Dallas Morning News March 26, 2013
By Sen. Ted Cruz
Three years after the
Affordable Care Act passed, it’s proved to be neither affordable nor caring.
Insurance premiums are skyrocketing. Seniors are losing health care
choices. Millions of Americans are being pushed into a struggling and
ineffective Medicaid system. Americans are grappling with scores of new
taxes. Employers are slashing jobs and hours to avoid complying with
Obamacare requirements.
This isn’t what was promised.
Americans were told if Obamacare was made law, they would be able to
keep their health plans, taxes wouldn’t go up, premiums would go down,
and more jobs would be created. But the law isn’t living up to its
label. And it’s hurting working families, young people, poor minorities
and seniors the most.
Before Obamacare was adopted, President
Barack Obama pledged that American families would pay $2,500 less for
their insurance premiums by the end of his first term. Today, they are
paying $3,000 more — a $5,500 swing between what was promised and
reality. Young people will be particularly impacted, with the Energy and
Commerce Committee estimating that recent college graduates with
entry-level jobs who are struggling to pay off student loan debt could
see their premiums increase between 145 and 189 percent on average.
As health costs are going up, jobs are becoming harder to obtain — a
double dose of economic pain for those worrying about making ends meet.
The Federal Reserve recently reported in its annual “beige book,” which
analyzed economic data from across the country, that “employers in
several districts cite the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as
reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.”
This is terrible news for Americans already suffering from
disproportionately high unemployment rates. Currently, the unemployment
rate for people who didn’t graduate from high school is more than 12
percent. Hispanics have an unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent, and
the African-American unemployment rate is over 14 percent.
Small businesses are discouraged from growing and hiring these folks.
Indeed, Obamacare is designed to keep small business small. Once an
employer has 50 employees on payroll, expensive compliance requirements
are triggered. The approximately $1 trillion in new Obamacare taxes
Americans will pay over the next 10 years, as scored by the Joint
Committee on Taxation, will go to the government instead of
private-sector paychecks.
For those who already can’t find
jobs, all this will make it even more difficult — especially for those
seeking low-skilled work. The Heritage Foundation found that “workers
who cannot produce at least $20,000 a year” for a single plan, or
“$27,500 per year” for a family plan “of value to their employers will
have serious difficulty finding full-time jobs.”
When I read
those statistics, I think of my father, who came to America as a Cuban
immigrant in 1957. He was penniless, could not speak English and worked
for 50 cents an hour washing dishes. At the time, he couldn’t come close
to producing $20,000 worth of economic value, but he needed that job to
climb up the economic ladder and help pay his way through college. It’s
what enabled him to graduate, get a higher paying job and start a small
business.
If Obamacare had been in place when he was looking for work back then, he may have never been hired.
More and more employers are dropping health care coverage because of
the burdens associated with Obamacare, too. The Congressional Budget
Office estimates up to 7 million people will lose their
employer-provided health insurance by 2020.
In Texas, one of
the largest insurance markets in the country, every single carrier has
dropped its child-only health insurance coverage.
According
to the Office of Actuary at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, Obamacare will reduce enrollment in the Medicare Advantage
program from 14.8 million to 7.4 million by 2017.
So much for “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
Americans deserve access to affordable health care that suits their
needs and an environment where jobs are plentiful. But Obamacare is
standing between them and those opportunities.
Congress can
help, and the first step is repealing Obamacare. That is why, fulfilling
my promise to Texas voters, the first legislation I filed as a senator
will do just that. And it is why I have twice pushed for votes to undo
Obamacare, which Senate Republicans unanimously supported.
There’s not a moment to waste. Because the longer Obamacare remains the law of the land, the more damage it is certain to do.
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