We have had to devote many posts every month to this fiasco since last August. The fallout from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by Washington just keeps on giving and messing up Americans’ lives. This month is no exception. We will probably need most of this week to cover it all, that is how bad the law is many, many months after it was rolled out in such a disastrous manner last fall.
As with previous months, we will likely stop talking about it this month not because we ran out of material but because it can get so depressing going over the damage the legislation is doing to lives, health, freedom and the economy.
This is our third update post for this month’s Obama Care disasters. The first post can be accessed at:
1) The Washington Examiner ran an article on July 10, 2014 by Philip Klein that discussed the coming rate increases that Obama care policy holders are likely to experience in 2015. Highlights from that article include the following:
- One driver of higher premium costs in 2015 is the fact that Obama Care policies must offer a certain, large set of benefits and services regardless of the specific needs of a specific customer, a set of benefits that is expensive and often unneeded but required by the law.
- The second cost amplifying reason is that insurers are now required to accept anyone who applies, including those with pre-existing conditions, so that their costs go up which means everyone’s premiums eventually must also go up.
- Obama Care also limits the amount that insurers can charge older and sicker patients relative to younger and healthier patients, driving the costs up for the latter group who end up subsidizing the care of older, sicker customers.
- Obama Care will collect over $100 billion in taxes on insurance plans between 2014 and 2022. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the taxes “would be largely passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums for private coverage.”
- A June, 2014 detailed county-level analysis of insurance premiums by Avik Roy and a team at the Manhattan Institute found that, on average, individual market premiums jumped by 49% in 2014 as compared to 2013, likely due to the reasons listed above.
- A PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis of premiums across 18 states in which insurers have submitted filings for next year, found that in 2015, rates would be going up in those states by an average of more than 7%.
- In six of those states, increases are likely to be in the double digits.
- According to eHealth, a website for purchasing medical coverage, the average monthly rate for health insurance premiums in Indiana was $172 in 2013. But by 2015, according the PricewaterhouseCoopers study, the state average will be $514, about three times higher after Obama Care is implemented.
- On top of all of these upward forcing pressures, the only factor keeping the rates from not going higher is the fact is that insurance companies have responded to Obama Care by reducing the choice of doctors and hospitals offered in their plans. This helps cap costs but results in increasingly narrow and inferior medical care and choices.
2) We have seen the ever widening scandal at the Veterans Administration where it appears that the Federal government has been quite inept in providing care to our veterans. The fear, of course, is that the same incompetence and huge expense will occur as Obama Care rolls out and costs us much more with minimal benefit in return.
A recent report out of Great Britain adds more evidence to the argument that governments and politicians are quite incapable of operating a nationwide health system in an effective and efficient manner. Details of their latest nationalized health care scandal includes the following details:
- The Royal College of Surgeons recently issued a report claiming that the British National Health Services (NHS) is denying life-saving operations because of age discrimination in defiance of the law.
- Recently uncovered documents prove for the first time that across large areas of the Britian no patients above the age of 75 are “receiving surgery for breast cancer or routine operations such as gall bladder removal and knee replacements.”
- This should not come a surprise since nine years ago, back in 2005, the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a research report that predicted exactly what this latest report asserts: older citizens could be denied health care services because of a lack of funding combined with their advanced age. NICE concluded that it would just not be economically expedient to provide care for these older (and sicker) citizens.
- Because of budget considerations, the 2005 NICE report suggested that “patients could be denied certain health treatments because of their age.”
3) The saddest part of Obama Care is the reality that some Americans have already died as a result of the legislation. The Heritage Foundation recently reported on a recent fatality caused by Obama Care:
- A Nevada woman with a brain tumor who sued Nevada’s Obama Ccare exchange contractor for delayed coverage died recently as a result of complications from her illness.
- The woman, Linda Rolain, was among 150 Nevadans suing the contractor Xerox for lack of coverage via the Obama Care processes.
- Ms. Rolain’s lawyers issued the following statement as a result of her death: “We are worried that this is the first of many Nevadans who have life-threatening issues that may end up in such tragic circumstances.”
- Rolain was diagnosed with the brain tumor in early 2014 but was unable to receive treatment for her cancer for months after her diagnosis due to enrollment problems with the state’s Obama Care exchange, Nevada Health Link.
- Her husband, Robert Rolain, asserts that his wife’s tumor went from treatable to fatal as they awaited coverage.
- According to Las Vegas insurance broker Pat Casale, who helped Rolain with her enrollment issues, he knows several people who are “in serious need of care” but aren’t receiving it despite the fact that they’ve paid Obama Care insurance premiums: “This poor lady was told in January that she needed immediate attention. Her doctor said if she had begun treatment in March, he might been able to give her quality of care, and she might have lived longer. She had no chance because of the delay.”
The Federal government and the politicians who operate it had billions of dollars and years for the preparation of the program and still could not get it done. As a result, people are dying as they wait for the Obama Care mess to somehow mend itself, a miracle that is not likely to happen anytime soon or at anytime at all.
People are dying, costs are going up, and a clone of Obama Care in England has basically devolved into a death panel medical system. And there is more to come in the next few days, the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.
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