Politics

Obamacare architect: Law will cause ‘the end of employer-sponsored insurance’

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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Obamacare architect Zeke Emanuel claims in his new book that the health care reform law will result in “the end of employer-sponsored insurance.”

Despite President Barack Obama’s claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep it” — a talking point developed in his first 100 days in office by a tiny but influential left-wing messaging group called the Herndon Alliance — his administration has long planned to disassemble the current U.S. insurance industry as well as alter health care reform.

The Daily Caller reported last June that the Obama administration was making moves to squash self-funded insurance plans, which small businesses use and which could represent the “Achilles heel” for Obamacare implementation, prompting Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell to introduce the Self-insurance Protection Act (SIPA). Obama also admitted in front of Republican congressmen in 2010 that 8 to 9 million Americans would lose their health insurance under his new health reform law.

Since Obamacare implementation began, Emanuel, brother of former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, has been vocal about things that his law seeks to destroy, diminish or replace.

Emanuel also wrote in his book “Reinventing American Health Care” that “insurance companies as we know them are about to die” and be replaced by Obamacare-created health systems called Accountable Care Organizations (ACO).

“For the next few years insurance companies will both continue to provide services to employers and, increasingly, compete against each other in the health insurance exchanges. In that role they will put together networks of physicians and hospitals and other services and set a premium. But because of health care reform, new actors will force insurance companies to evolve or become extinct,” Ezekiel wrote in the book.

“The accountable care organizations (ACOs) (which I discuss in Chapter 8 of my new book) and hospital systems will begin competing directly in the exchanges and for exclusive contracts with employers.”

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