October, 2014 Part 2 - The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: 30 Million More Americans To Lose Coverage, Higher Costs, Lower Quality, and More

Over the past few years, but especially over the past fourteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:

• It has and will continue to increase the national debt.
• It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now.
• It has restricted overall economic growth.
• It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways.
• It has reduced the job growth rate in this country.
• It has turned many full time workers into part time workers or into unemployed workers.
• It has generally increased the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed.
• The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people.
• The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the negative ramifications of the law.
• It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
• It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms.
• It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law.
• It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate any kind of successful program.
• It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves.
• It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.

I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. To see what disasters have popped up over just the past month or so, read on:

1) Daniel Mitchell, writing for the Townhall website on October 8, 2014, reviewed some Obama Care analyses that were done by the Cato Institute’s Mike Tanner. 

Here is what Mr. Tanner had to say about Obama Care and the promise you could keep your existing health insurance plan:

…roughly 6 million Americans were kicked off their insurance because their plans failed to offer a lengthy-enough maternity stay, didn’t provide sufficient drug and alcohol rehabilitation benefits or otherwise fell short of the insurance that federal bureaucrats thought that they should have. …on average, ObamaCare plans were worse than the plans they replaced, in terms of both providers covered and cost-sharing. A new wave of cancellations is about to begin as well. …In several states, insurers have dropped plans that they offered on the exchanges or even withdrawn from the market altogether. And if that was not bad enough, Americans with employer-based insurance may find out their insurance has to be changed starting next year.

So we pay more, get less, deal with lots of uncertainty, and still millions of Americans could not keep their original plans despite the Presidential promise and/or deception.

What about saving consumers money:

If judged against President Obama’s promise that health-care reform would save us all at least $2,500 through lower premiums, ObamaCare deserves an F. …In states where the individual market was not already dysfunctional, there were significant premium increases.

Another Presidential lie/deception.

What about the impact on taxpayers?

This summer the Congressional Budget Office announced that it had given up trying to score the cost of ObamaCare, given the frequency with which the administration was making unilateral changes to the law. …roughly 85 percent of those enrolled through exchanges are receiving subsidies, higher than predicted. Overall, the best estimates suggest the law will cost $2.63 trillion over the next 10 years. That will be paid for by $1.38 trillion in new taxes and at least $1.25 trillion in additional debt.

Over another trillion dollars in debt for the Federal government, an additional debt load of almost $11,000 for every U.S. household.

What about the impact on jobs?

…surveys from Federal Reserve Banks in New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta confirmed that businesses are cutting employment and shifting workers to part-time positions because of ObamaCare. According to the New York Fed, 21 percent of manufacturers and 17 percent of service companies have reduced the size of their workforce because of the law. In addition, roughly 20 percent of both manufacturers and service companies said that they have shifted workers from full- to part-time jobs.The overall impact on employment could be as high as two million workers.

So, according to reputable and often government sources, Obama Care will stifle job growth, add over a trillion dollars to the national debt, generally raise insurance premiums while reducing the quality of care, and cause millions of Americans to lose access to insurance policies that they were perfectly happy to have for their specific needs.

Oh, by the way, none of these analyses include the fact that the Obama administration is likely to offer billions and billions of dollars in bailout money, really bribes, to insurance companies that partake in the Obama Care program. How can anyone argue this is not the worse piece of Federal legislation ever passed?

2) Although the Obama administration promised, and failed miserably, at being the most transparent administration ever, that has not stopped it from taking its love of secrecy, lack of transparency, and stealth over to the Obama Care website exchanges. According to an October 7, 2014 New York Times piece written by Margot Sanger-Katz, the new head of the www.healthcare.gov effort, Kevin Counihan is promising that the next round of Obama Care signups will be a tremendous improvement over the fiasco that occurred last fall.

In an interview with Alex Wayne of Bloomberg News, Mr. Counihan said his objective was to create a consumer experience so satisfying that it would result in “raving fans” for the insurance shopping site. Compared to last year’s botched rollout, he has a pretty low bar to get over for this kind of experience.

But will it really be so satisfying given the reality that the so-called improved experience and website won’t have any tools to allow consumers to see which doctors and hospitals are covered by individual insurance plans? Mr. Counihan explicitly told Bloomberg that HealthCare.gov would not change to allow consumers to comparison shop on insurance plan networks.

How is that major shortfall going to get people “raving” about the experience? Are we just supposed to blindly choose a plan and hope that it has good doctors and hospitals and that there is a broad enough selection to satisfy our family’s needs? 

When you buy a new car, you get to test the engine, sit in the seats, choose your color, see what the maintenance plans are ahead of buying, and compare that information to other dealers, that is a good consumer experience. If the government was running a car showroom, you would see the price and the options but nothing else, a totally unsatisfactory buying experience. But to expect anything more out of Obama Care would be folly.

3) While an estimated 5-6 million Americans lost access to their preferred individual health insurance policies as a result of the first wave of Obama care tenets, you might not have seen the whole carnage yet. According to an October 4, 2014 NewsMax article that interviewed health policy expert Betsy McCaughey:

• 30 million more Americans could lose their current health care coverage due to the next wave of Obama Care rules and regulations.
• These 30 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored healthcare at the end of the year because those plans will not meet the requirements of Obamacare: "Most people still get their health insurance through an employer. Thirty million people could lose their on-the-job coverage this year and be forced onto one of those exchanges."
• The reasons these policies are being killed is: "The plans that the employers bought in the small-group market are suddenly no longer eligible — and employers are going to be stuck with going to the very expensive Obama Care one-size-fits-all requirement or saying to their employees, 'I am sorry, you will have to get it somewhere else.'
• Under the Obama Care legislation, many small companies with fewer than 50 employees have insurance plans that are set to expire this year. However, as the plans expire, businesses will either be required to provide plans that meet Obama Care's long list of requirements, making them more expensive, or they can drop coverage, forcing employees to obtain coverage on their own.
• But because those companies with fewer than 50 workers are most likely to drop coverage rather than pay the higher costs due to the Obama Care requirements, millions of Americans will most likely get "a very raw deal" when those policies expire at the end of the year, according to McCaughey: "Rates will go up for quite a few people." 

Great, so if you thought six million Americans losing their preferred health care insurance plans was a tragedy, what would you call 30 million more Americans who work for small businesses losing their health insurance? All this grief, aggravation and stress for a piece of legislation that has no chance of ever being successful along any dimension of measurement. Pitiful.

That will do it for today’s disasters. Higher costs, worst quality, massive disruption of peoples’ lives, the song carries on but never changes, And worst yet, we still have more Obama Care disasters to cover tomorrow.

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