City Comptroller Scott Stringer laid out the grim facts last week on how the most progressive law in decades means disaster for New York City.
The bottom line of Stringer’s report: Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, Uncle Sam will cut more than $800 million in payments to the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp, by Fiscal Year 2019.
The president’s signature law slashes federal payments that long helped out hospitals serving lots of patients who lack insurance. The idea was that the law would boost coverage so dramatically the aid would be unnecessary.
Except that illegal immigrants don’t qualify for ObamaCare coverage — and they make up a big chunk of the city’s uninsured population.
Mind you, it was Democratic leaders trying to ease worries of Democratic members of Congress, who opted to deny that coverage. And none worried about how hard it would hit America’s cities.
This is hardly the only huge problem with the health law. What with President Obama’s decisions to ignore or waive its clear language, laws passed by Congress and signed bv Obama to amend it and Supreme Court rulings that rewrote it, ObamaCare’s been tweaked nearly 50 times, by the Galen Institute’s count.
Repeal it or not, much of the law is just going to have to be replaced. (No lawmaker’s even started addressing the fact that state ObamaCare exchanges are hemorrhaging cash, as Michelle Malkin noted in these pages Friday.)
But back to Stringer’s exposé.
In ObamaCare’s first full year, New York was supposed to see its ranks of uninsured drop 7.2 percent. Oops: It only fell 1.3 percent.
But the federal subsidies are dropping anyway. So the Health and Hospitals Corp. faces huge shortfalls that will leave it with just $44 million in cash reserves in FY 2019, down from $1 billion this year.
In short, the city’s entire public-hospital system is headed to fiscal collapse, even with new taxpayer subsidies.
Stringer’s solution? Short-term, get Washington to delay slashing the payments. How the city’s lone Republican in the GOP-run Congress is supposed to pull that off, he doesn’t say.
Long-term, he wants Washington to fund ObamaCare for illegals. Good luck: It was the most liberal Congress in generations, perhaps ever, that put the city in this fix.
Any other ideas, Scott?