The first post in this month’s update series can be accessed at:
This is the fifth post in this month’s disaster update.
It is our contention, backed up with dozens of blog posts and hundreds of examples, that Obama Care is easily the worst piece of legislation ever produced and enacted by the Washington political class. To prove out point, just review previous posts by entering the search term, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above or just browse through the previous monthly posts over the past years to find out why this law is so bad.
Below are just a few of the many failings of the law:
- While the law did get health insurance coverage for millions of uninsured Americans, it also caused millions of Americans to actually lose their current health care insurance coverage.
- Rather than decrease the annual cost of health insurance for Americans households by $2,500, as promised by President Obama, on average, it actually increased the cost of household health insurance.
- Rather than being able to retain access to their preferred doctors, hospitals and drug treatments, millions of Americans lost access to their preferences despite Obama’s promises that they would not lose that access.
- Despite the promise that the number of emergency room visits would go down, the volume of visits has gone up.
- The law made a doctor shortage crisis even worse.
- The law’s weak data systems operations placed millions of Americans at a high risk of identity theft.
- The law has resulted in the American taxpayer subsidizing abortion expenses despite the promise that Obama Care insurance policy subsidizes would not allow taxpayer money to subsidize abortions.
- The law never addressed the underlying root causes of high health care costs in this country (e.g. a fat, sugar, and salt infested food chain, smoking addictions, lack of exercise, aging diseases, etc.) and thus has no chance of actually doing what it was supposed to do, reduce health care costs in this country.
- The law has stunted economic growth and employment growth throughout the economy.
- The law will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt despite the Obama promise that it would actually reduce the national debt.
This is probably just a partial list of the bad things this law has done to the country. Let’s read on to see the latest disasters from this disastrous piece of legislation.
1) Robert Moffit and Kenneth Manyari-Magro, writing for the heritage Foundation, did some nice summary work from a numbers perspective on how badly Obama Care has performed and is performing:
- While more Americans have insurance now than before Obama Care was enacted, the cost has been staggering, quite possibly over $5 billion already spent just on the online exchanges.
- While the Obama administration originally crowed that 8.6 million Americans had received health care insurance under the legislation, that number quickly dropped down to 7.1 million when 1.5 million people never followed through with payment after their initial interest in obtaining Obama Care insurance coverage.
- That 7.1 million was recently downgraded to 6.7 million when the administration “mistakenly” included Obama Care policies that were strictly dental policies and had nothing to do with other medical care.
- But in the first two quarters of 2014, the Heritage Foundation writers estimate that 3.8 million Americans LOST insurance coverage as a direct result of Obama Care so that 6.7 million number discussed above should really be reduced by 3.8 million to 2.9 million to get the true, incremental impact of Obama Care. [note: more recent estimates from other sources peg the current number of Americans who lost insurance coverage As a result of Obama Care closer to six million, making the true, incremental impact of the law only 700,000.]
- Going back to the original 8.5 million administration estimate of people who got health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care, 6.1 million or about 71% of that 8.5 million were new enrollees to Medicaid, a poorly run, low quality government operated health insurance program.
- Looking forward, the administration has already dropped its forecast for total Obama Care enrollees in 2015 from 13 million to between 9 and 9.9 million, upwards of a 30% reduction.
- So not only are fewer people enrolling than promised, costs are going up. An analysis of insurance premiums between 2013 and 2014 found that in individual health insurance markets premiums increased substantially in the vast majority of states.
- For persons age 50, who benefit from younger people paying more than their actuarial risk would entail, premiums in 13 states went up by 50% or more. The House Ways and Means Committee found that families unable to access employee-based insurance coverage lived through, on average, a 24.4% increase in their premiums.
- In 2014, the deductible for an Obama Care Silver plan in the Federal health insurance exchange was nationally over $2,700 on average, compared to the average annual deductible of just over $1,000 for employer based health care insurance plans.
2) The Red State website recently ran some news on a new regulation proposal from Health and Human Services (HHS). Moe Lane wrote on November 22, 2014 that HHS is thinking about adapting a policy that would allow the Federal government to automatically choose your Obama Care policy for you: “Here’s a Friday Obamacare news-dump for you: In a 300-page regulation proposal released late this afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is considering changing Obamacare’s auto-renewal rules so that, within the health law’s exchanges, instead of being automatically renewed into your current health plan, you’d be moved into the lowest cost plan from the same service tier.”
Thus, rather than you taking responsibility for your health care insurance and let the auto-renewal keep you in the same Obama Care policy you currently have, the government wants to take over and automatically downsize you to a cheaper policy as the default for annual renewal. Thus, if you are no careful, you could end up with a different policy every year with a different set of forms and procedures, a different set of doctors, a different set of hospitals, a different set of drug coverage options, etc.
Why would the government want to do this? Simple: since it is highly likely that your current policy cost will go up every year making it politically dangerous for supporters of Obama Care, the government wants to downsize you to cheaper plans to make it look like costs are not going up as fast and to avoid political fallout for politicians.
But besides the issue and hassle we just discussed of having different medical networks, doctors, etc. every year, cheaper usually means not as good from a quality of coverage and care perspective. Thus, it is not a stretch of the imagination that a malady that is covered this year under your current Obama Care policy would not be covered next year when the government automatically shifts you to a cheaper policy that does not cover the same malady. At that point your health and family financials could take a serious hit, all to satisfy a government and political mandate, your health and needs be damned.
3) We have always maintained that Obama Care never went after the root causes of our nation’s high health care costs. One of the biggest root causes is the reality that Americans, on average, are overweight and many are obese.
According to an article from the Wall Street Journal that was summarized in the June 13, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, according to a 2014 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, there are about 2.1 billion obese people in the world, about 30% of the entire world’s population. 87 million of them live in the Untied States. 87 million.
Imagine how much health care costs would go down if somehow, via an effective and long term public health initiative, we could get rid of the obesity in this country. There would be fewer heart attacks and heart disease issues. There would be far fewer diabetes instances and related health care costs. Other obesity related diseases and ailments would plummet. And if your reduce the demand for any product or service, in this case medical service for obesity related ailments, the immutable laws of economics say the cost of those products and services has to come down.
Even if Obama Care got twenty million Americans new health insurance coverage, the root causes of high health care costs, e.g. massive obesity in this country, would still exist and still be driving up health care costs.
4) David Hogberg, Ph.D. is senior fellow for health care policy at the National Center for Public Policy Research who has written extensively on the fallacies and disasters of Obama Care. He recently did an extensive piece where he took the Congressional testimony of Jonathan Gruber and laid it up against the reality of Obama Care and the impacts we have seen so far from the legislation.
For example, during his testimony, Gruber claimed people that obtained their Obama Care insurance from the Federal online health care exchange are supposed to receive tax subsidies/credits to help pay for their insurance premiums. However, Mr. Hogberg points to a video from January, 2012 where Gruber publicly states: "If you're a state and you don't set up your exchange, then your citizens don't get their tax credits.”
This is just one of the many areas that Mr. Hogberg covers where Gruber gets himself, and the bigger Obama Care picture, tied up in lies, deceptions, and hypocrisies. Rather than me trying to do justice to his analysis, I refer you to his original work and analysis at:
That will do it for this month’s unfolding disaster s that is Obama care. It continually amazes both us and the nation that one piece of legislation is so bad that years and years after it was passed we still find enough new disasters every month to write about it across four or five days. It is the piece of legislation that keeps on giving in new and odious ways. I am sure that we will be back next month, same time, but with an entirely new set of disasters to contend with.
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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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