ObamaCare Cuts To Home Health Become Reality

Here is a flashback for you. On December 23, 2013, I wrote about ObamaCare had a surprise in store for New Year’s Day, 2014. There was a planned cut of 14% to the funds that help provide home health services to patients who do not go to the hospital. As it turns out, not only is that 14% cut a reality, but Kathleen Sebelius has doubled down on the cuts, to the tune of causing a 40% reduction in the amount of services home health providers will be able to supply. I would wonder what she is up to, if it were not so plain. And to think, the Obama administration, including Kathleen Sebelius, has the audacity to claim there are no job losses coming about as a result of ObamaCare. Do tell!

Fox News - Discussing the impact of ObamaCare on jobs, she said last week in Orlando, “There is absolutely no evidence and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act.”

But Sebelius herself, using discretion granted her by the Affordable Care Act, cut the maximum allowed by law from home health care funds. The cuts were deep enough that officials offered a damaging prediction of the impact saying, it was estimated that approximately 40 percent of providers would have negative margins.

And companies with negative margins don’t last long — or have to cut workers.

Dan Weber, head of the Association of Mature American Citizens, says “forty percent will be put into the red and anyone who has a brain in their skull knows that they’re going to have to cut jobs and reduce services in order to make up the money.”

In fact, those cuts put in jeopardy 498,000 jobs of home health care workers who work just for that 40 percent of firms that will be forced into the red.

You see, the firms that provide home health services are just like any other small business. They have no choice but to make ends meet. If they are not profitable, they have to close the doors. Cutting 14% of their payments from Medicare is causing 40% of these businesses to go into the red. Unlike the federal government, who robs Peter to pay Paul and stays consistently in the red, home health providers have to stay in the black. If they do not, they can not operate for an extended period of time. The only options they have are to lay off employees or close their doors entirely.

Home health providers supply an important service to the elder members of our society. Many of them have no desire to go to the hospital, especially when they can receive the care they need at home. That is important, to them and to their families. We now know that 40% of the businesses who provide these services will be forced to lay off employees or close their doors. The job losses may not be calculable, but as the quote from Fox News implies, 498,000 jobs are in danger of going down the drain of ObamaCare.

All the while, we are told ObamaCare is the greatest thing the government has ever came up with. Its praises are constantly praised by the liberals and their friends in the media. No matter how much proof we have to the contrary, our concerns are falling on deaf ears. We are told we are fear mongering and trying to stir up people against the federal government. We are labeled as someone who is against the poor receiving the health care they need. Except it is ObamaCare itself that is causing these problems, not those of us who are trying to tell the rest of America what it is really doing.

The proof really is in the pudding and the pudding of ObamaCare is becoming blacker every day.