The real “war on women” comes from President Obama’s signature health overhaul law. It will is an assault on women’s freedom that will drive up their health costs, deprive them of choices, and make it harder for them to find a doctor for their families.
- Higher cost of insurance and health care: The president promised that premiums would go down by $2,500 for a family by 2012, but they actually have gone up by nearly as much. And the benefit mandates under ObamaCare are sure to drive premiums even higher.
- You can’t keep your insurance: The Obama administration estimates that 51 to 80% of Americans will lose their current health insurance because their policies won’t qualify as acceptable under Obamacare rules. McKinsey and Co. says as many as 80 million people could be forced to change policies to comply with requirements under the health law.
- Dependents losing coverage: One of the perverse risks of Obamacare is that it could cause families with employer insurance now to lose it. Because of a perverse provision in the law, dependents could lose coverage at work and be ineligible for subsidies in the exchanges.
- Unintended consequences: One of the early provisions of Obamacare required employers who offer dependent coverage to allow children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ policies. But some families are finding that this has a dark side: Firms are finding they can’t afford the added cost and are dropping dependent coverage altogether.
- Anti-Conscience mandate: The Obama administration has forced a debate over contraceptives by mandating that most private health plans and employers provide employees with free access to sterilization, contraception, and drugs that cause abortion. Private employers, including women business owners, face fines if they object on religious grounds.
- Vulnerable Americans hit hardest: The new health law could shred the safety net because it does not increase capacity or make desperately-needed structural reforms to Medicaid but simply drives more people onto the program. A mother trying to get care for a critically ill child who is on Medicare will face even more challenges in the future finding a doctor.
- Loss of control: One of the things that women want most is more control over decisions involving health care for their families. Under Obamacare, those decisions will be made, not by families, but by bureaucrats at the 159 new agencies and boards in Washington.
- Longer waits to see doctors: We need at least 160,000 more physicians just to meet the demands of a growing and aging population. A recent survey said that as many as 46% of doctors are planning to leave medical practice when Obamacare kicks in. The doctor shortage will be huge, and women and their families will find it harder and harder to find a doctor to see them.
- Losing full-time jobs: Many moms must juggle full-time jobs with full-time family responsibilities. But Obamacare’s employer mandate means they could have even bigger challenges because the law provides incentives for employers to cut their full-time employees’ hours to 25 hours a week so they can avoid costly mandates.
- Child-only policies vanish: Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in 2010 directed health insurers to offer child-only health insurance policies to anyone younger than 19, regardless of their health history. In at least 17 states, insurers have pulled out of the child-only market, saying they would face “adverse selection” because parents can wait to enroll their kids in a health plan after they got sick, destroying the basis for shared insurance against risk.