June, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Dragging Medicaid Down the Drain With 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) One of the major tenets of Obama Care was to dump millions and millions of Americans onto the failing and flailing Medicaid program. Previously we have reviewed why such a strategy was a failure from day one:

• Medicaid is infested with waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud, wasting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars every year.
• Putting millions of more people on the Medicaid roles and increasing the budget to handle the increase resulted in more waste and criminal fraud.
• Less than two thirds of the country’s doctors currently serve Medicaid customers and less than fifty percent are accepting new Medicaid patients, leaving many Americans with Medicaid insurance coverage but without the ability to use that insurance to visit a doctor.
• Medicaid was designed for the nation’s poor, disabled, blind, and childless adults but Obama decided that it was a good idea to put an entirely different set of people on the program, not poor, not disabled, not blind, and not childless, a segment of the population that the program was not designed for. Thus, a bad program designed for one segment of the population got worse when it had to handle a whole different segment that it was not designed to help.
• Continually increasing Medicaid costs are killing state budgets with some states devoting over 20% of their entire tax revenue stream just to the Medicaid program.

What a disaster, made multiple times worse by Obama Care.

But now some states are fighting back and trying to get the program under control and focused on what it was supposed to do, not what Obama shoved down their throats to do. Consider a recent article by Wes Goodman, an assemblyman from the Ohio state government, writing for the Heritage Foundation website on June 30, 2017:

• Ohio realized that the Medicaid program in their state was failing and getting way too expensive besides leaving the most needy state residents behind, all as a result of Obama Care.
• As a result, the state government recently imposed a freeze on Medicaid enrollment in their state to try and finally get a handle on the problems of the program.
• The intent was to, “free up resources for those who are truly vulnerable and to ensure that our Medicaid program, and state as a whole, is financially sound for the future.”
• Currently in Ohio, there are almost 60,000 state residents who qualify for traditional Medicaid benefits including, “children and adults with developmental disabilities who need anything from specialized medical equipment to assist them with their daily lives to therapeutic intervention, to at-home medical services.”
• But Obama Care forced the states to divert Medicaid funds from these types of truly needy people to fund Medicaid coverage for middle class, working, non-disabled, childless adults.
• In the opinion of the writer, “The truly vulnerable have been forced to wait for services, while many who have the capacity to provide for themselves have been jumped to the front of the line.”

Finally, someone somewhere doing a simple set of math calculations and then applying those calculations to help the truly vulnerable in our country. We have previously reported on how the state of Maine slashed their Medicaid budget to help the truly needy in their state with wonderful results, results that did not harm anyone in the process: 

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-2017-part-2the-unfolding-disaster.html

2) An article from the National Review website on June 27, 2017 shed more light on how the Medicaid expansion under Obama Care continues to be a disaster, a disaster upon the original disaster that is Medicaid:

• Since the more that states spend on Medicaid the more they receive in financial support from the Federal government, in some cases getting three dollars for every dollar they spend, there has never been an incentive for the states and Medicaid to be cost efficient since there ineptness and wasteful spending is paid for by the nebulous “American taxpayer.”
• In 2016, improper and criminal Medicaid payments accounted for a whopping 12% of all Medicaid payments, making just the wasted/lost wealth about equivalent to the size of the whole Kenyan economy and certainly larger than the GDP of dozens and dozens of entire countries.
• Even though the people that Obama Care put on Medicaid tend to be healthier, wealthier, and able bodied, the Obama Care legislation gave them preference and better benefits over the people originally intended to be covered by Medicaid, older, poorer, disabled, etc.

What a mess. Obama Care is a disaster and Medicaid is a disaster so Obama thought it would be a good idea to put these two disasters together. Still no cure for stupid.

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