COMMENTARY: Look at the whole patient when it comes to Obamacare repeal
I was going to write about what the next GOP governor of Nevada must stand for. However, I’ll have to save it for next Thursday. Because Obamacare has jumped to the top of my priority list.
The unhinged, loony left is obsessed with blocking the potential repeal and replacement of Obamacare. They act as if everything is hunky dory. Why repeal something so wonderful? This is either delusional, denial or Bernie Madoff-like fraud.
The Congressional Budget Office poured gas on the fire by claiming the repeal of Obamacare would possibly throw 24 million Americans off health insurance. The office also happened to mention that repealing Obamacare would save our nation more than $300 billion and reduce the cost of health insurance. But somehow the biased, left-wing media propaganda machine forgot to mention those two benefits.
But here’s the thing. First, those in the CBO have been wrong on most every prediction they’ve ever made about Obamacare. They over-exaggerated how many Americans would sign up by more than 10 million. That’s a miss the size of Texas.
More importantly, the media aren’t mentioning that none of those 24 million Americans who might lose Obamacare don’t actually has real health insurance in the first place.
You see, they have $3,500 and $7,000 deductibles (depending on the size of their family). Every bill is on them until they meet the ridiculously high deductible. They also have separate prescription and X-ray deductibles. They have no money for any of the bills. So the Obamacare policy they supposedly have is worthless. It might as well be used for toilet paper.
By the way, even if they had a reasonable deductible, they still couldn’t use it. Because few doctors will take Medicaid patients. So 24 million Obamacare patients now enlisted under Medicaid would never see a doctor. By any standard, Obamacare is worthless.
And no one in the biased mainstream media bothered to point out that the CBO didn’t say 24 million Americans would lose their Obamacare coverage. What the CBO said is they might choose to drop it for something better (such as private health insurance).
Now comes the really big omission. If a 20-year-old kid’s leg has advanced gangrene, do you spend millions of dollars in a crazy one-in-a-million attempt to save the leg? If so, you risk killing the patient. Or do you make the smart decision to amputate the leg to save the patient’s life?
What’s more important — a leg, or the next 60 years of living a quality life?
The media have omitted the fact that Obamacare has been an Obama-nation for the American middle class. The vast majority of Americans have been badly damaged by Obamacare. They’ve lost their quality of life. Like me, their health insurance went from $500 per month to almost $2,000. And this obscenely priced insurance now covers very few health-care bills. So when you factor in the bills not covered, our health-care bills are actually more like six times higher because of Obamacare.
And that’s precisely why the economy is in freefall. The full 2016 GDP was a miserable 1.6 percent. But the first quarter 2017 GDP is now projected at 0.9 percent. Obamacare is strangling the nation, killing the economy, destroying middle-class jobs.
Obamacare is Godzilla. We must kill it, or it will kill us. And to be blunt, my focus isn’t the 24 million who might be inconvenienced. It’s the entire dying American middle class. Save them, or we lose the economy. It’s time to focus on the whole patient. Either we lose the leg or we die.
I choose life.
Wayne Allyn Root’s column appears Sunday and Thursday.
