Love My Country, Loathe My Government: November 2015

Sunday, November 29, 2015

November, 2015, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Insurance Companies Balk, Baillout Time?

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans do not exercise enough.
The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating health care costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high health care costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our health care costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

This will be the final review for this month of the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Earlier in this series we extensively reported on how the Obama Care co-ops were going out of business on an almost daily basis. These organizations were established to provide Obama Care insurance policies in areas of the country where there was not a lot of regular insurance company competition to hold down insurance costs.

Unfortunately, most of the co-ops ended enrolling far fewer customers than needed or expected and the customers that did enroll were older and sicker than what was needed to make the co-ops financially viable. As a result, the co-ops are shutting down, over a billion dollars (so far) that they received as Federal loans will likely never be repaid, and tens of thousands of Americans need to hustle to find other sources of health insurance.

But while the closing of a dozen or so co-ops is a disaster for Obama Care, a much larger disaster is looming, as laid out in a Washington Examiner article by Philip Klein on November 19, 2015:

UnitedHealthcare Group, which is the largest insurance company in the country, recently announced lower than expected earnings due to policies related to Obama Care.
And what could be an earth shattering move, the company announced that it may exit out of Obama Care exchanges and not write any more Obama Care policies.
Stephen J. Hemsley, the CEO of the company stated: "In recent weeks, growth expectations for individual exchange participation have tempered industrywide, co-operatives have failed, and market data has signaled higher risks and more difficulties while our own claims experience has deteriorated."
In addition, a company press release stated: "UnitedHealthcare has pulled back on its marketing efforts for individual exchange products in 2016. The company is evaluating the viability of the insurance exchange product segment and will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public exchange markets in 2017."
The company said its “earning pressure” is "driven by projected losses on individual exchange-compliant products [i.e. Obama Care policies] related to the 2015 and 2016 policy years."
In a conference call with investors, Hemsley said that customers' claims for medical care against their Obama Care policies were getting worse over time and that there was no sign that this trend would reverse any time soon, if ever.
When asked about whether the UnitedHealthcare could sustain these Obama Care losses past 2016, Hemsley was very clear: "No. We cannot sustain these losses. We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself."
This is critical since in 2017 the Obama Care programs that were put in place for the first years of the legislation to mitigate insurance company losses on Obama Care policies are scheduled to go away, making any financial cushion that does exist today for insurance company losses a thing of the past in 2017 and beyond.
This could push other insurance companies to also reconsider their decision to offer Obama Care policies as their financial results possibly deteriorate even faster.

And thus the death spiral picks up speed. As companies like UnitedHealthcare dropout of the Obama Care exchanges, their high risk, high cost customers will migrate over to the remaining Obama Care insurance carriers which will see an increase in their costs from these sicker and costlier customers which will cause them to raise their insurance rates which will cause more people to drop their insurance which will decrease Obama Care insurance company revenues which will cause them to raise rates more……

2) Let’s stay with this mess that is bad financials and Federal subsidies. Another recent article by Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner shows the first hint that the American taxpayer may be on the losing end of another corporate bailout scenario. Klein reported on November 20, 2015 that “The Department of Health and Human Services attempted to reassure private insurers on Thursday that they'll be able to recover losses from participating in Obamacare by claiming it was an "obligation" of the U.S. government to bail them out.”

Yes, America, after bailing out the car companies, the banks, Fannie Mae, AIG, Freddie Mac and who know what other corporations a few years ago, the Obama administration is looking to put together a corporate bailout for the insurance companies that were foolish enough to sell Obama Care policies. The issue revolves around the Obama Care ”risk corridors” program.

This program was supposed to run from 2014 through 2016. It called for the Federal government to confiscate money from health insurance companies that did better than expected with Obama Care policies and give that money to Obama Care insurance companies that were doing worse than expected. In theory, this was supposed to ease the transition into the Obama Care world and encourage all insurance companies to participate since their losses, if any, would be mitigated by the risk corridor money.

By law, this pool of money can only be replenished by insurance company funds, no taxpayer funds are allowed to be used to help out the insurance companies. Which is where the problem gets tough: as we discussed above, the Obama Care policies are turning out to be from disproportionately sicker and costlier people which is causing more bad financial results than good financial results.

For example, in 2014, Obama Care insurers who lost more than expected ended up asking for $2.87 billion in risk corridor payments. But the Federal government collected only $362 million from insurers performing better than expected from Obama Care policies. Thus, the Feds had only about 13% of the funds needed to fulfill the risk corridor requirements of the law ($363 million in excess earnings divided by $2.87 billion in excess losses).

This is a situation that has ticked off the insurance companies since they are getting back less than what they claim was promised by the Obama administration when they signed up for the Obama Care exchanges. The industry’s lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, is demanding that its members be kept whole: "We've been very clear with the administration about the serious challenges facing consumers and health plans in this Exchange market. Most recently, nearly 800,000 Americans have faced coverage disruptions as a result of the significant and unexpected shortfall with the risk corridors program. When health plans cannot rely on the government to meet its obligations, individuals and families are harmed as a result. The administration must act to ensure this program works as intended and consumers are protected."

In response to this demand and threat, the Obama administration announced that it would use money collected in 2015 and 2016 to make up for the 2014 $2.5 billion shortfall. Which is a ridiculous statement and promise to make because how are the risk corridors going to pay for the 2015 and 2016 insurance company claims if the excess profits in 2015 and 2016 were used to pay for the excess losses in 2014? It is a zero sum game and unless the people in Obama Care policies get a lot healthier in 2015 and 2016, reducing insurance company costs, there will continue to be a shortfall.

Thus, one of two things have to happen. The first option involves the Obama administration breaking existing law and giving the insurance companies taxpayer money to keep them happy, i.e. another taxpayer bailout of large corporations.

The second option involves the insurance companies being stuck with less than what they expected which will eventually lead them to go down the same route as UnitedHealthcare and get out of the Obama Care business. This would then cause the whole Obama Care house of cards to implode onto itself and collapse.

But long ago we and others predicted that this would happen. Obama Care never looked at the underlying root causes of our high healthcare costs in this country. The law mistakes a public health problem for an insurance problem and thus, invokes a bad solution for a misdiagnosed problem. The underlying drivers of high costs still exist, as listed above, and risk corridors and such do nothing to fix those problems.

And now, the Obama administration is faced with two bad options: try to find a way for taxpayers to bailout multi-billion dollar insurance companies or watch the whole house of cards collapse as more and more companies refuse to offer Obama Care policies.

3) One last piece of disgust from Obama Care this month. We mentioned above that the industry lobbying group is demanding that the Federal government, i.e. taxpayers, keep the insurance companies whole relative to the risk corridors. This lobbying group is headed up by a Marilyn Tavenner.

Ms. Tavenner just happens to be a former Federal government employee who coincidently was in charge of the government implementation of Obama Care when she was the overall boss at the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, she set up the risk corridors and certainly knew the risks involved with them but is now probably a very highly paid consultant trying to tear down those risk corridors at the beckoning of her new employer.

While probably nothing illegal is going on here, this potential conflict of interest just adds another layer of stench to the whole Obama Care process. A former high government official now using her government knowledge and insights to rip off the American taxpayer and laughing all the way to the bank in the process. Disgusting.

More Obama Care disasters tomorrow, the legislation that never stops giving….bad news.

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

Friday, November 27, 2015

November, 2015 Part 4,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Death Spiral Analogy and More

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans do not exercise enough.
The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.
You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.
But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

For the next several days we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Edward Woodson, writing for the The Blaze on November 5, 2015, laid out the sordid relationship between the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Obama administration over the years as it relates not only to Obama Care but to the entire Medicare/Medicaid/AHA government cronyism scam:

Back in in May, 2009, as the Obama Care legislation was being put together, the AHA publicly announced its support for healthcare reform in general, reform that eventually turned into Obama Care.
When early drafts of the legislation were not as favorable to the AHA and its members as it would like, Obama’s so-called health reform czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle emailed an AHA operative, Linda Fishman, that, “I know you understand that you are much more likely to end up where you want to be if you don’t box us in.” In other words, relax, we got your back.
After Obama Care was passed, the AHA was so delighted with the results that it funded a million dollars worth of ad campaigns for 16 Democratic members of Congress to thank them for their support in getting the legislation passed.
That support paid off when the Department of Health and Human Services decided to further curtail a government audit program of hospitals that has already recovered billions of dollars in Medicare fraud and wasteful spending incurred by, surprise, AHA members.
In 2013, this audit program recovered $3.7 million of taxpayer wealth from crooked hospitals but the recovery rate dropped more than a third to $2.4 billion in 2014 as a result of the Obama administration putting stringent restrictions on the government auditors trying to recapture wasted dollars.
For example, current rules allow the auditors to only look at 2% of a hospital’s claims for government reimbursement and even worse, the Obama administration recently announced that it was dropping that restriction even further down to .5% of claims, less than 1%.
Now there is no more than a one in two hundred chance that an auditor will come across a bogus claim by a member of the AHA, and thus, the ability to cheat the American taxpayer and get away with it is greater today and greater than it has ever been.

Now, it could be that the more lax enforcement of criminal investigation of AHA members has nothing to do with the campaign money and support the AHA provided to the passage of Obama Care. More likely though, given the current atmosphere of cronyism that pervades the Obama administration, these events are all connected and the American taxpayer gets screwed again in the process.

Given that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified in front of Congress this past October that the Federal government annually pays out $125 billion in improper payments from its programs such as Medicare, up from $105 billion in previous years, it is not as if everybody is being honest and forthright when it comes to accepting government payouts for services rendered.

Of the $125 billion, the GAO estimated that $75 billion of that waste comes from just Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that are integral to Obama Care and AHA's hospitals' financials. By recovering only $2.4 billion a year, criminals and others such as the AHA may be getting caught a meager 3% of the time.

2) Richard Pollock, writing for the Daily Caller on October 22, 2015, dove more deeply into the GAO testimony and findings that we just discussed:

The GAO ran an undercover operation to see how easily they could cheat the government’s health care operations.
Ten out ten fake Obama Care applications were approved for government subsidies even though the ten people did not exist, they were just GAO fake identities.
The fake identities used fake Social Security numbers and fictitious employers.
The ten fake people were scattered across the country in different states.
The GAO also submitted eight fake people into the Medicaid system of which seven out of the eight got approved for Medicaid coverage even though they also were totally non-existent.

Totally inept and corrupt government programs and the processes that support them.

3) Betsy McCaughley, writing for the New York Post on October 19, 2015, described how Obama Care is entering into a “death spiral:”

In general, the death spiral is being caused because, “The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up."
In late October, the Obama administration announced that enrollment in Obama Care policies in 2016 will be less than half of what the original expectations were.
Despite a large increase in the penalty for not having health insurance in 2016, only one in seven uninsured Americans will have signed up for insurance for next year.
Without enough healthy people signing up for Obama Care policies, the existing pool of policies becomes very expensive and unprofitable for the insurance carriers offering them, which is causing the companies to raise the premiums of current policy holders to make up the difference.
David Wichmann, UnitedHealth Group’s president, recently stated that higher premiums are required going forward since current Obama Care enrollees will “require more medical services than original expectations.”
The Robert Wood Johnson/Urban Institute analysis predicts that many states will see Obama Care policy costs go up 30% or more in 2016.
The Heritage Foundation estimates that Obama Care insurers lost 12% selling Obama Care plans so far.
Most of the Obama Care co-ops have already gone out of business, are going out of business, or are in dire financial straits which will result in hundreds of thousands of Americans seeking out other insurance coverage which is likely to be more expensive than the insurance they got through their now defunct co-op.

But none of this should surprise anyone who reads this blog or who has more than a passing interest in healthcare. The Obama administration never addressed the underlying causes of high healthcare costs in this country. They misunderstood a public health crisis with an insurance crisis and thus, applied the wrong solution to the wrong problem. And even worse, the insurance solution they tried to apply was a Rube Goldberg like contraption that was so onerous, confusing, and idiotic that it also has failed to reach even its ill founded goals and objectives.

More unfolding disasters tomorrow, disasters that never stop coming from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted.

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:

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

November, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - More Co-op Failures, Turning Doctors Into Typists and More

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans do not exercise enough.
The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

Over the past few days we have been reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington. Let's see what is else is going sour int he world of Obama Care:

1) Dan Joseph, writing for the MRC TV website on October 20, 2015, outlined how the penalty under Obama Care for not having health insurance is going up substantially in 2016. The cost will be 2.5% of a household’s taxable 2016 income, more than double the fine in 2015.

But given that yesterday we saw that only one out of seven Americans without health insurance are expected to get it by 2016, it seems that Americans are saying that the fine is a better financial decision than paying more and more for Obama Care insurance policies that have growing premiums and higher and higher deductibles. Joseph’s article reiterates the information that we discussed earlier this week when Health and Human Services announced that it might get Obama Care policy enrollments up to 10.5 million, about half of what was originally expected.

Obviously, in most facets of life, missing your objective by 50% is usually a sign of abject failure. But in the Obama world of non-reality, it is not a missed goal it is just on “a much longer path toward equilibrium,” according to a senior government official. Talk about denial.

2) In reality, if the country does not find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia afflictions it does not matter what Obama Care’s performance is. As America ages, these types of aging diseases will overwhelm and break the nation’s health care system. This is one of the root causes of our higher and higher healthcare costs that we listed above.

How bad is the situation:

According to a recent article in BusinessWeek, Alzheimer’s kills 100,000 Americans annually.
It affects 5 million Americans every year with deteriorating health and high health care costs.
Currently, these types of brain diseases already consume 20% of Medicare and Medicaid budgets and expenses every year.
By 2030, just 15 years from now, these diseases will account for half of Medicare and Medicaid’s expenses.
Despite Obama Care, the Federal government spends ten times as much each year on cancer research and five times as much on AIDS research.
Non-government resources for disease research raise $.03 for Alzheimer’s research for every $1.00 raised for cancer research.

So, it will not matter how many people have a gold, silver, or bronze Obama Care plan. Tens of millions of Americans will likely face these types of brain diseases as the population ages and the cost involved in serving them will blow the economy and Obama Care out of the water. And Obama Care does nothing to address this financial time bomb.

3) Charles Krauthammer, writing for the Washington Post last summer, asserted that doctors have been turned into typists by Obama Care. The electronic health records (EHR) mandate required all doctors’ offices to digitize their patient records by January 1, 2015. According to Obama, this would save the healthcare industry billions of dollars a year.

The problem is, as would be expected by politicians that know nothing about running a medical practice, is that doctors now spend so much time trying to comply with Federal mandates that it takes time away from actually providing medical care. Krauthammer cites one study that found that 44% of doctors' time is spent filling out government forms vs. working with their patients. Thus, another aspect of Obama Care accomplishes the exact opposite of what it was supposed to accomplish: rather than improving efficiency and reducing costs this Obama Care mandate makes doctors and their practices more costly and less efficient.

4) And finally, let’s take another look at the failing Obama Care co-ops, a topic we have already hit hard this week. Recall that more than half of the original 23 state co-ops have already gone out of business or have announced they are shutting down by the end of the year because of financial troubles. An article in the December, 2015 issue of Reason magazine filled in some of the most troubling numbers from the co-ops:

The Louisiana co-op lost $5.7 million in 2014 one year after it opened its door for business, paying out $1.13 in benefits for every premium dollar it collected.
The Nevada co-op is going out of business after burning through $66 million in taxpayer wealth.
The Iowa co-op ran up a whopping $150 million in liabilities in less than two years and thus, went out of business since there was no way for it to repay those costs.
The Massachusetts co-op spent six times as much money on administrative costs than it collected in premiums or about $10,900 on each policyholder/customer.
This $10,900 level stands in stark contrast to a study that found that Medicare and private insurers spend about $150 a year per policyholder.
A potential co-op in Vermont never got off the ground but still burned through $10 million of Federal taxpayer money.

What a mess. But there is two pieces of good news within this co-op disaster:

The 23 co-ops burned through about $2.4 billion with very little benefit in return. Imagine how much more money would have been wasted if every state formed their own co-op under Obama Care?
The original plan called for a single national co-op to be administered by the Federal government. Imagine how much more expensive and how much of a failure that would have been, given the experience and screwups in every other aspect of Obama Care.

How sad when a piece of legislation is measured by how much worse it could have been.

That will do it for this today’s unfolding disasters that keep coming out of Obama Care. More tomorrow.

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:

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

November, 2015, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Costs Conitnue To Skyrocket While Enrollment Continues To Crater

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans do not exercise enough.
The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctor2, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

For the next several days we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) One aspect of Obama Care that we have not discussed recently is the employer mandate that forces employers to offer their full time staffs health insurance options or be fined $2,000 a year per employee. Previously, we have reported how hundreds, if not thousands of companies, could not afford either option, providing health insurance or paying the fine, and as a result took two actions in order to stay in business.

First, many business owners made sure that most of their employees never worked enough hours to be considered full time employees, defined by Obama Care as those working more than 30 hours a week. The law allowed businesses to avoid paying the fine or providing health insurance coverage for those part time workers. The second option was to insure that businesses fell below certain thresholds of total number of employees employed.

Thus, Obama Care’s insurance coverage regulations reduced working hours of thousands of Americans, turning them into part time employees, without giving them the benefit of health insurance coverage, or restricted job and economic growth, denying a lot of unemployed Americans the opportunity to get a job.

But another problem has arisen as Obama Care has unfolded. It seems that even when businesses tried to offer health insurance to their currently uncovered employees, the vast number of employees decided to pass on the opportunity.

For example, consider the situation of Billy Sewell who employs 600 restaurant employees at the Golden Corral restaurants he owns. He tried to do what the Obama Care legislation told him to do, i.e. offer a company sponsored health insurance program to all of his employees.

Despite trepidations that his business could not afford to do so, he went ahead and offered health insurance to all of his 600 employees. His costs turned out to be far lower than anticipated because a grand total of TWO employees took him up on his insurance program offer. Why? It was too expensive even with Sewell picking up a majority of the insurance tab.

And according to New York Times reporting, Sewell and his experience is not unique. Many small business companies with over 100 employees are finding that very few of those employees are taking the health insurance when offered. Michael A. Bodack, an insurance broker in Harrison, New York: “Based on what we’ve seen in the marketplace, we’re advising some of our clients to expect single-digit take rates. One to 2 percent isn’t unusual.”

Brad Mete, the managing partner of Affinity Resources, a staffing agency in Dania Beach, Fla., began offering insurance in 2015 to avoid the $2,000 per employee fine. He also saw a very low take on those employees who signed up for his company’s new insurance program. The cost of insurance to his employees is $30 a week to many of his employees who make $300 a week. Thus, many decided that giving up a whopping 10% of their weekly earnings for insurance is not worth it, given that there are annual deductibles that have to be met before the insurance coverage kicks in.

Which comes back to the point we have been making over and over during the past few years of covering the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The law never addressed the root causes of our high insurance costs, as listed above. As a result, insurance costs did not go down and we are now seeing that even when offered health insurance coverage through their company, it is still too expensive for the employees of companies that Obama Care forced to starting offering an insurance program.

2) Rich Edson, writing for Fox News on October 27, 2015, did a nice job summarizing the insurance policy cost increases that are going on around the country as people enroll in Obama Care policies for 2016:

The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that the average cost for the average “silver” plan on the Obama Care Federal exchange will go up 7.5% in 2016.
Keep in mind that Obama frequently promised that the typical American family would see up to a $2,500 reduction in their annual insurance premium costs, not a 7.5% INCREASE.
In Oklahoma, the silver plan average will go up a whopping 36%, in Alaska the cost will go up about a third, and more than 34% in Montana.
Some states will actually see an average decrease with Indiana silver Obama Care policy holders seeing about a 13% decrease and those in Mississippi seeing an 8% decrease.
These double digit increases may be the reason that Obama Care is now forecasted to attain no more than half of the enrollees it expected and promised when the law was passed, 10 million enrollees vs. the 20 million forecasted.
According to Robert Laszewski, president of the Health Policy and Strategy Associates: "Insurance companies by and large are losing lots of money in Obama Care. Obama Care's got some really serious problems here and the enrollment, the only way for Obama Care to solve problems is for enrollment to increase dramatically."
But if enrollment does not go up the financial losses will mount which will force more increases in the cost of Obama Care policies which will cause fewer people to keep their insurance which will force more increases in costs = death spiral.

Higher costs, lower than expected enrollments, disaster.

3) Richard Pollock, writing for the Daily Caller on November 1, 2105, reported that the increase in Obama Care policies in 2016 will not be 7.5% as described above but upwards of three times as much. Why? Because the Obama administration released cost increase information for only “silver” plans but withheld cost increase information for the other three types of plans that are available under Obama Care.

When the cost increase for the other plans, bronze, gold and platinum, are considered, the cost increases for ALL Obama Care plans jumps to over 20%. Which obviously means that if the silver plans were at 7% or so, than the other plans must be experiencing increases that are much higher than the average of 20%.

The Daily Caller News Foundation found the following bad news for Obama Care policy holders once one looks at all types of Obama Care policies:

Some Obama Care policies in Utah will see a 45% price increase.
In Illinois, the highest price increase will be 42.4%.
In Tennessee, the highest price increase will be 36.3%.
In South Dakota, silver plans will increase 24.7% in 2016 but the average increase across all plans will be 39%.
In South Carolina, the average silver increase will be 10.8%, compared to 23.4% when all four plans are considering.
In Colorado, silver customers will see a 12.94% price hike, but Gold users will see a 20.33% increase, and Platinum enrollees will see a 29.80% price rise.

Another case of the Obama administration not being transparent in publishing only a subset of data or an honest mistake? Given there has been very little honesty in any aspect of this administration, I vote for lack of transparency...again.

That will do it for today’s unfolding Obama Care disasters. Unfortunately, more disasters will be unveiled tomorrow.

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:

Sunday, November 22, 2015

November, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Co-ops Die, Insurance Policy Costs Go Up and More

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans do not exercise enough.
The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating health care costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high health care costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

The lack of Federal taxpayer funding from the Obama administration was cited as the cause for the shutdown.
In total, all of the co-ops asked for $2.9 billion in so-called “risk corridor” funds but received only $356 million, 12% of the total request.
This is the tenth Obama Care co-op to go out of business.

So now tens of thousands of Utah co-op customers are soon to be without health care insurance, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do.

2) But wait, it gets worse in the Obama Care co-op world. In another Washington Examiner written shortly after the article about the Utah co-op shutdown, and also written by Robert King, we find out that the Arizona co-op was also going out of business. Details include the following:

Both Arizona insurance regulators and Federal officials were involved in the decision to shut it down.
This latest co-op shut down brings the total number of Obama Care co-ops to go down is now up to 11, just short of half of the total number began (23).
The Arizona co-op got $93 million in Federal taxpayer money to into the health insurance business but has lost more than $78 million in the short time it has existed.
As with the Utah co-op, all of the Arizona co-op insurance policy holders, all 50,000 of them, now have to go find other sources of health insurance.

Seems that if you blink another co-op goes belly up.

3) But there is more bad co-op news. According to a recent article on the Young Conservatives website, 83,000 people in Colorado are about to lose their health insurance under Obama Care because that state’s co-op recently announced that it too was going out of business. The Colorado state insurance regulators decertified the co-op as an eligible insurance option when the Federal government announced that it would not pay the full amount of money originally promised to the co-ops.

The same article described how the New York Obama Care co-op is also collapsing into insolvency. In an added twist to this specific collapse, not only is the co-op failing financially but investigations of fraud and criminal activity are underway regarding its funds and operations.

4) A recent Heritage Foundation article by Dr. Sreedhar Potarazu called Obama Care a cancer that needed to be removed from our lives. His reasons for this analogy include the following:

- Declining Enrollment Forecasts -

By 2016, Obama Care was supposed to have provided health insurance to 20 million Americans.
However, the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid recently announced that the expected number of enrollees after the 2016 enrollment is half of what was promised, about 10 million.
Even worse, the mix of Obama Care insurance policyholders is expected to be deficient in young and healthy customers, the kind that pay insurance premiums but are unlikely to need medical and health care service.
The lack of enough healthy and younger customers makes Obama Care insurance companies more likely to raise rates in order to cover the more expensive medical needs of its older, and less well policyholders.

- Rising Costs

In the past month or so state insurance regulators have approved all or most of the premium increases filed by the health insurers in their states.
These increases are necessary since these insurance companies never attained the number and quality mix of customers they originally expected.
Thus, the customers that they did sign up were less healthy and more expensive than they originally forecasted, costing them more than they anticipated.
Now they have to dig out of their financial hole by raising rates on those customers.
So much for the Obama promise that insurance costs for most American families would decrease up toto $2,500 a year.

- Death of Obama Care co-ops

We have already covered the details of this disastrous piece of Obama Care: all but one of them has been a losing proposition from a financial perspective so far, about half of them have already gone out of business or have announced that they will go out of business shortly, hundreds of thousands of customers from these co-ops now have to go out and find different insurance coverage, and over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding that was used to get these failed co-ops established is unlikely to ever be paid back.

Failed co-ops costing the American taxpayer over a billion dollars and disrupting the lives of thousands and thousands of Americans. Inept and corrupt management of those co-ops. Higher and higher insurance costs every year for Obama Care policies resulting in anemic enrollment numbers vs. the promised number of enrollees by 2016. The unfoldiing disaster that is Obama Care never stops unfolding. More disasters tomorrow.

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:

Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Sunday, November 29, 2015

November, 2015, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Insurance Companies Balk, Baillout Time?

Friday, November 27, 2015

November, 2015 Part 4,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Death Spiral Analogy and More

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

November, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - More Co-op Failures, Turning Doctors Into Typists and More

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

November, 2015, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Costs Conitnue To Skyrocket While Enrollment Continues To Crater

Sunday, November 22, 2015

November, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Co-ops Die, Insurance Policy Costs Go Up and More

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