Research

Several news stories have just hit about how Obama’s promises fall far short of the reality of his government-run health care experiment. First, the President is eager to tout the benefits of new tax credits for small businesses to buy health care, but small businesses are discovering that it’s a “bait-and-switch” because the benefit would actually only apply to a small number of companies. A small businessman in Illinois noted that “he’d have to cut his work force to 10 employees and slash their wages” to qualify for help from ObamaCare.

Next, Democrats also remind people early and often about how students graduating from college this spring will now be able to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans. Despite cutting a deal with the insurance industry to get them to sign on, it turns out that the majority of Americans will have to wait until next year when that provision of the law actually takes effect.  This is because most Americans get their insurance through jobs in which their employers self-insure, and these self-insured employers are deciding not to fold to public admonishment from the Administration to clean up the Democrats’ sloppy legislating and start covering young-adult children before they’re legally required to next year.

Finally, Obama frequently spoke about the hidden tax brought about by uninsured people going into emergency rooms who stick the rest of us with the bill for their uncompensated care and make ERs more overcrowded. It turns out, Obama dramatically misdiagnosed the problem. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found:

ER visits by the uninsured were no more likely to be triaged as non-urgent than visits by privately insured patients or those with Medicaid coverage … Older adults, African-Americans, poor people and those on Medicaid were more likely to have had at least one visit in a 12-month period than others. Medicaid-covered patients were more likely to have multiple visits in a 12-month period than privately insured and uninsured patients.

So not only do the uninsured and insured have similar visit patterns to emergency rooms, it’s people on Medicaid who go the most frequently. This is a huge problem because half of people who will be newly insured —16 million— by ObamaCare will be get that coverage through Medicaid. So we won’t see any savings from a reduction in uncompensated care, and we’ll likely see even more overcrowded hospitals.

It hasn’t even been two months since Obama’s government-run health care bill was signed into law, and almost none of the claims used to sell the bill have held up. To learn about more of ObamaCare’s shortcomings, check out today’s Health Care Pulse Check, “List Of ‘Losers’ From ObamaCare’s ‘Bait-And-Switch’ Grows.”