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More still according to Wendell Potter, former PR executive for CIGNA insurance, now a whisleblower exposing shenanigans he saw on the inside, including the industry's "Medical Loss Ratio" (MLR) profit margin. Until about two decades ago, it was five cents on the dollar. Now it's a quarter or five times as much, and they're still not satisfied, so they're going for broke on Obamacare to skim hundreds more billions off the top in what will be greater than ever grand theft if they get it.
Other likely final legislation features will include:
-- providing government subsidies of about $460 billion to lower income people over ten years to buy private insurance;
-- expanding cost-sharing with the states for an additional 14 million Medicaid recipients because of growing numbers of poor and lower income households needing it; in addition, raising the income threshold so more people qualify at a time the need is the greatest in decades;
-- exacting deep Medicare and other social service cuts to fund it - for starters, around $400 billion in federal programs for the elderly, poor, and disabled over 10 years; another $200 billion in lower payments to providers; and $113 billion in Medicare Advantage cuts affecting 10 million seniors getting benefits through private insurers;
-- taxing so-called "Cadillac" plans by levying them on insurers to be passed on to customers through higher premiums, larger deductibles, and/or less coverage, even though these plans mostly cover state employees, municipal union members, and other working Americans, not just the well-off;
-- exacting more Medicare cuts ahead, including from a White House appointed independent Medicare Commission to curb "excess cost growth" by rationing care through capping costs, denying expensive tests, procedures and drugs, and incrementally ending Medicare as we know it to deny future generations of seniors of what those covered now get - packaged as "health care reform" with deceptive promotion to disguise a scheme few will understand until they need expensive care and can't get it.
As bad, millions will be left uninsured or underinsured as Washington cuts back on its obligation to provide universal quality care as a human right. Instead, final legislation will be class-based on the ability to pay with growing millions of poor and lower income people offered sub-standard care, millions left out entirely, and a time coming when only those who can afford it will be covered, no others. That's Obamacare's bottom line, but expect no public discourse to explain it.
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