June, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Senator's Disaster Review and The Bumbling Republicans

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, sugar, 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 copays 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.

1) Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming recently did a nice job in an article he wrote for the Heritage Foundation where he outlined the “5 Ways Obamacare Proves That Government-Run Health Care Is A Disaster":

- Disaster #1 - Obama Care insurance policy costs continue to skyrocket even though Obama promised numerous times that American families could see up to a $2,500 decrease in their annual insurance costs. But Obama Care insurance premiums, on average, have increased 105% since the law went into effect in 2013, hardly the $2,500 annual decrease Obama and the Federal government promised.

But it is not just Obama Care policy premium costs that have risen since 2013. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that premiums for employer sponsored insurance plans have gone up, on average, $4,372 from 2010 to 2016. 

And Obama Care deductibles levels have also gone up substantially with Obama Care bronze policies’ deductibles now costing $6,092 and silver deductibles now costing $3,572. Thus, many Obama Care policy holders have policies that are useless to them since they cannot afford to pay the high deductibles before their insurance coverage kicks in.

- Disaster # 2 - While Obama claimed that Obama Care would increase competition and choice for insurance policies, the exact opposite has happened:

• Of the 23 health co-ops created by the law, 17 have already gone out of business and the remainder are under intense financial pressure. Their failure has cost taxpayers $2 billion.
• In 2017, about 70% of U.S. counties had access to only one or two Obama Care insurers and 2018 will likely be worse as more and more insurers pull out of the Obama Care marketplace due to unprofitability.

- Disaster # 3 - Although Obama promised dozens of times that if you like your current insurance policy, you could keep your current insurance policy, that was both a crude lie and crude joke. Probably 6-7 million Americans lost their insurance coverage and policies since the Obama Care legislation resulted in the policies held by those people to be illegal and thus, had to be terminated.

- Disaster # 4 - Obama constantly promised that those earning less than $250,000 would not be paying a single incremental dime in taxes as a result of the law. In reality, the country and most Americans will end up paying an incremental $800 billion in Obama Care taxes and fees over the next ten years. These increased tax burdens covered such a wide variety of categories including medical devices, prescription drug makers, and individual and employer tax mandates.

- Disaster # 5 - Medicaid was designed to serve the poor, sick, aged, and blind in our society. And it was designed poorly, disappointing both customers and doctors. Doctors get paid far less for serving Medicaid patients than other patients and as a result many doctors, likely higher quality doctors, do not serve the Medicaid market. The problem is infested with incompetence and criminal fraud which results in tens of billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted every year.

Which begs the question why Obama Care would now dump millions and millions of new people onto this decrepit and wasteful program, people who are not poor, sick, aged,or blind? So stupid, a program designed for one segment of people is now forced to support an entirely different segment of people, a program that was imploding before Obama Care even went into effect.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obama Care will add $1 TRILLION of new Medicaid spending over the next decade, a TRILLION dollars being spent on a broken, corrupt, and ineffective program. Insanity.

A nice summary by the Senator on a law that is still the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington.

2) And while Washington Democrats and only Washington Democrats are responsible for the worst piece of legislation ever passed, Republicans are turning out to be not much more competent themselves. For many years, Republicans correctly complained about how bad Obama Care was and is. Thus, this is not a problem or an opportunity that suddenly cropped up for the Republicans.

One would have thought that once they had a chance to repeal the law, they would have been ready to go right out of the gate, that they would have written a replacement bill and that the skids were greased to pass it quickly. That they would have worked the issue long before they had to move on it. 

An alternative approach would have been to do nothing and let the Obama Care process collapse on its own, and thus blaming the Democrats. They then could have put forth their own replacement bill at that point.

Instead, the Republicans have done the worst thing possible: look like bumbling idiots as they rush at the last moment to try and pass a replacement, any replacement legislation that they seem to be writing hastily and on the run. Insanity.

It never ends, the unfolding disasters of Obama Care. More disasters to follow.

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