Wednesday, May 25, 2016

May, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Whacking Small Business Employees, Helping Illegal Immigrants 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.

Yesterday and today, and possibly longer, we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) MRCTV recently ran a piece on a real life business and the real life struggles Obama Care has placed on a business owner, his business, and especially his employees. According to writer Steve Bannister on May 19, 2016:

  • Testifying in front of a Congressional small business committee, CEO Tom Kunkel of Full House Marketing and Printing in Maryland said that Obama Care forced him to stop helping his employees pay for their individual, personal health care plans.
  • IRS directive “Notice 2013-54 prohibits businesses from assisting with their employees’ individual market health insurance.”
  • Cohen testified: “I was just stunned. I could no longer help my employees with health care expenses. Mid-year, I had to tell my employees I could no longer reimburse them for health care and that they were essentially on their own.”
  • If Cohen continued to help his employees he would be fined $100 a day per employee, a penalty that would shortly put him out of business.
  • A small business industry organization, NFIB, estimates that 912,000 businesses are affected by this ridiculous rule since 16% of the country’s 5.7 million small businesses had been helping out their employees with payments of their individual health insurance payments.
The impact of such nonsense is drastic as Kunkel pointed out since many of his employees lost access to their current health care plans when he was forced to stop helping them out financially and one employee had to go without her cancer medication for a month: “I had several employees who could not afford their premiums without my contribution. Since they were mid-year in their plans, they were forced to cancel insurance, reenroll in a lower cost plans, and then start over with a new deductible for the year. It was very difficult. One of my employees has cancer, and was not able to get his prescription refilled for over 3 weeks because of the new plan. He also had to pay his deductible all over again. It was a heartbreaking situation. I do not believe this is what lawmakers intended when they created the law.”

Here is an employer, and hundreds of thousands others like him, trying to do the right thing for his employees and the government via Obama Care has this asinine ruling. A major unfolding disaster of Obama Care.

2) We have previously discussed the reality that over half of the 23 Obama Care co-ops that were created by the law have already gone out of business, that 8 of the remaining 11 are on a financial death watch, and that only one out of the 23 has actually been profitable. According to Heritage Foundation writer Melissa Quinn, the Obama administration is changing its rules again as it relates to co-ops in a desperate attempt to get outside investors to invest in what were supposed to be independent competitors in the marketplace.

Now, in reality, whether anyone is insane enough to invest in these co-ops is yet to be seen. The 11 co-ops that have already gone out of business easily lost over $1 billion of taxpayer money. And according to Politico, the remaining 11 co-ops lost $400 million across all of them last year. In exchange for investing in any of these losers would allow the investors to place one or more people on the co-op’s board of directors. 

Given that major health insurance companies have already gotten out or have openly discussed getting out of the Obama Care business, it is doubtful that any sane investor would think that this is a good business opportunity and will see it for what it is: a major, desperate change in Obama’s vision for the co-ops which have been mostly losers from day one.

And given that the reinsurance program that we discussed yesterday is ending, the remaining co-ops will get less financial support from the reinsurance pool that has helped offset a little bit of their losses. An investment for losers, much like the larger Obama Care disaster.

3) Nicholas Fondacaro, writing for the MRCTV website on May 12, 2016, reported that the mainstream media, in this case, the large television networks, decided NOT to cover the fact that Obama Care and Obama suffered a major legal defeat recently. That defeat was the judge and court ruling that Obama had illegally and un-Constitutionally decided to use general taxpayer funds to fund Obama Care subsidies.

This should have been a big news story as it shows how the Obama Care train is coming off of the tracks. But instead, the networks continue to protect this President despite his massive failures in the Obama Care world and other areas of his failures. This story was big, it showed how desperate the administration is to salvage its landmark program that is in the beginnings of its death spiral. But good journalism and truth are often lacking with the news departments within the large networks today.

4) One of the biggest promises of Obama, which turned into one of the biggest lies, is that under no circumstances would Obama Care be made available to illegal immigrants. When Congressman Joe Smith yelled out that Obama was a liar during an Obama State of The Union speech when he said that illegals would not be eligible for Obama Care’s benefits, he was crucified by Democrats and liberals. Now, while he chose the wrong venue to point out the lie, he was likley correct. 

The California state government recently passed legislation that would likley extend Obama Care health coverage to that state’s 2.6 illegal immigrants via the state’s Obama Care Obama Care health insurance exchange. According to Sally Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute: “The law does not allow illegals to enroll in the state exchanges or the federal exchange Healthcare.gov.” But as always with Obama Care, what is legal and in the law is just a suggestion for Obama despite it being illegal.

The pending state legislation requires the state government to formally request that the Obama administration violate the illegal immigrant component of the law. The proposal does require the illegal immigrants to pay for the health insurance themselves without taxpayer subsidies. At least that is what the pending legislation asks for today. 

That will do it for today’s unfolding disasters from Obama Care, the worst legislation ever passed by Washington. More disasters tomorrow.


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