August, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama's Illegal Obama Care Money Laundering and Medicaid's Continuing Financial Problems

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) Not only was Obama Care a failure in every legal way possible, it now appears that it was a failure from an illegal perspective also. According to a new stash of government documents (about 3,500 documents in total) that have become available:

• The Obama administration took profits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and illegally funneled those funds to the Obama Care process.
• That is the bottom line of the analysis of a new set of documents that showed that this was the case and that it was not an accidental accounting screw up, it was an intentional misuse and illegal use of government resources to prop up the failures of Obama Care.
• Once Fannie and Freddie recovered from their horrific financial losses as a result of the 2008 recession, the Obama administration changed the terms of the loans that Fannie and Freddie took out to refinance themselves and basically stiffed those that had loaned them the money and their ability to recover their loan dividend payments.
• Instead, those dividend payments were swept out of Fannie and Freddie’s profits into the general Treasury fund.
• The bulk of these stolen funds were used to pay the health insurance subsidies promised in the Obama Care legislation, without which the whole Obama Care house of cards would have collapsed back in 2012 according to some estimates since the money expected to be generated to fund the subsidy pools did not materialize to the levels promised.
• This information was discovered only after years of litigation were needed to unlock the access to this illegal money laundering scheme.

Thus, not only has Obama Care failed on a financial basis, an economic basis, a health care basis, a health insurance basis but apparently it should have also failed back in 2012 as a subsidy basis if not for the illegal transfer and manipulation of the loan terms of Fannie and Freddie.

2) We have often talked about how wretched a program Medicaid is from a number of different perspectives:

• Research study after research study have showed that people on Medicaid are either only as healthy as people with no health insurance or sometimes are found to be LESS healthy than people without health insurance.
• Obama Care promised that the number of emergency room visits would go down if people had Medicaid but since many, many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients, the increased number of Medicaid patients as a result of Obama Care has caused emergency room visits to increase, the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen.
• Medicaid costs have been escalating rapidly, so much so that four states devote over 30% of their state government budget just to Medicaid funding, leaving less money for schools, infrastructure and other state government needs.

Chris Pope, writing for the National Review recently, highlighted some of the other troubling aspects of Medicaid:

• Almost 60% of Obama Care costs in 2017 ($70 billion out of $119 billion) will be solely to support Medicaid recipients so as Medicaid costs continue to go up, the overall Obama Care costs will continue to drive upwards.
• While the original beneficiaries of Medicaid, the elderly, the disabled, and pregnant women, receive a 50% to 75% subsidy for medical services, Obama Care provided a 90% subsidy to able bodied, non-pregnant, non-elderly people who came on board the Medicaid train as a result of the Obama Care legislation, i.e. Obama Care financially took better care of those that could take care of themselves than the elderly, disabled and pregnant.
• While Medicaid enrollment has gone up just under 100% from 2000 to 2015, Medicaid spending has gone up almost 150%, 50% faster than the growth in enrollment, indicating a cost spiral that is out of control.

So that is the current, sad situation of Medicaid. But Mr. Pope does provide a solution to this Medicaid problem that is reasonable and would definitely help alleviate the high and rising cost of the program with minimal impact to benefits. His complete plan and reasoning can be accessed at:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450097/medicaid-expansion-dilemma-how-capita-caps-point-way-compromise?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-03&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

That will do it for today: illegal goings on during the Obama administration that were needed to keep Obama Care from collapsing and Medicaid out of control and ineffective but with a proposed solution that might actually work. In fact, any solution would work better than Obama Care itself.

Tomorrow we will, as always, take a step back from the global numbers and results that highlight Obama Care’s failures and look at some real life stories of real life Americans and how Obama Care wrecked parts of their lives, their wallets, and their health.

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