October, 2014 Part 7, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Screwing Up Cubs' Games, Ignoring Freedom of Information Act Requests, 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. The latest disasters start here, which should wrap up the latest bad news from the worst piece of legislation ever written.

1) Judicial Watch recently filed a law suit against the Washington D.C. Obama Care Small Business Health Exchange. Why? Consider this abuse of the rules that every other American citizen has to live but which are merely suggestions for those in D.C.:

• Under D.C. law, only local small businesses that have 50 or fewer employees can participate in the D.C. Small Business Exchange. 
• Now, compare that law/rule against how many people work for Congress. And, guess how many employees Congress claims to have? Judicial Watch puts the number of Congressional employees at almost 20,000 people.
• And I doubt any sane person would call any part of the Federal government “small” since it spends almost $4 TRILLION a year.
• But according to government documents obtained by Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request, the House of Representatives and the Senate claim to have only 45 employees each, less than even the number of elected officials in both houses BEFORE counting their staffs.
• This is what Congress claimed when it put its 20,000 or so employees onto the Washington D.C. Obama Care small business health insurance exchange.
• Someone from Congress actually signed the following statement attesting to the claim that Congress was a “small business:” “I've provided true and correct information to all the questions on this form to the best of my knowledge. I know that if I'm not truthful, there may be a penalty.”
• Who that person was could not be ascertained since the actual names of the signatories were blacked out by the D.C. Exchange.
• The government documents show that as of this month, there are at least 12,359 members of Congress, Congressional staffers, their spouses and dependents who now purchase their insurance through the D.C. Small Business Exchange. 
• Since there are only a little over 14,000 participants in total on the D.C. Obama Care Exchange, that means that almost 90% of this “small business” exchange’s customers are Congressionally related.  
• Judicial Watch sued since this infraction is clearly illegal under current D.C. law.

While being illegal, you might ask why anyone would care? But remember that according to the Obama Care law, if anyone gets Obama Care health insurance under the Federal exchange, the law explicitly states they are not eligible for a taxpayer funded subsidy to help pay for it. 

So in order to protect their own wallets, the Washington political class decided that 1) Congress qualifies as a small business, 2) Congress has less than 50 employees, 3) lying on the exchange application form was okay, and 4) they are eligible to get insurance, and hopefully matching subsidies, under the D.C. small business exchange. If Obama Care is so good, why do the people that passed it go to such extremes to get out from under it.

2) The following story is a little funny in that it points out just one of many, many unintended consequences of Obama Care. One would have never thought that Obama Care legislation would negatively impact a major league baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago but it did.

But first, a little background. If you have over fifty full time employees on your business staff in the Obama Care world, you have two choices. You must either provide a full menu of health insurance options or be fined $2,000 a year per employee as an Obama Care penalty if you do not provide insurance.

Since many businesses cannot afford to provide health insurance for their employees or cannot afford to pay the fine, they have been working feverishly finding ways to get the number of full time under 50. That way they do not have to provide insurance, they do not have to pay fines, and they can still stay solvent and viable.

Now, back to baseball. In the summer, the San Francisco Giants were playing the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley field in Chicago when the rains starting coming down. It was raining so hard, that the umpires pulled the teams off of the field and told the grounds crew to put the rain tarp down on the field.

However, the grounds crew could not get the tarp down in a timely manner which made any chances of completing the game after the rain passed impossible. Now, one could say that the Cubs have an inept grounds crew since rains and tarps have been a part of baseball for over a century. But the Chicago Sun-Times says that part of the problem was that the team’s grounds crew was understaffed because the Cubs were trying to keep hours down because of Obama Care:

“The staffing issues that hamstrung the grounds crew Tuesday during a mad dash with the tarp under a sudden rainstorm were created in part by a wide-ranging reorganization last winter of game-day personnel, job descriptions and work limits designed to keep the seasonal workers – including much of the grounds crew – under 130 hours per month, according to numerous sources with direct knowledge.

That’s the full-time worker definition under “Obamacare,” which requires employer-provided healthcare benefits for “big businesses” such as a major league team.”

Who would have thought that poorly written legislation in Washington would screw up a baseball game and baseball fans’ enjoyment in Chicago?

3) Despite a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated press last year, the Obama administration refused to turn over government documents pertaining to technical difficulties and shortcomings relative to information security in the Obama Care data systems operations. 

The administration claimed that making such information public would make the already bad data security situation even worse by giving important information to hackers: "We concluded that releasing this information would potentially cause an unwarranted risk to consumers' private information," government spokesman Aaron Albright said in a statement.

The Associated Press asked that the denial be reconsidered but the Obama administration still denied access. Which led Dan Metcalfe, a former director of the Justice Department's office of information and privacy who's now at American University's law school, to state his disgust with the government’s secrecy: "Here you have an example of an agency resorting to a far-fetched privacy claim in an unprecedented attempt to bridge this legal gap and, in the process, making it even worse by going overboard in withholding such records in their entireties." 

If the problems have all been fixed and the data operations are now secure as we have been told, why not release the requested AP information that Associated Press requested since hackers would not be able to do anything with any released information? Or is the real reason for the non-compliance is that a year after the botched rollout and failed data systems, the Obama administration has still not fixed the problem and Obama care customers are still at risk of identity theft?

That will do it for now, Every day, every week, every month the Obama Care legislation is screwing up some part of Americans' lives. From higher premiums and deductibles to lost insurance coverage to narrow networks of doctors and hospitals to adding to the national debt to screwing up major league baseball games, this is a piece of legislation that ever stops giving….bad news. 

And it is a piece of legislation that will never resolve what it set out to resolve, the ever escalating high cost of health care in this country since it never addressed the root causes of high health care costs:

• American eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• Americans smoke too much and drink too much alcohol.
• America’s food chain is filled with too many bad, unhealthy products, much of which is the direct result of faulty government food subsidies.
• America’s medical tort system needs to be reformed.
• America’s insurance companies must be able to more easily compete across state lines.
• Government waste and criminal fraud in government health care programs drain much needed resources from actual health care improvement efforts.
• America is aging and much research is needed to attack and cure aging diseases such as dementia, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, etc. before the aging of America and its resultant diseases overwhelm the nation's health care system.

Obama Care addresses none of these root causes and thus, has no chance of being successful. But at least its disasters give us something to read and shake our heads at in frustration. More disasters next month.

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