Alfonse D'Amato

Obamacare: the big ‘bait and switch’

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Remember the promises President Obama made when he was first selling us the health care prescription that came to be known as Obamacare?

Speech after speech, he promised the American public many things with the Affordable Care Act. Six years later, it is clear that the American people were meant to believe there was gold at the end of the affordable-care rainbow.

That was simply not true.

Remember when he said that Obamacare would cut the cost of your health care? Last week, the administration announced that premiums for a midlevel plan are set to rise an average of 25 percent in 2017 in the 39 states that use the federal HealthCare.gov. Friends, if you’re in one of those states where it rises only 25 percent, consider yourself lucky.

According to the administration’s statistics, the average premium will rise 116 percent in Arizona, 40 percent in North Carolina and 53 percent in Pennsylvania. Try telling people in Arizona that Obamacare will cut health care costs.

Remember when the president said the program wouldn’t increase the deficit? That wasn’t true. According to the Government Accountability Office, Obamacare will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion. Also growing? The number of Americans joining the Medicaid rolls. Yes, more people are insured, but nationwide, Medicaid enrollment has increased since the implementation of Obamacare.

Despite the increase in the cost of health insurance under the program by over 20 percent, federal subsidies help soften the blow. Who do you think pays the subsidies? Taxpayers.

Obama also promised that if you liked your doctor, you would be able to keep your doctor. That, too, was a lie. And the biggest lie of them all? “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep it.”

The Obama administration deceived the American people about Obamacare, promising one thing and delivering another — the good old bait and switch.

Even President Clinton said, “So you’ve got this crazy system where, all of a sudden, 25 million more people have health care, and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.”

He was right.

Americans are now spending a larger portion of their paychecks on health insurance because in this sluggish economy, medical costs are increasing faster than their stagnant salaries. In 2006, 6.5 percent of workers’ paychecks went to pay premiums and deductibles. That grew to 8.4 percent in 2010, and to 10.1 percent in 2015. The biggest supplier of medical insurance is employers, and due to the rising costs of Obamacare, more money is coming out of employees’ paychecks to cover medical costs.

Many people have seen their work hours cut drastically so that their employers won’t have to pay for their health care. Nonsupervisory employees are logging an average of 30 hours per week, the shortest retail workweek since early 2010, when Obamacare was enacted. These are the facts, Mr. President.

Now he has the audacity to tell Americans not to worry, because there will be subsidies. Again, who do you think will be paying for them? Taxpayers. Obamacare is a mess because the president didn’t care enough to cooperate with Republicans on a workable health care program. Now it will have to be fixed by the next president.

This, coupled of course with the new emails uncovered by the FBI, could be the ammunition Donald Trump needs in the key swing states to try to salvage his campaign and become the next president. It’s time for the Republican Party to offer a plan to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. House Speaker Paul Ryan has said that Republicans are working on a deal that would replace it “with real, patient-centered solutions that fit your needs and your budget. We don’t have to accept this kind of sticker shock.”

Ryan is right. The American public has been deceived by the big lies that constitute Obamacare. Now that Obama is on his way out, let’s hope the program follows him.

Al D’Amato, a former U.S. senator from New York, is the founder of Park Strategies LLC, a public policy and business development firm. Comments about this column? ADAmato@liherald.com.