Covered California’ the state’s Obamacare exchange, has racked up one accomplishment. Thanks to its policies, there are more uninsured Californians in January 2014 then there were one year ago.
According to media reports, some 430,000 people signed up for health insurance through Covered California during the three month sign up period to be covered January 1. But over the past year, 1,087,169 Californians in the individual market had their plans canceled due to Obamacare’s new rules.
Nationwide, some 5 million people lost their health insurance. When President Obama felt the heat, he saw the light and asked the states and insurers to extend the cancelled plans for another year. California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones had already pressed insurers to extend these plans and immediately endorsed the one-year extension.
These 1.1 million people are mostly healthy and had limited coverage catastrophic plans that they liked. But for Covered California’s actuarial schemes to work, these people must be forced into the exchange. So exhibiting the empathy of Stalinist five year planners, Covered California denied the extension. As a result, came January 1 these people had no coverage.
But even if you assume that all 430,000 enrollees in the new exchange come from this pool (probably an inaccurate assumption), that still leaves 670,000 Californians with cancelled plans. Some probably found new plans through the private market, but how many simply are doing without insurance because they cannot find or cannot afford another plan?
President Obama received the Politifact “Lie of the Year” award for “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” But there is an even bigger lie that has been spread by the Administration and its liberal supporters, and that is that there are no losers in Obamacare, only winners. In fact, there are more losers so far in California than winners, and there is every reason to expect this disparity to grow in 2014.
That’s because Obamacare is essentially a huge redistribution of wealth between income levels and between generations, and in that there are always winners and losers
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