In “The Health Care Dirty Dozen: Twelve Things (Still) Wrong with ObamaCare,” Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews lists the greatest flaws and backward incentives of the bill, concluding: “It is the wrong policy for the dynamic and fast-paced 21st century, an albatross fit for 1960, not 2012."
Matthews writes that President Obama’s signature legislation:
- Imposes twenty new taxes, including taxes on investments, medical equipment, health savings accounts, and even tanning services;
- Expands a nation of entitlement recipients, adding 16 million more to Medicaid and health insurance subsidies for 20 million additional
- Creates a maze of cross subsidies, a means of transferring wealth without using the tax code;
- Cedes control to unelected bureaucrats, giving the Health and Human Services Secretary unprecedented powers over every health-related decision individuals make;
- Empowers the IRS, expanding the agency with 16,000 new IRS employees charged with ensuring Americans are either obtaining health coverage or paying a penalty;
- Imposes perverse economic incentives, in which patients are kept isolated from the cost of care;
- Explodes health care spending, insuring 32 million more Americans who were not previously covered with comprehensive coverage;
- Enhances rationing to contain the explosion of health care spending;
- Reduces health insurance options to only four levels of qualified coverage. Larger health insurers will be the only ones able to offer the coverage requirements, forcing out the competition from the market;
- Creates more inefficiency through a top-down approach to control administrative costs;
- Includes pork, with a $16 billion slush fund dedicated to “investment” in communities; and
- Cooks the Medicare books, requiring Medicare trustees to make several ludicrous assumptions in their annual report making the program look like it is in better shape than it is.
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