March, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Bonus Post 1: Religious Freedom Going Down, Costs Going Up, and Pelosi Ducks An Inspector General Function

I know I promised that yesterday would be the final update on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. But since we finished writing yesterday’s post, more disasters have risen to the surface. Thus, we decided to take not one more day but two more days, call them bonus posts, to finish up what a mess Obama Care continues to create just over the past 30 days. 

This will definitely be the last posts for this month on the subject. Not because we covered everything but because it is too depressing to linger on the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever to hold office.

1) One of the truly dangerous parts of Obama Care is that it destroys the religious freedom of individuals and institutions whose religious tenets prohibit them from supporting certain or all kinds of abortion and contraceptive methods. Once a government can destroy certain rights and liberties of certain groups of citizens it will have no trepidations of destroying the rights and liberties of all citizens when the destruction suits its needs.

That is why an upcoming Supreme Court case is so important from a freedom of religion perspective. One of Obama Care’s requirements is that employers who provide health coverage to their employees must pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs and contraception. And for many Americans, paying for those drugs violates their personal and religious consciences. The government is saying, “We are going to force you to do something that is against your moral principles,” says Wayne Hepler, owner of Seneca Hardwood Lumber in Pennsylvania.

Hepler and his family want to continue providing health insurance for their employees without being forced to violate their consciences. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, they’re challenging the government’s freedom destroying mandate. And it’s not just champions of religious liberty who should be worried.

As we stated above, a government gone wild on a certain set of individuals is sure to go wild on others, a position also taken by Carrie Kilesar, Mr. Hepler‘s daughter and part owner of the company: “Any time that you see someone else’s rights being violated, that should be a concern. You know, if religious freedom isn’t particularly important to an individual, they could still see that if you could violate one right, what’s to keep another right from being violated?”

A Federal judge ruled in favor of Seneca Hardwood Lumber last year, giving the family temporary relief from the mandate for now. They, along with more than 300 plaintiffs across the country who are also challenging the mandate, are waiting to see what the Supreme Court does after it hears oral arguments in two similar cases on Tuesday. 

We wish them luck since destroying parts of the Constitution and destroying the religious freedom of law abiding, hard working citizens for a lousy piece of legislation that has no chance of being successful is the epitome of insanity.

2) This past week we have previously discussed the real possibility that Obama Care policy holders will see a major jump in their insurance costs in the near future as Obama Care fails to do what it promised: reduce health care insurance costs for millions of Americans. 

This likelihood was reemphasized by a Reuters news article that recently appeared on the NewsMax website on March 22, 2014, whose highlights included the following:

• Consumers holding Obama Care health plans could see double-digit price hikes next year in states that fail to attract enough younger, healthier enrollees for 2014, according to insurance industry experts. 
• WellPoint sells plans on 14 Obama Care exchanges and expects health insurance rates nationwide to be higher: “Looking at the rate increases on a year-over-year basis on our exchanges, and it will vary by carrier, but all of them will probably be double digit plus," said Ken Goulet, president of WellPoint's commercial business, recently speaking in front of investors in New York.
• Premium increases for the Obama Care policies are expected to outpace those in the employer-sponsored market, which serves about 170 million people.
• Industry officials and independent analysts say the lack of hard data will mean huge variations in premiums, with increases ranging from the high single-digit percentages in some states to as much as 30% in others.
• Lower than expected Obama Care enrollment is a leading indicator of big price hikes in over a dozen states, where younger and healthier residents are not signing up as fast as expected. This is critical since Obama Care prevents insurers from charging sick people higher premiums and thus, the legislation’s financial model requires the participation of healthy young people to offset the cost of covering policyholders with preexisting conditions. 
• As we have discussed many times, government data estimates only 25% of new Obama Care enrollees are in the younger demographic of adults aged 18 to 34, well below the White House's 38% target that is required for fiscal sanity.
• Larry Levitt, a policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tracks healthcare trends and he predicts that most states will see premium increases of 7% to 10% in 2015.
• In 16 states, Obama Care sign-ups represent less than 10% of the potential marketplace population, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study of enrollment data released by the administration on March 1. Analysts say those markets could skew toward older, sicker members, which raises the likelihood of high rate increases.
• Which brings us back to another broken promise/lie of the President and Obama Care. This legislation was supposed to REDUCE the cost of health care in this country, not raise it by double digit increases. The President himself promised that Obama Care would reduce the annual health insurance costs of an average American family by $2,500 a year, not increase it. 
• Even Kathleen Sebelius, the HHS secretary and main manager of the whole disaster, recently said that health insurance costs will go up in 2015. 

Viewed just on this reality, no one can really claim that Obama Care is anything but a failure when measured against its own benchmark of reducing health care costs for every American.

3) According to a Washington Examiner article from March 7, 2014, 73 Federal government inspector generals are supposed to root out waste, fraud and inefficiency in the executive branch of the Federal government. Using thousands of auditors and inspectors, the IGs issue hundreds of investigative and audit reports a year that have sent crooks to jail while at the same time saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. They are the unsung heroes among a Federal government that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Thus, given the disaster that is Obama Care and its busted information systems, high probability of identity theft, and billions of dollars wasted for no results, it's particularly disappointing and bewildering to see House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi playing politics with the tremendously reasonable proposal of Congressman Peter Roskam to create an inspector general for Obama Care. 

In fact, given how massive, ineffective, and inefficient Obama Care is, it is very surprising that it did not come out of the gate with its own inspector general function to begin with. However, as soon as the Illinois Republican made his proposal, Pelosi made clear her opposition to it. 

When asked about the Roskam proposal at her daily news conference, Pelosi said: “No. Each of the committees of jurisdiction has oversight, so the Congressional oversight is something that I support. Each of the agencies of government that are implementing the law, the Affordable Care Act, have their own inspectors general. I think that the system has enough appropriate oversight. I don't see any reason to go to that point.”

The Examiner article correctly points out that there are indeed oversight committees of Congress for all 73 of the departments and agencies that presently have IGs. However, none of those entities control one-sixth of the U.S. economy or trillions of dollars in Federal spending, making Pelosi’s opposition strange and baffling.

This is especially baffling since Pelosi had previously supported creation of new and special IGs for the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well for the Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP), the Federal relief effort to victims of Hurricane Katrina and the intelligence community. In all of these cases, the varying Federal agencies involved all at their own IGs but Pelosi still wanting an overarching IG appointed to look at the entire effort.

Pelosi was speaker of the House when Congress approved the $700 billion Wall Street bailout in 2008 which included a Special Inspector General for the program. As Congressman Roskam pointed out, that IG effort has “identified $5.3 billion in restitution and savings, including $533 million in direct taxpayer savings. In comparison, the healthcare law is estimated to cost $1.8 trillion when fully implemented, dwarfing TARP's cost to taxpayers.”

Is it just a coincidence that every one of those IG proposals Pelosi pushed for came when a Republican President was in the White House? Why is it only for this massive effort, when a Democrat works in the Oval Office and is responsible for the biggest Federal entitlement program ever created, that Pelosi thinks an IG is unnecessary?

Give that Pelosi, who famously said of Obama Care that “we have to pass it so you can see what’s in it” implying she had no clue what was going on, and given that Obama Care was written behind the closed doors of Pelosi’s office in cahoots with health care industry lobbyists, could it be there’s something in Obama Care that she fears an Obama Care IG will expose? 

It has been my experience that whatever Nancy Pelosi says, just the opposite is true or likely to happen. Meaning that the need for an Obama Care Inspector General must be of the utmost priority and importance.

So let’s review: 1) religious and Constitution rights still under fire and attack by Obama Care, 2) more proof that Obama Care insurance policy costs will likely rise dramatically in cost within the next year, and 3) what is Nancy Pelosi hiding by opposing an Inspector General function for Obama Care? Just another day of unfolding disasters for the law.

Tomorrow is guaranteed to be the last update this month, a writer and nation can only take so much bad news at once.

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