July, 2017, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama's Promises Unfulfilled and Medicaid Still Sucks

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) Obama promised that if Obama Care was passed, by the end of 2016 over 20 million incremental Americans would have obtained individual health insurance coverage from Obama Care insurance policies from participating insurance companies. 

Of course, we now know that the number of Americans who got coverage from Obama Care policies is about 50% below that promise from Obama. And since Obama Care caused 6 to 7 million Americans to lose their current insurance coverage, the incremental number of Americans who got coverage insurance is really only 3 to 4 million, not the 20 million that Obama promised.

And things appear to be going in the wrong direction from an insurance coverage perspective:

• According to a Moneymax article on July 10, 2017, the number of uninsured Americans has risen by 2 million over the past year.
• This was the latest estimate from the Gallup-Sharecare Well Being Index.
• The current percentage of uninsured is 11.7% at the end of June, 2017 vs. 10.9% at the end of 2016.
• This is a statistically significant difference.
• The losses were concentrated among younger adults and people buying individual insurance policies, the market segments that Obama Care was designed for.

But none of this should be a surprise since:

• Premiums and deductibles for Obama Care customers have risen dramatically despite Obama’s promise that annual insurance costs would go down upwards of $2,500.
• Young adults were duped into Obama Care policies in order to have their premiums subsidize the health needs of less healthy Americans which tend to be much older than the young adults dropping their insurance coverage.
• As more and more insurance companies leave the Obama Care market, leaving fewer and fewer options for health insurance in a market, it should not be a surprise that people are dropping insurance since their choices for insurance are getting thinner and thinner.
• So not only has Obama Care fallen over 50% short of its rosy predictions but as time goes on more and more Americans are deciding that that they are not getting the value for their health insurance costs that Obama promised.

So much for Obama Care curing the country's healthcare problems.

2) Obama Care supporters like to brag that well over 10 million Americans now theoretically have health insurance via Medicaid. Which on the surface would appear to be a good thing except that, according to a recent article in the National Review:

• A “gold standard” research project of a randomized control trial of Medicaid in the state of Oregon found that Medicaid provided no significant improvement in health in Medicaid recipients vs. uninsured people.
• Analysis by economist Raj Chetty concluded that health care access to Medicaid for low income households had nothing to do with life expectancy.
• Yale researchers determined that states achieve better health outcomes when they allocate LESS of their social spending towards health care.
• Somehow, since Obama Care was enacted the country’s mortality rate stopped decreasing and actually started going up, a trend that was WORSE in the states that enrolled in Obama Care’s expanded Medicaid program.
• A study of Medicaid in three states found that Medicaid expansion under Obama Care found no improvement in mortality in Arizona and Maine and a decrease in mortality in New York state, showing that maybe or maybe not, at least in this study, Medicaid is at best a hit or miss at improving the health care of people.

So saying that Obama Care is great because millions of people now have access to a government health insurance program that does not improve health is ridiculous.

For the original article and more details, go to:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449107/obamacare-probably-didnt-save-any-lives

Another day, another set of Obama Care failure examples.

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