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Saturday, January 23, 2016

The Affordable Care Act — Mission Accomplished?

During the Democratic presidential debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned that as president she would build on President Obama’s signature health care plan. The Affordable Care Act “is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country,” she added. I beg to differ.

First, the ACA didn’t reform the health care system. It just threw trillions of dollars at an already dysfunctional system. In the next 10 years alone, ACA spending will be at least $1.5 trillion.

To our already burdensome tax system, it also adds many new taxes, including an individual mandate excise tax, an employer mandate tax, a 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, an excise tax on comprehensive health insurance plans, a hike in Medicare payroll tax, a Medicine cabinet tax and many more.

The law’s subsidies — available to lower-income people to make the ACA plans more appealing — are also a huge drag on the economy, since they drop sharply as income increases. As such, it’s not surprising that the Congressional Budget Office projects the ACA will reduce work by an amount equal to two million full-time jobs and lower the nation’s economic output by half of 1 percent. However, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan thinks the negative effects of the ACA will be twice as large as the CBO projects.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

POSPOTUS and the dumbocrats goal was to screw up the country - they succeeded!

Thornton Crowe said...

If the mission was to destroy our healthcare system, make it impossible not to have a single-pay system, force good doctors out of business, embolden the IRS's already abusive power over citizens, and make health insurance even more expensive for working Americans, then it has succeeded admirably.

Anonymous said...

People are forced to buy insurance but then cannot afford the co pay so the government forced them to buy something they cannot use without going broke.