- It is too depressing writing about what this law is doing to the country and its citizens.
- We are now circling back on the same disasters that are happening to different people but the effects are the same.
- We are going to step aside over the next few days and let industry experts express their opinion, opinions that are no different to the conclusions that we have arrived at.
The first post in this depressing series can be accessed at:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/11/november-2013-unfolding-obama-care.html
To finish up as much as possible today with our research, the facts and fiascos will be presented as crisply as possible to get everything in. I am sure we will revisit the disasters next month as they seem to be growing exponentially.
1) The Independent Journal Review recently reported on some personal experiences from Obama Care, reporting that puts a human face on the hardships the law is creating:
- Edie Littlefield Sundby of San Diego lost her “world-class” insurance while in the middle of battling stage 4 bladder cancer. Obama Care will not cover her current cancer treatment team and she has no idea how she will access treatment through Covered California, the Obama Care health exchange in her state.
- Carla Albers of Colorado entire family will now be dropped from the insurance plan they were very happy with for over 7 years.
- Jim Stadler of North Carolina is self-employed and was very satisfied with his family’s coverage to the tune of about $400/month. His insurance notified him the new stringent demands from Obama Care are forcing them to drop Jim’s plan. They did offer him another one that covered no more than his current insurance but will cost him almost $900/month.
2) Consider the viewpoint of Daniel R. Dawkins, senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers. His organization includes 9,000 medical clinics across the country. In an interview in the New York Time earlier this year he correctly pointed out another major fiasco of Obama care: “We serve the very population that will gain coverage—low-income, working class uninsured people. But insurers have shown little interest in including us in their provider networks.”
We have talked about this a number of times before: the operation was a success but the patient died, i.e. Obama Care was successful in getting people insurance but they could never find the right doctor or hospital to accept that insurance. Pitiful.
3) According to a recent report, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obama Care will also cause millions of Americans will lose their employer provided health insurance coverage beyond the millions of Americans who are losing their health insurance coverage in the individual insurance policy holder market. The CBO analyses show that at least 30 million more Americans might find themselves uninsured as a result of Obama Care.
Put this latest dire estimate in the perspective of the President who declared at least two dozen different times that if you like your current insurance policy, you can keep it. This is turning into the biggest political lie in the history of the country, especially when tens of millions of Americans will not be able to keep their current policies.
4) There have been many accusations, probably true, that this legislation was done behind closed doors with business cronies in the drug and insurance companies. These companies wanted to ensure that the government sanctioned medical care in the most favorable ways for their companies’ financial well being by forcing every American to buy overpriced and over priced health care insurance.
These companies had the government do what they could not do: legally force Americans to buy products they did not necessarily want, making ordinary Americans criminals for not obeying Obama Care. This is crony capitalism at its worse.
But was this actually what happened? We will never know but consider what has happened over the past few years to two large health insurance companies, United HealthCare and Aetna:
- In the past five years, the S&P stock index has risen about 70% and the Dow stock index has risen just under 100%.
- However, in that same timeframe, the stock price of United HealthCare has risen almost threefold, going from about $25 a share in 2008 to about $71 today.
- Aetna’s stock price has risen about two and a half fold, going from about $25 has share in 2008 to about $64 today.
- Thus, the stock price shares of two large health insurance companies, companies that expected Obama Care to deliver millions of young low cost, highly profitable customers to them have far out gained the rest of the stock market over the past five years.
Now, this could have all been a coincidence. It could be that these two companies just happened to be better business people, better marketers, etc. than the rest of corporate America. Or, it could be that they are better lobbyists, better at working the political class in Washington.
Consider the following political financial information from the Open Secrets website:
- In 2012, Aetna spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and contributions to political candidates.
- Their political candidate spending levels ranked them ahead of 99.4% of other political contributors to political campaigns and ahead of 97.1% of the companies that used lobbyists in 2012.
- In 2012, United HealthCare also spent billions of dollars on lobbyists and contributions to political candidates.
- Their political candidate spending ranked them ahead of 99.6% of other political contributors to political campaigns and ahead of 96.5% of the companies that used lobbyists in 2012.
Yes, these two example companies might just be better business people. But I bet the extremely high amounts of money they spent on political campaign contributions and lobbying did actually get them access to the closed door deal making that ended up being the atrocity that is Obama Care. It also ended up paying off handsomely from the perspective of outsized gains in their respective stock prices.
Crony capitalism at its worse.
5) Consider the recent words of Democratic Congressman Kurt Schrader: “So I think the president saying you could stay with it and not being honest that a lot of these policies were going to get cancelled was grossly misleading to the American public and is causing added stress and added strife as we go through a really difficult time with health care.”
Yes, it is not only Republicans, Tea Party members, and Americans that are calling the President’s promises a lie, at least one member of his own party is jumping onto that reality bandwagon.
6) Consider another Obama Care lie or deception or subtlety that is coming to light, as exposed by a November 5, 2013 article in Forbes magazine:
The Affordable Care Act does indeed specify, in Section 1201, that “a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage.” In other words, a health plan cannot deny enrollment, or the plan’s benefits, to someone based on that person’s preexisting.
However, that is not the same as saying that a plan has to include coverage for any particular preexisting condition, and it certainly does not mean a plan has to include coverage for ongoing treatment that a patient started before obtain coverage in an exchange plan on January 1, 2014.
Key to understanding this distinction is that having “health coverage” is not the same as actually obtaining “health care.” The insurance plan has to take anyone who wants to enroll, regardless of their health status or health history – but they don’t have to provide the same treatments, the same doctors, or the same medications that a patient has been receiving.
Another version of “the operation was successful but the patient died.” Under Obma Care you cannot be denied health insurance coverage for a pre-existing condition but that does not mean you will get proper and adequate treatment for a pre-existing condition. Another massive deception of the American people.
7) Circling back to the identify theft threat from the Obama Care’s website, consider the first the three paragraphs from a CNN wire story from late October, more than three weeks after the website went live:
The Obamacare website has more than annoying bugs. A cybersecurity expert has found a way to hack into users' accounts.
Until the Department of Health fixed the security hole last week, anyone could easily reset your Healthcare.gov password without your knowledge and potentially hijack your account.
The glitch was discovered last week by Ben Simo, a software tester in Arizona. Simo found that gaining access to people's accounts was frighteningly simple.
Bad security still existing after the disastrous introduction of the system. Truly an identity thief’s paradise.
8) One last set of bad news about Obama Care. Not from Republicans, not from conservatives, not from racists but from President Obama’s traditional supporters and fans:
Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) on his plan to delay the individual mandate:
Affordable health care was never meant to be — if you’ve got insurance, now you’re going to have to buy insurance that’s more costly and not as good. That has to be fixed.
David Axelrod, a former White House adviser and strategist on Obama’s reelection campaign, said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word”:
They need to be forthcoming with the public and report on a regular basis as to the progress that’s being made … This has been shrouded in a little bit of mystery. I don’t quite understand why that is … I also would be very, very tough on the people who are responsible to get those fixes done quickly … I’d be, as I’m sure they are, kicking a bunch of folks in the butt every day to make sure that what need to be done is being done.
Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said:
These people want to run our health care system, and they want to be the grand organizers of what’s most important to most Americans over the age of 35 or 40. And yet they’re not telling us what’s going wrong with our system that they want to run?
Ezra Klein, blogger and columnist for The Washington Post, said the website’s problems aren’t simply glitches:
One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well. … On that, so far, this has been a big failure.
Clay Johnson, who worked for Obama’s digital team in 2008, said:
HealthCare.gov got this way not because of incompetence or sloppiness of an individual vendor, but because of a deeply engrained and malignant cancer that’s eating away at the federal government’s ability to provide effective online services.
Sam Stein, political reporter for the Huffington Post, appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said:
No one beta tested the site, which is almost criminal, when you think about it. The president was caught off-guard, which is really unfortunate and also really kind of messed up.
Arthur Delaney, a Huffington Post reporter, hoped the problems with HealthCare.gov were a joke:
It’s no joke.
Mike Barnicle, an MSNBC contributor, said:
They’re lying about it now. … They’re not depriving us of information, they are outright lying…about the numbers of who have enrolled, the numbers who have made the process complete, the numbers of people who have actually signed up, a couple others things. The larger point is they keep using the word, ‘unacceptable.’ This is not unacceptable, this is outrageous.
Mark Halperin, TIME’s editor-at-large and senior political analyst, said:
Mark Halperin, TIME’s editor-at-large and senior political analyst, said:
The secrecy is unacceptable. It begins with not saying how many people have enrolled. I don’t understand why they can’t release that figure on a rolling basis. But in addition, you search in vain for answers to lots of questions. Tom Costello, lots of other reporters have asked them every day for basic information. When governments are in crisis, they withhold information, and sometimes they don’t tell the truth.
When your friends are this critical, you really, really screwed up.
That is all for now regarding Obama Care, from us. Over the next few days, we will be sharing the views of industry experts who agree with us that this is the worst piece of legislation ever written and enacted by the most inept Washington political class of all time.
And this entire disaster is occurring because the writers of this legislation had no obvious problem solving skills that would have enabled them to identify the root causes of our high health care costs in this country. Unless you can identify and address the true root causes of a problem, you have no chance of resolving that problem.
Obama Care did not address the root causes of our cost problem, e.g. Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans are obese, Americans smoke too much, Americans do not exercise enough, Americans are aging which brings aging diseases to the forefront of medical costs, there is a need for serious tort reform in the medical industries, etc. Instead, we got an unworkable Rube Goldberg-like insurance scam that does not address the root causes of high health care costs, it just rearranges money in the country to get inferior, more expensive insurance into the market. Not going to work, it is not working and we are all suffering as a result.
Later this week we will look at other ways the political class is screwing with our lives and our freedoms and our wealth, a welcome change from discussing Obama Care!
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
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
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