When Florida Gov. Rick Scott visited Palm Beach County on Monday, he criticized the health-care exchange part of Obamacare as being too uncertain to build plans around.
“They won’t tell us what the rules are,” Scott said while fielding questions after a short speech to the newly formed Independent Conservative Action Network in Boca Raton.
“The exchange is not something that makes any sense to me.”
But it does if you’re getting bankrolled by retirement costs from contracts, like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel.
Last month, Emmanuel, the president’s former chief of staff, announced a plan to move Chicago retirees onto the health insurance exchanges subsidized by taxpayers nationwide.
That means Chicago will be off the hook for a projected $800 million shortfall in its retirement system, but the rest of the country won’t be.
And if Chicago’s noticed it can get out from under crushing public debts brought on by impossibly generous retirement benefits, it’s a good chance California, the state of Illinois, and other workers’ paradises are going to notice the same thing.
That’s the argument in a column in the print version of today’s USA Today by David Walker, a former comptroller of the United States and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative. (It’s different from the print version posted on the paper’s website last week.)
So even if you live in a reasonably well-governed state with a reasonably funded retirement system (like Florida), you’ll still have to help foot the bill for California, Chicago and the rest.
As Walker writes, “States that offer extremely generous health benefits for government retirees, and which have little to no pre-funding for those benefits, could choose to move their retirees into the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges …
“A significant portion of the tab would be passed on to the federal government, effectively shifting the burden to Americans in other more fiscally responsible states.”
“Moreover,” Walker continues, “the cost of the exchanges could grow precisely because more retirees are joining the pool. And if young people forgo the exchanges in large numbers, it will put upward pressure on the total costs and related insurance premiums over time.”
“They won’t tell us what the rules are,” Scott said, talking about the exchanges.
Here’s one: Like everything else connected to Obamacare – like the proposed Medicaid expansion rejected by the Florida House of Representatives this session – the only thing certain about it is that it will be more expensive than advertised.
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