Of Obamacare and the Private Sector

First let me get this out of the way: F*ck Obamacare and the horse it rode in on.

My employer's Open Enrollment period just began.  When I was hired in October last year, there were two plans- a "traditional" plan (the PPO that we've all come to know and love) and a "Select" (or something like that) plan- a High Deductible Health Plan.  As I was hired after open enrollment, I was not given an option, and was placed in the HDHP.  Given my family's medical needs this was sub-optimal, but we made it work looking forward to open enrollment when we could elect to spend a little more per paycheck and get a PPO plan with co-payments instead of the High Deductible plan.

Well, that got all blowed up.

Now, our CEO and CFO and all of those people went to great pains to tell us how the "Private Exchange" into which we've been entered is not a "Public Exchange" and therefore isn't ObamaCare.  It just *happens* to have a "Gold," "Silver," and "Bronze" level and they all just *happen* to be High Deductible plans (though the Gold Plan doesn't qualify as one for Health Savings Account purposes).  It also just *happens* that the least bad of the plans for my family would nearly double my current insurance premium.

I want it on the record that I do not blame my employer for this.  Health care sucks right now, thanks to Obamacare.  If I blame for anything it's for lying to their employees about the reasons for the sucky choices, and for hiding behind "MOAR CHOICE!" (Ooooh, we have 3 sucky plans instead of 1 good one and 1 bad one- oh, and more insurance companies.)  C'mon guys, at least man up and admit "Hey, for those of you who want/need the PPO, this is really going to suck."

However, I wanted to highlight this because of two things.  First, this is going to happen everywhere.  Where employers don't just drop coverage entirely, they are all going to be forced to move to these kinds of plans because the insurance carriers are going to have to raise rates for everything to cover their increased costs under Obamacare.  I would feel worse for the insurance companies, but many of them supported Obamacare.  Now my family and I are trapped in the middle.

Second is this: this was an entirely predictable occurrence.  Many of us on the right said this would happen, and we were told that we were being "scare mongers" and "conspiracy theorists."  The SCOAMT, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid forced this on the American People, and it's going to kill us.

"Yeah, that's old news," you say, and you're right.  That is old news.  So is this, but it bears highlighting as well-  Republicans are being way too weak-kneed about pushing for full repeal.  There is no "fix" here.  It must be utterly and completely destroyed.  As I've pointed out before, those "popular" provisions of the law are some of the worst.  Anything less than full repeal is unacceptable, because anything less than full repeal will *still* kill the best health care system in the world.

Obamacare:

Burn it down.Scatter the stones.Salt the earth where it stood.