22,000 Lose Their Health Insurance Due to Obamacare

Approximately 22,000 senior citizens just lost their health plan with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which dropped its Medicare Advantage Program due to “cuts in Medicare” that “are being used to fund national health care reform.”  As the Washington Examiner notes, “President Obama’s most frequently repeated health care reform claim — ‘If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it’ — sounds about as credible these days as the finger-wagging Bill Clinton did when he said, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'”

While Obamacare cuts Medicare for the elderly, it does nothing to slow the growth of health-care spending, since it adds costly new Medicaid mandates for people on welfare, as former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey, a healthcare expert, notes in the New York Post.  She calls it “Obamacare’s redistribution of health.”  Obamacare will also cause Medicaid lawsuits to proliferate at taxpayer expense.

President Obama falsely claimed that the health care law would cut health care costs, but regulators in some states are now approving increases in premiums precisely because Obamacare increases costs.

As columnist David Freddoso notes, the Obama administration has been a windfall for wealthy trial lawyers.  As I noted in the Examiner‘s print edition, “Obamacare will also result in an explosion of lawsuits against employers’ health plans by stripping them of protection against unnecessary lawsuits based on paperwork technicalities, and by displacing settled exhaustion principles in employee benefits litigation.”