February, 2015, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Single Payer Disaster, Abortion LIes and The Failure To Be Epic

Every month for the past two years or so we have had to dedicate numerous posts each month to cover the many, many unfolding disasters that have been spawned by the Obama Care legislation. This is easily the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the Washington political class for so many reasons:

• First of all it will never work in reining in the high cost of health care in this country since it never addressed the underlying root causes of our high costs, mistakenly implementing a Rube Goldberg like health insurance solution for what is mostly a public health problem.
• It will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt even though Obama promised it would not add “a single dime” to the debt.
• It has stifled economic growth and job creation.
• It has increased taxes on every American, either directly or indirectly, despite Obama’s promise that it would not.
• It has forced upwards of seven million Americans to lose access to their preferred health insurance policies.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred Doctors, hospitals, and current medical treatments.
• Nationally, it has increased the cost of health care premiums and deductibles as compared to before the legislation was passed.
• It has opened up millions of Americans to the real threat of identity theft since Obama Care’s data systems security protocols are woefully inadequate.
• Even those that have obtained health care insurance under Obama Care policies are finding that their choice of doctors and hospitals are extremely narrow and more narrow than before the legislation was passed, resulting in many policy holders not getting access to the premier doctors and hospitals in this country.’The legislation has made a shortage of primary care physicians even worse since it is forcing primary care physicians to either retire earlier of move on to over options.
• Ten years from now the Congressional Budget Office predicts that tens of millions of Americans will still be without health care insurance coverage, the primary reason for the legislation in the first place.
• It has burdened the failing Medicaid system with millions of more applicants without fixing the massive problems with the system, causing more and more doctors to discontinue taking Medicaid and in some cases, Obama Care patients, resulting in the cruel irony that “you finally have health insurance but you do not have health care.”
• It failed to deliver on the Obama promise that the average American family would see a $2,500 annual reduction in their health insurance costs.
• While the legislation was supposed to reduce the number of emergency room visits, it has actually increased the number of emergency room visits.
• While it was supposed to make people healthier, the legislation’s resultant high co-pay levels and high deductible levels has forced many Obama Care patients to defer medical treatment because of the higher costs.

We could go on but you get the idea. This is a disastrous piece of legislation across multiple parameters. To get more details on each of the above disasters and explore other disasters of the legislation, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

This is our fourth post for this month that looks at the latest Obama Care disasters and fiascoes:

1) Recall our past discussions in this blog of the Canadian health care system, a so-called single payer system. In a single-payer system, the government is in charge of all aspects of health care in the country. They handle the paperwork, oversee prices and costs, dictate treatment protocols, etc. Everywhere it has been implemented in the world has usually resulted in a failure: higher costs and lower quality.

At the beginning of the Obama Care process, some of the President's supporters wanted Obama to implement a single payer system in this country. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was one of the biggest supporters of such a plan.

Fortunately, Obama Care did not go all the way to a single payer system but many of its "features" have the characteristics of a single payer system:

• The Federal government dictates what features and coverage must be in Obama Care insurance policies even if some of those features and coverage are not needed and not wanted by a citizen.
• The Federal government is herding millions of people into a single payer-like system called Medicaid via Obama Care, dictating what doctors will charge for services, dictating what is covered, and basically controlling all healthcare aspects of those enrolled.
• Obama Care has increased fees, taxes, and costs as it relates to healthcare in order to pay for its dictates in both the Medicaid arena and the private insurance arena.

Thus, while we did not go whole hog into a total single payer system in this country, Obama Care and Obama took us pretty far down the single payer road. Thus, it is worthwhile to see what a single payer system does to a country's health care health even if we did not finish the journey down the single payer path.

One way to do this is to examine the state of the Canadian single payer system since it has been around for a while and its citizens' wealth levels and health care levels are comparable to ours:

• According to a recent article on the Newsmax website, a Canadian citizen has to wait about 18.2 weeks to see a specialist doctor in Canada if they need specific medical care, i.e. more than four months.
• This is the overall finding from the latest annual report from the Fraser Institute, "Waiting Your Turn." 
• It found that the median length of time Canadians wait for necessary medical treatment after being referred by a general practitioner is 18.2 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993.
• And this is the median amount of wait time, which means half of those Canadians needing specific medical help wait more than four months to see a health care specialist
• Canada "rations" healthcare through long waiting times and limited access, according to Dr. Roger Stark, a healthcare policy expert at the Washington Policy Center; he recently told The Heartland Institute: "These long waits would not be acceptable to Americans, who are rightly accustomed to timely healthcare."
• And the wait times vary significantly across the country with the new Brunswick median wait time being 37.3 weeks, (an astonishing nine months plus) to Ontario where the median wait time is 14.1 weeks, still over three months.
• Wait times also vary greatly according to what type of specialist you need to see with the median wait time for orthopedic surgery being 42.2 weeks, neurology patients median wait time is an average of 31.2 weeks, and the wait for radiation oncology is 4.2 weeks.
• Think about this last statement: if you are fighting cancer, on average you have to wait over a month to get radiation treatment, four weeks where your cancer continues to spread.
• Canadians are waiting 3.8 weeks for a CT scan, 8.7 weeks for an MRI scan, and 3.3 weeks for an ultrasound.
• Extensive wait times can have serious consequences, report co-author Bacchus Barua points out: "For example, they may force some patients to endure months of physical pain and mental anguish, they may result in lower worker productivity and [forgone] wages, they can sometimes result in a potentially treatable illness being transformed into a debilitating permanent condition, and in the worst cases, they may result in death."
• Barua goes on to claim that the extensive wait times are not due to lack of funding and resources since Canadian healthcare expenditures per person have gone up by 50%, adjusting for inflation, since 1993.
• Thus, he claims the likely underlying causes of these gross waiting times are the government monopoly on the financing and delivery of medical services and the lack of appropriate incentives for providers.
• "This is indirect rationing," said Dr. Dale Dunn, a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. "Almost 30 years ago I started seeing doctors leaving Canada because they were disgusted with the system because it prevented them from treating patients."

Steadily increasing costs for steadily decreasing quality. Even though Obama Care is not a single payer system, the negativity of a single payer systems sounds an awful like the unfolding disasters of Obama Care.

The Newsmax article concludes with this interesting news tidbit from New York: The New York State Assembly's Health Committee held a hearing in January on Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried's bill to adopt single-payer healthcare in the state of New York. Reminds me of an old saying: you cannot fix stupid.

2) There have been a lot of lies and deceptions that have come out of the President's mouth and other supporters of Obama Care over the past few years:

• The President promised that if you liked your current insurance policy you could keep it: false/lie
• The President promised if you liked your current doctors and hospitals, you could keep them: false/lie
• The President promised that not one single dime would be added to the national debt as a result of Obama Care: false/lie
• The President promised that the average American family would see about a $2,500 annual decrease in their health insurance costs: false/lie
• The President promised that signing up for Obama Care online in the Obama Care health exchanges would be simple, quick, and easy - false/lie

I am sure I am missing other lies and deceptions but you get the idea. It is very difficult to believe anything this President says relative to Obama Care given his trail of deceptions. 

And let's add another lie to this list, as documented recently by the Heritage Foundation. Obama had promised, both the country and anti-abortion Congressional Democrats, that not a single dollar of Obama Care would be used to cover the cost of abortions. This promise was critical to getting the necessary House votes he needed from pro-choice Democrats for the approval of the Obama Care legislation. Specifically, the President promised that "no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortions."

But as expected, this has turned into just another lie. According to pro choice groups, the non-green states below are states where Federal dollars and Obama Care insurance policies may be being used to fund abortions, a direct contradiction of what Obama promised.

How important was this issue to the passage of the legislation. According to Charles Donovan of the Charlotte Lozier Institute: “Federal funding for elective abortion was the most salient issue as the fate of the Affordable Care Act was hanging in early 2010, right up to the day of its passage.”  But a late 2014 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed what many pro-life people had worried about - more than 1,000 Obama Care plans covered abortion while remaining eligible for Federal tax subsidies.

Even worse, the GAO analysis found that insurance companies were failing to collect from policyholders a required separate payment for abortion coverage, what critics call a “hidden” or “secret” fee. Requiring Obama Care policy holders to make two separate payments each month, one of them exclusively for abortion coverage, was the government’s attempt to prevent tax dollars, as Obama promised, from directly funding abortion.

According to the Heritage article, despite the GAO's findings and recommendations to fix what Obama promised would never happen, those fixes were not put in place for the second round of Obama Care policy signups that began in late 2014. In the absence of information or proof to the contrary, it must be assumed that Federal dollars are continuing being used to help fund Obama Care policies that support and fund abortion procedures. Thus, a critical deception was used to enact the law despite Presidential promises to the contrary.

3) One last point today, an example that shows what should have been done to reduce the high healthcare costs in this country. The following chart shows the dramtic and positive decline in breast cancer death rates over the past several decades:




Thus, the breast cancer death rate has dropped by about a third in the past two decades as a the result of better treatment, greater awareness and more women getting mammograms. The American Cancer Society says this translates into more than 200,000 deaths averted.

Imagine if Obama had focused on these types of success stories six years ago rather than a Rube Goldberg government insurance bureaucracy called Obama Care. Imagine if he had diverted those billions of dollars spent on a failed data systems process, enlargement of several existing government bureaucracies, etc. and had put that wealth into finding cures for colon cancer, prostate cancer, dementia, Parkinsons, heart disease. 

If we could reduce the death rates and incidences of these afflictions by one third or more, imagine how costs for health care in this country would plummet, making insurance that much cheaper without the idiocy of subsidies. If Obama had led the country to a healthy living and medical research vision, he could have been epic, much like Kennedy was epic when he led the country with a grand vision to use our resources to put a man on the moon  by the end of the decade.

But alas, the Obama administration has been anything but epic. We have wasted six years chasing an insurance answer for a public health and medical research issue. A one third decrease in the big diseases of our times would have been historic. Instead, Obama Care has become hysterical.

But it is not hysterical for the Americans we will focus on tomorrow, the last Obama Care update for this month. The people you will meet tomorrow have had their lives, their families, and their healthcare turned upside down in a truly negative way via Obama Care. And that is the sad human side of Obama Care.

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