Obamacare Healthcare Professionals Survey: Americans Will Die Earlier

The Obamacare implementation means that Americans will die earlier according to nearly 20 percent of healthcare professionals responding to a new survey.

The survey of what is described as 204 of the country’s top (but unidentified) healthcare professionals by Coupa Software contained other interesting findings about the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, both positive and negative.

The Washington Examiner reports that the full survey will be released on Monday.

Of those surveyed about Obamacare, 53 percent believe that the quality of health insurance polices will suffer, 51 percent said that quality of healthcare itself will go down, 49 percent maintained that the law is overly complicated, 42 percent predicted the insurance exchanges will be poorly managed, 37 percent criticized the law for still allowing insurance companies to operate as a middleman, 32 percent indicated that Obamacare is too complex for small businesses, and as alluded to above, 19 percent think it will result in Americans dying earlier.

Of the positive attributes associated with Obamacare, 57 percent of those suveyed said more Americans will have coverage, 52 percent indicated that spending inefficiencies in hospitals will be eliminated, and 36 percent said that more consumer will access preventive care.

Overall, however, 56 percent of the healthcare professionals surveyed either opposed all or most of the provisions of Obamacare.

The US Senate voted today to restore Obamacare funding in the continuing resolution to keep the federal government running. The House of Representatives already voted to strip out the Obamcare funding, so the two chambers will have to get to together on the final language to avoid a government shutdown on Monday at midnight. As part of the budget negotiations, the House GOP reportedly is considering a proposal for a one-year delay in the Obamacare individual mandate that requires every American to buy health insurance or pay an IRS penalty.

The Obamacare health exchanges or marketplaces — for individuals without insurance or those losing their employer-provided insurance — to purchase insurance are supposed to go live on Tuesday but many are behind schedule or experiencing significant software issues.

After a contentious political struggle, and with Democrats controlling both chambers in Congress at the time, the US Senate passed what is now referred to as Obamacare on a straight party-line vote on Christmas Eve 2009. The House of Representatives narrowly passed the Senate version of Obamacare on March 21, 2010, and it was subsequently signed into law by the president.

In a 5-4 vote in June 2012, the US Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to the individual mandate’s constitutionality. Chief Justice Roberts ruled that the mandate was a constitutional tax, a contention ironically denied by the Obama administration. Speculation is that Roberts originally was the fifth vote to toss out the mandate, but for whatever reason he switched sides at the 11th hour.

Earlier this week, editorial page editor Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote that “The public’s dislike of ObamaCare isn’t growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe… Enacted with zero Republican votes, ObamaCare is the solely owned creation of the Democrats’ belief in their own limitless powers to fashion goodness out of legislated entitlements. Sometimes social experiments go wrong. In the end, the only one who supported Frankenstein was Dr. Frankenstein. The Democrats in 2014 should by all means be asked relentlessly to defend their monster.”