August, 2017, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Ever Rising Costs Despite the Promises of the Opposite From Obama

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) It is that time of the year when insurance companies file for their next year rates and what has become an annual event, Obama Care insurers and their policies are again headed for double digit increases in costs. Consider the latest realities of Obama Care cost increases as described by a recent article by Joseph Curl on the Daily Wire website:

• According to a new report from the Federal government, some Obama Care policies will see up to a 30% average increase in premium costs in 2018.
• This is obviously a far cry from when Obama repeatedly claimed that an American family would see up to a $2,500 decrease in their annual health insurance premium costs.
• The Department of Health and Human Services reported that customers in Idaho, West Virginia, South Carolina, Iowa and Wyoming are customers of insurers requesting premium AVERAGE increases of 30% and possibly more.
• If the average increase is 30% than obviously some people will see their insurance premium costs increase by more than 30%.
• The Hill has reported that Maryland’s largest insurer, CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, is looking for a rate hike in excess of 50%.
• The Chicago Tribune reported recently that "insurers propose to hike health insurance prices by as much as 43% next year for those who buy coverage through Obamacare exchanges. That's on top of nosebleed-section rate increases of more than 40% for 2017." 
• In New Hampshire, the Union Leader recently reported that premium costs for Obama Care individual insurance policies will rise at least 44% in 2018: “Today’s news about rates is alarming, especially for the 94,000 New Hampshire residents who obtain their insurance through the individual market, but unfortunately, it does not come as a surprise,” New Hampshire Insurance Commissioner Roger Sevigny said.
• In Nebraska, there is only one insurer for the whole state selling Obama Care policies and the average increase for premiums for that sole company in the state will be 16.9% although some people in Nebraska will get increases of over 50%.

How anyone in Congress or anywhere can continue to insist that Obama Care is good for Americans and good for America is a good thing is beyond me. Higher and higher costs, more narrow networks, inferior care, you could not try to make a worse system if you tried.

2) Martin Walsh, writing for the Conservative Tribune on August 1, 2017, continued to report the worsening news for Obama Care customers:

• A new study from the Federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found that 1,332 counties in the United States will have access to only one health insurer on the Obama Care exchanges in 2018.
• This is a whopping one third of all U.S. counties.
• Even worse news is that 40 counties will have NO access to Obama Care insurance company policies in 2018 even though they have to get an Obama Care policy to have any chance of a Federal subsidy. 
• According to the CMS: “The map currently shows that nationwide 40 counties are projected to have no issurers, meaning that Americans in these counties could be without coverage on the Exchanges in 2018. It’s also projected that 1,332 counties — over 40 percent of counties nationwide — could only have one issuer in 2018.” 
• CMS went on to conclude that, “This could represent more than 2.3 million Exchange participants that will only have one choice and may not be able to receive the coverage they need.” 
• The CMS also concluded that Obama Care policies saw their premium costs rise 21.6% in 2017 vs. 2016.

Despite even the Federal government via CMS telling the world that Obama Care is an unmitigated disaster, the bozos in Congress still cannot get their heads together to fix ANY aspect of Obama Care. I hope they are enjoying their five week vacation this month along with their gold plated, taxpayer funded healthcare plans.

3) One last set of bad Obama Care cost news for today, this bad news courtesy of a recent NewsMax article:

• The Kaiser Family Foundation is estimating that some U.S. cities will see the cost of Obama Care health insurance policies rise by as much as 50% in 2018.
• Kaiser tracks insurance costs across 21 U.S.cities.
• The cost of mid-level Obama Care insurance policies will increase by double digit rates in 15 of those cities and decrease in only two of the tracked cities.
• The single Obama Care insurance company in Delaware is proposing raising rates by 12.8% on average.

Now Kaiser did try to justify the rate increases to some extent by saying that the actual insurance policy holders will not have to pay the entire increase since the American taxpayer would help pay for their subsidies, which is likely a correct assertion. But Obama promised to “bend the cost curve downwards,” not just shift costs from the individual to the entire American taxpayer base. Somebody is going to pay for those increases and it is you and I.

Sad, sad news on the Obama Care front: ever increasing premium increases for lower and lower quality and service. More to follow over the next few days as the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care continues to unfold.

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