Obamacare to raise CA costs, shutter Anaheim hospital

March 27, 2013

By John Seiler

Many people, including yours truly, have warned that Obamacare would lead to higher costs and worse medical care. That’s now happening like a heart attack.

A new estimate by the Society of Actuaries pegs increases in California medical claims costs by 2017 at 62 percent. This is for “individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers rather than get coverage from employers.”

Meanwhile, reported the Orange County Register, “Anaheim General Hospital, which made a rare turnaround two years ago after a near-fatal loss of federal funds, will go out of business in May.

“The closure will result in the loss of 142 hospital beds at a time when Orange County hospitals are preparing to serve more patients because of the federal Affordable Care Act.”

The hospital did have some problems meeting federal health requirements. The real cause of the closed hospital is the immense paperwork from Medicare, Medi-Cal — and now Obamacare.

Like Medicare itself, Obamacare is not designed to help the poor get health care. The poor were well taken care of by charity before 1965, as Ron Paul, himself a medical doctor, has pointed out. Instead, these programs have been created to increase federal control over our lives, and to pad the pockets of Big Pharma, Big Hospital, Big Health Insurance, the HMOs and rich doctors.

American medical care now has the worst of both worlds: the incompetency and high mortality of socialist medicine, and the high expense of capitalist medicine.