On a regular basis since August, 2013, we have had to dedicate multiple posts every month to this insipid piece of legislation, the worst piece of legislation ever written and enacted by Washington. It is a piece of legislation that never understood the true root causes of our ever escalating health care costs and thus, never had a shot of actually reining in those costs.
Instead, we ended up with a Rube Goldberg-like health insurance contraption that has failed at every opportunity and has done nothing to get health care costs under control. In fact, if anything, the law has resulted in higher costs of monthly insurance premiums, higher costs of deductibles, and a worsening of quality when it comes to health care.
The dozens and dozens of previous posts on this subject can be accessed by typing “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. The latest disasters are listed below:
1) The Conservative Tribune website recently revisited the claim made by Sarah Palin a few years back that part of the Obama Care legislation included the concept of so-called “death panels,” a group of appointed people who would decide whether or not sickly Americans would receive medical care or be allowed to die since providing that care might be too expensive.
Palin was immediately mocked and ridiculed by those who supported Obama Care who claimed there was no such provision for death panels in the legislation. But recent news reports indicate that Medicare is seriously considering reimbursing doctors enrolled in the Medicare program for “end-of-life consultations,” which some people are saying is a way to encourage sick patients to reject high priced medical treatments that could prolong their life. The news reports indicate that the billing codes for these consultations have already been put into the Medicare billing process.
Compare this development to what Palin claimed was going to happen as a result of Obama Care:
“Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding. It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and its purpose all along has been to ‘keep costs down’ by actually denying care via price controls and typically inefficient bureaucracy. This subjective rationing of care is what I was writing about in that first post.”
When is an end-of-life consultation just another name for a death panel? Seems like they are getting very close in name and practice when Medicare has billing codes for end of life discussions and there is a formal panel of bureaucrats required by the legislation.
2) Reuters recently reported that another Federal government website created under Obama Care is suffering the same major problems that the flawed Federal health care exchange went through last fall. This latest website, the Open Payments website, has been plagued with delays, data problems and other major issues as the deadline to take it live gets nearer.
This website effort was created to create visibility and transparency on the financial relationships between doctors and pharmaceutical companies as well as medical device manufacturers. It is supposed to include detailed information about drug company payments made by doctors as well as the value of gifts and services given by drug makers. In this way a person would be able to find out whether the treatment and medicine being recommended by a doctor may have been as a result of favors that doctor had received from a drug company.
Although the Feds were hoping to take the website live by September 30, 2014, its owners had to shut its private use down for a week and half in early August because of bugs and problems. The scheduled deployment of the site is already a year behind schedule and some involved with it want its rollout delayed at least another six months.
This is a nonevent in most Americans’ lives. I doubt that many people are going to seek out this type of information online before accepting their doctor’s medical treatment recommendations. I include it here as more evidence that the Federal government in general, and the Obama administration in particular, are totally clueless and inept when it comes to managing simple website processes and development.
Every time they try to build an online process in the health care arena, they screw it up royally. If they cannot be trusted to build simple websites, they cannot be trusted with our medical and health care issues, a fact that the whole Obama Care fiasco has proven time and time again. This is just another example of their incompetence.
3) One of the big promises of Obama Care is that when more Americans had health insurance, visits to emergency rooms across the country would decrease and help reduce the one of the drivers to ever higher health care costs in this country, heavy emergency room visits. Almost a year after the law really started to take effect, this is most likely another broken promise of the legislation, at least in southern California.
According to a recent article in the Orange County (California) Register newspaper:
- Hospitals both in Orange County, and nationwide, are experiencing high to moderate increases in emergency room visits over the past year of so.
- Many of these hospitals are actually pointing to the millions of people who are newly insured under Obama as the driver of higher visits, the exact opposite effect that Obama Care supporters claimed would happen.
- In a recent opinion survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians, nearly half of emergency room doctors surveyed said they had seen a rise in emergency visits since the beginning of the year, and a whopping 86% expected visits to increase into the future: “When I speak with other emergency physicians, it seems as if volume has increased faster since the Affordable Care Act than in the past,” said Mark Reiter, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, who works at St. Thomas Rutherford Hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
- Although some hospital emergency rooms have not seen any noticeable increases in visits, the overall trend in emergency room visits is upward.
- Since an emergency room visit costs about $580 more, on average, than the same treatment administered in a doctor’s office, the overall cost of medical and health care in this country will continue to go up with increased emergency room visits being a driver.
- Across Orange County, the emergency room patient load has risen by an average of 4.4% since January, according to data provided by the county’s Emergency Medical Services agency. January was when the rollout of Obama Care policies was getting some momentum and market impacts.
- The impact at some hospitals in the county have been much heavier with visits to the emergency room at UC Irvine Medical Center up by 10.9% in July from a year earlier.
But given his track record of deceptions and other fallacies, should we expect anything else?
4) One last Obama Care disaster for today, a disaster that is quite unrelated to the health and medical implications of Obama Care but one that speaks of the ineptness and general insanity of the whole process. According to a recent article by the Independent Journal Review, written by Jennifer Van Laar, a high ranking former security chief in charge of Obama Care cyber security is going to jail, having been convicted of several child pornography charges, after a yearlong investigation by the FBI.
The New York Daily News: reported that: “Timothy DeFoggi, who had been the lead IT specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services, was found guilty Tuesday for accessing and viewing child porn, and discussing his fantasies — which included the rape and murder of children — on message boards. [He] was found guilty of engaging in a child exploitation enterprise, conspiracy to advertise and distribute child pornography and accessing a computer with intent to view child pornography.”
He was formerly an employee with top clearance in the Health and Human Services department up until January 2014, though he was charged and held without bail in May 2013. Despite his top clearance in the Federal government, he was caught by an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security in a major bust of a childhood pornography ring leading to the arrest of 71 individuals. Unbelievable that someone like this could be cleared to work on cyber security and protecting the personal information of millions of Americans while also being a pervert of the first degree.
I am not inferring that everyone who worked on Obama Care is of this ilk, I am pretty sure that the overwhelming number of Federal and contract employees are not like this. But it is just another sad chapter in a sad piece of legislation that someone of this importance and statue was such a low life in reality. But low expectations are something that we should expect from Obama Care, the worst piece of Washington legislation ever enacted.
More disasters to come over the following few days.
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