Nightmare of Obamacare, part XXVII: Hospitals imploding

So Obamacare is "popular," health care coverage will now extend to millions more, and suddenly...we have a hospital shortage.

Via Tyler Durden, Bloomberg reports:

A wave of hospitals and other medical companies are likely to restructure their debt or file for bankruptcy in the coming year, following the recent spate of failing retailers and energy drillers, according to restructuring professionals. Regulatory changes, technological advances and the rise of urgent-care centers have created a "perfect storm" for health-care companies, said David Neier, a partner in the New York office of law firm Winston & Strawn LLC.

Some signs are already there: Health-care bankruptcy filings have more than tripled this year according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and an index of Chapter 11 filings by companies with more than $1 million of assets has reached record highs in four of the last six quarters, according to law firm Polsinelli PC.

The reasons cited include a cutoff of subsidy payments for hospitals that had to cover massive costs of uninsured using emergency rooms as their primary health care and unpaid medical bills from customers caught up with high-deductible Obamacare plans and unable to cough up the $7,000 or so in costs upfront.  Hurricanes and storms have damaged infrastructure, too.

Small and rural hospitals in particular are being hit, and many have less than a day's operating cash, Bloomberg reports.

As Durden notes, Obamacare was supposed to bring us plenty.  Instead, we are getting boarded up hospitals and the signature shortages of socialism, even as Obama himself repeatedly claimed that his health insurance "reform" was not socialist.  Like so much of what he said about Obamacare, it was a lie.

Because no doubt about it, socialism is about central planning, and central planning is about allocation of resources.  Resources that went one place now go to another.  Winners are in the Beltway and in the rich enclaves of the Bay Area; losers are in the rural hospitals.

Of course, there is no letup in the use of emergency rooms for primary care in these distressed places.  These emergency rooms are primarily used by millions of illegal aliens, who are forbidden to purchase Obamacare and, in any case, would get subsidies and likely not pay a dime if they did.  So to protect that pot of subsidy money from being drained by illegals, the hospitals are asked to foot the bill for the illegals using the emergency rooms instead.

See how misallocation of resources by central-planning socialists works?

Now, as Obamacare provides insurance coverage for millions more, as Obamacare advocates claim, somehow there is less and less to go around.  Fewer hospitals and fewer getting actual care due to the skyrocketing costs of deductibles.  Durden notes that health care premiums under the Nightmare of Obamacare have doubled in four years, asking how it is that consumers can swallow that.  Not in a market economy, they can't.  Only in a highly oppressive tax-socialism regime that has no accountability whatsoever for the ever increasing political forces dipping into the money troughs and giving those who pay less and less and less.

It's another reason to just throw Obamacare out.  Keep trying, Congress.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/11/nightmare_of_obamacare_part_xxvvii_hospitals_imploding.html