- 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.
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/10/october-2014-part-1-unfolding-disaster.html
1) On about the one year anniversary of the disastrous rollout of Obama Care in 2013, Michael Tanner, writing for the Cato Institute on September 28, 2014 gave his expert opinion and grade on how the legislation has worked out in different categories. Not surprisingly, he gave it an overall grade of F based on the following analyses and realities:
- Earlier this October, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services director Marilyn Tavenner testified in front of Congress that about 7.3 million people actually signed up and paid for insurance for insurance through the Obama Care exchanges, down about 10% from the from early estimates of 8.1 million.
- The bigger question that we have already answered with data available to us how many of those were actually INCREMENTAL Americans who did not have health insurance prior to Obama Care. Our estimates but that real number at only about a one or two million truly pure, incrementally insured people as a result of billions of dollars spent on Obama Care.
- Mr. Tanner takes a slightly different approach to ours and says the best estimates suggest that roughly 8 million people gained insurance under Obama Care, but roughly half of those were enrolled in Medicaid (outside of the exchanges), a number we did not have data for.
- He does point out that if this is true and one of the major objectives Of Obama Care was getting uninsured Americans insured, that still leaves over 40 million Americans without health care insurance.
- Despite the President’s assurances to the contrary, roughly 6 million Americans had their current and preferred health insurance policies cancelled because those policies failed to offer a lengthy-enough maternity stay, did not provide sufficient drug and alcohol rehabilitation benefits or otherwise fell short of the insurance that government bureaucrats and Obama Care supporters thought that they should have.
- This 6 million estimate included more than 100,000 New Yorkers who are now probably not quite as happy with their replacement insurance policies via Obama Care since a study from the National Center for Public Policy Research found that Obama Care plans were usually worse than the plans they replaced, in terms of both providers covered and cost-sharing.
- In some states, insurers have dropped plans that they offered on the exchanges initially or even withdrawn from the market altogether, forcing many Americans to get new insurance coverage again just a year after they had their original plans cancelled.
- Not surprisingly. if judging Obama Care against President Obama’s promise that health-care reform would save us all at least $2,500 through lower premiums a year, Obama Care deserves an F since in most states, premiums and deductibles have gone up and will continue going up, a direct opposite of $2,500 in savings.
- Cost wise, about 85% of those enrolled through Obama Care exchanges are receiving subsidies, higher than predicted. This cost overrun and other factors yield a best estimate which suggests the legislation will cost $2.63 trillion over the next 10 years, which includes a whopping incremental hit to the national debt of $1.25 TRILLION.
- Mr. Tanner also cites the detailed Federal Reserve studies form around the country that we have already cited that indicate that business owners will be taking serious steps to cut health care costs at the expense of their employees’ coverage, options, and costs.
Mr. Tanner’s closing summation says it best: “About the best thing that can be said about Obama Care’s first year is that it wasn’t quite as bad as some critics predicted. But it isn’t even close to what we were promised — and nowhere near a passing grade.
2) Just when we thought we had flushed out all of the idiocy in the legislation, a new piece of idiocy comes to light. The latest one is known as the "family glitch” principle within the law, a glitch that could cost another 1.93 million Americans their health insurance coverage.
A little background: Obama Care has provisions within the text of the law which enable those who earn below 138 percent of the poverty line qualify for Medicaid coverage and Americans who make up to 400 percent more than the poverty line to receive Federal government subsidies to financially help support their efforts to obtain health insurance coverage.
But some idiotic writing of the law resulted in the reality that this provision does not apply to families who are offered employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). If at least one member of the family unit gets offered employee sponsored insurance options that does not cover the spouse of that employee, then this precludes that spouse from getting subsidy help even if the family income falls within the stipulated subsidy income criteria of the law. Insane.
This situation has actually arisen with a friend of mine. His company adjusted their insurance policy to account for the increased cost of Obama Care, changing their company insurance plan to cover only him and his two kids but leaving his wife exposed with no health insurance. According to Obama Care and IRS interpretation of the law, they now have to go out and buy an entirely new piece of insurance just to cover her health insurance care needs and will be ineligible for subsidies.
Before Obama Care, his company was perfectly happy to cover all family members. With Obama Care, his policy gets less attractive financially AND his spouse loses he coverage and cannot get subsidy help even though their family income would otherwise qualify.
As Nancy Pelosi once infamously and idiotically said: “We have to pass the law to see what is in it.” Four years after passing it, the nightmares that are in it seem endless.
3) One last piece of bad news for today. A Bloomberg article by Alex Wayne on September 24, 2014 spoke to the fact that the truly dysfunctional Federal government health care exchange has cost an amazing $2.1 billion so far. His estimate was based on a Bloomberg Government analysis of contracts related to the project.
What is interesting is that the Bloomberg analysis is more than twice as much as what the Obama administration will admit to, with its cost estimate being $834 million. In either case, it is pretty obvious we did not get $843 million or $2.1 billion worth of value for our taxpayer money, given the fiasco of a rollout that occurred.,
According to Peter Gosselin, a senior health-care analyst at BGov and lead author of study. "The way in which Obamacare has been rolled out has been very messy, with spending scattered across dozens of contracts, many of them predating the law and amended afterward. One of the reasons it has been implemented in the way it has been, financially, is precisely to deny opponents of the law a clear target."
One of the main management problems with the whole mess is that the construction of Federal exchange involved 60 companies, supervised by different employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services instead of a lead contractor, according to the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department. The inspector general found infighting among the contractors, CMS executives and top executives at HHS, the Cabinet-level department that oversees CMS. This cat fighting was verified according to e-mails released last month by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Although a CMS spokesperson defended the work that has been done already, obviously not considering what a disaster it was, it is interesting to see the long litany of changes that have been made to the entire process, a list so long it makes you wonder how anything got done originally: "CMS takes its responsibility for spending taxpayer dollars seriously. That's why we've moved aggressively to implement extensive contracting reforms, bringing in new leadership to oversee marketplace operations, hiring a systems integrator, and ending our largest contract with CGI and moving to a new type of contract with Accenture that rewards performance."
It seems the spokesperson protests to much, to paraphase Shakespeare.
More messes, some of which even we have not run across despite reporting on this lousy piece of legislation for several years. It is the legislation that keeps n giving, unfortunately…. And it will keep on giving up the disasters at least for a few more 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
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Please visit the following sites for freedom:
Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
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http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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