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 stop talking about Obama Care’s disasters this month with today’s post, 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 fifth update post for this month’s Obama Care disasters. The first post can be accessed at:
1) How many people really did sign up for Obama Care insurance policies and took advantage of its supposed benefits? The Obama administration claims that 8 million Americans received insurance coverage, courtesy of the legislation. But the Heritage Fundaiton peeled back that claim of 8 million to show that this is really a gross number that needs to be adjusted downwards to get a true picture of what really happened:
- While 8 million may have actually signed up for Obama Care insurance policies, reputable sources indicate that only between 80 and 90% of them actually activated their policy by paying some money.
- Thus, if we remove the non-payers, using 85% as a good estimate for the number of enrollees who actually paid, we end up with only about 6.8 million paying Obama Care customers.
- Other research has shown that only about half of Obama Care enrollees were new to having insurance, i.e. they did not have insurance coverage prior to the rollout of Obama Care.
- This means that about the other of enrollees were nothing more than churn in the marketplace, from one existing insurance policy type to another policy type from Obama Care.
- Thus, the actual number of incremental, newly insured Americans, the whole intent of Obama care to begin with, is about 50% of 6.8 million or only about 3.9 million.
- This is less than half of what the administration claimed was its target of 7 million newly insured Americans as a result of the legislation.
- If you believe the supporters of Obama Care when they claim the legislation was supposed to help the 56 million uninsured Americans get insurance coverage, we find that using some simple math that the first wave of Obama Care pure, non-incremental paying enrollees cover less than 7% of the uninsured population.
- Even if we assume that not all of the 56 million would be eligible or approproiate for Obama Care policies, the rate of enrollment so far is still less than 10%, as illustrated by this heritage Foundation graphic:

Since rates for Obama Care policies are likely to go up and in some states go up substantially in 2015, it is doubtful that the next open enrollment period will do much better than the first enrollment period when attention was high and rates were lower.
Pretty pathetic performance given it was years and billions of dollars in the making with widespread media coverage. A detailed analysis of Obama Care’s impacts, both pro and con, can be accessed at:
2) As we have mentioned many times before in this blog and on this topic, we would never want to deny any American access to a doctor or medical professional. However, one of the other negative aspects of Obama Care is that by providing more access to health insurance for what is a disappointing number of enrollees, the legislation never effectively figured out how to get more doctors available to handle this higher work load.
As a result of the legislation and other factors, the country is facing a severe shortage of doctors, especially general practitioner doctors to handle America’s medical needs. Which gets us to a potential piece of Obama Care irony: the good news is that you now have health insurance, the bad news is there are not enough doctors for you to take advantage of your new insurance.
A June 14, 2014 article from USAToday summarized some of these issues quite nicely:
- The country is expected to need 52,000 more primary care physicians by 2025, according to a study by the Robert Graham Center, which does family medicine policy research.
- However, despite Obama Care, Federal funding for teaching hospitals that could train thousands more of these doctors expires in late 2015.
- Population growth will require 33,000 additional physicians, the aging population will require 10,000 additional doctors and Obama Care is expected to increase the number of family doctors needed by more than 8,000, the study says.
- Farzan Bharucha, a health care strategist with consulting firm Kurt Salmon, says the ACA should have focused more on the primary care shortage "because we already knew there was a problem -- and we knew implementation of ACA would potentially make it worse."
- The Obama Care legislation came up far short in this area, providing funding for 600 new primary care residencies.
- So while Obama Care is not the primary driver of our doctor shortage, it certainly is a significant factor contributing to the shortage, a reality that the Obama Care supporters never truly understood and a reality that will eventually affect every American.
However, a recent HHS report “Premium Affordability, Competition, and Choice in the Health Insurance Marketplace, 2014,” shows a much larger-than-expected number of Americans enrolling in the “silver” plans. This could indicate that the exchanges are getting a mix of customers that are older and sicker than what the insurance companies and the Obama administration expected and planned for.
This could mean higher policy prices going forward that may cause many healthier customers to drop their Obama Care policies which would require higher insurance premiums going forward which would force out more customers, etc. = death spiral.
According to David Hogberg of the National Center for Public Policy Research the key indicator to watch for the beginning of the death is to watch how much insurance premiums rise in the coming months. The fact that insurance companies in Arizona, Ohio, Vermont and Washington state have already asked for premium increases anywhere from 12 to 26% could be a precursor to the death spiral, since according to Hogberg: “If we see really high increases like that, there’s going to be a lot of incentive for young and health people who aren’t getting very big subsidies or getting no subsidy at all to drop out of the exchanges.”
Given that no one is denying that the percentage of younger, healthier enrollees is far below what the expectations and need was and we now know that a higher percentage of policies sold were Silver and not Bronze, it will not be surprising that the future betting on Obama Care is not whether or not it survives but rather when will it die from its own weight and ineptness.
4) You cannot go too wrong in life if you listen to the views, opinions, and experiences of smart people than if you listen to the views of politicians. First of all, politicians have been known to lie and usually have a long track record of non-accomplishments beyond their own self-enrichment.
Smart people on the other hand, are creative, good problem solvers, and innovative. That goes many times over for the original developers of Google, a non-entity until recently and now one of the most powerful companies in the world. Given that success, I tend to listen to the founders of Google when the talk.
In a recent CATO Institute interview from July 10, 2014, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page has some pretty damning comments about Obama Care when they were asked, “Can you imagine Google becoming a health company?”
Brin responded: Health is just so heavily regulated, it’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that I think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.
Page responded: I am really excited about the possibility of data also to improve health. But I think that’s what Sergey’s saying. It’s so heavily regulated, it’s a difficult area…I do worry, you know, we kind of regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities.
If two of the most innovative and creative people in the country want nothing to do with health care because of government regulations and heavy handedness, that tells me something and that something is not good.
5) And finally for today and this month’s updates, consider a recent Washington Examiner editorial on Obama Care’s costs and the high likelihood of even higher costs next year:
- The Examiner editorial starts off with that famous false Obama promise that insurance premiums would go down by $2,500 per year for the average family, a reality that never took place.
- The editorial also cites an analysis we have already discussed, an analysis done by the Manhattan Institute which found that individual market insurance premiums have increased by 49% on average in 2014 after the most recent round of Obama Care regulations went into effect compared to prior to the legislation.
- Some of these increases were much worse in some places than others. The average 27-year-old man in Miami, for example, is now pays 59% more this year than in 2013.
- In Philadelphia, that same man is paying 68% more.
- In both Las Vegas and Little Rock, the rates for 27-year-old women more than doubled, and the rates for men of that age more than tripled.
- In North Carolina, rates for 64-year-old men and women nearly tripled as Obama Care took effect.
- In Colorado, a unique state where Obama Care actually did bring down premium rates in 2014, instate insurance companies are now planning to claw recover lost profits, with the result that some customers will face increases as high as 35%.
- Indiana citizens will soon pay, on average, about three times as much ($514 per month) for individual market insurance plans as they paid in 2013 ($174 per month.)
This brings to mind one of Obamacare's most important lessons about government overreach. A simple expansion of Medicaid or a law assisting people who were uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions could likely have insured as many new people as Obamacare without being so unpopular. But Obama grandiosely insisted on the kind of “fundamental transformation” of American health insurance. That's why Obamacare has disrupted the already-insured and made health insurance significantly less affordable for millions of middle-class families.
Higher costs, less choice, less freedom, economic hinderance, more fraud, higher debt, this is the Obama Care legacy. And I am sure it will be the same disastrous legacy that we discuss when we touch on the subject again.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
No comments:
Post a Comment