The ObamaCare Ambush!

America's community hospitals, local physician-directed medical care, and the economies of thousands of cities and small towns are being systematically destroyed. It is being done in plain sight and almost no one knows about it.

The Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare") is an elaborate scam, the most outrageous betrayal of public trust in history. It is a last ditch attempt to postpone the imminent collapse of Medicare, Medicaid, and the entire Third Party Payment system. It is designed to benefit insurance companies, the federal government, large corporate employers, cooperative professional and trade associations, and a bi-partisan gang of establishment politicians at the expense of everyone else.

The Affordable Care Act's disastrous web site rollout received significant media attention. There have been a few news stories about narrow networks and premium costs. However, there has been virtually no coverage of its devastating impact on the private practice of medicine or upon the resulting catastrophe that threatens to engulf thousands of hospitals and the communities they serve.

According to the American Hospital Association, there were 4,999 community hospitals in the U.S. as of January 2, 2014 of which 1,980 are small and rural. To learn how U.S. hospitals have fared financially since passage of The Affordable Care Act, we reviewed financial data for the 3,449 acute care and critical access community hospitals that had so far filed Medicare cost reports for the years 2011 through 2013. 

ObamaCare kills hospitals by restricting patient admissions (and hence revenue) as it simultaneously increases mandated regulatory expense. This graph shows the large and rapidly increasing gap between net patient revenue and operating expense for U.S. community hospitals. 

Although the overwhelming majority of America's hospitals are non-profit organizations, they cannot survive if expenses are greater than income. America's community hospitals have experienced aggregate cumulative losses from operations of $10 billion dollars since ObamaCare was enacted! Those losses, by the way, were not confined to small rural hospitals. The next graph shows what has happened since 2010 to the bottom line of America's community hospitals.

America's hospitals are not the only casualties. For many small towns, the local hospital is the largest employer and for them the crisis is existential. The hospital provides most of the community's jobs, including the highest paying ones. Its payroll supports the community's grocery stores, retail shops, gas stations and other businesses. Those businesses, in turn, provide the tax base that sustains local government. In summary, the hospital's payroll is the engine that drives the local economy. If it dies, the community's economy dies with it!

In the wake of the midterm election outcomes, it is tempting to believe that ObamaCare’s days are numbered, especially since all of the new Republican Senators promised to repeal The Affordable Care Act during their campaigns. Unfortunately, the GOP leadership remains as committed to ramming some form of ObamaCare down our throats as it is to granting amnesty. That's why RINOs are all over the media bleating about the need to "repeal and replace" ObamaCare. With respect to amnesty, the RINO mantra is that "America's immigration system is broken" and that we need "immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship". Here's what they should be saying instead:

• ObamaCare does need to be repealed but it does not need to be replaced. The federal government needs to get out of the health care insurance business, regardless of the promises that RINOs have made to insurance companies and other large corporate donors. 

• Our "broken immigration system" doesn't need to be "repaired" as much as it needs to be employed. Simply enforce existing immigration laws, aggressively prosecute employers who knowingly hire illegals, and deny illegals access to any federally-funded programs. Washington's decades-long politically correct approach not only encourages illegal immigration, it subsidizes it.

The most destructive components of The Affordable Care Act (the employer mandate, etc.) won't be implemented until next year and beyond and so their disastrous effects have yet to be felt. If you want to preserve small hospitals, local medical care, and the small town communities of rural America, I urge you to forward a link to this post to your Senators, to your member of Congress, and to any hospital board members and/or administrative staff you know. Urge them to repeal The Affordable Care Act's individual and employer mandates as well as all subsidies. If that is accomplished, ObamaCare will collapse of its own rotten weight and the free market will create a vastly superior replacement..

FJB

This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. It reflects the point of view of a life-long conservative constitutionalist and recovering Republican. If you are among the millions trying to understand what has happened to the GOP, please visit "Who Killed the Republican Party?" and read what is posted there. It may help explain things. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest.