July, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Why A Single Payer Plan Is Still Nonsense and More Obama Care Failures

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) We have spent a number of posts in this theme over the past month on what a lousy program Medicaid is for Americans. It is expensive, inefficient, criminal and fraud infested, financially unsustainable, and worse of all, according to a large number of research studies, it does not make people any healthier than those people that have no health insurance at all. It is a complete and utter Federal government run failure.

We have also spent time over the past couple of years discussing what a complete disaster the Veterans Administration has been in serving the health and medical needs of our armed forces veterans. Waiting lists so long that people die waiting to get medical treatment, criminal fraud, wasted taxpayer wealth, and massive cover ups of VA administrators’ incompetence.

Given that it is pretty obvious that the Federal government is incapable of operating any kind of medical and healthcare operation, along with being incapable or running any kind of operation efficiently and effectively form the Postal System to AMTRAK, what do many liberals and Democrats in Washington want to do? Yes, they want to double down on failure and operate and control ALL of the country’s medical and health operations. They want to put the U.S. into a single payer system where the government, politicians, and bureaucrats control your entire health care needs and fate.

Several key Democrats have supported the idea of a single payer system, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Chuck Schumer. Schumer recently stated that: "We're going to look at broader things. Many things are on the table. Medicare for people above 55 is on the table. A buy into Medicare is on the table, buy into Medicaid is on the table. On the broader issues, we'll start examining them once we stabilize the system."

“Stabilize the system?” Really Chuck, Medicare and Medicaid have been around for about fifty years and Washington has not stabilized them yet, what makes you think you can “stabilize”the programs now? Give me a break.

Larry Kudlow, an economist and former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, nicely summarized what a stupid idea Schumer has: “A government plan is not going to work. Medicaid, which is a disaster and has spiraled out of control and has expanded and expanded and expanded with no eligibility requirements anymore – that’s the perfect example. If you want a Democratic program that is going to be government-run, single payer – take a look at Medicaid, which has been a disaster.”

A recent article on the Moneymax website shed some light on why Schumer and the others mentioned above are insane:

• Medicare spending was a whopping 15% of the total Federal government budget in 2016.
• It is projected to rise to 17.5% by 2027.
• The Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund is expected to be out of money by 2029, according to research from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
• Medicare spending per capita is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 4.5% over the next decade.
• Since the economy has been growing at a measly 2% for the past eight years on average, at some point the economy will not be able to sustain Medicare spending since that spending is growing more than double the underlying economy supporting it.

So let’s summarize: the people that cannot run Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration health care function, the Postal System, and AMTRAK efficiently and effectively want to control all of our health care matters. Still no cure for stupid.

2) Dr. Tom Barrett, writing for the iPatriot website on July 18, 2017, did a great job describing what a failure government run medical operations are and then provides some common sense ways to reduce healthcare costs in this country without any government and politician intervention in our lives. We will talk about the first topic today, the problems, and continue tomorrow with his solutions.

The problems and current situation:

• Obama promised that Obama Care would lower health insurance premiums but insurance premiums have actually doubled in some states since the legislation was passed.
• Obama promised better insurance policies but Obama Care insurance policies are often so bad that the policies provide no insurance coverage at all since deductibles and networks are so high and narrow.
• Research by Health Pockets: “...reveals that the average ObamaCare Bronze plan (the cheapest one available) has deductibles of $12,393. That was the amount many of these families paid for a year of insurance. Now they have to pay higher premiums, and the insurer doesn’t pay them a cent until they have shelled out $12,393.”
• The New York Times reported that three million Americans living in 1,388 U.S. counties, one third of ALL U.S. counties, now only have access to only one Obama Care insurer despite Obama promising that Obama Care would INCREASE the number of competitors.
• At least 45 counties now have zero Obama Care insurance companies.
• Despite Obama’s promises of lower costs and “bending the cost curve” of health care in this country, seven years into ObamaCare and health care costs still rise much faster than other costs of life:

So in summary, costs have not gone down they have gone up, the number of competitors has not gone up it has gone down, healthcare insurance coverage has not gotten better, it has gotten worse. Has any piece of legislation ever passed by Washington so totally and utterly failed like this piece of legislation? And people like Schumer want to continue to control more and more of our healthcare? Lord help us.

Tomorrow we will continue to review the article by Dr. Barrett but with an emphasis on his proposed and common sense solutions to reduce healthcare costs without the American political class being involved.

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