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

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.

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.

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