October, 2016, Part 1, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science: One Hurricane Means Global Warming is Back, More John Kerry Insanity and More

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in man made global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of man made global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control of our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical posts listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims:

1) I have been living in Florida for eleven years. Up until a few months ago when Hurricane Hermine came ashore, our state had not seen a single hurricane touch down since 2004. But despite that extended drought of hurricanes, you knew that the first time a hurricane touched down again in Florida, the global warming/climate change advocates would be out in full throat.

And that is exactly what happened when Hurricane Hermine, the only the hurricane in ten years to come ashore in Florida, caused Hillary Clinton to go all Al Gore on us. According to Philip Hodges, writing for the Eagle Rising website, Hillary attributed Hermine to man made global warming and climate change: “Another threat to our country is climate change. 2015 was the hottest year on record and the science is clear: it’s real, it’s wreaking havoc on communities across America. Last week’s hurricane was another reminder of the devastation that extreme weather can cause and I send my thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by Hermine.

“But, this is not the last one that’s going to hit Florida given what’s happening in the climate. […] If it affects people who lose their homes or their businesses that took a lifetime to build, it doesn’t matter to him. When it comes to protecting our country against natural disasters and the threat of climate change, once again, Donald Trump is totally unfit and unqualified to be our President.”

So typical, ignore ten years of no global warming/climate change ill effects and then go bonkers on a solitary hurricane event that was really not that bad. How about we look at real data relative to hurricane activity? Which is exactly what atmospheric scientist Philip Klotzbach did when he tweeted out a historical chart since 1985, 31 years, that showed hurricane activity is actually trending DOWNWARDS despite 31 years of humanity using carbon based fuels:



Lord forbid that we actually use real data when discussing climate change. Fewer hurricanes over time and yet Hillary goes crazy on a single hurricane event. Insane.2) One of the most irritating feature of global warming/climate change advocates is their condescending attitude, tone, and words. No one is better at being condescending than Secretary Of State John Kerry. According to Eric Scheiner, writing for the CNS News website on September 16, 2016, Kerry was speaking at a recent oceanic conference when he stated that “the melting of the ice and the rise of sea level, all that extra water is just going to spill over the sides of a flat Earth.”Give me a break. A double insult: if you do not believe in man made global warming you think the earth is flat. This is the Al Gore method of arguing global warming: berate, insult and verbally beat down anyone who has an honest and justified theory that says man made global warming and climate change may not be as bad, even exist, than the advocated claim. Rather than look at ALL of the climate science and research that is out there, much of which contradicts what Kerry and Gore claim is the absolute truth, let’s just belittle and insult those that dare to think for themselves.Kerry goes on to make some pretty outrageous claims, many of which I have never heard before despite researching this topic for years:“We now have the highest rate of increase of acidity in the ocean in 50 million years. And believe it or not scientists have the ability to measure that.And that acidity changes the capacity of particularly crustaceans to be able to grow. I’ve seen tests that show what happens with clams when they’re exposed to higher levels of pH, and you see the diminished size of the clams.”“So, lobsters could conceivably lose the hard shell – I mean, you can run the list of these challenges – and none of them exaggerated, except perhaps to that small group of people in America who still block things from happening because they somehow believe that with global climate change and the melting of the ice and the rise of sea level, all that extra water is just going to spill over the sides of a flat Earth.”As always with people like Kerry, he provides no sources to check his lobster and acidity claims, just throws these tidbits out there and proceeds to insult Americans who are global warming doubters. Pathetic.3) Michael Bastasch, writing for the Daily Caller website on September 27, 2016, reminds us of how poorly people like John Kerry predicted the devastation that man made global warming would cause by ….2016. In 2012, so-called expert Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University predicted that the Arctic would be ice free by 2016. But according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, there are still 1.6 million square miles of ice up at the North Pole. Missed it by that much, zero ice vs. 1.6 million square miles of ice, so close.That will do it for today’s update to our theme, "I am a global warming doubter and a believer in science.” Today we learned that global warming advocates lie in the face of real data, they insult in the face of real data, and they make really bad predictions that never come true in the face of real data. More tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

If You Are Voting For Hillary, Please Consider Reading This Before Voting

As the Presidential election is coming up and the campaigning FINALLY coming to an end, I thought it would be a good idea to do a little side by side comparison of Hillary Clinton, Democrat, to Gary Johnson, Libertarian, before election day. Since I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life and I have been voting since the 1970s, I am leaving Trump out of this comparison, he is not worth my attention. 

To be honest, I am fed up with Hillary supporters coming at me because I am not a big fan of her (frankly, I believe she should be in jail given the number of laws she has broken), implying or outright accusing me of being either an idiot or I am intimidated because she is a strong woman. At no point do they talk about the issues and character of the woman, the fact that I do not support her means there must be something fundamentally wrong with me.

So today, let’s try to get past the emotions and name calling and do a little comparison between Gary Johnson and Hillary Clinton that is based on facts and realities, not blind obedience to a party or personality or the sex of a candidate. If you are a Hillary supporter, I challenge you to read the entire comparison and open your mind to the possibility that who you support as a liberal is really not what is right for the country, your kids or your grandkids. I dare you.

Gay Rights:

• Gary Johnson - fully supported gay rights from the beginning, in fact, the Libertarian Party has supported full gay rights for decades.
• Hillary Clinton - fully supports gay rights but supported gay marriage only when it became politically advantageous for her to recently do so.

Women’s Rights:

• Gary Johnson - fully supports women’s rights including the right to choose.
• Hillary Clinton - fully supports women’s rights including the right to choose...unless a woman went public after she was groped, fondled, or sexually harassed by Hillary’s husband, in which case those women must be publicly humiliated and destroyed.

Military Intervention:

• Gary Johnson - vehemently anti-war unless the sovereignty of our country or the safety of American citizens are immediately at risk.
• Hillary Clinton - vehemently pro-war given her support of the Iraq invasion, the U.S. military intervention in Syria and Libya and the new news that she supported bombing Iranian facilities on Iranian soil.

Federal Budget:

• Gary Johnson - strong supporter of the Federal government expenses being in line with Federal government tax revenue and will propose a balanced budget for Congressional approval within 100 days of being elected.
• Hillary Clinton - strong supporter of the Federal government running large budget deficits which will continue to put additional tax and debt burdens on our kids and grandkids for decades to come.

War on Drugs:

• Gary Johnson - would stop the lost war on drugs.
• Hillary Clinton - would stop the lost war on drugs.

Classified Information/Material Security:

• Gary Johnson - has not mishandled classified government materials and documents.
• Hillary Clinton - should be in jail for mishandling classified government materials and documents, obvious felonious acts.

Set-up Illegal Computer Systems For Use By Government Employees:

• Gary Johnson - has not set-up illegal computer systems for use by government employees.
• Hillary Clinton - has set up illegal computer systems for use by government employees which should have gotten her thrown in jail.

Protected Government Email Records:

• Gary Johnson: No record of him ever destroying government email records.
• Hillary Clinton: Destroyed over 30,000 emails via high tech computer scrubbing software,and using lawyers without security clearances, to cover up her felonious behavior and then lied about what was in those 30,000 destroyed emails.

Integrity and Lying:

• Gary Johnson: No evidence he is a pathological liar.
• Hillary Clinton: Has been proven to be a pathological liar from falsely claiming that she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia to falsely claiming her daughter had a Phd in Public Health to falsely claiming that the Benghazi terror attack was caused by an obscure YouTube video to falsely claiming she was always against NAFTA, to falsely claiming that the 30,000 emails contained only personal and family information, etc., etc., etc.

Name Calling:

• Gary Johnson: no evidence that he has made bigoted remarks about broad swaths of Americans from a racial, religious, and ethnic perspective:
• Hillary Clinton: documented proof that Clinton and members of her staff have insulted broad segments of American civilians, calling tens of millions of them “deplorables” (Trump supporters), “basement dwellers” (Bernie Sanders supporters), “never do wells” (Muslims and African Americans), “rednecks”, “old white men”, medieval thinkers (Catholics), and “taco bowl” outreach targets (Hispanics).

Chance of Bipartisanship:

• Gary Johnson: successful two term Republican governor in a traditionally Democratic state.
• Hillary Clinton: Has insulted tens of millions of Americans by calling them deplorables, basement dwellers, never do wells, etc. making bipartisanship very difficult and unlikely.

Accepted Billions Of Dollars From Nations With Horrific Women’s Rights and Gay Rights Records

• Gary Johnson: Not known to have taken money from nations with horrific women’s rights and gay rights records.
• Hillary Clinton: Has taken billions of dollars in various ways from such nations as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Morocco, UAE, and others, all of whom have catastrophic records on women and gay rights.

Million Dollar Payoffs To Their Spouses:

• Gary Johnson: No record of his wife ever receiving a million dollar payoff from a foreign country.
• Hillary Clinton: Husband Bill was rewarded with a million dollar payoff from Qatar, one of those Muslim nations who are not kind to women and gay rights.

Government Size:

• Gary Johnson - will submit a balanced budget within 100 days after being elected and will aggressively cut government's size and influence in our lives including the complete termination of whole Federal government Cabinet-level departments.
• Hillary Clinton - will aggressively expand the size of government, resulting in an ever increasing national debt, higher taxes, lower economic growth, and less individual freedom.

Obama Care's Future:

• Gary Johnson - will totally repeal and terminate the disastrous Obama Care process and put the choice and resources for each American's health care back into their own personal hands with a market driven, competition driven economic model that attacks the root causes of high healthcare costs.
• Hillary Clinton - has called Obama Care one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic party even though Obama Care health insurance premium costs are skyrocketing upwards, deductible levels are surging, health care costs overall continue to climb much faster than inflation, Obama Care policy holders have much fewer choices in doctors, hospitals, and insurance options and carriers, the law has stifled economic growth especially among the small business segment, has exposed millions of Americans to increased threats of identity theft given the lousy data systems of the law, it has attained no more than 50% of its promised level of insured Americans, and it will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt over the next ten years, leaving one to try to imagine how bad a failed Democratic party initiative is if this is one of their greatest accomplishments.

Operator Of A Crime Syndicate:

• Gary Johnson - no evidence that he has ever operated and profited from any type of crime syndicate.
• Hillary Clinton - she and her husband have gotten rich, attaining a wealth level north of $100 million, by operating a crime syndicate known as the Clinton Foundation.

Harbored A Sexual Predator Family Member:

• Gary Johnson: No reason to believe that Johnson or his spouse ever harbored a sexual predator family member.
• Hillary Clinton - Every reason to believe that she protected, condoned, and abetted a sexual predator husband for decades who fondled, groped, sexually harassed, and possibly raped an untold number of women.

Two Faced When It Comes To Policy:

• Gary Johnson - no reason to believe that Johnson changes his position on issues and policies depending on his current audience.
• Hillary Clinton - has admitted in speeches to Wall Street firms that she sometimes has both a "public" policy position and a "private" policy position, which many would call hypocrisy.

Beholden To Wall Street:

• Gary Johnson - no evidence that Johnson is beholden to or owes Wall Street any favors.
• Hillary Clinton - has given numerous speeches to Wall Street firms, usually receiving speaking fees worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with the likely quid quo pro return favor implied.

Sabotaged His/Her Opponents During Primary Activities:

• Gary Johnson - no evidence that Johnson sabotaged his opponents' primary activities or efforts.
• Hillary Clinton - conspired with Debbie Wasserman- Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, to ensure that Hillary was the party's nominee and undercutting Bernie Sanders at every opportunity.

Individual Health (could they withstand the rigors of the Presidency):

• Gary Johnson: has climbed high mountains, has completed triathlons, and has excellent overall physical condition and health.
• Hillary Clinton: coughing fits, fainting spells, heavily medicated, suffered seriously head injury from a fall several years ago.

Views on the Constitution:

• Gary Johnson: staunch defender of the Constitution as are all Libertarians.
• Hillary Clinton: already signals that she wants to limit Constitutional rights, particularly those guaranteed by the First and Second Amendments.

There you have it, an exhaustive list of the issues, behavior, and character of Gary Johnson vs. Hillary Clinton. If after reading this list and I have convinced you that Gary Johnson is a better choice on election day than Hillary Clinton, I applaud you for having an open to to facts and realities and your changing of your vote to Johnson.

If I have not changed your mind and you are still going to vote for Hillary, I still certainly respect your Constitutional right to do so. But I have a hard time understanding how you could vote for a women that is AT BEST going to maintain the status quo in this country, a status quo that has made most Americans poorer, less optimistic about our future, has heaped TRILLIONS of dollars of debt on the back of our kids and grandkids, likely continued to support military intervention across the Middle East, and a woman whose moral character and integrity is abysmal in my opinion. This is a woman who obviously despises broad segments of Americans but who loves the money that flows to her and her family from foreign countries that abhor women and gay rights.

And finally, if I have convinced you that Gary Johnson is a better candidate and person than Hillary Clinton but you are still going to vote for her anyway, than I do not understand that behavior at all. If it is to vote against Donald Trump, then I remind you of the old saying, “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” Supporting Hillary Clinton even when you know she is not the right candidate just perpetuates the existing political class in this country, people that care more about themselves and their enrichment than you and the rest of the country. 

Every vote for Trump and Clinton, either one, continues to support the trash that resides in Washington today. A vote for Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders or anyone else, weakens the evil that is the political establishment. Continuing to reinforce that evil is inane, in my opinion.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: HIgher Costs, Less Competition, An Alternative and Stories From America

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) Melissa Quinn, writing for the Heritage Foundation on October 17, 2016, provided some upfront and personal stories on ordinary Americans and how Obama Care was screwing up their lives:

• Warren Jones is a veterinarian in Kansas City, Missouri, who has had a health insurance policy with Blue Cross Blue Shield Of Kansas for 15 years.
• In 2014, the year that Obama Care took effect, that policy cost him $318 a month to maintain.
• In 2015, that same policy went up to $394 a month and then to $491 a month in 2016, about a 60% increase in just two years.
• This is the exact opposite of what Obama promised when he claimed that people could see up to a $2,500 REDUCTION in their annual health insurance policy costs.
• In 2017, that same policy will cost him $716 a month, much more than double what he paid just three years ago.
• Despite paying so much more now, his policy no longer has vision and dental coverage and his deductible has also increased to $2,500 a year.
• So he is paying a lot more and getting a lot less as a result of Obama Care.
• Although he does not get his policy via the Obama Care exchange process, even if he did he would not qualify for Federal taxpayer subsidies since he earns too much money.
• And insurance rates, especially for Obama Care policies are going to continue to skyrocket: “A lot of insurers didn’t understand that the market was going to be skewed in terms of income and health status as severely as it was,” Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “Generally, the pool was much worse than anybody expected because of things the administration did that made it worse.”
• Things are not much better in neighboring Kansas where the Kaiser Family Foundation says that six of ten Kansas counties will have only two Obama Care insurers to choose from, a far reach from Obama’s promise that Obama Care would spur competition.
• Before Obama Care was enacted, there were 17 insurance companies operating across Kansas.
• Kaiser also estimates that five states will have only a single insurer issuing Obama Care policies in 2017.
• Rochelle Bird lives in Overland Park, Kansas where she is self-employed
• She has had a non-Obama Care policy from Coventry, a subsidiary of Aetna, for two years.
• In that short time her premiums have gone from $335 a month to $487 while her deductible has increased fivefold, from $1,200 to $6,200.
• And then, adding insult to injury, Coventry then decided to cancel her policy altogether.
• She was not optimistic that she would find a good replacement policy for herself: “I am now faced with the fact that unless something changes, there will be one health care provider presumably with two different health plans that I will have a choice of [while] living in the state of Kansas. That’s absurd. How is that helpful? I’m expecting (a) I’ll pay more, (b) I’ll have less, and (c) I may or may not have the same doctors. Those are always the moving parts.”

Regardless of whether or not you have an Obama Care policy, people across the country are seeing less competition vs. Obama’s promise of more competition, higher premiums despite Obama’s promise of up to a $2,500 decrease in premiums, and higher deductibles. 

2) We listed a bunch of root causes of high healthcare costs above, causes, that if properly addressed, would help reduce healthcare costs and improve the healthcare of every American. But we do not have a monopoly on good ideas to reduce healthcare costs. Consider another Melissa Quinn article from September 12, 2016, that talked about a unique approach for a group of people that is actually reducing healthcare costs:

• Although Deirdre Folley of New Hampshire is one of more millions of Americans nationwide who is considered uninsured, she does not have to pay an Obama Care penalty for not having health insurance.
• Folley and her family are members of Samaritan Ministries which is a so-called healthcare sharing ministry.
• This organization is structured so that members share the cost of each other’s health care expenses.
• This was especially useful to her when her daughter broke her leg which required visits to an urgent care center, a radiologist, and orthopedist which cost her nothing.
• 600,000 Americans are getting healthcare coverage the same way as Folley via Health Care Sharing Ministries.
• According to the article: “Health care sharing ministries facilitate the sharing of medical costs between members, all of whom have shared beliefs. The ministries don’t serve as insurance, but rather when a member has a medical “need,” other members “share” that person’s medical costs.” In some ministries, like Samaritan, members are encouraged to negotiate prices directly with providers to bring down the cost of their medical bills, like Folley did, and they pay in cash before being reimbursed by members of the health care sharing ministry."
• According to Folley, being part of the ministries healthcare model allows them to not violate any of their religious beliefs either: “We didn’t want to buy into a plan where we were most likely going to be paying for abortions or not knowing whether or not we were paying for abortions. With Samaritan, we know we don’t pay for anyone’s abortions, we don’t pay for contraception, we don’t pay for sex changes or counseling for things we would object to. We know that our money isn’t taking part in anything that we have a moral objection to."
• These options are obviously becoming very popular in the face of Obama Care with Folley’s organization almost tripling in size since Obama Care took effect.
• Similar types of healthcare organizations have seen similar growth rates.
• It costs Folley’s family $425 a month for her family of four to be a part of the ministries and she is directed each month where to send that monthly fee directly to another member in need.
• Not surprisingly, the insurance industry is not happy these are not paying customers and users of their insurance policies: “The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has previously warned that health care sharing ministries are not insurance and therefore don’t have the protections of insurance.”
• But given the poor record of insurance companies in the Obama Care world, they really should not be casting too many stones at others looking to keep their families healthy.
• Folley and others like her have not seen the mega cost increases that Obama Care policy holders experienced on their Obama Care policies over the past few years nor the narrowing of the networks of doctors and hospitals they can use.
• And since members pay members directly, there is no profit motive involved as there is with insurance companies which is a big reduction in health care costs right away.

So there are many ways to reduce healthcare costs in this country. Whether it is attacking the root causes of high costs we listed above or organizations like these ministries that are providing low cost, local medical needs financial support to their members, it is a shame that Obama Care more or less ignored what would work in place of what we now know does not work.

3) Let’s finish up today's and this month’s discussion on the unfolding disasters of Obama Care with some quick stories of real Americans that Obama Care has created havoc, stress, and agony for, stories that come from the website: 

www.ourhealthcarestories.com:

CHARLES, OKLAHOMA: 5 of my medications that I have to take everyday went from 60.00 to 90.00. I was given no warning . That is an increase of $180.00 -Those are not the only medications I have to buy. There is no way those kinds of increases are justifiable-- I have many friends that tell me the same thing is happening to them. Insurance companies are trying to re-coop losses by passing these kinds of increases onto the American public. I wonder who is my advocate? Senior citizens like myself cannot afford these kinds of increases. Not to mention my co-pays going up also. Especially when you only find out this ridiculous increase when you go to pay for your medications. I know some people who cannot afford them any longer and they will just do without them.

HARVEY, TENNESSEE: Anchor: Harvey Burniston owns a landscaping company in Butler, and hailed CoveredTN as one of the best decisions the state legislature ever made, splitting insurance costs between the employee, the employer, and the state. Now Burniston says the only plan available is triple the cost. 

Harvey: “A lot of small businesses like myself do not even - they’re not required to have health insurance, [and] I’m not either but I try to do that in order to keep high quality [workers] and take care of my people that work for me. Right now, the average is around $100 a month. When the insurance goes up the least expensive policy we can get is $296 a month, so it’s basically tripling in price.”

EDIE, CALIFORNIA: I am a stage four cancer survivor and I am about to lose my health care plan. When I wrote about my struggle in the Wall Street Journal, the White House directly challenged my account. No empathy was offered and it was suggesting that I was incorrect.

PAUL, UTAH: I learned last week our insurance plan was terminated under the Affordable Care Act, more than 3 1/2 months into our daughter's fight with undifferentiated sarcoma began. The options we are weighing have premiums that are more than double the premiums under our previous plan.

SHEILA: Obamacare takes away from the right to choose the healthcare we want.

Less choice, higher costs, interruption of critical medical care, same sad disasters every month.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Making Up Excuses For Failure, IRS Harassment of Citizens, 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) The October 14, 2016 issue of The Week magazine did an article on the downfall of Obama Care called, “Why Obama Care Is Struggling.” It covers much of the failures we have already discussed this week and adds in a few others along with the very few, and very weak, Obama Care success stories:

• Some of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, and Blue Cross Blue Shield are rapidly pulling out of the Obama Care market because they are losing billions of dollars by being in those markets.
• Only 12.7 million people enrolled in the Obama Care exchanges this year, far short of the forecasted and promised 21 million who should have already enrolled. [Note: not included in the article is the reality that over 1.6 million original enrollees out of the 12.7 million have already been kicked out of their policies because they never paid the first installment of their premiums so the miss relative to the 21 million is even worse.]
• As many as 19% of those customers will have access to only one Obama Care insurer in 2017, very short of Obama's promise that Obama Care would increase competition, not reduce competition to only one provider.
• The main reason cited for the failure is that not enough young people have signed up for Obama Care policies, preferring to pay the penalty for not having insurance.
• While the business case and financials of the Obama Care effort required at least 35% of the enrollees to be aged between 18 and 34, in reality that percentage is only a meager 28%.
• Another problem with the shortfall is that small businesses did not kick employees off of their business insurance plans and onto the Obama Care policies as often as the Obama Care planners and forecasters expected, leaving the Obama Care insurers with older, sicker, and more expensive customers than expected.
• As a result, Obama Care insurance companies either have to hike up premium costs which drives away customers or strip down the benefits of their insurance policies, forcing customers to pay higher prices for less robust insurance coverage which drives away customers so much that many insurance companies decide that from a financial perspective, it is better to be out of the Obama Care world than be in it and take a financial beating.

What a mess, missed customer forecasts, higher premiums, less competition. Now, to be truthful, the article does point out that 20 million more people have health care insurance vs. the times previous to the Obama Care legislation. Also, the percentage of Americans without insurance coverage has dropped from 16% to 9% since Obama Care was passed. But there is a problem with considering the increased quantity of people having healthcare insurance vs. the quality of their healthcare insurance:

• Many of those with Obama Care policy customers are paying more and getting less than what they had with their previous insurance policies, policies that Obama Care outlawed and doomed to termination.
• Which gets us to another point, the 12.7 million who enrolled in Obama Care policies in 2016, were not all people who had not had health insurance before the law was enacted; likely more than half of the 12.7 million just traded their existing policies for Obama Care policies, often under duress, so that the incremental number of Americans insured under Obama Care insurance policies is likely closer to 4 or 5 million.
• Half of those Americans that are now insured as a result of the law, have gotten insurance via Medicaid, a reality that places upwards of 10 million people on a government program that will add tremendous costs to our national debt, provide health care via very narrow networks of less than the best doctors and hospitals, it is a government program that is hurtling towards financial insolvency, is corrupted with inefficiencies and criminal fraud, and if a Harvard study is to be believed, being a Medicaid patient does not make you any healthier vs. not having Medicaid coverage at all.

So yes, Obama Care did increase the number of Americans with health care insurance coverage. But Obama never promised that it would be lousy coverage that costs a lot, has high deductibles, had narrow networks of doctors and hospitals that were not of the highest quality, the reality that we see today. Quality also matters, it is not just quantity that matters.

[Note: the article tries to make the point that “overall government spending on healthcare was $2.6 trillion less last year than what it was expected to be before Obama Care…” This is obviously a ridiculously wrong number. The entire Federal government budget is just under $4 trillion a year so to claim that it is spending $2.6 trillion LESS, not in total, $2.6 trillion LESS, a year on healthcare is obviously either a falsehood meant to make Obama Care look better than it is or a gross typo.]

2) Zachary Tracer, Katherine Doherty, and Tatiana Darie, writing for Bloomberg on October 14, 2016, continued the bad news train coming out of the Obama Care disaster:

• According to an analysis by Bloomberg, 1.4 million Obama Care policy holders in 32 states will lose access to their policies in 2017, forcing them to find other insurance options. 
• Most of the damage is being caused by major insurance companies pulling out of the Obama Care world.
• The search for replacement policies will like lead to fewer insurance policy choices that are more expensive.
• S&P Global Ratings predict that 2017 enrollment in Obama Care insurance policies will be down by 8%.
• Just in Washington DC 7,800 Obama Care customers will lose access to their current policies.
• Kaiser Family Foundation has predicted that at least 19% of people in the Obama Care individual market will have the ability to choose from exactly one provider in 2017.
• In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield will be the only Obama Care option in 95 out of the state’s 100 counties since Aetna and UnitedHealthcare have withdrawn from the state, leaving 284,000 state residents without Obama Care health insurance policies.
• 117,000 residents in Tennessee will lose access to their Obama Care policies.

Another article, another set of implosions.

3) Obama Care from the beginning always had a little bit of the “Big Brother” syndrome ala George Orwell’s 1984. The government was forcing you to buy a product/service that you may or may not want to buy and making you a criminal if you did not heed their warnings and tracking your behavior to make sure you obeyed.

That Big Brother feeling came about again with a current IRS program that was put in place to ensure your compliance. The IRS, the enforcement arm, the “muscle” behind Obama Care is sending out official IRS letters to uninsured Americans (“reaching out” in their words) to remind them (“attracting” in their words) they need to get insured or be fined. The emphasis of the IRS has been to “remind”younger Americans to get insured because in order for Obama Care to work, younger Americans have to subsidize older, less healthy Americans, kind of a cross generational subsidy program from Americans with generally less wealth paying the bills of Americans with generally more wealth to their name.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise and Ways & Means Chairman Kevin Brady recently sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. It stated, “We strongly object to any action by the Administration to improperly use sensitive taxpayer information to identify and harass individuals who have rejected the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by choosing to pay a tax rather than be forced into a health care plan they don’t need and don’t want.” 

Their other concern is that the IRS was using “protected taxpayer information” to conduct the outreach program and that “We do not believe it to be an appropriate tax administration activity, or a good use of scarce taxpayer resources, to use protected return data to direct taxpayers on their personal coverage decisions.”

So yes, Big Brother IRS is watching and like Santa Claus, knows if you have been naughty or nice when it comes to your personal decision on health care insurance, the First Amendment be damned.

4) This next story is great because it shows how out of touch many of the Obama Care architects are relative to the current meltdown of the program and how deep they are into denial. According to David Ruiz, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on August 16, 2016, Zeke Emanuel, one of the more primary and certainly one of the more obnoxious architects of Obama Care, implied that Aetna’s decision to withdrawal from 70% of the Obama Care exchanges markets is not because they were losing money on Obama Care policies but it was to spite the government for not allowing its merger with Humana.

Is he that much out of touch with reality or just pissed off that his work is turning out to be a disaster? Let’s consider some facts:

• Blue Cross and BlueShield have also pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• UnitedHealthcare has pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• Humana and other insurance companies have pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• 17 out of the 23 Obama Care co-ops have gone out of business already because of heavy financial losses.
• We know for a fact that younger, healthier Americans did not sign up for Obama Care in the volume expected which increased insurance company costs more than expected.
• The primary objective of any business executive is to maximize shareholder wealth so no executive would stop operating in a profitable market category if they were maximizing shareholder wealth in that category, i.e. being profitable serving that category.

And despite all of these realities, this sore loser blames Aetna for doing something the whole market has done or is considering doing. By the way, Emanuel provides not proof, no income statements, no Aetna financial disclosures, no Aetna SEC documents, he just accuses them of doing what everyone else is doing. Pathetic.

One last set of unfolding Obama Care disasters tomorrow.

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October, 2016, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Insurance Company Exits, The Silence of Hillary, and An Illegal Bailout Stopped

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) Over the past two days we have been reviewing how Obama Care is imploding across the country. It was a piece of legislation that was doomed to failure from Day One and now that reality is coming to past. Today and tomorrow we are probably going to sound a little redundant as we continue to review the implosions but it is important to understand how wide and how deep this disaster is becoming. So bear with us as we continue to document the impacts of the worst piece of legislation ever produced by Washington.

Let’s see what Michael F. Cannon had to say for the Cato Institute on August 30, 2016:

• It is now impossible to purchase an Obama Care policy in Pinal County, Arizona as ALL Obama Care insurance carriers have pulled out of the Obama Care market there, leaving 10,000 people without health insurance coverage.
• Aetna and Blue Cross had considered staying in the county if they could get an 86% and 65% increases in insurance premiums respectively approved by the state of Arizona but even then decided that even those huge increases in premium rates would not be enough to be profitable.
• The highly touted co-op concept also fizzled in the county since the Arizona Obama Care co-op went out of business like sixteen of its brethren did across the country.
• In a sad irony, those residents of Pinal County are still going to have to pay Obama Care fines for not having insurance even though it is impossible for them to buy Obama Care insurance policies in their county now.

So much for Obama's promise that the legislation would increase competition and reduce costs, it worked so bad that it eliminated ALL competition from the county, the exact opposite of the promise.

Mr. Cannon reminds us of Obama’s promises back in the early days of the legislation: “In 2009, President Obama promised that under Obamacare, “it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition” or “to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most” or “to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime.” Obamacare would place a “limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses” and require insurers “to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies.”

Weighty promises, none of which became true for people across the country who are losing access to most, if not all, Obama Care insurance carriers so it makes no difference if their costs of illness are limited or they get free services if they cannot even get a policy. The unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

2) Reason magazine, via an October 3, 2016 article by Peter Suderman, came up with a very interesting observation: even though Obama Care is imploding in glorious and disastrous ways, Hillary Clinton has been very, very quiet of the mess. In 15 out of 16 speeches she has given over the past month, she only mentioned Obama Care once and that was because Obama was in the audience. 

As a politician who until recently thought that Obama Care was a great accomplishment, maybe she looks a little foolish with that statement given that:

• The state of Minnesota state government announced that Obama Care premium rates would go up between 50% and 67% in 2017, with state officials calling it “an emergency situation.”
• A few weeks before Minnesota admitted Obama Care was coming off the rails in their state, Tennessee officials declared that its Obama Care exchange was “very near collapse.” That state approved rate hikes for Obama Care policies in 2017 of more than 40%.
• In Arizona, the majority of state counties will be served by only one Obama Care insurer with at least one county being served by NO Obama Care insurers.
• In at least four other states, the entire state in 2017 will be served by only one Obama Care competitor: Alaska, Alabama, Wyoming and Oklahoma.
• Janet Trautwein, the head of the National Association of Health Underwriters, a trade group for insurance brokers, was recently quoted in the The New York Times, "Employer markets are fairly stable, but the individual insurance market does not feel stable at all….In many states, the individual market is in a shambles."
• Even Obama realizes to some degree that things are coming apart with his recent suggestion that the Federal government become an insurance company, an idea we have already debunked and ridiculed yesterday.

No wonder Hillary has been quiet as things have unraveled, she is on record defending what is a rapidly sinking ship, as summarized in the Reason article: “Clinton's silence is telling. Crucial elements of Obamacare are on teetering on the brink of collapse, and the only solutions that its backers have on offer involve spending more public money and giving the government even greater power over health coverage and care. Is it any surprise she doesn't want to talk about it?” If she had a solution, this would be a great time to step into the breech. Given her hesitation, it must assumed that she has no solution.

3) Things have gotten so bad that the Obama administration tried to an end run around the wording of the law and illegally funnel money to insurance companies in a last ditch effort to keep them financially sound and in the Obama Care world. 

Fortunately, their efforts were uncovered and ruled illegal by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Chris Jacobs, writing for the National Review on September 29, 2016 did a great job explaining how things went down: “...the reinsurance funds collected from employers had two – distinct purposes: first, to repay Treasury for the $5 billion cost of a separate program in place from 2010 through 2013; and, second to subsidize insurers selling Obamacare plans to high-cost patients during the law’s first three years. When collections from employers turned out to be less than expected, HHS [the Obama administration] prioritized the second objective to the exclusion of the first – an action that, according to the GAO, violates the plain text of the statute. As the opinion noted, “the fact that HHS’s collections ultimately fell short of the projected amounts does not alter the meaning of the statute.” The memo continued that, because agencies must “‘effectuate the statutory scheme as much as possible’ . . . HHS continues to have an obligation to carry out the statutory scheme using a method reflective of the specified amounts even though actual collections were lower than projected.” As a result, the GAO concluded that the Department has no authority to divert to insurers approximately $3 billion in reinsurance contributions that should be allocated to the Treasury.” 

Nice try if illegal. But we should not be surprised, the Obama administration has illegally changed the law and delayed tenets of the law many, many times. This attempt to illegally divert billions of dollars to insurance companies smacks of desperation and crony capitalism.

Another day, another set of Obama Care failures More of the same tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w