As you will easily see by reading our posts in the past eight months and the posts we have been doing on Obama Care for the past three years, this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever.
As we said yesterday, we will not go into our solution for resolving the problem of ever escalating health care costs this week. You can read and comment on our solution in past posts we have already published. There is so much bad coming out of the legislation every day that this week we are focusing just on the disasters, not our solution.
1) Millcreek, Pennsylvania schools were in the local Pennsylvania media recently relative to the severe financial hardships that Obama Care is putting on the Millcreek school district, and likely other school districts across the country:
- The school district is already facing a $4.4 million deficit before considering Obama Care.
- If the school district does not change its mode of operation, Obama Care will pile another annual half a million dollars of cost on the district’s budget every year.
- Possibly the only solution is to fire dozens of non-teaching employees such as janitorial and food service personnel and outsource those functions to an outside employment agency to avoid further costs from Obama Care.
Remember, Obama and others promised that health care costs would go way down as a result of this legislation. Apparently, health care costs have gone down so much as a result of Obama Care that school districts like Millcreek are looking at a half a million dollar INCREASE in their health care expenses [sarcasm].
2) The Heritage Foundation had a short update piece on its website on March 7, 2014 that illustrates just a small portion of the insanity of Obama Care:
- The first piece of insanity goes back to the time of the original intentions of Obama Care: it was supposed to provide inexpensive health care insurance for EVERY uninsured American. Noble goal, total flop. Heritage reports that the Congressional Budget Office now estimates 31 million Americans will still be left uninsured years after Obama Care is in place.
Thus, one of the primary reasons for Obama Care, the reason that millions of Americans lost their current insurance, lost access to their preferred doctors, lost access to their preferred hospitals and generally had their lives substantially disrupted, will not come close to be successful.
- But to add insult to injury, we now find out that the Obama Care back room operations and logistics do not even have the processes or intention to track their progress in signing up uninsured Americans for health insurance. Recently, an executive with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Gary Cohen, was asked: How many uninsured Americans are signing up for Obama Care? His reply: “That’s not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.”
Unbelievable. One of the primary selling points for President Obama was that Obama Care would insure the uninsured. And now the Administration doesn’t even know whether the people signing up had insurance to begin with. The Washington Post reports:
The online application, used by most people to enroll, asks whether people want to apply for coverage but does not give them a place to indicate whether they have insurance now or have had it in the past. As a result, HHS analysts have no way of assessing how many of the online enrollees were uninsured in the past.
How can you know where you are going and how well you are doing against your primary objective if you do not track your progress against your primary goal? You cannot make up this type of incompetence.
3) A Washington examiner article by Michelle Malkin on March 7, 2014 reported on the effort by Senate Democrats to repeal a tax that they purposely included in the Obama Care legislation, the so-called medical device tax. The device tax was put into effect to make the Obama Care business case look good by providing revenue to offset the costs invoked by the legislation.
But the writers of Obama Care had very little knowledge of how business, economics, and reality works. Take profits away from a business, in this case by taxing that business, and they will have less money to hire employees, retain employees, invest in research and development, and have less flexibility to grow their business. It is that simple, but obviously beyond the grasp of Democrats in Congress.
That is why last March, with the support of several key Democrats, the Senate voted to repeal the Obama Care medical device tax that all Democrats had voted to put in the legislation to begin with. They got cold feet when businesses and voters in their home states raised the reality of how devastating the tax would be to their businesses and their employees' lives.
But the vote never got enacted into law. As a result, device makers have cut back on research and development, cut back on hiring, and moved some manufacturing to cheaper overseas facilities. Thus, long term, with less research and development, the ability of these businesses to grow by introducing new products and technologies into the marketplace will be lowered.
Also, according to the medical device manufacturers industry group AdvaMed, the punitive tax has forced companies to lay off or avoid hiring at least 33,000 workers over the past year. This reality proves that recent statements by Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration person responsible for implementing Obama Care, and who declared that Obama Care had no negative impact on jobs, is proven again to be a lie and a deception. This time in the medical device industry.
4) The Malkin Examiner article also reviewed the numerous, and illegal, changes the Obama administration has made to the law without staying within the confines of the Constitution, making all of these changes illegal, void, and probably impeachable offenses under our rules of law:
- Allowing insurers for two extra years to continue selling plans that otherwise would have been banned by the Obama Care legislation.
- Extending the open enrollment period for 2015 from November 2014 to February 2015, a months longer than originally scheduled.
- Relaxing eligibility requirements for insurers to qualify for financial help under a three-year program intended to protect insurers' costs of complying with Obama Care mandates.
- Exempting labor unions, universities and other self-insured employers from paying a fee.
- Allowing medium-sized employers an extra year to comply with the Obama Care mandate to offer insurance to all full-time workers and reduced the percentage of workers that large companies are required to cover.
- In November 2010, the administration began issuing thousands of waivers to unions, cronies, businesses and organizations that offered affordable health insurance or prescription drug coverage with limited benefits outlawed by Obama Care. Many of these exemptions went to the political allies of of the Washington political class.
- In April 2011, Obama signed a law repealing his own onerous $22 billion Obama Care 1099 tax-compliance mandate that would have destroyed small businesses inundated with pointless paperwork.
- In December, 2013 and January, 2014, Obama, Sebelius, and this administration got really busy by delaying premium payment deadlines, delaying high-risk insurance pool cancellations, delaying equal coverage mandates that force companies to drop health benefits rewards for top executives, and delaying onerous "meaningful use" mandates on health providers grappling with Obama Care's disastrous top-down electronic medical records rules.
She is probably not too far off in her assessment. How bad is a piece of legislation when the makers and supporters of that legislation have had to make so many changes that the current bastardized version of the legislation is unrecognizable from the original legislation? Have we gotten to a point where it would be better to just start over:
Not because millions of Americans have lost insurance coverage,
Not because millions of Americans have lost access to their preferred doctors and hospitals,
Not because the law will add massive amounts of debt to the national debt,
Not because people’s lives have been endangered by the legislation,
Not because identity theft will make millions of Americans lives a nightmare,
Not because identity theft will make millions of Americans lives a nightmare,
Not because the legislation has no chance of success because it did not attack the root causes of our high health care costs,
Not because the law is killing jobs creation and the economy,
But simply because the legislation has changed more than it has remained unchanged relative to the original legislation? More disasters tomorrow.
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www.loathemygovernment.com
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