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.
1) Besides the big problem Obama Care is facing that we discussed yesterday, namely that a court ruling may have gutted the main thrust of the legislation which was to give out subsidies to low income Americans to purchase overpriced and under featured Obama Care insurance policies, the logistics and operations of the entire effort continues to be a disaster.
The General Accountability Office of the Federal government recently announced that it had completed a sting operation on the sign up process of the Obama Care process. What they found was very discouraging, but not surprising, given how poorly every other aspect of failed to meet even minimal standards of quality:
- Despite using totally fake ids, undercover GAO investigators were able to obtain taxpayer-subsidized health care coverage in 11 of 12 attempts, according to Associated Press reporting.
- This latest disgrace and dysfunction appears focused on Obama Care call centers that handle applications from those people who were unable able to enroll in the system via online the online exchanges.
- Members of Congress had some correct if cynical, remarks about non-existent people being able to get enrolled in Obama Care policies. Congressman Dave Camp said the GAO finding is just more proof that Obama Care is rife with “incompetence, waste and the potential for fraud.” Senator Orrin Hatch said: “Obama Care is working really well — for those who don’t exist.”
2) Not surprisingly, more states are finding out that the premiums likely to be paid next year on Obama Care policies will be much higher than today’s premiums. Kaiser Health News recently did a story on what is going on in Florida relative to the latest cost increase news. Highlights of their report include the following:
- The top executive of Florida Blue, the state’s largest health insurance carrier, recently went public with the announcement that his Obama Care customers will see an increase in their policy costs in 2015.
- Apparently, the company, which picked up the most Obama Care enrollees in the state, were stuck with a larger percentage of older and sicker patients than they expected.
- In addition to not getting enough younger and healthy enrollees, the company ended up paying more than expected for people seeking more expensive health services: “We will be under tremendous financial pressure initially given the age, risk profile and high utilization of the new membership. It is far from clear that large enrollment in the marketplace is a financially beneficial place to be.”
- In other words, expect your Obama Care policy premiums to go up next year because we are getting killed financially by those same policies.
- Florida Blue has not yet gone public with its 2015 rate increases, that information will be made available in a few weeks but the news does not sound good for none or minimal rate hikes.
- About 23% of those who bought Obama Care policies from Florida Blue this year were in the 18-to-34 age category, far below the national rate of 28% and farther below the 40% threshold that the Federal government said was needed for the entire Obama Care process to be viable.
3) Given how poorly every aspect of Obama Care has unfolded so far, is there any hope that it will work itself out for the greater good over the next decade or so? If you believe the latest forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, the answer to that question is not good.
Remember, one of the utmost, primary goals of Obama Care was to get affordable health insurance coverage for every American. That is why it is officially called the “Affordable Healthcare Act.” But that primary goal will not be attained, even ten years from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office‘s April forecast of what will happen to enrollment in health care plans from 2015 to 2024:
- By 2024, about 31 million Americans will still remain uninsured.
- Starting with an estimate that 56 million Americans did not have health insurance coverage prior to Obama Care, that number will be reduced by 25 million people who will purchase Obama care coverage in the exchanges in the next ten years.
- 13 million more Americans will gain health insurance coverage coverage through the dysfunctional Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program as a result of Obama Care.
- 7 million Americans will lose health insurance coverage from their employees as a result of Obama Care.
- 5 million fewer Americans will carry individual coverage directly from an insurer.
- Add all of these additions and subtractions up, account for rounding, and we find that the official CBO estimate forecasts 31 million Americans will still be uninsured in 2024.
It is an amazing and stupefying cost and yet, despite the high cost, more than half of today’s uninsured Americans are still uninsured ten years from now. Failure is the only way to describe such a high cost to meet less than half of the overall and primary goal of the entire Obama Care operation. There has to be a simpler, more effective way.
4) We have often made the case in past Obama Care posts that the legislation, as it is written, hinders economic and employment growth in so many ways. That reality was reinforced recently n a Heritage Foundation interview with Billie Baggett of IHT Staffing, a temp agency located in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Under financial and work hour pressure to comply with the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Baggett claims many South Carolina businesses are cutting back by hiring more part-time rather than full time employees. He points out that while unemployment levels have dropped, to pre-recession levels at 6.1% nationally, his staffing agency work in South Carolina shows that this number may be skewed. Many employees have returned to work, but in new part time positions.
He blames Obama Care for the shrinking work week and the growth in part time vs. full time hiring: “I would say 90% of our employers, businesses today, are hiring part-time as opposed to full-time, because of the Affordable Healthcare Act.”
A primary provision of the 2009 law, the employer mandate, requires all business with more than 50 workers to provide healthcare benefits to full-time employees. The law defines a full time employee as any employee who works more than 30 hours a week. While the Obama administration has put off this employer mandate until 2015, Baggett believes that it still discourages business from filling full time posts: “It’s not something a corporation wants to do.”
James Sherk, a senior economic analyst at The Heritage Foundation, agrees and believes that the Obama Care employer mandate has already affected the job market, the economy, and predicts additional downsides in the future: “Obama Care will further reduce hours by increasing the costs of hiring full-time employees while discouraging workers from working full-time. Fewer work hours will impede income mobility for low-wage workers.”
That will do it for today. More of the same for those affected already by Obama Care: faulty and criminal fraud-ready sign up processes, likely insurance premium cost increases in Florida, failure to reach fully insurance status in ten years despite an astronomical cost of failing to do so, and the continuing proof that Obama Care is stifling earnings, work hours, and the economy.
And we still have a lot more disasters to cover in this month’s Obama Care disaster updates.
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