Barack Obama's) "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," (promise) the Lie of the Year for 2013.
7) It makes health insurance considerably more expensive for most Americans: Today, the Manhattan Institute released the most comprehensive analysis yet conducted of premiums under Obamacare for people who shop for coverage on their own. Here’s what we learned. In the average state, Obamacare will increase underlying premiums by 41 percent.
8) Obamacare will reduce the incomes of most Americans: There's no doubt the Affordable Care Act will redistribute wealth in America. People at the top of the income ladder will pay more; people at the bottom will benefit. But how, exactly, will that work? A new study finds that Obamacare's redistribution will be stunningly lopsided. Scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution have discovered that Obamacare will increase the income of Americans in the lowest 20 percent of the income scale, and especially in the lowest ten percent. But all other income groups -- even people who make very modest incomes in the $25,000 to $30,000 range, as well as all income brackets above that -- will experience a decline in income because of Obamacare.
9) It bails out insurance companies: In addition, insurance companies are to estimate their payouts during the coming 12 months every year. If they miss, or the costs are greater than they supposed, the feds will pick up 80 percent of the overage. It is a kind of cost-plus deal for insurance companies. All told, insurance companies are to get $1 trillion in subsidies over the next 10 years, a staggering amount of tax money. They will make out far better than General Motors, defense contractors or any TARP recipient banks.
10) They lied when they said it wouldn't increase the deficit: Obamacare will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today....President Obama and other Democrats attempted to win support for the health-care bill by touting it as a fiscally responsible enterprise. “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” Obama told a joint-session of Congress in September 2009. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”
11) Millions of workers are being cut back to part-time because of Obamacare: Retailers are cutting worker hours at a rate not seen in more than three decades — a sudden shift that can only be explained by the onset of ObamaCare’s employer mandates.Nonsupervisory employees logged an average 30.0 hours per week in April, the shortest retail workweek since early 2010, Labor Department data out Friday show.
…This reversal doesn’t appear related to the economy, which has been consistently mediocre. Instead, all evidence points to the coming launch of ObamaCare, which the retail industry has warned would cause just such a result.
…One way for employers to minimize the costs of providing “affordable” coverage to modest-wage workers is to shift more work to part-time, defined as less than 30 hours per week under ObamaCare.
12) Two and a half million Americans will leave the work force because of Obamacare: If that’s not startling enough, there’s also the telling projection (in the CBO report) about ObamaCare’s effect on employment — “a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.”
13) Obamacare will dramatically reduce economic growth in the United States: (Congressional Budget Office Director) Elmendorf’s answer was simple, short, and devastating. “(Obamacare) is the central factor in slowing economic growth,” he said. “After we get out of this current downturn, but later in this decade and beyond, the principal reason why we think the economic growth will be less than it was for most of my lifetime will be a slower rate of growth by the labor force.”