July, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: One Way To Fix Our Health Care Crisis and One Way Not To Fix it

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) Yesterday we started talking about an article on the iPatriot website by Dr. Tom Barrett. We talked about his review of how bad things are today as a result of Obama Care. Today we will review some of his common sense solutions that rely on common sense rather than the lack of brainpower of American politicians.

As we go through his solutions, keep in mind that many of them are mentioned above since both his list and our list above address the root causes of today’s high health care costs:

• For some reason, Federal law inhibits insurance companies from selling health insurance policies across state lines. If you really want more competition in the health insurance market, remove these types of artificial barriers that make it hard for insurance companies to compete in different markets and different states.
• Pass legislation that would make it easier for people to join together under some common interest or trait which would allow them to negotiate lower insurance rates, much like employers do today.
• Clean up the mess that hospitals are faced with today, i.e. “Repeal the 1986 law that requires hospitals to provide care for illegal aliens and others regardless of their ability to pay. Allow hospitals to turn away non-emergency cases. There are plenty of free clinics in almost every county. Emergency room care for non-emergency situations costs about five times as much as Urgent Care Clinics, whether the patient or insurance pays. Free clinics are obviously even cheaper. I have spent thousands of hours working in emergency rooms. Without question, the majority of cases we saw were not emergencies – but they clogged up the system and delayed treatment for real emergencies.”
• Reduce government regulations and insurance paperwork so that healthcare professionals actually work on health care issues vs. administrative work; research by BMC Health Services Research found that $375 billion is wasted every year on unnecessary insurance-related administrative costs.
• How much cheaper would healthcare be in this country if you could reduce the expenses in the industry by a whopping $375 billion?
• Avoid the stupid mistake that Obama Care made when it required Obama Care policies to cover a whole myriad of potential health concerns (e.g. forcing a 60 year old single male to pay for maternity benefits) and offer a full range of health insurance options so that people can choose the best policy for their needs and risk tolerance including catastrophic policies that cover only catastrophic health care needs, an option that is illegal under Obama Care.

So very well said, address the root causes of the healthcare crises which is really a public health issue, not a health insurance crises, the fatal flaw of Obama Care. Dr. Barrett had some final advice for our bumbling politicians in Washington: “If you enact health care legislation, don’t pretend that health insurance is health care. Deal with the real reasons for rising health costs, including fraud, lawyers abusing the system with shameful malpractice claims, and the abuse of insurance coverage.”

2) One has to look no further than the Veterans Administration to see how poorly the Federal government operates a health care operation, a reality that should scare any American away from supporting a single payer health insurance system in this country. VA scandals have been plentiful with long waiting lists resulting in American veterans being denied and delayed medical treatment while VA administrators covered up their incompetence to protect their careers and pay bonuses. 

Despite Obama’s many promises to fix the VA’s dysfunction, six months into the Trump administration it appears that Obama failed again in this endeavor, not surprising given that his administration failed in just about anything it touched. According to CBS Evening News:

• Nearly 100 veterans died while waiting for medical and health care at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration facility.
• A new VA inspector general analysis found that 43% of the 225 patients who died between October, 2014 and August, 2015 were waiting for appointments or were in need of medical tests that they never were able to get before they died.
• The report did conclude that not all of the deaths could be attributed to not getting the tests they needed in a timely matter but you can be sure that not getting the tests and attention in a timely manner did not prolong their lives either.
• Dr. Christian Head, who is a surgeon at the Los Angeles VA where this crisis happened claims that 140,000 patient consults were deliberately deleted and that things were worse than at the Phoenix VA, the location where we first saw how bad the VA was: "The number of patients waiting for care, the deletion of consults, and the wait list were much more significant here than at Phoenix I first noticed an unusual number of patients who are presenting with delay in diagnosis, meaning that they present into the system, they disappeared for a number of years and then they presented late with advanced cancers. Those consults were being deleted, literally removed from the system." 

There you have it, another VA example where it is still a stupid idea for the entire country to be subjected to such gross government and bureaucrat fatal bungling and cover ups from a single payer system operated by the same Washington politicians that bungled not on health care via the VA but health care via Medicare, Medicaid, and Obama Care. 

That will do it for today, one example of how to actually make Americans healthier and healthcare less expensive and another example of how not to do it, i.e. letting the government handle healthcare matters. One more post tomorrow on this theme, another compilation of real Americans telling us how they endured real suffering at the hands of Obama Care.

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