Commentary:
By Edie J. Adler
“If you like your health plan, you can keep it,” President Obama said when promoting his Affordable Care Act. He also promised that if you liked your doctor you could continue to see your doctor. What he should have said is that if Obama likes your health plan, then you can keep it.
The Associated Press reports that more than three and a half million people have already lost their insurance plans as a result of Obamacare, and this is just the beginning. According to CBS News, industry experts like Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, say the insurance companies have no choice.
The new “law of the land” commonly referred to as Obamacare, is forcing them to drop many of their plans if they don’t meet the law’s 10 minimum standards, including maternity care, emergency visits, pediatric dental care and mental health treatment. This means people have to buy new, more expensive plans, even if they don’t want or need more coverage. The more expensive plans also come with higher co-pays and deductibles. Please do not let the Administration apologists convince you this massive drop is because the insurance companies are greedy.
And their good insurance policy is not the only thing people are losing. Many companies are now cutting their full time employees’ hours to part time in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance coverage.
If Obamacare is so good for the people, why did the President change his own law, a law which by the way was passed without a single Republican vote – a first in the history of the United States – to exempt Congress and members of their staff? Call me old fashioned, but I believe that the law of the land should also apply to the people who passed and imposed it on the rest of us.
My parents came to this country trying to leave behind a government whose shameless corruption was making it harder and harder for its average citizens to succeed; where the needs of the few outweighed the good of the many. Most immigrants to the US leave their beloved country behind for the same reason. Why would any of us support a government that has promised to radically change this land of opportunity?
The Obamacare website has turned out to be an embarrassment for the president and while its “glitches” may actually be fixed some day, the atrocity of this Affordable Care Act will cause this country problems that may never be solved.
Things are being imposed on us little by little. If a boy feels like a girl, he has the right to go into the girls’ bathroom or locker room, but if this makes the girls uncomfortable, they are the intolerant ones!
Today the government is imposing on us what type of health insurance they deem good for us. What’s next? Will the day come when we are told what kind of job we can have, where we can live, or how many children we can have? They’re already telling us what type of light bulb we can use or how large a soda we can drink!
You may be one of the few lucky ones who will actually benefit from Obamacare; but please remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch and freedom has never been free.
Edie J. is an actress, public speaker, and author. Re-published from LatinoLA.com