OBAMACARE AND A CARAVAN OF UNICORNS

Obamacare will reduce the earnings of its 300,000 members by up to $5 an hour, said a union which represents chiefly lower wage workers in service industries.

Obamacare "threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage," said Unite Here.

"Obamacare would cost me $4,855.20 a year more, or a $2.33 an hour pay cut," said Earl Baskerville, 50, a food service worker at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.  

"The Obamacare website says (my husband and I) would have to pay $8,057.04 a year more to keep the great insurance we have now," said Angela Portillo, a maid at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. "That’s a $3.87 per hour pay cut."

Americans who’ve been hurt by Obamacare outnumber those who say they’ve benefited from it by more than 2 to 1, according to a Rasmussen poll March 3 and a Gallup poll March 6.

The number of beneficiaries will plummet if the Supreme Court rules in June the language in the Obamacare statute that says subsidies can be paid only to those who buy health insurance through state exchanges means what it says — that subsidies can be paid only to those who buy health insurance through state exchanges.

Through February, only about 15 percent of those the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates are eligible had enrolled — far short of the number needed to prevent a "death spiral."

"The long-time underwriting rule calls for at least 70% of an eligible group to participate in order to get enough healthy people to pay for the sick who will always show up first for coverage," said insurance industry consultant Robert Laszewski.

Americans aged 18 to 34  account for only 27 percent of signups. To subsidize premiums for those older and sicker, at least 39 percent in the risk pool must be "young invincibles," the Department of Health and Human Services calculated.

Young people are less likely to have paid their first month’s premium – a prerequisite for actually being insured – and more likely to default on subsequent payments, so the outlook is more grim than the HHS numbers indicate.

And while younger Americans tend to be healthier, not all of them are.  If a disproportionate number of Obamacare signups come from the 4.2 percent of 18 to 34 year olds who describe their health as "fair" or "poor," catastrophe looms.

Administration officials hold out hope for a rush of signups before the March 31st deadline. I, by contrast, hold out hope my retirement will be financed by the arrival of a caravan of unicorns laden with baskets filled with gold dust.

My hope may be the more realistic.  The pace of enrollments has slowed sharply since December.  About half the uninsured have browsed Obamacare web sites, but just 10 percent of the eligible uninsured signed up, according to a survey by McKinsey & Co. It costs too much, said most who browsed but didn’t buy.

"They are not buying it because the premium — even net of the subsidies — is too much for plans that have deductibles that are too high," Mr. Laszewski said.

The administration plans to spend nearly $1 trillion on Obamacare subsidies.  But they’ll benefit insurance companies at the expense of the low wage workers he represents, said Unite Here President Donald Taylor.

Families with incomes between $20,000 and $38,000 will suffer the largest proportionate income declines, a Brookings Institution study indicated.

"Only in Washington could asking the bottom of the middle class to finance health care for the poorest families be seen as reducing inequality," Mr. Taylor said.

Those who think Obamacare is a bad deal, or who can’t afford it, aren’t likely to change their minds before the end of the month.

President Obama gave them a good reason not to when he (illegally) delayed, again, enforcement of the provision cancelling "substandard" policies.

This may save the scalps of a few endangered Democrats, but it undermines the economic viability of his "signature legislative achievement."

HHS isn’t keeping track of how many enrollees previously were uninsured, a senior bureaucrat admitted March 6. This suggests either that HHS is even more incompetent than we’d suspected, or the ostensible purpose of Obamacare — to provide health insurance for those who don’t have it — isn’t its real purpose.

The percentage of Americans in a Gallup survey March 10 who said they were without health insurance (15.9 percent) is higher than it was in 2008 (14.8 percent).

If the uninsured are not buying into Obamacare because they don’t like it or can’t afford it, the individual mandate won’t be enforced,  said Bloomberg News economics writer Megan McArdle.

"Otherwise, we would be ‘helping’ the uninsured by raising the cost of the insurance available to them, and then fining them hundreds or thousands of dollars for not buying it," she said. "I believe the technical term for this is ‘political suicide.’"

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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