- 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.
1) Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican Senator, is the senior Republican on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Thus, he has had some experience and knowledge base relative to Obama Care.
He has come up with an interesting comparison relative to the cost of building the dysfunctional Federal health insurance exchange website. The cost the site exceeded the combined value of his state's three professional sports teams. Think about the effort that goes into operating and building value in the Tennessee Titans NFL football team, the NHL Nashville Predators hockey team and the Memphis Grizzlies basketbal team and realize that more value and wealth was spent on building the website than building these three large sporting organizations.
But despite the spending, the Senator correctly points out that the Obama Care website "still isn't secure, doesn't let people easily compare doctors and medications covered by each plan, and has not processed all of the applications from last year's open enrollment." he said in an e-mail from a spokeswoman.
Such a waste of time, money, and effort,in such a short time, for a process that will never reduce the nation’s high health care costs.
2) David Hogberg, writing for Amy Ridenour’s National Center blog, recently discussed the failure of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to deliver cost savings from the nation’s health care industry. According to Mr. Hogberg, ACOs, “are supposed to be one of the great innovations in Obama Care that will save money for Medicare and improve quality for beneficiaries.”
In theory, ACOs that create savings for Medicare are allowed to retain some of those savings as an incentive. The hope under Obama Care is that expanded use of ACOs would result in more savings for the country and its taxpayers.
However, the Department of Health and Human Services recently released the results for several hundred existing ACOs and the results were underwhelming in the big picture. Mr. Hogberg did some simple extrapolation of the savings from the current ACOs to a national rollout and estimated that the savings on a national basis would be about one percent of Medicare’s annual budget.
While any savings is good, one percent is hardly going to “bend the cost curve” as Obama promised that Obama Care would do to reduce the cost of health care spending in this country. Thus, another primary assumption of the entire Obama Care process appears to be under delivering, much like everything else in this legislation.
3) A recent Washington Post article, that was summarized in the October 10, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, showed how Obama Care missed another opportunity to really reduce health care costs in this country. According to the Post, about 24 million American adults consume an average of 74 alcoholic drinks a week, over seven a day on average.
How much of a strain on medical and health care costs does consuming over 70 alcoholic drinks a week put on the health care system? Drunk driving injuries, liver disease, liver transplants, and other physical maladies have to eventually occur by drinking so much alcohol. Wouldn’t that $834 million (or over $2 billion depending on whose numbers you sue) wasted on the Federal Obama Care website been better spent on programs focused on reducing alcohol abuse in this country?
This is what happens when you try to problem solve but do not know what the root causes of your problem are. If you reduce the demand for health care services, e.g. get people to stop abusing their bodies with excessive alcohol consumption, you reduce the cost of health care services. Obama Care does nothing of the sort.
The same analogy could be done for smokers. Smoking results in a whole slew of diseases and health care problems that increase the demand and thus, the cost for medical and health care needs. Reduce the demand, get people to stop smoking, and you reduce the cost of health care for everyone.
3) The more you find out about Obama Care’s tenets, the more holes you find in its reasoning and logic. In the past week, for example, we reported on how a family that might other wise qualify for Federal subsidies to buy health insurance are not eligible for the subsidies if one member of the family get their health insurance from their employer, even if that employer‘s health insurance plan does not cover spouses.
A recent Businessweek article exposed another hole in the whole legislation. While Obama Care plans must cover medical vision care like cataract surgery and pay for eye exams and glasses for children, those same health insurance plans are not required to cover glasses or contact lens or vision exams for adults. To make matters worse, Federal subsidies help cannot be used to purchase an additional policy that would cover those basic vision care needs.
Now ask yourself: how many more people are likely to need new glasses, or eye exams vs. those that are going to need cataract surgery? But unfortunately, Obama Care decided that covering the condition that will affect a very small minority of Americans was more important to cover than the condition and needs that will affect much more Americans. Just another piece of faulty insanity from those that wrote the law.
4) One last piece of Obama Care insanity for today. According to an article by Jennifer Van Laar that recently appeared on the Independent Journal Review website, those with Obama Care bronze plans could get a mighty large sticker shock when they actually see their 2015 Obama Care insurance premiums, depending on where they live.
Fifteen states have now officially published their 2015 Obama Care rate information, and according to an analysis by Investor’s Business Daily, the premium news is not good across much of the country:
While some policy holders will see a decrease in their bronze plan rates, mostly policy holders in smaller metro areas, bronze policy holders in many major, large metro areas will see double digit increases in their insurance premium costs. The average across the sixteen metro areas that were examined comes out to a whopping 14% average increase. So much for the President’s empty promise that an average American family will see a $2,500 DECREASE in its annual health insurance costs.
That will do it for today. Bronze policy costs going up, cost reduction initiatives that fizzle, gaping holes in vision care coverage, and missing the root causes of high health care costs. Very depressing. We will depress you one more time tomorrow as we wrap up this month’s unfolding disasters from Obama Care.
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