“After four years of implementation, countless delays, a website disaster, and constant litigation, the Affordable Care Act celebrates its inauspicious birthday this week,” says the introduction to a new study from the American Action Forum. ”From a regulatory perspective, the law has imposed more than $27.2 billion in total private sector costs, $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, and more than 159 million paperwork hours on local governments and affected entities. What’s more troubling, the law has generated just $2.6 billion in annualized benefits, compared to $6.8 billion in annualized costs. In other words, the ACA has imposed 2.5 times more costs than it has produced in benefits.”
159 million paperwork hours is more than double what the hideously complicated, economy-retarding Dodd-Frank law dumped on Americans – enough of a burden to keep eighty thousand people working 2,000 hours per year. Of course, Big Government liberals believe private-sector time is without value – you should be happy to spend hours expressing your patriotism by wrestling with mandatory paperwork! – but even government agencies, such as HHS and the Treasury, are paying for millions of hours of paper-shuffling due to the Affordable Care Act. Or, more to the point, they’re forcing you to pay for it by funding these bloated agencies, but at least they acknowledge the cost exists, unlike the private-sector compliance costs they try to obscure.
ObamaCare imposes costs far beyond paperwork compliance, of course. All those mandates, plus dozens of hidden taxes, siphon more billions out of the private economy. And all this for a law that has, thus far, actually increased the number of uninsured Americans!....
◼ Fourth anniversary: Why Obamacare is beyond fixing - UT San Diego
What our leaders need to do may be unlikely, but it’s obvious: Democrats should swallow their pride and acknowledge how unpopular the law is and how ineffective it’s been at helping the uninsured, then back a do-over on health reform.◼ Gee, why haven’t more younger and healthier consumers bothered to sign up? - HotAir
That do-over could start with some face-saving: a bipartisan agreement to maintain popular ACA provisions such as allowing children to stay on parents’ policies until age 26. Then Congress and the White House could try to fashion a health reform law with a chance of working — one that is actually read by lawmakers before being enacted.
Sticking with a failing, far-reaching law out of partisan stubbornness shouldn’t be an option.
...The problem? Most of the plans that these younger consumers can afford come with deductibles that far exceed the $3,000 out-of-pocket per household estimate, which sounds fantastically high in the first place, especially for that demographic. They will have to pay those deductible costs plus the premiums, which will also run in the thousands of dollars, before they see a single dollar in benefits. That’s why most of that demographic got catastrophic insurance coverage … before ObamaCare took that choice away from them.
