Today’s disasters start now:
1) Theoretically, if you do not have health insurance coverage by the end of this month, you are supposed to pay a fine for being so negligent of Obama Care’s tenets and PR campaign. As we discussed earlier this week, this is really a shadow/faux deadline since the President recently, unilaterally, and un-Constitutionally decided that if you have any kind of self-determined “hardship” you can exempt yourself from this requirement.
This is a new concept in government, self exempting yourself from a Federal law without proof. When we first reviewed this idiotic action by the President, we fantazied of exempting ourselves from other Federal laws, specifically the law that requires me to pay Federal income tax. I doubt the President would allow me to flaunt that law even though he is flaunting his own pet piece of legislation and the tenets it laid down.
However, the penalty is still on the books and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that from 2015 to 2024, the mandate penalty, which the Supreme Court ruled is essentially a tax, could cost Americans upwards of $51 billion. The irony and hypocrisy here is another broken promise/lie that came directly from the President’s mouth: the Obama Care legislation promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. Another promise broken because you can bet that the vast majority of people that end up paying this penalty, or tax, will come from the middle class and lower class.
Adding insult to injury, this administration thinks we are too stupid to realize this is another Federal tax. In pure Orwellian, and “1984” misspeak, the administration does not call this a tax, they call it the “shared responsibility payment.” If it smells like a tax, the Supreme Court calls it a tax, if it hurts to pay it like a tax, it is still a tax.
2) How many times over the past three years did the President utter these words or similar words:
“No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.”
This turned out to be one of the President’s biggest lies or deceptions. Millions of Americans have lost access to their current and preferred health insurance policies, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals, all as a result of Obama Care. White House and other government documents prove that this administration and the writers of the legislation knew that tens of millions of Americans would lose access to their current health insurance and medical situations years ago but said nothing. Or even worse, lied about the reality.
But in the second example of showing how stupid this administration thinks we are, one of their favorite press representatives, Dan Pfeiffer, was recently on Meet the Press where he insisted that Obama Care was not causing millions of Americans to lose access to their doctors. It was the health insurance companies that were causing the lost access.
Come oneMr. Pfeiffer, never in the history of the country have millions of Americans lost access to their preferred doctors in such a short time. Is it just a coincidence that the first time happened as Obama Care rolled out and that Obama Care had nothing to do with it?
Please, do not insult our intelligence with such idiocy. If you are going to lie, at least make it believable whether it is lying about lost doctor access or telling us a tax is not a tax. Your lack of creativity in you PR deceptions are boring and insulting to us.
3) On March 13, 2014, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the House of Representatives Ways and Means committee that nobody knows how many Obama Care enrollees have actually paid their Obama Care health insurance premium bills. Yes, in another epic screw up by the people that put the information systems specs together for Obama Care, no one seemed to think that actually counting the number of people that actually sign up for and pay forObama Care policies was important.
But as always, Kathleen Sebelius, the point person in this administration on operationalizing Obama Care had a lame excuse: “People are buying a product in the private market. As soon as we have accurate information, we will give it to you. But we do not currently have information about how many people have paid.”
Unbelievable that they do not have any way to count how successful or unsuccessful they are. As we discussed previously, can you imagine the Chairman of Amazon going to his Board of Directors and telling them that he knows how many people put products in their Amazon virtual shopping cart but he has no idea how many of those items in the shopping cart were actually paid for. He would be fired on the spot for incompetence.
The administration does think it knows that 4.2 million Americans have signed up for Obama Care insurance policies through the health insurance exchanges. But they do not know 1) how many of them were previously uninsured, 2) how many of them were younger and healthier, a requirement for the Obama Care financial model to work, and 3) we now know they have no clue how many have actually paid for their Obama Care policies. These are basic data collection processes that should have been primary specs in the website development.
The bad news for the administration and the legislation is that a recent Mckinsey survey found out three things:
- The percentage of people signing up for Obama Care policies that are younger and likely healthier (27%) is substantially below the threshold (40%) the administration says it needs for the legislation to be financially viable = bad news.
- Of people signing up for Obama Care policies in the survey, only 27% of them were previously uninsured which implies that Obama Care is doing a bad job of hitting its target market (the previously uninsured) = bad news
- The percentage of people in the survey who said they signed up for Obama Care policies AND were previously uninsured (27%) AND have paid for those policies was 13%, implying that less than half of those that signed up for Obama Care insurance policies actually followed through and actually paid for them = bad news.
This puts the real number of Obama Care insured Americans not at 4.2 million or so but closer to about 2 million or so, far short of their 7 million goal by March 31, 2014.
5) And the McKinsey estimates might indeed be true, based on some early real life experiences of a major health care insurer. Kentucky base Humana insurance has indicated that it will ask for a payment of $450 million out of the Obama Care insurer back up fund to cover losses it anticipates on Obama Care policy holders.
It seems that Humana is already realizing that the Obama Care effort is severely missing its target mix of customers, not providing enough younger, healthier customers to offset the higher percentage of generally older and sicker customers coming across from the Obama Care health exchanges.
Thus, it looks like McKinsey is right on this point and if they are right on the other points, Obama Care is not hitting its target market, its target enrollment estimate, and its target mix. In baseball that’s three strikes….and you’re out.
And we are out for today. More disasters to review, at least through tomorrow.
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