The Truth About Obamacare: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Our New Health Care Law
The Truth About Obamacare: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Our New Health Care Law
Pipes, Sally
On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that will lead to the largest expansion of government in the history of the United States. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was over 2,400 pages long and will reportedly cost a cool $1 trillion over ten years, give or take a few hundred billion.
But sticker shock is just the beginning. In The Truth About Obamacare: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Our New Health Care Law, Sally Pipes shows how Obama’s health care “reform” will crash into our economy and culture with a tidal wave of regulations that, taken together, will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and access health care. How will all those changes affect you? Pipes goes over the bill with a fine-tooth comb, laying out the specifics of what exists now in the legislation, and where it will likely lead. Most important, she looks at whether the reality of Obamacare measures up to the promise.
How Obamacare will affect you
- How Obamacare takes the country inexorably toward the universal systems that have already been tried in Canada and Europe, with catastrophic results
- The many frightening ways Obamacare will attempt to lower costs — most often by rationing care
- How Obamacare will exacerbate our nation’s shortage of doctors — and in fact, since its passage, many doctors are already choosing to close up shop
- “Comparative effectiveness research”: how the new law empowers bureaucrats to deny coverage of cutting-edge medicines in order to save the government money
- How Medicare and Medicare Advantage — which provide coverage to senior citizens — will be cut, while Medicaid — detested by doctors and patients alike — will grow exponentially
- How Obamacare forbids insurers from offering inexpensive, bare-bones policies — making health-care less affordable, especially for young people
- How, out of the gate, the legislation sets up an astounding 159 new boards and commissions — including an Elder Justice Coordinating Council, a Pregnancy Assistance Fund, and an Office of Indian Men’s Health (the list goes on and on)
- How will Obamacare be enforced? For starters, 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired to track down individuals and businesses that don’t purchase insurance, offer insurance, or fill out the required reams of forms
- How, starting in 2013, many upper-income individuals and families will see their Medicare payroll taxes increase — and many more will find themselves subject to a brand new tax on income—interest, capital gains, and dividends
- How the bill cuts in half the amount of money people can set aside in Flexible Spending Accounts for routine medical expenses — and also slashes tax deductions for people who face catastrophic health care expenses
- Onerous new regulations on how people can use Health Savings Accounts
- Why future generations of taxpayers can look forward to shouldering billions upon billions in debt to pay for Obama’s new long-term care entitlement
- “I will cut taxes for 95 percent of all working Americans”: how the president broke both this promise as soon as he signed Obamacare into law
- “One of the biggest deficit reduction measures in history”? How every penny of Obamacare’s supposed “savings” is an illusion — achieved through a series of legislative and accounting gimmicks
- How Obamacare will massively increase regulation of insurance companies, dictating what they must include in their coverage — from addiction care to fertility treatments — and how much they must spend on claims
- Why not even other government agencies predict success — for instance, by 2019, 23 million people will remain uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office
- Why Obamacare won’t reduce costs at all — in fact, it will drive the country’s health care bill ever higher, according to economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department
Is it too late to stop Obamacare? By no means, argues Pipes — who shows how Americans can, and must, force its repeal. Then, she offers 10 principles for real reform that would make health care accessible and affordable for all without destroying individual freedom, quality treatment, medical innovation, and the economy.
“Punctures the wishful thinking”
“Sally Pipes shows how a misdiagnosis of the problem led to the wrong prescription for American health care. She not only shows what is wrong with the new law, but also puts forward some solid ideas on putting doctors and patients back in charge.” —Tom Coburn, M.D., Member of Congress
“Ms. Pipes (a Canadian by birth) established herself as not simply an extraordinary expert on health care, but a force of nature, churning out dozens of articles, participating in hundreds of radio and TV interviews, and speaking at countless townhalls across the country. In this new book, she explains why the debate isn’t over. Left and right must consider her weighty arguments.” — David Gratzer, M.D. Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
“Debunking myths, Sally Pipes shows how President Obama and a Democrat Congress have crafted a government takeover of our health care system that will burden families and job creators with new hidden taxes and mandates, increase the deficit, raise health care costs, and impose a government- run bureaucracy between doctors and their patients. The results — lower quality of care, higher costs, and more Washington bureaucrats in charge of our health care decisions. This is a must read for all who want to face the challenges before us.” — Tom Price, M.D., Member of Congress
“Pipes penetrates the political sloganeering and punctures the wishful thinking that the anointed ‘experts,’ long pining for government-managed health care, can deliver universal medical insurance without inflicting unacceptable costs on businesses and individuals and without sacrificing Americans’ unique access to valuable health care innovations.” — Tom Stossel, M.D. and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham Women’s Hospital
