March, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 1: Unions Freaking Out, Low Enrollment, Hawaii Going Bankrupt, And Another Constitution Violation

I put this off as long as possible this month but can no longer delay. The following week or so will be spent reviewing the latest disasters that are coming out of the Obama Care legislation. We have been doing this on a regular monthly basis since last August and on a sporadic basis since the law was passed several years ago. In every case, our findings have been devastatingly negative, destroying the economy and people’s lives.

So much more wrong has happened over the past 30 days or so we will need to go through the new bad news quickly. We have already set out the right way to correct our ever escalating high health care costs in previous posts. Our solution attacks and eliminates the root causes of our high health care costs, something that the Obama Care writers never understood and thus, never got right. 

Thus, this week we will only present the bad news and disasters and let you go back to previous months’ posts to see what our common sense solution is, something we will not cover again this week.

1) Although many unions initially supported Obama Care, recently, as the disasters have unfolded, many unions have realized and spoken out on the negative ramifications of the legislation. The latest to speak out is United Here, a national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers.

A recent report that the union issued charges that “Obama Care will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality” President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.” Their analysis found that due to Obama Care's much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay will result in the equivalent of a pay cut of up to $5 an hour: "If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage." 

The report went to say: “Only in Washington could asking the bottom of the middle class to finance health care for the poorest families be seen as reducing inequality. Without smart fixes, the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage. The Irony of Obama Care: Making Inequality Worse.”

The head of the union, Donald "D." Taylor, expressed his frustration and anger in recent news reports: “Unite Here was the first union to endorse then-Senator Obama. We support the addition of health care to millions of Americans. Yet facts are facts, and Obama Care will cost our members the equivalent of a significant pay cut to keep their hard-won benefits.”

His anger also extended itself to the hypocrisy of the Washington political c lass that has exempted themselves and their staffers from the very legislation that is killing union members’ personal financials: “We cannot sit idly by as the politicians carve up our health plans while they carve out exceptions for themselves and every special interest feeding at the trough in Washington.”

Strong words, but necessary words, to get across the fact that Obama Care is not working for union members, who initially supported the effort that turned into Obama Care.

2) Obama Care was supposed to reduce the nation’s health care costs, families’ health care costs, and make the industry less expensive to operate. However, that may not be the case in Hawaii, according to a recent Associated Press report. 

Hawaiian lawmakers are proposing charging a fee to insurers that are NOT participating in the state's insurance exchange under President Barack Obama's Federal health care overhaul. I guess the legislation is not turning out to be that efficient and cost effective in Hawaii. 

The new fee/tax is required to prop up the financially troubled Hawaii Health Connector Obama Care health insurance exchange, which could run out of money to pay its bills by year's end. So if a business decides not to participate in a government program like Obama Care because it is not good for business, the government and the political class can now penalize it by taxing it to cover up their incompetence in operating the Obama Care exchange program. Crazy.

The Hawaiian exchange was established with $205 million in Federal grants and Hawaii has asked the Federal government to spend the money more slowly than originally planned. As scheduled, it is likely to spend those funds by the end of the year. 

The real irony is that the Hawaiian state government wants to get waivers from the Obama Care’s legislation so that its exchange’s insurance policies does not have provide all of the many health care coverage requirements mandated by the law. Which raises an interesting question: if Obama Care’s specifications and requirements were so great and would reduce costs, why does Hawaii want to get out of providing those specs and requirements in order to get its costs down? Can we hear the foundation and selling points of Obama Care washing away in a wave of reality?

3) Health and Human Services recently announced the latest signups for Obama Care. Details of the results include the following:

• 4.2 million Americans have signed up for Obama Care insurance policies, up slightly from the 4 million level announced in late February. 
• The exchanges saw a total of 943,000 sign-ups in the month of February, a sign up level that was down from the 1.1 million who enrolled in January.
• HHS said 1.6 million of the enrollees signed up through state-based marketplaces, with 2.6 million in the Federal exchange.
• The overall figure, 4.2 million, is well behind the administration’s target of 7 million enrollees being on board by March 31. 
• Those Americans that have not signed up for individual health insurance plans by then become criminals in the eyes of the Federal government and will subjected to fines, assuming that the IRS can find them and can assess them the fine.
• The current numbers also show an ongoing shortfall for the administration to sign up the younger, healthier consumers needed to offset older, sicker patients and keep the health law afloat.
• The administration originally needed to have 40% of sign-ups to be between the ages of 18 and 34, but the latest figures are well behind that target, reaching only 27% in February.

Besides the bad age mix in the enrollment figures, there are two other major missing pieces of information, as always:

A) How many of those 4.2 million have actually paid for their new insurance policy? It really does not count if they have signed up but not paid. It is like shopping on Amazon and putting items in your virtual shopping cart. It is not really a sales transaction and a benefit to Amazon until those items in the shopping cart are actually run through the virtual cash register. Same thing with Obama Care policies, until the check is mailed, that policy is not in play and not truly a sale. 

The government either does not know how many have actually paid or are ashamed to tell the world how few have paid. In either case, pathetic.

B) How many of those people within the 4.2 million are the unfortunate Americans who had had their existing insurance policy cancelled by Obama Care’s requirements? You really cannot claim you signed somebody up for Obama Care if the reason they signed up for Obama Care is that Obama Care caused them to lose their insurance policy in the first place. Got it? A logic stream that would make Abbott and Costello proud.

4) The legislation is so bad and causing so many Americans to lose their existing policies and access to their favorite doctors and hospitals, that in a purely political move, Obama recently unilaterally decided that these Americans could keep their policies until 2016. Three pieces of insanity with this latest ploy:

• Like the dozens of other unilateral changes to the law, this one was also done without Congressional approval and thus, it is illegal and un-Constitutional.
• Many of these policies have already been cancelled, leaving upwards of six million Americans without health insurance coverage and their cancelled policies are not going to get reinstated regardless of what the president says, the damage is already done and it is widespread.
• This is purely a way to do damage control for Democrats running for office in November, it has nothing to do with the national health care industry or being kind to those Americans who might lose their insurance coverage due to Obama Care, it is a blatant, illegal, and political air cover stunt.

That will do it for now, the first installment in what promises to be a long slog through many Obama Care failures. Unions freaking out as the realize what they signed up to support, Hawaii’s exchange already going bankrupt and looking to cut coverage to cover the ineptness, enrollment numbers that are low with a bad mix and a mystery as to what is really going on under the top line, and more violations of the Constitution for political damage control. How much more comprehensive, negative, and widespread could one piece of legislation be?

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