April, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care: Illegals Get Illegal Obama Care Benefits, The Administration Stonewalls Congress, 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 have beeen reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington at a very high level. Let's continue with more disasters today:

1) Michael McGrady, writing for the www.constitution.com website on April 1, 2016, took a look back at the the havoc created by Obama Care on its sixth anniversary of being enacted into law:

• 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.”

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