Obama Care - "What Could Possibly Go Wrong"

Unfortunately, Obama Care and its related failures continue to haunt the country as we wait for the Supreme Court to render its verdict on the Constitutionality of the legislation. We have discussed this horrible law many times in this blog and the many negative impacts it is having on the country:

• From politicians accusing those opposed to this flawed legislation of being racists, dividing the country even more,
• To the ballooning costs of implementation that will dramatically increase the national debt,
• To the basic fact of life that it will not work since it did not address the root causes of our high health care costs.

Today, we will review the latest news, failures, and commentary about the law and end this blog with a short, sarcastic review of the entire process entitled, "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"

So what is the latest bad news regarding Obama Care:

- Several months ago, the Obama administration canceled one of the show pieces of the legislation when it terminated the CLASS program. The CLASS program was supposed to provide affordable long term care to Americans under the Obama Care umbrella.

Unfortunately, it was more expensive than private long term care insurance programs and for those higher costs, contained fewer and less robust benefits than the typical private long term care policies.

Thus, the administration canceled the program for having a much, much lower enrollment rate than expected. More ominous, this program was one of the few financially positive aspects of the Obama Care business plan, initially showing a large positive contribution to the overall Obama Care financials. With its failure and termination, Obama Care's financial viability also takes a major hit.

Not to be outdone, last week the Obama administration terminated another major component of the law due to embarrassingly low participation rates. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services canned a program that offered a $100 incentive to insurance brokers and agents for recommending eligible people to Obama Care’s Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP).

PCIP was intended to be a stop gap way to cover people with pre-existing or chronic conditions prior 2014, when insurance companies will be prohibited from excluding people based on health conditions. Although this situation was hyped as a major concern and need for Obama Care, consider some of the program's and administration's numbers and decide for yourself if this was truly a dire situation requiring such a program (numbers courtesy of a recent Heritage Foundation analysis and publication):

• The Obama administration originally claimed on its website, http://www.healthcare.gov/law/resources/reports/preexisting.html  that as many as 129 million Americans might be suffering from pre-existing conditions and might need a program like PCIP.
• Out of these 129 million people, the Medicare actuaries forecasted that 375,000 people would enroll in PCIP. This forecast is only about .3% of 129,000,000, making one wonder if the 129,000,000 was really an accurate number.
• But actual results were far worse, with only 56,257 actually enrolling in the program. Thus, only 15% of the forecasted 375,000 people came to fruition. The percentage that enrolled vs. the claimed universe size of 129,000,000 is too small to calculate.
• And this 56,257 number and low 15% fulfillment number occurred only because of loosened enrollment requirements and lower premiums.

You cannot claim you know what you are doing when you put your universe of need at 129,000,000 and only 56,257 enroll in your program after you made it easier to enroll. You also cannot claim any credibility with any number or forecast that Obama Care produces, given their horrific track record of CLASS and PCIP forecasts.

- A New York Post article last week contained an interview of Dr. Scott Gottlieb and his view on what Obama Care might end up doing to older, poorer Americans who are eligible for either Medicare or Medicaid. The article identifies Dr. Gottlieb as a one time senior official at the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services and an American Enterprise Institute resident fellow.  

In the article, Dr. Gottlieb warned that under Obama care, disabled seniors who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid will receive inferior care since Obama Care will shuffle them off of the Medicare rolls and onto state run Medicaid rolls and pay the states handsomely to do so. This will inject more money into the ailing Medicaid program and make the Medicare cost problems seem less severe. According to the article, California and New York have already started this process.

While these actions might make the government programs' financials look better, Dr. Gottlieb claims that the people moved off of Medicare onto Medicaid are likely to suffer a significant drop off in the quality of care they receive in the less robust state Medicaid programs. In his words, these elderly and sometimes disabled Americans "will be uprooted from the tried-and-true Medicare fold and “herded” into state-run Medicaid plans as another phase of Obama care grips the nation."

Furthermore, in Dr. Gottlieb's words: "It’s hard to see how they’ll be better off in bare-bones, and sometimes poorly-run state Medicaid plans than by getting access to Medicare options they were entitled to before Obama care."

This gets back to one of the fundamental problems with Obama Care. Its creators never identified and solved the underlying root causes. As a result, we end up with financial accounting tricks to shift revenues and costs without attacking the underlying causes of our problems. We end up with more bureaucracy, high and growing costs, accounting shenanigans, and worse care for millions of Americans.


- Now that he is leaving politics, Congressman Barney Frank is speaking out and criticizing President Obama's approach to healthcare. In a recent article on Forbes' website (http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/04/17/barney-frank-obamacare-was-a-mistake/), the soon-to-be-ex-Congressman sends out a message that maybe the political class in Washington overreached with Obama Care and that is why it is turning into a colossal failure in the eyes of many Americans. Consider two of his quotes from the article:

• "I think we paid a terrible price for health care. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after [Republican] Scott Brown won [Sen. Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts], I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform but certainly not health care."
• "Obama made the same mistake Clinton made. When you try to extend health care to people who don’t have it, people who have it and are on the whole satisfied with it get nervous."

Maybe, just maybe, if Obama, Pelosi, and Reed had done their homework and identified the root causes why less than 15% of Americans did not having health care and crafted their solution to addressing that 15% rather than upending the health care lives of the 85%, as Frank suggests, we might now have an effective solution that is smaller in scope, larger in success, and without the cost and bureaucracy we are ending up with.

Great legislation. Another major component of Obama Care bites the dust, an expert in the field says elderly and disabled Americans will suffer in their health care options just to save the financials of two government bureaucracies, and a Democratic Congressman now identifies what most of us already know, that Obama Care was an unnecessary overreach.

These latest new items just reinforce what we already knew, Obama Care is a health care program that:

• Will force us to purchase government health care insurance and will fine and criminalize us if we don't,
• Will cause millions of us to lose our corporate health care insurance coverage as a result of the legislation,
• Will be so intrusive into our lives that it will seriously affect our life decisions of employment, marriage, retirement, and death,
• Was written by a Congressional committee whose chairman said he didn't understand all of it,
• Was passed, by the most narrow of margins, by our Congressional people, most of whom never read it but exempted themselves from its tenets,
• Has greatly contributed to the high unemployment levels in this country due to the uncertainty, extensive regulations, and additional taxes it has imposed on all businesses and the economy,
• Has already approved over 1,500 waivers to Obama's political friends and allies,
• Was hyped by the Speaker Of The House who actually, mistakenly, or deceptively proclaimed hundreds of thousands of new jobs would be magically created almost overnight,
• Was signed by a President who once smoked and may still smoke, an action that is a major contributor to our high health care costs,
• Will have little chance of being successful since it never identified the root causes of our health care problems,
• Will have its funding administered by a Treasury Secretary who didn't pay his taxes and by a Senate Majority Leader who has not delivered a Senate budget for three years,
• And will be financed by a country that's almost broke and which is that much closer to actually being broke as a result of the legislation.

What could possibly go wrong? Such a deal.


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