Obamacare Is Just Medicaid for Everyone

Baby Boomers should be rooting with all their might for the repeal of Obamacare, since it’s going to be Medicaid for everyone if the widely despised law is allowed to become entrenched. Medicaid was designed for the poor and provides reimbursement rates so low that many doctors have come to shun Medicaid patients.  They are going to start shunning Medicare patients as well, since an implicit goal of the Affordable Care Act is to squeeze physician and hospital payments down to Medicaid levels. As this change takes place, the healthcare system in general will increasingly resemble its Medicaid poor cousin, with the following consequences:

• Doctors will become increasingly choosy about whom they accept as patients.
• Concierge care will divide the patient population into haves and have-nots.
• We’ll all wait much longer to see a specialist.
• Certain procedures, such as hip and knee replacements and bypass surgeries, will become drastically rationed.
• New doctors will be in critically short supply, since medicine as practiced under ruthlessly intrusive Government control has already stopped attracting the best and brightest students. Why would they want to spend half their lives training for a job, and going hundreds of thousands of dollars into hock, just to work for The Government?
• Hospitals, on the other hand, are loving Obamacare, since it has turned their emergency rooms into profit centers where every patient that comes in the door is guaranteed to have a ‘sponsor.’ A predictable result is that emergency rooms, particularly in urban hospital, will become increasingly crowded and crazy.
• Doctors and physician groups that have signed on with hospitals will discover they’ve made a deal with the devil. While this may have helped them claw back some of the pay they lost when The Government arbitrarily cut reimbursements to private practitioners, the hospitals will eventually be cut back as well.
• Members of the Greatest Generation enjoyed excellent Medicare benefits during a time when America was relatively prosperous, but that’s about to end. The nation’s retirement ledger is headed toward certain bankruptcy, and this makes it inconceivable that Baby Boomers will receive the level of benefits their parents got.
• If you doubt the foregoing, consider who will be paying for the Baby Boomers’ healthcare and Social Security benefits: a cohort of twenty-  and thirty-somethings with college degrees that are mostly useless, six-figure debt and abysmal job prospects.

Something’s got to give, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves in the meantime into thinking there are easy political remedies.  Imposing Obamacare on a healthcare system in which prices were already out-of-control crazy has put us on a path that can lead only to severe rationing of healthcare services, federal bankruptcy, or both. Keep in mind that the problem cannot be “monetized” in the fraudulent way that has keep the U.S. and global banking system nominally afloat. Unlike the financial system’s smoke-and-mirrors economics, healthcare’s costs are both real and immediate. As such, the Fed cannot “bail out” the healthcare or retirement systems, even if so drastic an attempt at inflation were politically feasible.