Love My Country, Loathe My Government: April 2016

Friday, April 29, 2016

April, 2016, Bonus Post, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Failing Numbers and ....A Retro Look Back to One of The Smug Fools That Developed The Whole Mess In the First Place

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 its 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 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 insurance premiums, 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.

We thought that we were done with yesterday’s post regarding the “unfolding disaster that Is Obama Care,” but true to form, just when we think we are through the current month’s disasters, a few more worthy discussion points and disasters pop up, which leads us to the following:

1) One more source of failing Obama Care data today. Some of this information we have already referenced over the past week but the following list from Michael F. Cannon’s article, “5 Things ACA Supporters Don’t Want You To Know About UnitedHealth’s Withdrawal From ObamaCare,” writing for the Cato Institute April 22, 2016, kind of neatly sums everything up:

Unitedhealthcare,the country’s largest health insurance provider, is getting out of most of the 34 states where it sells Obama Care insurance policies in 2017 because it cannot make money in those states.
The company lost $650 million on those policies in 2015.
A recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation stated that if the company leaves the state of Oklahoma, only one company will be left selling Obama Care policies in that state.
If the company gets out of every one of those 34 states, not just most of them, the share of counties across the country with only one or two Obama Care insurers will jump from 36% to 52% and the share of Obama Care policy enrollees with only one or two carriers will double from 15% to just under 30%.
If those former Unitedhealthcare customers go to other Obama Care carriers, you can probably expect those health insurance companies to see their financial results to also go south since they will be serving the same Unitedhealthcare customers that Unitedhealthcare could not make a profit on.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, whose member companies are the biggest health insurers in the Obama Care world, reported that Obama Care policy holders are 22% more costly than the customers they serve that have employer based insurance coverage.
Mr. Cannon points out another negative wrinkle within the whole Unitedhealthcare situation: “Unitedhealth generally didn’t have the lowest-cost premiums in the Exchanges. The fact that it still lost money provides further evidence of significant adverse selection. It suggests high cost patients are shopping for the most comprehensive benefits, regardless of premium; that Unitedhealth offered coverage that was attractive to the sick; and the company thus attracted a particularly costly group of enrollees.”
Unitedhealthcare also assumed that its current enrollment will drop 18% over the course of this year, with a lot of the reduction driven by current customers that cannot afford their policies despite Obama promising that annmual family health insurance costs would go down by upwards of $2,500.
A McKinsey analysis recently found that despite getting subsidized by the Federal government’s reinsurance program, 70% of Obama Care insurance companies were still losing money on those policies and the average profit margin of all Obama Care insurance companies was negative in 41 states.
Obama Care insurance costs will continue to rise in 2017 because of how bad it program it is and because those sicker and less healthy Unitedhealthcare customers, the ones that cost that company to lose so much money, will seek out other Obama Care carriers and by law, those carriers must accept these higher cost customers.
Given this rising premium and sicker than expected customer scenario, the author predicts that more companies will leave the program if they are not allowed to substantially raise their insurance policy costs in 2017.

As the cost of insurance goes up under Obama Care, less people will purchase insurance, leaving the Obama Care insurance carriers with only the sickest and most costly patients which will cause them to raise rates or get out of the Obama Care market which will reduce competition which will drive up costs, which will dry up customers = death spiral.

Just about any human endeavor that finds itself in a death spiral never gets out of it until that death spiral collpases into failure. That is what we are witnessing today as the Obama Care logic, structure, and realities begin their relentless trend downward.

2) Okay, last disaster review for this month, I promise. Let’s go up a few years to find out how this whole fiasco was spawned. The following paragraph contains the words of one of the academic geniuses [sarcasm] that helped to build the Obama Care legislation, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, and how it was derived and developed to confuse, divert, and sneak through the legislation, in the process assuming that Americans are too stupid to understand how we were about to get screwed by the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed.

I have copied some of his words below with my emphasis on how little he respected our intelligence and brains and have also included a link to the original videotape so that you can hear the contempt that this professor has for you and the rest of us: "This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcannon/2016/02/05/obamacares-low-enrollment-numbers-also-show-why-exchange-coverage-will-get-worse-over-time/#8b7f48d5a053

“The stupidity of the American voter.” Given the epic failure of Obama Care, who is stupid today, those that pointed out how much this law sucked years ago or those that were so smug, so condescending that they viewed themselves too smart for their own good and that their work on Obama Care will be long known as an unmitigated disaster?

And you can bet that we will be back next month with more disasters, regardless of what an MIT professor claims in the above video.

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

Thursday, April 28, 2016

April, 2016, Part 6, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Personal Horror Stories Of Obama Care

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.

We have just spent more than a week of discussing and analyzing the failures of Obama Care at the global level of details. Today, we will focus only on the real life, personal hardships that Obama Care caused Americans. The source of these heartbreaking stories comes from the website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

So, if you ever come across someone who thinks that Obama Care is great and effective, ask them if these people would agree with that assessment:

CHIP - OREGON: My family and I have had great health insurance for years. We got a 3 month extension this year of our old policy. In February I have to have emergency open heart surgery. In the middle of this process we had to get new coverage since our policy was being canceled due to Obamacare. I will need other procedures and medication and more unexpected costs. Our new policy is $306 a month more and our deductible went from $5,000 to $12,500, because of Obamacare after March 31 I will have a new deductible to make of 12,500.00. I have already met the deductible on the old policy but since it was canceled I will have the new deductible to meet. We are looking at over a $20,000 to $26,000 cost in 2014 due to Obamacare! Where are all the politicians out there helping me and my family? Why do they not care the cost I have to pay? This has got to end!

DEB: NEW YORK - We were happy with our insurance company. Obama care mandatory coverage raised the premium beyond what we or our employer could afford, so we went to check out the NYS insurance exchange, Healthy New York. There were an overwhelming number of plans to choose from and not much ability to easily compare plans. Plans from insurance companies whose names we recognized were too expensive. All had high deductibles - - we had no deductible on our old plan. We finally signed up for a start up company that was recommended to us.

Aside from the high deductible, the plan seemed to be good. We were paying $400 less per month and they paid some claims promptly. But finding providers has been a real problem. The website has numerous errors in contact information. And then we needed to find a pediatric orthopedist for our son when he broke his ankle. We quickly discovered how limited their coverage was where we live on Long Island. Then I got curious and checked for hospitals and doctors out of the NYC area and I discovered something that concerns me very much. Our insurance pays NO out of network benefits and it only offers coverage in a few counties in NY state, nowhere else! So if we travel more than 80 miles from home we have no insurance!

Now, wouldn't you expect that a national health insurance would cover you anywhere in the country? Now we are stuck with a plan that holds us prisoners in the NYC area. We can't afford to leave and possibly need health care.

CYNTHIA: VERMONT - I not only have to pay a higher premium, but I can not afford the deductible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LINDA: FLORIDA - We have a group Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO plan. When I broke my ankle I found out that all the good orthopedic groups had dropped my plan, not an Obama plan! My x-ray was $50 with my insurance or $35 cash. I paid cash. The orthopedic I ended up going to only cost me $99 cash, since they did not take my insurance. My insurance costs me over $500/month and this was the first I had used it in years, but I didn't even use it! Since I work out and am not overweight I only used preventive health care I seldom access healthcare at 60. The only medication I take, hormone replacement, is $300 with insurance. What I really need is just a catastrophic plan for cancer or accidents with these costs. I am sure this plan will change and/or increase when we renew this year. We are a small company with 4 employees and we pay for everyone's healthcare even though we aren't required by law. I anticipate we may have to discontinue that policy this year or make our employees pay for their coverage.

SUSAN: WASHINGTON - I was happily going along with my jcpenney insurance when I retired from jcpenney, which was only $40 a month. I got a letter from my insurance stating it didn't follow the Obamacare guidelines (Health Care Authority) and they cancelled my policy. Now, I have to pay 4x that amount to get the catastrophic insurance (deductible of $5,000) before anything is covered, through the Health Care Authority.

JOHN: NEW HAMPSHIRE - I was probably one of the very first victims of the Affordable Care Act. I was a self employed entrepreneur who was purchasing in the state of New Hampshire a major medical insurance policy, "that I liked". And that worked for me in my budget, I paid for my own medical, eye and dental exams. Because I believe that regular doctor visits precluded serious medical injuries and am insuring myself only in the event of something serious happening with the major medical policy.

I was notified in the early stages of the ACA when all the states were being told what the insurance regulations required had to be at a specific level. Mine was not an acceptable level and was not being offered again by my insurance carrier. The new regulations required a plan that was not cost effective, though I'm sure it would have covered many things, prenatal exams, pregnancy tests, Viagra, birth control pills and even the doctor visits that I was already paying for out of my pocket because it's cheaper. Yes! Thanks to the wonders of Obamacare.

I have been without any catastrophic medical coverage for the past few years, in which I have had to pay out an $8,000.00 medical expense because of an emergency room visit while on vacation for kidney stones, which would have been covered under my original major medical coverage. Yes I'm in favor of repealing the ACA! I want to be in charge of my body, not be forced to do things that will encumber my life. "It's my body, I want the government out of it!"

SCOTT: CALIFORNIA - I'm a small business owner that covers myself and another employee. My Blue Cross Blue Shield plan went up $400 to $850 a month for 2 people. Its outrageous. I looked for a cheaper plan but the cheapest plan was only $100 cheaper and I would lose my doctor. My female employee had to pay for children’s dental insurance. She doesn't have children and she medically cannot have children.

Higher costs to customers, lost access to favorite doctors, narrow doctor networks, loss of personal freedom, the disasters continue. More disasters next month as the Obama Care death spiral accelerates.

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, April 27, 2016

April, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care: Illegals Get Illegal Obama Care Benefits, The Administration Stonewalls Congress, 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.

Although we have already shown the many disasters of Obama Care including the termination of millions of insurance policies, the loss of access to preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans, the ever rising Obama Care policy deductibles and premiums, the narrowing of insurance and doctor networks, the increasing chance of identity theft, the trillions of dollars that the law will eventually cost taxpayers, the increasing amount of taxes, the dampening of economic growth, etc., on the sixth anniversary, the Obama administration seems oh so ever out of touch with these realities, issuing the following statement: “We’ve made good progress in the last six years.”
They must define “progress” as skyrocketing premium and deductible costs of Obama Care policies.
The must define “progress” as millions of people losing access to their current insurance policies that they were perfectly happy with.
They must define “progress” as millions of losing access to their current employer provided insurance options because Obama Care made those current insurance benefits too expensive to continue.
They must define “progress’ as the situation that was outlined in a recent Blue Cross Blue Shield industry group analysis which found that individuals who were once insured by a Blue Cross or Blue Shield policy but were forced into an Obama Care policy for coverage ended up being sicker and most costly to insure than prior to their Obama Care coverage.
They must define “progress” as insurance companies across the company losing hundreds of billions of dollars from their Obama Care policies.
They must define “progress” as over half of the 23 Obama Care co-op organizations already going out of business for financial reasons with another eight or more likely to collapse in the next year or so.
They must define “progress” as the recent finding from the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that health insurance deductibles will rise faster than insurance premiums, wages, and inflation, with those deductibles rising seven times faster than wages over the past five years and three times faster than premiums.

If this is Obama’s definition of progress, I would hate to see his definition of failure because no matter you view Obama Care, it has been a disaster along just about any dimension possible.

2) One of the selling points that President Obama constantly harped on prior to the enacting of the legislation is that no illegal immigrants would get an advantage of the law, it would only be for legal residents. But of course, this has turned out to be another Obama lie and Obama Care lie, as outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal article which was based on a public opinion survey:

Taxpayers are indeed subsidizing healthcare for illegal immigrants across the country even though it is prohibited by the legislation.
Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in 20 of the 25 counties across the country with the largest illegal immigrant population have been signing up for Federal government healthcare programs paid for by American taxpayers.
As many as 750,000 illegal immigrants have gotten this taxpayer benefit at a cost of over $1 billion.

More lies, more costs, more law breaking, typical Obama administration mode of operation.

3) Kathryn Watson, recently writing for the Daily Caller website, pointed out how the Obama administration was ignoring formal requests for documents from Congress as they are related to Obama Care. In this instant of Obama administration lack of transparency, the administration are refusing to give Congress formally subpoenaed documents regarding the failed co-ops of Obama Care.

Members of Congress are concerned that the remaining Obama Care co-ops are likely to go belly up soon and want to help make the process as painless as possible for those customers of those likely failing co-ops, giving them enough time to line up other health insurance coverage if their co-op policies tank. Seems like a reasonable Congressional request, given that the customers of the 12 co-ops that have already failed received very little heads up as far as arranging for alternative coverage once their co-op failed.

These documents were formally requested months ago but still the Obama administration has refused to release them as they are legally required to do, leading Congressman Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, the committee that requested the documents, to state: “Health and Human Services has not provided any valid legal reason for withholding information from this committee. Rather, they assert that if certain information was released publicly, it could cause consumers to think twice before enrolling in CO-OP insurance plans….Our efforts to obtain information about these programs have been met with unexplained delays and what seems like bad faith.”

Well, duh, that is the reason Congress wants the documents, to ensure that Americans are protected from a coverage and financial perspective. Instead, the Obama administration would prefer to protect the interests of the failing co-ops than the Americans who are or who might use them. Insanity.

4) And finally for today, more Obama administration shady dealings, as reported by Washington Examiner reporter Robert King on April 15, 2016. Apparently, some Congressional Republicans are charging that the Obama administration is using $3.5 billion in taxpayer wealth to help protect insurance companies from financial shortfalls as a result of Obama Care. Democrats in Congress, of course, disagree with this assessment.

A recent House committee looked into whether billions of dollars are being improperly diverted into the law’s reinsurance program. This program was embedded in the legislation and was intended to help insurance companies adjust to the Obama Care world by creating a pool of insurance company money to help them serve the claims of Obama Care policy holders who were the sickest and most in need of medical care and had pre-existing conditions.

However, as required by the law, part of the funds that went into that pool from insurance companies was supposed to be sent to the Treasury Department as a deficit reduction mechanism. But Republicans claim that the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid decided to keep that money and not send it to the Treasury as required: "Despite issuing two final rules that allocated a portion of the reinsurance payments to the U.S. Treasury, CMS changed its position to prioritize payments to insurers," said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., chairman of the subcommittee. "Essentially, CMS ruled that the Treasury doesn't get any money until the insurers got paid."

But Democrats and Obama administration officials deny this reality and say they are allowed to withhold those funds and divert them to the insurance companies offering Obama Care policies, essentially giving the big insurance companies a taxpayer funded bailout. And the insurance companies probably desperately want those Treasury bound dollars since according to the article, the Obama Care results have been so bad and the funding of the reinsurance pot so lean that insurance companies only got $363 million of the $2.9 billion they requested to be kept whole by Obama Care policies.

That will do it for today. More failures: big insurance companies getting taxpayer bailouts, stonewalling Congress at the risk of hurting ordinary Americans from a failing Obama Care co-op program perspective, illegally giving illegal immigrants Obama Care and Federal government health care at taxpayer expense, and a delusional administration on the sixth anniversary of the Obama Care disaster legislation being enacted.

As we have said before, I do not think you could have purposely constructed a law to fail in so many ways as Obama Care has failed. And every month we see and report on more failures as the death spiral of the legislation continues to gain speed. We will do one more post on the unfolding disaster tomorrow for this month where we will just focus on the personal tragedies that Obama Care has created for ordinary Americans across the country, tragedies that Obama thinks is “progress.”

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, April 26, 2016

April, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Rising Costs, Too Few Docotors, 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: 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 insurance premiums, 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) With more people getting insurance, one would have hoped that the backers and writers of the Obama Care legislation would have seen the obvious and put a plan in place to get more doctors into the industry to handle the newly insured. But alas, hoping that the political class and this Presidential administration do anything right is usually a false hope.

The country is now faced with a severe doctor shortage throughout the nation, a shortage now made more acute by Obama Care. While Obama focused so much, and so poorly, on getting more people insured, he failed to realize that increasing the demand for a product or service should be matched by an increase of those supplying the product or service. Failure to do that increases prices, costs, and results in unfilled promises, in this case, unfulfilled medical care.

The shortage of general practitioner doctors across the country looks like the following:

Phil Miller, a representative of the physician search firm,Merritt Hawkins, recently estimated that “some 65 million people live in what’s essentially a primary care desert.”
One third of the states have less than half of the primary care doctors that are needed.
Connecticut has only 15% of the needed primary care doctors it should have, Missouri has only 30%, Rhode Island has only 33% Alaska has only 35%, and North Dakota has only 37% according to Federal government estimates.
Many other states have more doctors than North Dakota on a percdentage basis but still fall short of the 50% rate for primary doctors needed in their state.

And while this current primary doctor shortage has been building for years and prior to Obama Care, Obama Care made it that much more acute and was never addressed by the legislation. So we may now have the insane and ironic situation where an uninsured person now has health insurance but cannot use it because there are no doctors available to treat that person and allow them to use their insurance.

2) The President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Ms. Marilyn Tavenner, recently predicted that the country should expect a “stark rise” in Obama Care health insurance rates in 2017. We have already discussed the serious and double digit health insurance rates of Obama Care policies in 2016 earlier this month. Now an expert in the field is predicting similar double digit rises next year.

And what makes her an expert? Ms. Tavenner’s previous job involved rolling out the entire Obama Care legislation and operations when she was a top executive in the Obama administration. Thus, she has seen the this disaster from inside government and inside the insurance industry. Tavenner’s exact quote is as follows: “I’ve been asked, what are the premiums going to look like? I don’t know, because it also varies by state, market, even within markets. But I think the overall trend is going to be higher than we saw previous years. That’s my big prediction.”

Tavenner identified several factors driving the higher insurance costs of Obama Care policies, most of which we have already identified and discussed in detail:

Obama Care has done nothing to reduce overall medical costs and drug costs so insurance rates are a by product of these higher costs.
Obama Care capped insurance company profits in certain areas.
Obama Care set forth a ton of regulations that caused additional costs to be incurred in the industry.
Obama Care required the Obama Care insurance carriers to accept anyone who applied even if they had serious pre-existing health conditions.
The influx of younger and healthier customers to insurance companies never occurred.

Too bad Tavenner never said anything when she was an Obama agent, government employee, and Obama Care facilitator; speaking up then would have prevented millions of Americans from losing their current insurance policies and access to their favorite doctors and hospitals, it would have saved the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars, and would have prevented a myriad of other problems.

3) We often end these blog posts with stories of real Americans relative to Obama Care. These are sad stories that make the bad numerical results we often discuss relative to Obama Care more human as these Americans saw their premium costs go way up, their deductible levels go way up, they lost access to their favorite doctors and hospitals, and ended up paying more in fines, fees, and Obama Care taxes. The source of these real life tragedies is:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

RICHARD - MONTANA: I'm currently paying $229 per month on a plan from Humana that does exactly what I want. It'll keep me from going broke if something bad happens.

That Humana plan does not comply with ObamaCare. So it will be cancelled at some point. Originally it was scheduled to be cancelled at the end of 2014, now I'm not sure if it will be extended to 2016 or what.

The least expensive policy I could find that complied with Ocare was about $500/mo. and that was for this year. My understanding is that compliant policies for 2015 will be about 20% higher. I hope I can keep the current policy for next year, but I don't know. I am displeased.

MICHAEL - MICHIGAN: Insurance broker Michael Harp said small businesses, part of what's known in the industry as the "small group market," are used to seeing health insurance premiums climb about 10 percent a year, but it's never before been this dramatic. For Extreme Dodge to have kept deductibles and out-of-pocket costs at last year's levels, he said, would have cost the dealership almost 50 percent more than last year.

Harp says what is happening at this dealership is representative of the other small businesses he deals with. Businesses with 50 or fewer employees currently provide health insurance to about 17 million U.S. workers, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

He said the biggest surprise to him in how the law impacts small business clients is "how many people are losers versus winners. … There are some people who do come out ahead, but I would say the overwhelming majority, they're paying much higher rates and they have lower benefits."

RODNEY - MICHIGAN: Rodney noted that his yearly premiums have gone up by almost $1000 since ObamaCare's implementation began.

Rising costs, doctors shortages, and more, the legislation that keeps on giving out bad news. More unfolding Obama Care 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:

Sunday, April 24, 2016

April, 2016, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Four Failure Realities Of Obama Care, More Insurers That Have Bailed Out, 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: 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 insurance premiums, 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Remember how a couple of days ago we reported that Unitedhealthcare was pulling out of two states where they were offering Obama Care health insurance policies because the customers they were obtaining via the Obama Care policies were grossly unprofitable? Well, it appears we spoke prematurely. According to a recent article from the Heritage Foundation, that article cited reporting from the Washington Times that said Unitedhealthcare was pulling out of MORE states for the very same reasons.

Details from the Heritage Foundation article include the following realities and facts:

Unitedhealthcare announced this week it would be pulling out of most state Obama Care exchanges and the related health insurance policies after reviewing their first quarter operating and financial results and determining that Obama Care policies are too risky an investment.
Their CEO, Stephen J. Hemsley said that his company will remain in only a handful of states in 2017, withdrawing from all others because “we cannot broadly serve it [those state markets]on an effective and sustained basis.”
The Washington Post reported that the company will withdraw from Michigan, Arkansas, Connecticut, and parts of Georgia.
In 2015, the nation’s third largest health insurer, Aetna, withdrew from Obama Care policies in Kansas, Utah, and Washington DC.
Blue Cross has already pulled Obama Care policies from the market in New Mexico and is thinking of getting out of North Carolina in 2017: “We can’t offer something for sale in this marketplace that we know every time it’s purchased we’re losing money,” Brad Wilson, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, said during a meeting with North Carolina’s The News & Observer.
And the article reminds readers that more companies may pull out of the Obama Care market since Federal subsidies, worth billions of dollars, are scheduled to expire soon, making financial results even worse.

Just another example of how the Obama Care death spiral is starting and take shape, higher and higher costs and fewer and fewer insurance providers resulting in fewer customers causing higher costs, etc., etc.

2) Jean Morrow, writing for the Heritage Foundation on April 1, 2016, reviewed four realities that prove Obama Care is not again well:

Reality #1 - Increased Costs

Costs across the board are rising with the 2016 premium increases in the double digit range
The Congressional Budget Office expects premiums will go up almost 60% in the next ten years, much faster than expected inflation and wage growth.
Similar rate increases in deductibles have discouraged the poor and young from getting Obama Care policies since if they can afford the premiums, they cannot afford the higher deductibles.
All this is happened even though Obama promised that his law would “bend the health care cost” downwards, something that has not come close to happening as shown by the reality that Federal government spending on major health programs was a whopping $936 billion in 2015, a 13% increase over 2014.
According to the latest CBO analysis, the net cost of Obama Care over the next ten years will be over $1.4 TRILLION, almost double what the Obama administration said the cost would be.

Reality # 2 - Higher Taxes

The CBO said that Americans will pay $832 billion over the next ten years in taxes, fees, and fines.
Many of these taxes and such will hit middle class and lower class American despite the promise from Obama that those Americans would not pay any additional taxes as a result of Obama Care.

Reality #3 - Unstable Enrollment

21 Million people should have gotten Obama Care health insurance coverage by now but only 12 million people have actually gotten Obama Care health insurance coverage.
Many of these 12 million include people that lost their current insurance as a direct result of Obama Care so that the net reduction in uninsured is far less than 12 million.
And as we have said before, these 12 million people are generally older and sicker than average, making insurance companies more likely to get out of the Obama Care program rather than continue to lose money on many of these 12 million.

Reality #4 - Hostility to Personal Freedom

The Obama administration has used the regulations spawned out of Obama Care to give favorable treatment to certain entities, companies, and unions and have given no favors to others, particularly religious organizations, impinging on their freedom.
Obama Care dictates everything from how insurance companies can operate to specifying exactly what options are included in insurance policies even if a customer does not need those options, e.g. maternity coverage of men.

Four realities that prove again that Obama Care is the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington.

3) A lot of Obama Care supporters think that Obama Care did not go far enough, that it should have gone to a so-called single payer system, a system in which the government controls EVERY aspect of the country’s health care process and industry, EVERY aspect. That includes insurance, treatment options, doctors fees, medical tests processes, etc. They fail to understand that even allowing the government and political class the control that they got from Obama Care has been a total failure, giving them even more power and responsibility would be even worse than Obama Care.

This latest assertion was proven again as described in a Daily Mail article from March 31, 2016:

The former head of England’s National Health Service, England’s version of a single payer program, has died after the operation she needed was cancelled four times at her own hospital.
Margaret Hutchon had been waiting since last June for a follow up stomach operation but her appointments to do so were cancelled four times and then she passed away from the ailment that the operation was supposed to fix.
She was a former mayor of the town and a former member of the hospital’s board of directors.

And this is what happens when government and politicians operate anything, they screw it up. Given that a former mayor and former board of directors at the hospital could not get timely medical care in England’s single payer system, what chance does a regular person without these connections have in a single payer system?

That will do it for today’s Obama Care disasters: a single payer system example that shows what happens when politicians get involved in the private affairs of health between medical providers and patients, four realities that summarize why and how Obama Care is failing, and more Obama Care insurers pulling out of Obama Care exchanges because frankly, being a provider of Obama Care insurance policies is a losing financial proposition.

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

Friday, April 29, 2016

April, 2016, Bonus Post, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Failing Numbers and ....A Retro Look Back to One of The Smug Fools That Developed The Whole Mess In the First Place

Thursday, April 28, 2016

April, 2016, Part 6, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Personal Horror Stories Of Obama Care

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

April, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care: Illegals Get Illegal Obama Care Benefits, The Administration Stonewalls Congress, and More

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

April, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Rising Costs, Too Few Docotors, and More

Sunday, April 24, 2016

April, 2016, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Four Failure Realities Of Obama Care, More Insurers That Have Bailed Out, And More

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