Remember President Obama’s promise to lower health care rates? Experts now say health insurance will be crazy expensive again in 2019. The Heritage Foundation’s Doug Badger says Obamacare was supposed to get lots of young subscribers to sign up and help subsidize the older among us, but that didn’t happen. Young people found that in many cases paying the penalty was still less expensive than insurance. Consider too that millennials tend to marry and start families later in life than those who came before them, so the perceived need for insurance is not as obvious to them as it is for people who have more responsibility. Here to help us make sense of it all is Dr. Steven Goldstein, a much-respected neurologist and founder of the Houston Healthcare Initiative.
Fines for not purchasing insurance under ‘Obamacare’ were supposed to cause more people buy insurance and lower the cost, but neither happened. Dr. Steven Goldstein, respected Houston neurologist and founder of the Houston Healthcare Initiative (www.houstonhealthcareinitiative.org) discussed the ramifications of the cancellation of financial penalties associated with ‘Obamacare’ among other things, on his weekly podcast. To hear the podcast go to https://houstonhealthcareinitiative.org/the-houston-healthcare-initiative-podcast/.
As the Trump administration has cancelled the fines assessed for not purchasing health insurance that were mandated by President Obama, the impact of the removal of these government-imposed purchases did nothing to lower the price of insurance or make the American public healthier. The positive effect of Obamacare on the price of insurance was what was promised, though little happened to make charges for insurance more affordable.