A Truthout op-ed article explains the real benefits of Obamacare. Once people understand how much benefit they provide, they love the new healthcare provisions. They’re also going to love the $500 rebate checks that will soon be sent out from insurance companies to compensate policyholders for the price gouging their insurers have been subjecting them to, and the $100 billion our government is going to save this decade because of the bill. Here’s an excerpt:
What the decision does do, using the taxing authority of the Constitution, is assure that everybody gets covered for health care – no one can be turned down. The President’s bill guarantees that everyone is now covered for pre-existing conditions, preventive care, mammograms, colonoscopies, seniors’ drugs, children on parent’s plans through 26, no lifetime caps, and this is a key part, requires that 80 percent of the benefits go to patients, not to administrators, prohibiting insurance companies from overcharging for their salaries and administrative costs. The insurance company overcharges – paying them as middlemen — were one of the factors that made us pay twice as much for health care as any nation on earth.
Thanks to the decision and the law, everyone in America who has been overcharged, and that is effectively everyone with a policy, is soon getting a BILLION dollars in checks. The insurance companies were holding off on these checks until the decision. Now they must go forward. An average of $500 a person is going out in checks. The law’s making the insurance companies fall in line is why congressional Republicans and Romney hate this and are still screaming for repeal. They get hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign money from the insurance companies, and the insurance companies hate that they will now be overseen and will have to return anything more than 20% in profits. The Congressional Budget Office says we are saving $100 billion this decade and a $1 trillion next decade because of the bill.
The Republicans, by six to one, have outspent Democrats in advertising defining the bill. That is one of the reasons that the overall bill is at a 20-point disadvantage. However, when you tick off the provisions, the pre-existing conditions, preventive care, mammograms, colonoscopy, seniors drugs, children on parents’ plan, no lifetime caps, insurance companies having to spend 80 percent on benefits – people love them by a 40-point margin. Romney says “on Day One” he’ll “repeal Obamacare.” The only thing Romney can legally do on “Day One”, should he win, is what Obama has already done, give the States the right to do something better. That’s the executive order that Obama already issued. Romney can’t unpass the bill. He doesn’t have the power.