The Obamacare Reality is Here

Yesterday, while delivering some heavy duty medical equipment to one of our business accounts, I chatted with a young employee of theirs. He was about 30 years old and I could tell he was fairly intelligent.

Here in Boise, we have a huge supply of medical equipment refurbishers. The margins are enormous. It is nothing for these refurbishers to buy a piece of medical equipment for five thousand bucks, put a little work into it, and re-sell it for eighty thousand dollars to some second tier medical provider who cannot afford to pay half a million for the newest device.

I have another friend who works for a company that quite literally drives a U-Haul truck around a population center in surrounding states- asking dentists if they have old equipment for sale. Old fashioned cold calling. They buy just about everything. Once the truck is full- they drive it back to Boise. They have been doing this for years. That little company employs 25 people all making 10-15 bucks an hr. No benefits of course.

In Boise, that's the standard wage everywhere. The owner gets rich while everyone else scrapes by. This is the new American business model. We call it, "Living someone else's dream."

So that is who I was talking to. A 30 year old man living someone else's dream. He had a wife and two kids. He told me he had just finished his taxes and he was screwed. I asked him why.

He said that he and his two children had no insurance. Obamacare costs are currently 700 a month or 8400 a year. He simply couldn't afford it. So he said, he was trying to come up with the penalty payment of 700. I had the impression the kids were not his deduction. He added, "it makes me sick to know that we pay pennies for this medical equipment and re-sell it for enormous amounts." He said that's how you know that the medical community has so much fucking money- that they think nothing of paying small fortunes for 15 year old pieces of equipment. Just the shipping costs alone usually amount to 2-3 thousand dollars.

On a personal level, one of the things that pisses me off the most about Obamacare is that the original bill writers arbitrarily assigned 11 thousand bucks as the "poverty level." Eleven thousand bucks is not even minimum wage. Nobody can live on 11,000 dollars. Period. If you are making 900 a month- you are in deep shit. However, the bill writers chose this level as the starting point for those who qualify for subsidies. That way- anyone making 44k or 400% of the "poverty level" a year- pays full price for Obamacare. Anyone making less than that gets some sort of subsidy.

Had they used 15k as the poverty level, most Americans would have been subsidized. They did not do that because it didn't pencil out- they needed every penny they could get. All Obamacare was ever meant to do- was to steal money from all of the healthy and productive citizens that lost jobs and benefits in 2008- and force them by law- back into the healthcare insurance system which was bleeding losses. That's it.

This is social engineering. Discrimination based on wages. The lowest earners, or the people least capable of having children and supporting them- get free health care and thus they have children. Higher wage earners, the people more likely to support their children- cannot afford to have children. It's a sort of cultural de-evolution where the least intelligent and least productive are encouraged to reproduce. The intelligent and productive people realize they cannot afford to have kids.

That is the Obamacare reality. It doesn't exactly bode well for the future.

That 30 year old kid is saving 8400 bucks a year in premiums along with a 2000 dollar deductible. That's net money after taxes. It's like a second mortgage except you have nothing to show for it. Strangely, millions of people aren't buying in. I do not care what type of bullshit our government is spewing about sign ups- people aren't going to buy this.

In the meantime, the rest of us are forced to try and find healthcare and pay cash for it. I cannot tell you how poor the level of service has been for me. Doctors and clinics simply don't want you. They don't need the business when they can gouge ridiculous prices that they know third party providers will pay.

In the mean time- anyone owing a penalty better pay it. Because if you don't pay the penalty you can damn sure bet that a few years from now you'll be receiving correspondence from the IRS. They'll be asking for a lot more than the original penalty and they'll get it.

And to think we fought a revolutionary war over 3% in taxes. I'll take King George III any day- over this clown.