Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works, Part 1

Over the past two weeks we have reviewed in detail the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We cited dozens and dozens of Americans, industry experts, and the realities of this disastrous piece of legislation. The first in that long series of posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

For a good summary of how bad this legislation is, consider the following general conclusions we have reached over the past two weeks:

• Many, many Americans are reporting on how their health insurance rates and deductibles are going up dramatically as a result of Obama Care despite the promise from Obama that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by $2,500.
• Many, many Americans are losing access to their doctors and hospitals despite the fact that Obama promised that if you like your current doctor, you would be able to continue seeing that doctor under Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are reporting that their current insurance policies are being terminated as a result of Obama Care.
• Many, many businesses and other organizations across America have curtailed hiring, stopped hiring, or have fired existing workers in order to stay profitable, a condition severely threatened by Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are having their work hours curtailed as a result of Obama Care and are being turned in to part time workers.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are deplorably designed and fraught with errors, down time, and other technical problems, resulting in extremely low successful attempts to actually sign up for insurance.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are likely turning into identify thieves’ paradise because of faulty or non-existent security protocols.
• The expected long term cost of Obama Care has tripled in just three years.
• The legislation will add trillions of dollars to the already too high national debt over the next decade or so.
• Many components of the failing legislation have already been terminated ( e.g. CLASS) for a variety or reasons or have been postponed because of implementation obstacles.
• In order to make the Obama Care financials look good, the legislation steals over $700 billion in proposed funding for Medicare over the next decade, further endangering the financial health of that government process.

Since we reached these conclusions, the situation has gotten even worse as more and more people find out how much more they are going to have to pay for insurance as a result of Obama Care and we learn more and more about what an epic failure the rollout has turned out to be, especially the website where all of the magic was supposed to happen. We will cover those latest instances of disaster in November.

But if not Obama Care, what? There is no debate that health care costs are going higher and higher in this country for less and less quality and service. Something has to be done. Today and tomorrow we will propose a problem solving approach that was first laid out in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.”  The twin philosophies of this approach include the following tenets:

1. Understand the root causes, the underlying causes of a problem because without that understanding you cannot resolve those problems.
2. And a favorite saying, “Try to pare things down. Few moves do a lot.”

These are obviously two tenets that Obama Care never understood. Those that created this monstrosity never understood the underlying root causes of escalating health care costs. Thus, their failure to resolve those causes. Second, the original legislation was over two thousand pages long and the regulations the law spawned are well over 10,000 pages and counting. Remember, few moves do a lot, over 10,000 pages do not.

Today and tomorrow, we will outline what we perceive are the true root causes of our high health care costs and propose steps to address and resolve those causes. After these two posts, we will review three alternatives to Obama Care as proposed by Republicans in Congress that have never seen the light of day because of  the mainstream media bias.

Root Cause #1 - Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food. On October 17, 2013, the health.com website ran an article based on the latest obesity results and research from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC). The CDC reported that about one in three U.S. adults are obese from a body weight perspective. 

This obesity epidemic costs the nation’s economy  an estimated $270 billion a year due to health care costs and loss of productivity associated with obesity and overweight, according to a 2011 report produced by the Society of Actuaries. This cost burdens every U.S. household with an average cost of almost $2,400 a year.

$270 billion a year, unreal. Imagine how much less heart disease, heart attacks, and diabetes health care costs could be avoided if the obesity monster was successfully addressed. Basic economic theory tells us if you reduce the demand for a product or service, in this case medical services for obesity's byproducts, the price of that product or service has to decrease. Obama Care does little, if anything, to address this $270 billion cost. 

Unfortunately, the Federal government is a top culprit in this obesity issue. Go to your pantry and refrigerator and read the ingredients on the label. How many of them of high fructose corn syrup (i.e. sugar) as a main ingredient? 

The U.S. government heavily over subsidizes the growing of corn in this country, resulting in extremely inexpensive fattening corn syrup that often ends up in our food chain, helping make people obese in just about every meal they eat. A quick, thirty second review of my refrigerator and pantry uncovers at least five products where high fructose corn syrup is a major ingredient, from tomato sauce to pancake syrup to jelly to soda to peanut butter.

 For a staggering view of how this fructose obsession and infestation works, I suggest that you view the documentary, “King Corn,” a scary review of how government subsides encourage the fructosing of our food supply.

So, how do we attack this root cause:

• Eliminate Federal government farm subsidies and no longer support the overgrowing of corn which ends up as inexpensive high corn fructose which ends up in our food chain which ends up as an obesity statistic.
• If farm subsidies are needed, they should be target specifically for bringing down the price of fresh vegetables and fruit, not the creation of obesity friendly foods and ingredients.
• Put together a five year plan that encourages food companies to phase out and remove damaging obesity ingredients such as high corn fructose from their product lines. Those companies that decide not to do so would face ever stiffening penalties, taxes, and fines for not dong so. 
• Those fines would be circulated back into education programs on health and diet for consumers. 

This root cause is really a public health issue which requires a change in behavior. It should be treated like the seat belt problem from decades ago to change behavior, steadily and logically over time. You need a rational, long term plan which eventually changes behavior at the farm level, the food processing level, and the consumer level. 

Find a way to leverage the food scientists at the food companies and challenge them to come up with new ingredients that provide the flavor without the obesity, especially since they would no longer be able to rely on cheap high fructose corn syrup. Failure to do so would eventually result in heavy fines, taxes, and penalties for those companies. 

Also, rather than hiring thousands and thousands of IRS agents to track down citizens that do not purchase health insurance under Obama Care, you would only have to hire hundreds and hundreds of government food scientists to ensure that the food companies are making their products healthier. This would result in  a substantial personnel cost savings for the Federal government.

Obama Care never understood this root cause. Even if it was able to get all Americans health insurance, those Americans would still be obese and would still be incurring the heavy medical price of being so. The root cause would be unchanged.

Root Cause # 2 - Americans smoke too much. How much cost savings there would be if no one smoked? Much less lung cancer, much less throat cancer, much less mouth cancer, much less heart disease, and much less of other types of diseases that inhaling smoke into your body causes. 

Much like the obesity problem, this root cause is a public health issue, not a health insurance issue. You can have all of the insurance in the world but if you still smoke, you are still likely to get a variety of cancers and diseases, you have not reduced the demand and cost for medical services. 

And just like with high fructose corn syrup, the Federal government is a major culprit. Every year, American taxpayers allow the Washington political class to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in farm subsidies to …tobacco farmers.. These farmers than grow tobacco that ends up in tobacco products which ends up in people’s bodies which causes costly medical expenses, disease, and death.

According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, every year the tobacco industry gets about $190 million in Federal money subsidies. This past summer, the Federal Health and Human Services department announced a $54 million campaign to get people to stop smoking. Talk about insanity, one part of the government is paying farmers to grow more tobacco and another part of the government is trying to get people to stop using tobacco. You cannot make this stuff up.

There are five steps needed to address this root cause:

• First, stop the insanity of paying tobacco farmers to grow tobacco. This will drive up tobacco production costs and hopefully stop some people from smoking from an economic perspective.
• Second, put a two prong research effort in place. One part of that research would be to more fully understand the smoking habit and addiction and find ways and treatments to reduce the desire and addiction to smoking, 
• The second research effort would be to find a way to either use tobacco products in non-lethal ways (e.g. bio fuels) or find a way to encourage tobacco farmers to switch to other, more profitable crops, further reducing the supply of tobacco.
• Third, continue and expand existing smoking cessation programs as much as possible, spending a little money up front to keep people from smoking and saving a lot of money down the road from treating their medical conditions from smoking.
• Fourth, put together a sustained public health program that discourages smoking at all ages, specially targeting the younger generation before they start smoking.
• Five, make tobacco users pay substantially more for their health insurance, let the cost causer be the cost payer. Maybe if the true medical cost of smoking was actually borne by smokers there would be less smoking. Obama Care actually tried to institute this type of policy but like everything else in this horrid piece of legislation, this component has been postponed for at least another year.

Public health efforts, supply and demand techniques, scientific research, easier and more effective approaches to this root cause than the Obama Care approach of making sure that people have health insurance but not reducing the levels of medical services needed to treat tobacco related diseases.

Would these public health approaches work? Consider the assertions made by the head of the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delose Cosgrove, in a Forbes magazine interview in 2010:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well. 
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs. 
• Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to 40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and cancer account for 75% of the nation's total health care. 
• At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated for Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons. 
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Wow, no 10,000 pages of regulations, no failed and expensive government website, no one losing their current health insurance, just good, old-fashioned  root cause analysis and solutions. In this case, the solution was focused on a public health effort to change behavior for the better and for the healthier, not to install an unworkable Rube Goldberg insurance process that did nothing to reduce the demand for health care services. 

Imagine how much heart disease was avoided because there was 60 fewer tons of fat stressing people’s bodies. Imagine how many cancer cases were avoided because the smoking rate in a county went down form 28% to 18%. Again, simple economics: reduce the demand, reduce the cost and price. Reduce the demand/need for health care services the cost of those services goes way down. Obama Care completely missed this simple fact of life.

For more on Dr. Cosgrove and an example of a town in Minnesota that got their citizens together to get the whole town healthy, go to the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/12/healthy-solution-to-our-unhealthy.html

We will finish up our root cause analysis tomorrow. You will see that addressing the true underlying causes of our high health care costs is not that hard but that Obama Care’s architects missed the boat completely. Remember: "Pare things down. A few moves do a lot." Ten thousands pages of unreadable government regulations accomplish very little.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w