But apparently we spoke too soon. In just the few days since we did that solo post, a number of other Obama Care disasters have hit the fan that we should discuss before next month rolls around. So here goes, with the typical introduction of missed root causes that we always preface our unfolding Obama Care disasters with.
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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.
This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:
1) Yesterday, we talked about the reality that 16 out of 23 Obama Care co-ops had already flamed out financially and gone out of business. As a result, they took over $1.7 billion worth of taxpayer wealth down the drain with them and caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their health insurance coverage. We also discussed the reality that six of the seven remaining co-ops are also on the verge of going out of business.
And now it seems that even Obama has faced the reality that his vaunted co-ops are a disaster. Remember, the co-ops were supposed to serve as a competitive counter weight in geographic areas where there was little competition for health insurance customers, which theoretically allowed those that serve those areas to jack up insurance rates. However, if the co-ops all go out of business, those competitive advantages will never appear.
According to a Wall Street Journal report that was summarized on the Legal Insurrection website, Obama recently proposed that the Federal government step up and “Congress and his White House successor add a government-run, or public, insurance option to the Affordable Care Act and increase federal financial assistance for people to buy coverage [in geographic areas with little or no insurance competition].” Does this not sound remarkably like the original co-op plan, a plan that has had expensive and disastrous ramifications and results?
Let’s review the Federal government’s track record in the healthcare industry:
- Sixteen out of 23 Obama Care co-ops have already failed and the remaining ones are more likely to fail than succeed.
- Medicare and Medicaid are so criminally infested that together they likely lose upwards of $100 billion a year to criminal fraud and inefficiency.
- Medicaid is so bad that one out of three doctors in the country do not accept Medicaid patients, probably resulting in Medicaid patients not getting access to the best doctors in the country.
- An extensive Harvard study of Medicaid patients in Oregon showed that Medicaid patients were no healthier than comparable people that had no health insurance.
- Obama Care has missed its customer enrollment forecast and promise in 2016 by almost 50%.
- Obama Care policy premiums, deductibles, and co-pays have increased substantially over the past few years despite Obama’s many promises that those costs would go down.
- The Veterans Administration, that operates a network of government run hospitals across the country to serve our veterans, has been found to be inefficient, poorly run and managed, and fatal to many veterans who did not get the care they needed in time.
2) The Americans For Prosperity website on July 15, 2016 ran an article where it described how the Obama administration was likely illegally bailing out insurance companies offering Obama Care policies even though Congress never approved funding for such an activity.
Recall, the original Obama Care legislation had provisions for creating a subsidy fund using excessive profits on Obama Care policies from insurance companies doing well under the Obama Care legislation which was given to insurance companies that were not doing well with Obama Care policies. This plan was supposed to ease the industry into the Obama Care world and be temporary, with this subsidy fund expiring after just a few years.
Apparently and allegedly, the administration has been sending billions of taxpayer dollars to various insurance companies after this subsidy program went out of business. A Federal judge recently ruled that this funneling of funds to the insurance companies was unlawful since Congress did not authorize the transfer of taxpayer wealth to the companies.
In addition, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services has also allegedly been sending billions of taxpayer dollars to cover the losses of insurance companies through another provision known as Obama Care reinsurance. According to the article, $3.5 billion has already been sent to the insurance companies as the administration tries to avoid the inevitable: the death spiral of Obama Care.
3) I recently came across one of the more infamous video clips of the Obama Care era. It involved an MIT economic consultant to the Obama administration’s development of Obama Care, Jonathan Gruber. Gruber famously called Americans stupid and how the legislation was written in such a convoluted manner as to make it very hard to understand what the legislation actually did. To view an adjunct member of the Obama administration calling you stupid, go to the following link:
http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2014/11/obamacare-architect-the-stupidity-of-the-american-voter-is-why-obamacare-passed-video/
4) We often finish off these unfolding disasters of Obama Care by showing real life cases of real life American families who have suffered under the legislation. The sources of these heartbreaking stories comes from the following website:
www.ourhealthcarestories.com
ED - OHIO: Even after the administration made hundreds of improvements to the troubled Obamacare website, many people are still encountering difficulty.
Ed Anderson, a graphic designer from Columbus, Ohio, who was recently bumped from his wife’s insurance policy for reasons relating to the new law, discovered that his family’s monthly premiums will double even if he chooses the most inexpensive plan available to him through the new federal insurance exchange in his state.
Anderson said he and his wife currently pay a monthly premium of $460 through Blue Cross Blue Shield. But now that he can no longer stay on his wife’s plan, he will have to get his own coverage. The most inexpensive option would cost him a $428 monthly premium. And he and his wife can’t qualify for a federal subsidy because their joint income exceeds the cutoff. The new insurance policy will cost the Andersons an extra $5,000 a year in premiums alone.
“When you’re trying to keep your house, pay car insurance and put your kid through college, it’s tough,” Anderson said. Everything we do is going to be affected by this. Getting groceries, eating out. Going anywhere. It’s just crazy.”
MARK - IDAHO: Mark A. York, a 60-year-old freelance writer in Hailey, Idaho, said he began shopping after he received a letter saying that his current insurance policy would be canceled because it did not meet the requirements of the health care law. In the exchange, he said, he found policies with premiums similar to what he is now paying, $440 a month, but “the deductibles were so high — $4,000 to $6,000 a year — that it defeats the purpose of having insurance."
JOSH - TEXAS: All I have to say is that it's way too expensive. I make 1600 hundred a month they want me to pay 650 bucks a month that's BS I live check to check already I'll be homeless if I get health care. I'm 28 with 1600 a month barely enough to put food on the table pay bills and gas in my vehicle I have to borrow money every month as it is so this would just be ridiculous it's cheaper for me to pay the penalty at the end of the year oh well what do you do
KEN - COLORADO: My wife and I have been on the same health insurance plan for 12 years. The cost of that plan has gone up 110% in the last three years and we had to go with different plan due to the cost. The new plan covers less with higher deductibles. It is due to the Obamacare act. We called BCBS to ask why the cost has gone up each year (that's three calls, one a year) we where told the same each time, to get ready for the new health care act. So much for cheaper insurance. IT IS A SAD, RECKLESS LAW! All those who voted for it should be ashamed for what they did!
P.S. We are now slaves to our government, we now have to buy something from a private company or pay a fine, to live in this country.
That will do it for this month’s review of unfolding disasters from Obama Care. The President finally admits that a major component of his legislation is a disaster that needs to be remedied, the same President tries to illegally and secretly bailout the suffering insurance companies, we are reminded that those who constructed Obama Care thought we were all too stupid to understand what was being forced onto us, and a reminder that many,many Americans are suffering serious hardships from the worst piece of legislation ever passed. More disasters sure to come around by next month.
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