Wednesday, January 22, 2014

January, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 3: Real Life Obama Care Disasters, Medicaid Increases Hospitals Visits, And Bronze Plans' Expensive Surprises

This is our third post this month in what has become a monthly series on the idiocy and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Millions of Americans have lost access to their preferred insurance policies, their preferred doctors, their preferred hospitals, and needed medicines, they have lost access to work hours and actually jobs,, the economy has suffered terribly, identity thieves are going crazy with glee, the national debt is going up faster, and a whole myriad of other threats and troubles have occurred as a result of this heinous piece of legislation.

Things are so bad that we are having a difficult time documenting and review all of the insanity. Over a six day period we will do our best to bring you the worst from Obama Care.

1) As we have discussed many times, there has been a lot of problems with Obama Care’s information systems processing and operations including the website where theoretically a person could easily sign up for an Obama Care insurance policy. The problems including the snafu that many people might think that they have health insurance via Obama care but the systems never properly processed the application and payment, leaving the person uninsured despite their belief that they are covered. 

And that reality is starting to come true. There are news reports starting to arise where people are going to the doctor or hospital and finding out that they are indeed NOT covered by an Obama Care insurance policy and either need to pay cash up front for the entire medical expense and fix the problem later or are walking out and not receiving the medical treatment they need because of the sticker shock of the price unadjusted for insurance. 

Regarding the top selling type of Obama Care plans, so-called Bronze plans, Kaiser Health News reports on the following developing problems:
  • Newly issued Obama Care Bronze Plans may not pay a dime of a simple doctor costs until an annual deductible of $5,000 is met/paid for by the policy holder: “This could be the next shoe to drop, as people don’t realize that if they’re buying a bronze plan, they may have to pay $5,000 out of pocket before it contributes a penny,” said Carl McDonald, senior analyst with Citi Investment Research, speaking at a Washington, D.C., conference.
  • Some health industry experts are concerned that some new Obama Care enrollees will be discouraged from seeing doctors if they have to pay the full charge, rather than simply a copayment. This would be the exact opposite behavior that Obama Care was supposed to be encouraging.
  • First -time insurance buyers via Obama Care may not realize they’re on the hook for additional costs before insurance and benefits kick in, having chosen a plan based solely on the lower monthly premiums.
  • In seven major U.S. cities, half of Obama Care’s bronze plans on require policyholders meet the entire deductible before insurers help with the cost of a simple doctor visit, according to an analysis by eHealthinsurance.com, a private online marketplace, for Kaiser Health News. 
  • A typical office visit can run $65 to $85, while more complex visits can cost more.
Thus, people are going to see higher monthly premiums, higher deductible levels, and delays in seeing any benefit of their Obama Care policy until they have paid out thousands of dollars in their own cash for any medical care. How does this reduce the cost of medical care int his country, an severely broken promise of the President?

2) Consider the following recent video news headlines regarding Obama Care and the human stories behind the numbers and agony of Obama Care‘s failures:

New York Woman’s Medical Care Delayed And Insurance Cancelled Due To ObamaCare Broken Promises

WWLP-MA: New ObamaCare Taxes Are Bringing Higher Costs To Massachusetts Residents

Faces of Obamacare WBOY-WV: 18,000 West Virginians Forced To Enroll In ObamaCare Again Due To Website Glitch

Oregon Mom Can’t Afford Health Coverage From ObamaCare

ObamaCare’s Taxes Are Hiking Costs For Small Business Owners

The actual videos of their heartbreaking stories can be accessed at:


3) A Washington Examiner article from January 3, 2014 pointed out the next likely huge failure of Obama Care. One of the original Obama Care promises was that the legislation would reduce the amount of visits, time, and costs for medical treatments that go through hospital emergency rooms. The faulty reasoning is that if previously uninsured Americans now had health insurance via Medicaid, they would be much less likely to us emergency rooms.

But if the writers had done their homework and a little research beforehand, they would have realized how inane this assumption would turn out to be:
  • According to the article and a just-released results of a new study published in the Journal Science, based on 10,000 low-income residents in Oregon newly covered by Medicaid, emergency room visits were actually 40% higher than those with no insurance at all and no access to Medicaid.
  • Supposedly, a big driver of our high expenditures in ever increasing health care costs has been due to those people without insurance going to emergency rooms.
  • According to this study, increased ER visits as result of expanded Medicaid coverage increased spending by $120 per covered individual.
The article points out that several factors could be at work here.
  • Being covered by Medicaid does not necessarily increase the chances of getting personal care in a private office since many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients and the related payment schedules. Thus, this may be another Obama Care example of people having healthy care insurance but who cannot get health care medical attention.
  • Another factor might be that behavior is driven by cultural experience. Anyone who understands the culture of low-income Americans who do not have experience with health insurance, knows that these are not communities where health care is associated with private physician visits. It is associated with emergency rooms and hospitals.
  • It may well be that as more lower-income individuals get under the Medicaid umbrella, they simply feel even more comfortable doing what they always have done — going to the emergency room.
Thus, rather than putting the fire out, i.e. reducing the costs and visits associated with hospital emergency rooms, Obama Care may actually be throwing gas on the fire by adding to the emergency room usage crisis. Just another bad, unintended consequence of a bad piece of legislation.

4) Let’s look at another real life example of how Obama Care is crushing Americans finances and health care insruance coverage using an NBC news report about a car delaership in Michigan, a classic American small business that President Obama was likely referring to in this quote from june 22, 2010: 

“This law will cut costs and make coverage more affordable for families and small businesses.“

In reality, at least for the Michigan car dealership, not so much, just another broken Obama promise. Highlights of the NBC story include the following points:
  • The car dealership had its current employee health insurance policy canceled directly as a result of the Obama Care legislation, a policy and benefit the dealership had provided to its employees for 35 years.
  • The car dealership owner decide at that point to give every employee a lump sum payment of $2,400 to each employee so they could individually purchase insurance. On their own. This increase his business costs from the previous year under the old insurance policy, rebutting the President’s assertion that Obama Care would reduce small business costs.
  • These additional costs prevent him, like any other business owner, from expanding his business, hiring more employees, taking better care, financially, of current employees, all actions that would help grow the economy.
  • As a further courtesy and help to his employees, he brought in a professional insurance broker to help his employees get on a group health insurance plan.
  • The best group plan that the broker could develop did benefit a small minority of the dealership’s employees by getting them lower costs.
  • However, for the vast majority if employees, relative to the previous plan that Obama Care killed off, deductibles are rising from $1,125 to $3,000, out of pocket costs went from $2,250 to $6,350, family deductibles jump from $6,000 to $12,700.
  • During a company meeting to discuss employee benefits and health insurance, one employee asked: “How is this helping the average American that works 40 to 50 hours a week? How are we supposed to live?”
  • Another employee is quote in the piece stating: “There’s nothing wrong with trying to help people, but there’s a better way. This isn’t the way.”
There has to be a better way, truer words about Obama Care have never been spoken. The original TV piece that NBC aired can be accessed at:


This is what happens when inept politicians that do not understand the root causes of a problem pass a piece of legislation that most did not read which was written by insurance company interests and which runs a mind boggling two thousands plus pages long. Americans and their families suffering, economic growth being stunted, and the original problems made worse, not better. The trifecta of incompetence that unfortunately, continues tomorrow.

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