June, 2016, Bonus Post, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Costs Keeping On Going Up

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.

I thought we would be done with this month’s Obama Care disasters yesterday but a few more things popped up so let’s finish them off today:

1) We have often pointed out how people that have Obama Care health insurance policies are always being faced with higher and higher premiums and deductibles but are receiving less and less quality and choice in their medical care needs. This reality is occurring even though the President promised any number of times that the cost of health insurance would go down up to $2,500 a year for American families.

This continually rising cost of Obama Care insurance was again documented and researched in a recent Breitbart article by Warner Todd Huston on June 15, 2016:

• The title of his article was, “Obamacare Insurance Premiums Set To Skyrocket Yet Again.”
• An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that some of the most popular Obama Care policies, “silver plans,” will see an increase of up 11% in 2017.
• 68% of all Obama Care insurance policies are silver plans.
• The reason for the continued price increases is simple: insurance companies found that they had underestimated the costs associated with Obama Care policies from the start.
• The companies found that silver customers tended to be sicker and more expensive to care for than what was expected and other types of non-Obama Care policies.
• The legislation requires the insurance companies to accept any and all applicants including those with pre-existing conditions which by simple logic, is gong to make them expensive customers to service.
• In addition, as the backup funding mechanisms are stopping, the financial support promised in the legislation has expired, placing more financial stress on the companies.
• Sabrina Corlette is a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms: “There are absolutely some carriers that are going to have to come in with some pretty significant price hikes to make up for the underpricing that they did before.” 
• In April, Larry Levitt, an expert on Obama’s signature healthcare law at the Kaiser Family Foundation, noted, “The industry is clearly setting the stage for bigger premium increases in 2017.”

High costs, higher premiums. The exact opposite of what Obama promised.

2) The Breitbart article referenced above also had a montage of Obama claiming an amazing 23 times that if you liked your current health insurance policy and current doctors, you could keep them under Obama Care. Since upwards of 7 million American lost access to their current insurance policies as a result of Obama Care and millions lost access to their current, preferred doctors, these 23 lies from the President must be especially painful to hear. The video is embedded in the following Breitbart article:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/15/obamacare-insurance-premiums-set-skyrocket-again/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

3) Doug McKelway, writing for Fox News on April 18, 2016, also checked in on how insurance policy rates in the Obama Care world went up as 2016 was unfolding and why:

• The study found that the Blue Cross Obama Care policyholders had higher rates of disease than those who had enrolled in Blue Cross policies before Obama Care went into effect.
• This has driven up the costs of Blue Cross insurers to service their Obama Care policyholders.
• The study was based on a large review of actual medical claims.
• Obama Care holders of Blue Cross policies had higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, depression, coronary artery disease, HIV, and Hepatitis C than previous Blue Cross customers.
• These Obama Care policy holders also had more frequent inpatient admissions, outpatient visits, prescriptions filled and more emergency room visits.
• This previous item, increased emergency room visits, is significant since Obama constantly promised that emergency room visits would go DOWN, not up, if this legislation was passed.
• This resulted in these Obama Care customers needing significantly more medical care which was 19% higher on average in 2014 and 22% higher in 2015.

Now, I am not a heartless bastard, these Americans obviously needed medical care and in many cases they are now getting that medical care. I would not wish the unavailability of medical care for anyone in need of it. But these results show that the Obama Care promises of “bending the cost curve,” reducing costs, saving Americans upwards of $2,500 a year on insurance premiums, etc. are now just cruel deceptions of the American public. 

These stories just prove our theory, as discussed above, Obama Care never addressed the root causes of our country’s high and growing health care costs. And if you do not address the underlying root causes, just providing high priced insurance coverage to the country does nothing about reducing healthcare costs, it just rearranges the those costs within the overall health care system

4) An analysis from the Freedom Partners website earlier this year summarized the premium cost increases of the individual Obama Care insurance policy market coming into 2016. Many of those premium increases expected in 2016 were double digit increases over 2015. They compiled their results in the following table:

State	Average	Range - Low	Range - High
Alabama*	28.3	8.8	28.0
Alaska	39.1	38.7	39.6
Arizona*	19.0	10.1	24.7
Arkansas	4.6	-8.2	7.2
California+	1.5	4.6	9.7
Colorado	13.4	4.0	30.8
Connecticut	2.2	-1.3	7.2
Delaware	22.1	16.8	22.4
Florida	9.2	-6.9	16.4
Georgia*	19.2	0.9	30.0
Hawaii	30.0	27.3	34.4
Idaho	20.1	-8.0	26.0
Illinois*	21.9	9.0	26.0
Indiana	1.0	-19.0	13.5
Iowa	22.0	9.4	28.7
Kansas	23.0	18.5	25.4
Kentucky	7.5	-11.0	25.1
Louisiana	13.9	6.8	29.5
Maine+	4.1	-4.8	18.3
Maryland	20.6	-3.3	26.0
Massachusetts+	6.6	1.5	20.8
Michigan	6.1	-12.6	20.5
Minnesota*	47.7	14.2	49.0
Mississippi*	-0.2	-0.2	-0.2
Missouri*	23.1	9.8	29.7
Montana	26.3	22.2	34.0
Nebraska	17.9	14.8	21.9
Nevada	8.4	2.9	11.4
New Hampshire*	7.3	-27.5	16.3
New Jersey*	13.1	-7.3	18.0
New Mexico	3.7	-2.7	10.5
New York	6.0	-10.4	13.2
North Carolina	29.0	20.0	32.5
North Dakota*	12.6	8.5	12.8
Ohio+	8.8	-5.8	32.0
Oklahoma	29.4	21.6	34.4
Oregon	23.2	8.3	37.1
Pennsylvania	14.6	-2.1	26.2
Rhode Island	4.5	2.7	5.8
South Carolina	14.9	8.7	31.8
South Dakota	13.5	6.0	25.0
Tennessee*	35.2	0.4	36.3
Texas*	14.1	-9.2	34.0
Utah*	15.7	-0.4	24.0
Vermont	5.5	2.4	5.9
Virginia	8.4	-3.3	14.9
Washington	3.1	-12.1	19.0
West Virginia	24.0	24.0	24.0
Wisconsin+	6.5	-10.2	20.8
Wyoming*	6.2	6.2	6.2

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These stories and the double digit increases in costs for Obama Care policies prove again that Obama Care is doing the exact opposite of what it was promised to do. It is raising premiums, not lowering them. It is raising deductibles, not lowering them. It is making health insurance more costly, not reducing the costs as Obama promised. It is not making the country healthier which would reduce costs while improving the health of America. 

It is an unfolding disaster which we will continue to track in subsequent months since if anything is consistent about Obama Care it is that it will continue to be a disaster for America and Americans.