August, 2017, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: $ MIllion Say NO Thanks To Obama Care, Aetna Says Good Bye to Obama Care, and The Failure Of Health Care In Canada

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) By this time in the Obama Care life cycle, we were promised that well over 21 million Americans would be enjoying affordable health care coverage from a plethora of insurance companies all eager for our business and insurance dollars and that we would be getting medical support from our current doctors or any doctor we wanted. Instead we have about half the promised number of people with Obama Care policies, the annual cost of those policies has been going up by double digits since the beginning, the number of companies offering Obama Care policies continues to dwindle quickly, and the network of healthcare professionals in Obama Care policy networks has gotten more and more narrow.

The quality of the insurance and health care provided has gotten so bad that a whopping 8.1 million Americans paid over $1.6 billion in fines since they did not purchase health insurance back in 2014, as required by Obama Care. According to the IRS: “Beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act required that individuals must have had health care coverage, qualified for a health coverage exemption, or made a shared responsibility payment with a tax return. A health care individual responsibility payment was made on 8.1 million returns for $1.7 billion, an average of $210 per tax return paying this penalty.”

While that number got lower as the penalty for not having health insurance got higher, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that this year 4 million Americans will still ignore the mandate to buy insurance and pay the fine which in total will come to about $5 billion. Let’s play with some numbers:

• That is $5 billion that will not be used to grow the economy, $5 billion less than cannot be used for movie tickets, nights out for dinner, kids’ camps, etc., $5 billion that will disappear into the Federal bureaucracy and never be seen again.
• With about 10 million Americans currently having Obama Care insurance policy coverage, a whopping 40% equivalent to those covered have said no to Obama Care.
• If Obama Care was really that good, you would not have the equivalent of 40% of the current enrollees saying no thanks.

Another sad Obama Care prediction failure. Or as Senator Tom Cotton summed it up: “It’s not surprising that the Obamacare mandate numbers are worse than the administration first claimed. Obamacare penalizes taxpayers who can no longer afford insurance that Obamacare made unaffordable. As Obamacare continues to unravel, things will only get worse. The legacy of Obamacare is skyrocketing premiums, unaffordable deductibles, the destruction of the individual insurance market, and tax penalties on Obamacare’s victims.”

2) So not only are millions of Americans savvy enough to realize that paying a lot of money for very poor insurance coverage is not a sound financial decision, even those that would like to get an Obama Care policy are having problems:

• According to Martin Knoll, writing for the Conservative Tribune website on August 4, 2017, another major health insurance company has pulled out of ALL of the Obama Care markets that it currently serves.
• Aetna, one of the largest health insurance companies in the country, announced they are completely withdrawing from Obama Care exchanges in 2018, leaving many Americans again without health insurance coverage.
• While the company had considered staying in the Nevada Obama Care market, in the end it pulled out of that state also.
• The reasons they are pulling out of all of the Obama Care markets was evident in their recent earnings report where they had a record 52% growth in profits with a lot of that growth being attributed to pulling out of other Obama Care markets previously.
• Aetna had lost about $700 million on Obama Care policies between 2014 and 2016 and was expected to lose another $200 million in 2017 despite a shrunken presence.

So much for “bending the cost” curve of healthcare in this country. The costs due to Obama Care are higher than expected or promised everywhere, from people voting with their wallets to not buy Obama Care expensive, poor quality insurance policies to large health insurers saying they have had enough, the costs of Obama Care policies are still too high.

3) The last refuge of Obama Care supporters is coming down to the universal healthcare/single payer system, where the government handles every single aspect of your health care needs. These people are now saying that Obama Care did not go far enough, did not allow the government enough control over our health care decisions, that is why it failed. They say this despite their promises seven years ago of lower costs, more competition, better medical care. They were entirely wrong back then in their predictions about Obama Care, why should we believe them and their predictions about universal single payer health care?

In fact, we do not have to believe them. We have previously reviewed the single payer government controls everything healthcare market previously in this blog and how it has failed miserably in other countries:

Canada: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/02/february-2015-part-4-unfolding-disaster_23.html

England: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/february-2017-part-5-unfolding-disaster.html

Let’s stay with this theme, i.e. failed single payer around the world, with a revisit to Canada:

• A new research report from the Fraser Institute shows that Canadians pay a lot of money for their single payer healthcare system and get very poor service in return.
• The research also found that that Canadians really have no clue how expensive their healthcare really system is since it is indirectly paid for via a myriad of taxes and fees: “Canadians often misunderstand the true cost of our public healthcare system. This occurs partly because Canadians do not incur direct expenses for their use of health care, and partly because Canadians cannot readily determine the value of their contribution to public health care insurance.”
• The research found that a typical Canadian family of four will pay $12,057 a year for health care in 2017, an increase of 70% over the past 20 years.
• Thus, the typical family is paying over $1,000 a month and still are not getting anywhere close to good medical care.
• Fraser also found that about 63,000 Canadians leave the country every year to get medical treatment, an average of about 120 a week.
• Thus, if the Canadian system is so good while do tens of thousands of Canadians abandon that system for medical care elsewhere, usually in the U.S. every year? Could it be the long waiting lists for both simple and complex surgery that exists in Canadian hospitals?
• According to the report from Fraser: “Services are being rationed. In our last report on wait times in Canada, we discovered that the average wait time from referral to treatment was 20 weeks. That was the longest wait time in the history of our survey.”
• While the U.S. healthcare model has its problems, can you imagine waiting for five months on average just to get a referral? That does not mean treatment, that means getting a referral to get an opinion on what treatment should be.
• A five month wait for a referral could be a death sentence for someone with a cancer or other life threatening disease, hardly good health care practices.

Rationed health care at high prices with long waiting lists? Does not sound so great when you understand the reality of failure of a single payer, government controlled healthcare system. 

And besides the point of the failure of single payer in England, Canada and elsewhere: do you really want the likes of Nancy Pelosi (the Speaker ofthe House who actually said that they had to pass legislation before they could see what was in it), Maxine Walters, Hank Johnson (the Congressman who actually thought the island of Guam could topple over and go upside down in the Pacific Ocean), Sheila Jackson Lee (the Congresswoman who wanted to know if the Mars Rover would be driving anywhere close to where Neil Armstrong landed on the moon), etc., etc., I think not!

More Obama Care unfolding failures to follow.

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