Here's another person for Democrats to insult as a meaningless "anecdote": Chris Dunn of Sonora, California, who lost his old insurance due to Barack Obama's Big Lie, got saddled with an overpriced and inferior ObamaCare plan, and can't get the back surgery he desperately needs. "Doc shock" for the win!
Americans for Prosperity introduces us to trivial anecdote Julie Boonstra, who also lost her insurance to the Big Lie, and now cannot get the cancer drugs she needs to fight her leukemia. "The out of pocket costs are so high, it's unaffordable," she says. "I believed the President. I believed I could keep my health insurance plan. I feel lied to."
That all seems like a modest price to pay for the incredibly tiny number of previously uninsured people who are flocking to ObamaCare's broken websites to sign up for insurance coverage, or at least put something in the online shopping cart, or maybe click on a couple of buttons until they see an error message. (If the true number of ObamaCare enrolles is about 2.6 million people, as industry experts suspect, and only 20 percent of them were previously uninsured, ObamaCare is one of history's worst examples of return on investment for the American people.)
But how much worse does "doc shock" get when entire hospitals are closing? The Daily Caller reports "the fourth Georgia hospital in two years is closing its doors due to severe financial difficulties caused by ObamaCare's payment cuts for emergency services."
The Lower Oconee Community Hospital is, for now, a critical access hospital in southeastern Georgia that holds 25 beds. The hospital is suffering from serious cash-flow problems, largely due to the area???s 23 percent uninsured population, and hopes to reopen as ???some kind of urgent care center,??? CEO Karen O???Neal said.
Many hospitals in the 25 states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are facing similar financial problems. Liberal administration ally Think Progress has already faulted Georgia for not expanding Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned.
But the reality is more complicated. The federal government has historically made payments to hospitals to cover the cost of uninsured patients seeking free medical care in emergency rooms, as federal law mandates that hospitals must care for all patients regardless of their ability to pay.
ObamaCare was falsely billed as the cure for such "cost shifting," when in reality it's increasing the burden on emergency rooms. Forcing the Affordable Care Act through Congress required states to be given the option of rejecting the Medicaid expansion that would theoretically have replaced these emergency room visits with a certified welfare plan. Now we've got the worst of both worlds. ObamaCare is such a disaster that the old, sloppy approach of letting the indigent use hospitals as free clinics, with the cost offset by government support and higher insurance premiums, might actually have been more efficient. It's a cure that's worse than the disease, a "reform" more expensive and chaotic than the problems it was supposed to solve.
If you like your plan, you can't keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can't keep your doctor. You're most likely not going to save money on health insurance, especially if you try to use your "benefits" and run into those massive out-of-pocket costs. And the number of uninsured Americans is scarcely going to change at all.
Update: CBS News in Minnesota captures an encounter between ObamaCare perpetrators and a skeptical citizen who remembers all those sweaty promises of lower insurance premiums:
The lawmakers fielded other questions as well, talking debt and immigration reform, but it was the question about the struggling health care law that everyone in the audience wanted to see answered, and two out of the three Democrats on the dais seemed hesitant to tackle.
The question: "I thought the Affordable Care Act would save $2500 per family. What happened?"
After Sen. Klobuchar and Rep. Walz looked at each other, laughter broke out in the room.
Rep. Peterson quickly picked up the microphone to say, "I voted 'no', so I'll let these guys handle that," to the applause of the crowd.
Both Klobuchar and Walz said they were aware of the problems, and wanted to find ways to fix it.
Walz says, "This health discussion has got to be broader, it's got to point out where there are weaknesses and failures, it's got to make sure we're not leaving people behind or distorting the system. But don't pretend there was some type of safe harbor before this where everything was just peachy keen."
Of course, none of these ObamaCare scam artists said anything about "weaknesses and failures" when they were shoving this crap bill down America's throat. They were the ones who spoke of peachy keenness.
They didn't say, "Sure, millions of people will lose their insurance coverage, but others will benefit, so the suffering will all be worthwhile" or "Yes, many of you will pay far more for coverage, especially if you're the sort of healthy individual who would normally expect to pay less under a rational insurance system, but it's important to redistribute your wealth in the name of social justice." They explicitly denied those possibilities and promised nobody would lose coverage, nobody would lose their doctor, most people would pay less, and the whole thing wouldn't cost taxpayers a nickel.
You've got to love this final, desperate fallback position from the ObamaCare scam squad: we didn't have utopia before, so all the failures of our scheme are justified. The choice is between the horrific failure of the Affordable Care Act and a safe harbor in the land of Oz, and since there aren't any boats leaving for Oz, we'll just have to embrace teh suck and live with the ACA.
Here's another "doc shock" story from an irrelevant anecdote who lives in California, courtesy of CBS News:
Julia Turner is surprised that she even has to search for a doctor. When she signed up for a policy through Covered California late last year, her long-time physician was listed as participating in her Blue Shield plan. It turned out; however, that he is not accepting patients with her Blue Shield policy, purchased on the Covered California exchange.
When Turner called around to find someone else to treat her, she got more frustration. ???The only doctors accepting new patients are urgent care clinics,??? Turner told KPIX 5 ConsumerWatch.
None of the doctors are located in the city in which she lives. Instead, Turner said, ???They are in areas of East Oakland that have a lot of violence.???
Wonderful. You don't mind driving a hundred miles, and taking your life into your hands, for the greater glory of Barack Obama's "signature achievement," right, citizen?
Rise by the anecdote, fall by the anecdote. President Obama is especially fond of marching a dozen people on stage, proclaiming them to be sainted ObamaCare "winners," and claiming their happiness with the system (which occasionally turns out to be embarrassingly transitory) justify limitless expense, and the dissolution of American constitutional liberty. Now let's confront every Democrat running for re-election with real live human stories of ObamaCare disaster, and watch the fun as they turn up their noses at these kulaks and explain how personalized stories suddenly don't matter a bit.
