It is really sad that every month we find enough data, experiences, and realities to write about this unfolding disaster for days at a time. And as we get closer and closer to more major rollout dates of Obama Care processes and regulation, I am sure that the information will continue to get worse and worse.
Wouldn’t it have been much better if the Washington political class had taken the time up front to understand what the root causes are of our escalating health care costs are and THEN developed plans to address those root causes? Instead, the failed to do that preliminary analysis work and in its place constructed a complex Rube Goldberg-like insurance monstrosity that will do nothing to address these root causes and will likely make a bad situation worse.
Consider the root causes of our high health care costs and how no one has been able to convince America that there are serious components of Obama care that will address these underlying drivers of high health care costs:
- Americans smoke too much.
- Americans eat too much.
- American eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
- The Federal government spends taxpayer wealth to support tobacco farmers who grow smoking products and farmers who grow unneeded corn that ends up as obesity inducing corn fructose in our food chain.
- Americans do not get enough exercise.
- The health care industry needs substantial tort reform, reform that has worked well at the state level in reducing health care costs.
- The health care insurance industry needs to be able to more readily compete across state lines, increasing competition for health care insurance and reducing prices.
- Americans are getting older but there is no national effort to remedy the effects of aging diseases such as dementia and certain cancers.
- The Federal government loses tens of billions of dollars every year via its Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs to criminal activity, tens of billions of dollars that could have been used to provide low cost insurance to the uninsured in America without Obama Care’s costly bureaucracy.
Instead of this coherent, problem solving-oriented approach, we get stuck with inane and expensive processes via Obama Care like the following examples illustrate:
1) Investor's Business Daily examined a recent Government Accountability Office report and its detailed information on insurance plans today in all 50 states, from the least expensive health insurance plans offered to a 30-year-old nonsmoker to the most expensive plans 55-year-old couples can buy. It then looked at the Obama Care insurance plans that were compiled by the state of Maryland for eight states that are putting together their state based health insurance exchanges and compared the cost of insurance today and the likely cost of insurance under Obama Care.
The results were not pretty relative to the claim that Obama care will reduce health insurance costs for Americans:
- In Ohio, the least expensive Obama Care "bronze" plan for a 25-year-old will cost $1,956 a year, a price that's almost three times higher than the cheapest plan in Ohio today.
- In Virginia, the lowest priced Obama Care "bronze" premium is $1,608, 252% higher than the cheapest policy available today.
- Maryland's least expensive Obama Care plan will be 83% higher than the lowest-cost plan sold in that state this year.
- Critics of these types of analysis, and thus, supporters of Obama Care, correctly point out that some of these plans will actually cost less because some people will get Federal subsidies to purchase Obama Care plans.
- However, not everyone will be entitled to Obama Care subsidies, based on their income level, and will be stuck with these higher costs.
- Other people who live in the 34 states that are not implementing Obama Care health insurance exchanges and by the law’s explicit language, they will not be eligible for any Federal subsidies.
- Other counter points to the supporters’ point is that even with the subsidies, the cost could also be higher. For example, Investor's Business Daily found that a young worker making $20,000 in Maryland, for example, would pay about $1,000 for the cheapest Obama Care plan, after the subsidy. That's still $278 more than the least expensive plan offered in the state today.
- It is difficult to believe that any subsidy will be enough to offset cost increases of like the 252% increase in Virginia or the 825 increase in Maryland.
So much for Obama Care resulting in significant cost savings for Americans when the buy health care insurance. Best, best case is that costs do not go up too much. Seems like a lot of energy and effort to get us no better and likely much worse than where we were prior to Obama Care’s attack on logic and sanity.
2) The biggest losers in the Obama Care legislation is likely to be younger Americans. Obama Care needs them to buy insurance plans so that the Federal government can take the wealth from these younger, healthier Americans and use it to subsidize health care insurance for generally older and less healthy Americans. It will be the biggest inter-generational transfer of wealth from younger Americans to older Americans in the history of the country.
As an example of what is actually underway as a result of this lousy legislation, consider an analysis and resulting graphic from the same Investor’s Business Daily article we discussed above (double click on the graph for a larger view):

The red bars in this graph are the least expensive Obama Care “bronze” insurance plans across eight states. The blue bars are the least expensive plan available to a young person on the market today. Not a pretty picture, with today’s plans substantially less expensive than anything Obama Care is spitting out. There is no way that cost health insurance goes down under Obama Care in at least these eight states even with subsidies.
The conclusion is obvious. If you are a young American, Obama Care is after your wealth in order to leverage your probable good health to fund health care for other, general older Americans.
3) Yesterday, we talked a little about how the infrastructure of Obama Care is really under the gun and behind schedule. The discussion focus of that problem was that the so-called Obama Care “navigators” are likely to be put in place without criminal background checks being completed (enhancing the hence of identity theft) and without adequate training.
Today’s infrastructure horror story comes from a recent article from Reuters:
- The government is months behind in testing data security for the main component of Obama Care: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1
- The missed data systems deadlines have pushed the government’s decision on whether information technology security is ready and secure to exactly ONE DAY BEFORE that crucial October 1st date, according to the the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general.
- Thus, data systems experts say the Obama Care exchanges might open with serious security holes or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.
- “They’ve removed their margin for error,” said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. “There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.”
- The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance because the government’s Obama Care systems have serious security holes.
- The Inspector General‘s report found that “Several critical tasks remain to be completed in a short period of time.”
- Any additional delays beyond one day would mean the government entity operating the Obama Care exchanges would not have the security testing information it needs to authorize know if they were entitled to subsidy support.
- One day leeway to have this thing working by October 1. No way the Federal government gets this right within the next 60 days. Take that to the bank.
- Since a 2002 law requires that government systems obtain a “security authorization package,” essentially the roadmap for keeping out hackers and preventing security breaches, implementing Obama Care without this common sense authorization would mean the government is in violation of its own law.
If the systems are not online and deemed secure by October 1, people could still apply for Obama Care exchanges but they would not know if the qualified for subsidies and how much they might get, probably delaying them for choosing and signing up for an exchange health care program, leaving them in health insurance limbo.
But enough bad news. We will do another update next month, a time that will be a mere weeks from the onset of a major component of Obama Care. How scary do we think that update will be?
That will do it for our own analysis and roundup of the unfolding disaster from Obama Care. Tomorrow we will step aside and present an analysis of Obama Care presented by the Cato Institute.
Cato's analysis and commentary is about how Congress and the President are breaking the law and allowing Congressional members and their staffs to side step the law’s financial burdens. It is a despicable act that 1) is clearly illegal under the law’s tenets, 2) is a slap in the face of the rest of America who will not get the same financial relief from Obama Care, and 3) reinforces the feeling that we are truly living in a “Hunger Games” world where the rulers in Washington get the best of everything and the rest of us are stuck with the remnants and the dregs of their decisions.
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