The Affordable Care Act should be repealed immediately.

Thank you to Sitara, who has taken up the challenge of debating the merits of the Affordable Care Act. I look forward to making the case for its repeal against your vigorous defense of the law. Rebuttal 1: PART A) A decrease in access to care. Sitara said: "I completely disagree. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, people with medical conditions can afford healthcare. There are many people who need medications that cost more than 1000 dollars monthly and healthcare coverage helps that. I certainly hope that Pro realizes this. This makes healthcare easier to obtain." The truth of the matter is that there are several reasons that health care will be made less accessible by the ACA. 1) The non-partisan CBO has projected that insurance premiums will rise by 27 to 30 percent for the average family. This is a direct violation of the promise that Obama made during his campaign that the price of insurance would actually go down by $2500, on average, per family. This is due to several factors, including the fact that 60% of current plans don't meet the minimum standards for Obamacare's policies and the issue that the inability of insurance companies to refuse coverage for "pre-existing conditions" negates any incentive people may have to get health insurance until they need it, because it's still cheaper than the fine for the majority of people currently without insurance, which means that the people that the law had intended to subsidize the costs of increased care outlays by the insurance companies aren't pooling their risk with the higher risk patients. This drives up premiums as well, which makes insurance less accessible to most Americans. http://online.wsj.com... 2) The next way that health care will be less accessible to Americans is the simple fact that there may not be enough doctors to meet the demand for health care. After a little more research, I found a more recent poll that shows that up to 60% of doctors currently practicing are either seeking to quit medicine or would do so today if they felt like they could, as a direct result of Obamacare. There are more bureaucratic requirements, more restrictions on the way we practice medicine (I am a practicing family physician), and higher pressure to see more patients and do more with fewer resources than ever before. Up to 52% of physicians have limited their acceptance of Medicare and Medicaid patients because of the terrible reimbursement rates of those programs, and Obamacare seeks to expand the rolls of Medicaid to cover even more people. According to the survey, 100,000 physicians are planning to either close their practices, switch to concierge medicine (which doesn't accept insurance), or cut back the number of patients they will see. This is going to exacerbate the already critical shortage that exists in rural areas - and other areas all around the country - of physicians, especially primary care providers. Considering that we have 75 million Baby Boomers about to transition into the Medicare system which is already overtaxed and in need of more accepting physicians, this is a very worrisome number and definitely shows that access to medical care will be much less available... not more available, as Con has expressed. http://www.westernjournalism.com... 3) Thousands of companies are cutting their employees' hours to under 30 hours per week to avoid the massive fines incurred for not providing health insurance coverage for their employees, when they're not just outright firing people. Even when they are not willing to cut back on the hours, they are opting in many cases to simply pay the fine, which is much less than the actual cost of the insurance, which as I have demonstrated earlier, has dramatically increased. Now, not only do they *not* have coverage, but they also have to live with a 25% pay cut or more due to the restriction on hours. The lack of wages and the unwillingness of employers to provide assistance with coverage combine to make insurance much less accessible to even middle-class people who had previously had access to coverage. PART B) Inefficiency: Sitara said: ": No one is saying that the ACA is perfect, but I feel that Pro is exxagerating things. I feel that by investing money in healthcare, sick people get back to work sooner, and with more people working, more money is poured back into the economy. Will Pro please tell me how that is a bad thing?" I wish that I were exaggerating. The truth of the matter is that the Medical Device Tax that is part of the ACA has stifled research and development in several major fields of inquiry in medical technology because the companies don't want to pay the tax. Furthermore, there is nothing in the ACA which will actually help doctors do their jobs better or reduce the cost of medicine. In fact, the only thing that is happening in medicine is that there is more paperwork to do, less time to see a larger number of patients, and more regulations on what procedures, tests, and treatments we are "allowed" to do on our patients by an unelected set of Bureaucrats who know nothing about medicine. The ACA will not put people back to work... in fact, as I mentioned above, it is putting millions of people *out* of work, and it is sucking money out of the economy on multiple levels. Will Con please tell me how this is a good thing? PART C) The broken promises: Sitara did not adequately address my point regarding the many broken promises of Obamacare. Her only rebuttal is, " I am not saying that the ACA is perfect, but it is far better than what we have now." I heartily disagree, based on the points I have mentioned above which have not been adequately rebutted and the ones I will provide below, which further strengthen my case. The current system isn't perfect, but Obamacare takes all the parts of our healthcare system that make the practice of medicine burdensome, inefficient, expensive, and unpleasant... and makes them all worse. Not a single measure in the entire 2700 page bill... or the 28,000 pages - and counting - of regulations that have come from the law has done anything to increase the quality, availability, or efficiency of medicine in this country. Furthermore, my points about the broken promises - keeping your doctor... the cost of the law... the timeline for implementation... these all still stand and have been completely unchallenged. These were points upon which the entire bill was passed, and they are proving, one by one, to be lies. Even the few measures of Obamacare that people are trying to quickly usher into implementation are being put together so badly that they can't even guarantee the safety and security of the sensitive health information they are asking that we turn over to health exchanges in several states, and they are cutting back funding for that program even further still. The result is that we have a dysfunctional system of exchanges which can't get up and running correctly and put the safety and security of their patients at risk simply by obtaining the information they need to be able to function. Any of these exchanges, with the level of lax security they have, would be extremely vulnerable to a cyber-attack from either criminals looking to commit identity theft or a terrorist seeking to cause damage to our social infrastructure. As Senator Max Baucus said, the whole law is a "train wreck." PART D) Executive overreach and bureaucratic abuses: Sitara said: " I need you to give me specific examples (of Administration's violations of the Separation of Powers and corruption, I presume) and back them up with links, please. Thank you in advance." I will do so with great pleasure. The Obama administration, in violation of the law he signed, has refused to enforce a key portion of the law requiring businesses to provide insurance for their employees, which was to go into effect in 2014. This is a part of the law that has no ambiguity: there is a hard deadline for employers to begin covering employees: Jan 1, 2014. In refusing to enforce this part of the law, Mr. Obama has arrogated to himself legislative powers to change a law that has already been written and signed into law, which he does not have the authority to do. If he were to acknowledge that the law was unconstitutional, this might be defensible, because the President does not have a duty to enforce laws which he believes are in violation of the Constitution. However, since he put the case before the Supreme Court, who found (much to my shock) that the law was constitutional, he is under a direct obligation to enforce every part of the law. He is refusing to do this, but only on a selective basis. Specifically, he is allowing businesses to avoid the devastating financial impact of compliance with the law until after the 2014 elections. I believe this is to shield his Democratic congressional colleagues from the backlash that will happen when the measure is finally enforced as it should be. http://thehill.com... http://freebeacon.com... In another example, the Department of HHS has used their regulatory authority to infringe upon the religious freedoms of millions of people who have moral objections to providing birth control or abortifacts to people, by refusing to grant many Christian organizations exemptions to the clause that requires them to provide coverage for such products and services. http://www.ncregister.com... Obama has exempted members of congress, members of the unions and lobby groups that helped him get into the White House, and his political buddies. http://thestir.cafemom.com...