We have been running half a dozen Oabma Care failure posts or so every month since last August, that is how bad this law is turning out to be. The first post in this series did a thorough overview of all the problems along with an in-depth look at why it was doomed to failure from Day One. That post can be accessed at:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html
Today's discussion is centered on a fantastic piece of journalism that recently was done by the Heritage Foundation. They took many of the disasters we have discussed extensively in this blog and put the reality and information into graphs and pictures to make the situation easier to visualize and understand. Below are a dozen or so graphs and pictures from the Heritage Foundation along with some of their commentary and some of ours mixed in
I am pretty sure that after reviewing and understanding these graphs and pictures on what Obama Care is doing to the country and how it is already a failure, you will understand why it has to be repealed and replaced with something that actually attacks the root causes of our high health care costs. The Obama Care approach has nothing to do with solutions to that problem and everything to do with creating another needless Federal bureaucracy that has little chance of being efficient or effecitve.
The orignal Internet post where Hertiage published its findings can be accessed at:
http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2014/obamacare-in-pictures-spring-2014/obamacare-in-pictures-slide-14
Note: double click on any of the graphs below for a larger view.
1) According to analysis done by the Heritage Foundation, which reached conclusions similar to other analyses by other organizations, 27 year old Americans are much more likely to be paying more for health insurance premiums as a result of Obama Care vs. how the world was prior to Obama Care.
If you are a 27 year old American looking for health insurance coverage, in about 90% of the states you will pay more now for insurance premiums than you would have if Obama Care did not exist. This runs counter to the whole promise of Obama Care which was to reduce the cost of health insurance and insurance premiums in this country.
But this should not be a surprise since the financial structure of Obama Care tries to force an intergenerational transfer of wealth from younger, healthier Americans to older, sicker Americans. That was the strategy from Day One so it is not a surprise that some young Americans could end paying more than double for insurance premiums what they would have paid in a non-Obama Care world.
2) While not as bad as for 27 year olds, 50 year old Americans in the individual health insurance market will also end up paying more for health insurance premiums in an Obama Care world than prior to the legislation, with the exception of five or six states. Many 50 year old Americans could see their insurance premiums go up by over 50%.
3) Not only will the insurance policy premiums be generally much higher for Obama Care policy holders, as the previous two points show, but the cost of the average annual deductible cost will also be much higher relative to employer sponsored insurance deductibles. In many cases, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher. Thus, after all of the hype, all of the angst, and all of the billions and billions of dollars spent on Obama Care, it cannot not even come close to matching what is already present in employer insurance market. Pathetic performance.
4) History shows that the best way for prices to optimized to the advantage of consumers in any marketplace is for there to be robust competition in those marketplaces. That history lesson must have been lost on Obama Care's developers since in more than half of the counties in the country, there is either only one Obama Care insurance carrier available (35%) or only two carriers available (17%). No way prices will be driven down with such meager competition serving the Obama Care exchanges.
5) In March, 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ten year net cost of the Obama Care legislation would be $898 billion. Less than four years later, as the disasters unfolded, the same organization estimating the current ten year window of Obama Care net costs found that their intital cost estimate was less than half of what their current cost estimate was. I dread to see how high the cost estimates will be in another four years at this rate.
6) Supporters of Obama Care like to think that their legislation at least got more people covered via Mediciad. That might be true to some extent but at what price? Using Congressional Budget office information, Heritage calculated how much more Obama Care would cost the citizens of each state relative to increased Medicaid costs.
Overall, the country will pay almost $42 billion more for Obama Care induced Medicaid costs or about $364 for every U.S. household. Some states such as California, Illinois, New York, and Arizona will see per household Medicaid charges that are orders of magnitude higher than the natinal average. All for a piece of legislation that was supposed to reduce health care costs, not increase them by billions of dollars.
7) Despite the increased Mediciad costs and the doubling of the costs forecasted to implement Obama Care to $2 TRILLION by the Congressional Budget Office, in ten years there will still be a whopping 31 million Americans that do not have health insurance coverage. Only 26 million Americans are forecasted to have picked up coverage, so in ten years the legislation would not even be half way to its stated, overarching goal, getting health insurance coverage for everyone.
Even worse, simple math shows that if this forecast is accurate, it would have cost the country at least $2 TRILLION to get healh care insurance coverage for 25 million people. This computes out to a whopping $80,000 cost to get those 25 million covered! $80,000 for each person. You cannot run a business or a government when you pay so much and get so little for each customer.
Additionally, if I read the above graph correctly on the $2 TRILLION, that number does not apparently include all of the billions of dollars that have been spent up front to set up this monstrosity nor does it include the ongoing costs of operating it. The $2 TRILLION estimate appears to only encompass the increased Medicaid costs and the Federal subsidies. Thus, the $80,000 per person cost we just calculated is probably way too low, given that these other expenses are not figured into the calculation.
8) Remember when the President stated that during his Presidency no American earning less than $250,000 would pay more in taxes while he was in office? Well, another promise (or another Presidential lie) broken since according to the Congressional Budget Office, almost 70% of those that are likley to pay the Obama Care individual mandate tax earn less than about $46,000 a year and 10% of that almost 70% actually live below the poverty line. So much for the $250,000 threshold.
9) Many times we have pointed out, and no one who supports the Obama Care has denied this reality, that the legislation intentionally reduced future Medicare expenses (by over $700 billion) and switched those expenses to the Obama Care business case and financial views to make it more appealing. However, if these reductions actually happen, an analysis from the Medicare Trustees shows that by not inititating true reductions in health care costs, Obama Care's Medicare budget reduction plans will cause upwards of 40% of hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies to operate at a financial loss in the coming decades.
This financial squeeze in the absence of real and effective health care industry reform will either cause these facilities to shut down or stop taking on Medicare patients. In either case, this Obama Care strategy will cause there to eventually be a new health care crisis, this one centered on the fact there are not enough health care professionals available to service the Medicare population.
10) So far, Obama Care has caused between 5 and 6 million Americans, who had gotten their health insurance coverage via the individual, non-employer market, to lose access to their preferred insurance plans, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals. However, the real tsunami of disruption will come when the delayed provisions of Obama Care hit employers' health insurance plans.
A recent survey of employers found that a whopping 92% of them expected changes to be done to their companies' health insurance plans, with almost half of them expecting substantial changes. Thus, in a year from now, that 5 to 6 million Americans who lost their insruance coverage might look like a rounding error when the employer operated insruance plans get the once over from Obama Care.
11) Supporters of Obama Care like to assume that when Medicare and Social Security were launched, there were operational problems with them also and that somehow, miraculously Obama Care will work itself out over time just like Social Security and Medicare. There are a few fallacies with this reasoning:
- Over time, the original cost projections for both Social Security and Medicare exploded far beyond the original estimates, so much so that just these two Federal government programs threaten the financial integirty and viability of the entire country. Thus, comparing Obama Care to these two bloated and inefficient programs is probably not a good idea, especially since the expected Obama Care costs have more than doubled in just four years.
- Social Security and Medicare were launched with bipartisan Congressional support and support among the country's citizen's. Obama Care was launched with only Demcoratic support, no Republicans signed on to this lousy piece of legislation and as the following chart shows, the majority of citizens never supported Obama Care in the first place, contrary to the other two massive programs, programs that are failing anyway despite bipartisan Congressional support and popular citizen support.
12) And finally back to the lie of the year, the President stating over and over through the years that if you liked your current health care policy you could keep it. The following chart from the Associated Press gives a state by state breakdown of the number of Americans that indeed did lose access to their current and preferred insurance plans, despite the President's assertion.
The Associated Press analysis and map show that 4.7 million Americans lost access to their insurance policy. However, that estimate does not include every state because informaiton was not available for every state. Thus, you can rest assured that the 4.7 million is off by quite a bit, especially since that figure did not include high population states like Texas and Ohio.
If we ratio the number of people living in Texas to the number of people living in California and then use that ratio to get a very rough estimate of how many people lost access ot the policies in Texas based on the 1.1 million who lost access in California, we can easily support a Texas estimate of over 700,000 people who lost their insurance coverage in Texas. Thus, it is not to hard to see that upwards of 6 million Americans across the country have already lost access to insurance policies that they were happy to pay for and carry.
That will do it for today. The unfolding disasters of Obama Care in pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these Obama Care "pictures" are worth $2 TRILLION and millions of newly uninsured Americans as a result of a piece of legislation that is doomed to failure today and ten years from today.
More disaster reviews for Obama Care tomorrow.
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