August, 2018, Part 3, By The Numbers - The Implosion of Social Security and Medicare and The Numerical Stupidity of "Medicare For All"

On a semi-regular basis we do a post under the theme, “By The Numbers.” Under this theme we analysis the crazy ways that politicians use numbers, from making them up outright, to using them inappropriately, to using them to lie to us. The problem for them when they do that is it is so easy to show how either stupid they are or how conniving they are.

As an FYI, as you read my analysis of the misuse of numbers, keep in mind that I have a masters degree in statistics and for most of my life have been involved in analyzing numbers and stats. Politicians misuse of numbers and statistics is taken as a personal and professional affront to me and my profession.

1) We have often discussed the serious and dire straits that Social Security and Medicare are in. The numbers are not good as more and more Americans retire and burden the systems with fewer and fewer workers to finance the needs of Baby Boomers' income and retirement needs. And as always, American politicians have neither the brains, will power or courage to fix what ails both systems.
A recent article in USA Today highlighted how bad the numbers are:

• The Social Security Trust fund will go broke in 2034 and Medicare’s trust fund will go broke in 2026, eight short years from now.
• But we know from previous discussion that this is fake news since the trust fund really does not exist as anything but a cruel accounting trick, Social Security has been in a negative cash flow situation for years.
• Former head of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, warned Congress of this situation in 2011: "The unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debt [under current policies] cannot actually happen, because creditors would never be willing to lend to a government whose debt, relative to national income, is rising without limit." [Side note: maybe he should pass along this insight along to the Chicago politicians who want to issue another $10 billion in debt to help fund a $28 billion debt liability shortfall, i.e. “creditors will never be willing …”]
• The numbers spelling out the crisis is pretty simple: Social Security and Medicare have unfunded liabilities over the next 30 years of of a whopping $82 trillion because 74 million Baby Boomers will be entering both systems over that time period.
• To fund this shortfall without changing benefits or the parameters of the program, taxes would have to be raised over $2.7 TRILLION a year for 30 years. 
• This would raise the annual Federal budget by over 60%.
• It also means that on average, every American family would have to pay an additional $22,000 a year in extra taxes to cover the shortfall.
• And taxing the rich, the inane all-purpose solutions from Democrats does not work since even if you doubled the existing top two tax brackets to 70% and 74%, that would only close 20% of the deficit.
• And it probably would not even do that since who would work hard and long to earn a lot of money just to give over 70% of it up to inept government bureaucrats , thus, making the shortfall covered less than 20%.
• And what if you did not tax the rich more but somehow could confiscate all of their money and liquidate it, something that would be impossible to do but what if: if you took the wealth of the ten richest people in the county and somehow used it to fund the $82 TRILLION shortfall you would cover about….1.4% of the $82 TRILLION.
• If you took the the wealth of the next 10 richest Americans you would not come close to that 1.4% of the first ten since those top ten folks are truly head and shoulders above even the 11th to 20th richest Americans.
• So “taxing the rich” is stupid if you think that it will close the $82 TRILLION gap, the numbers do not lie.
• Totally eliminating the defense budget for 30 years, which will never happen, would cover less than 25% of the $82 TRILLION.
• Eliminating all anti- Federal government spending for 30 years, which will never happen, would not do much better.

Nasty numbers telling a nasty story. And the longer that Washington waits to fix what is clearly broken and breaking, the harder the solutions will be to find and the harder the consequences will be on those that rely on Social Security and Medicare to live and stay healthy.
So don’t worry about whether the Russians colluded with Trump or Hillary. Don’t worry about who wins the midterm elections. Don’t worry about climate change. Because within the next ten years, a whopping and growing $21 TRILLION national debt and an $82 TRILLION Social Security and Medicare shortfall will crush any petty concerns you have today. The numbers do not lie.

2) So Medicare is racing towards financial insolvency and yet, stupid politicians in D.C. want to go to a single payer health insurance program for all Americans, the so-called “Medicare for all.” This means that the government would take over all aspects of every American’s health insurance and medical care needs under the Medicare umbrella even though it cannot fund its current needs and never mind adding hundreds of million Americans onto the program.

And as we have pointed out any number of times, such a government take over of a country’s health care industry has been a financial and quality disaster. From Canada to England, wait times for medical care goes up and the quality of that care goes in the dumper. Never mind the cost of this inane “Medicare for all” nonsense:

• According to an analysis by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, The “Medicare for all” program would increase government healthcare spending by a whopping $32 TRILLION over just the next ten years.
• Thus, given the $21 TRILLION national debt and the $83 TRILLION shortfall in the current form of Medicare and Social Security, this program would bring total Federal government debt in these areas to an unfathomable $136 TRILLION.
• This would put the per household debt burden on average to over $1,000,000 each.
• Obviously, the whole system collapses long before we actually get to this $1,000,000 level.
• At $32 TRILLION in the first ten years, the average increased government spending on healthcare would be about $3.2 TRILLION a year.
• This would mean that the Federal government spending, and increased taxes, would have to go up by over 70% a year.
• And as we discussed above, raising taxes on the rich to pay for this is still a stupid idea since confiscating the entire wealth of the ten richest Americans would cover about 3% of this increased government tax need.
• If you only took 10% of their wealth you would cover only .3% of the program’s cost and raising taxes on only their income would be too small to measure.
• And since the current Medicare program loses tens of billions of dollars every year from criminal fraud, imagine how many hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost annually to criminal fraud in a “Medicare for all” program.

Now, supporters of “Medicare for all” would claim that the country would see savings elsewhere from this type of program since Medicare would pay all of the country’s healthcare expenses. But the supporters fail to point out that their program requires doctors and hospitals to accept 40% less than what they get paid today which would result in:

• Doctors getting less compensation are less likely to stay in the profession, making the current doctor shortage even worse, greatly expanding the time it takes to see the remaining doctors, and increasing costs since the supply would go down without a corresponding decrease in demand.
• Future doctors are less likely to enter the profession since their earnings would be greatly reduced and they would spent so much more of their time dealing with likely inefficient and ineffective government bureaucracies than actually caring for people.
• And the Mercatus study showed that reducing hospital payouts by 40% would result in about 80% of those hospitals to be in an unprofitable mode almost overnight.

Thus, the numbers show that “Medicare for all” would result in longer wait times, lower quality, fewer doctors, financially at risk hospitals, more bureaucracy, more fraud, and unbearable Federal government debt. The numbers do not lie.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

August, 2018, Part 2, By The Numbers - Murders and Financial Suicide In Chicago and Massive Street Cleaning In San Francisco

On a semi-regular basis we do a post under the theme, “By The Numbers.” Under this theme we analysis the crazy ways that politicians use numbers, from making them up outright, to using them inappropriately, to using them to lie to us. The problem for them when they do that is it is so easy to show how either stupid they are or how conniving they are. 

As an FYI, as you read my analysis of the misuse of numbers, keep in mind that I have a masters degree in statistics and for most of my life have been involved in analyzing numbers and stats. Politicians misuse of numbers and statistics is taken as a personal and professional affront to me and my profession.

1) Walter Williams, writing for the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, listed out some very distressing numbers coming out of Chicago, a gang and violence infested city. Mr.Williams, by the way, is an economics professor so he probably has a pretty good handle on numbers:

• During the weekend of August 4 -5, 12 residents of Chicago were shot to death and over five dozen were wounded.
• In the first seven months of 2018, 1,718 Chicago residents had been shot and 306 had died from their gunshot wounds.
• The law enforcement authorities in the city have cleared only about 15% of all of the shootings which means that if you are a violent criminal you have pretty goods odds (85%) of getting away with your crimes in Chicago.
• As of early July this year, 626 people had been shot by police officers this year of which 114 (18%) were black and all of last year, 987 people were shot by the police of which 223 were black, 23%.
• While these percentages were higher than the percentage of blacks in the U.S. (12%), in Chicago in 2017 there were 674 homicides of which a whopping 80% were black residents.

So while people are getting bent out of shape because Tiger Woods recently refused to denounce Trump and protesting NFL football players show such “bravery” on the football field every Sunday but contribute nothing to bringing down these Chicago shooting numbers, the killing and maiming numbers continue to march on in Chicago.

2) Let’s stay in Chicago because the financial numbers are just as disastrous as the murder and wounded numbers. We have previously discussed the reality that the financial situation in Chicago, and the state of Illinois also, is horrible. There are unfunded future liabilities, the schools are in terrible shape, and the most productive citizens continue to move out of the city as taxes go higher and higher without a commiserate drop in city expenses. Things are so bad that the city bonds have basically been dropped in value to junk bond status.

The local CBS outlet recently dropped two distressing numbers on the politicians in Chicago. The city apparently has unfunded future liabilities of about $28 BILLION. A single city that is short an amazing $28 billion. 

And rather than do the right thing, reduce city spending to cover this future shortfall, the city plans on issuing additional debt of $10 billion. Yes, great strategy, dig yourself an overwhelming debt hole and the proposed solution is to take on more debt! According to the report: “[Mayor] Rahm Emanuel suggested the city issue billions in obligation bonds. The plan aims to inject more cash into the pension system now in order to leverage a higher rate of return to exceed the interest that will accrue on the bonds, the Illinois Policy Institute says.”

Think about these numbers. Why would anyone want to own any of these new city bonds worth $10 billion when it still leaves the city short $18 billion? Does anyone really think that the $10 billion would ever be completely repaid when more city debt continues to pile up? And if Chicago is serious about issuing more debt, how high will the interest rates have to be to attract anyone to by basically junk bonds? 

Thus, it is obvious from these numbers that Chicago is in a financial death spiral: to pay off current debt they need to create more and more debt which drives up the interest rate they have to issue for the latest bonds which increases debt even more, etc., and the death spiral is underway.

3) We have previously discussed the reality that San Francisco has been turned into a third world hellhole. The streets are overrun with human defecation, urination, and illegal drug usage and needle use. So much so that the city actually has both a hotline for citizens to report human feces on the streets of the city and a five person full time pooper squad that goes around the city scooping up human feces from the street.

The numbers are unbelievable:

• The city has received a whopping 20,000 reports of human feces on the street.
• The five person city pooper squad costs almost $1 million a year just in salaries for the squad since each person on that assignment makes an obscene $185,000 a year.
• According to the San Francisco Chronicle: “San Francisco Public Works has a $72.5 million-a-year street cleaning budget — including spending $12 million a year on what essentially have become housekeeping services for homeless encampments. The costs include $2.8 million for a Hot Spots crew to wash down the camps and remove any biohazards, $2.3 million for street steam cleaners, $3.1 million for the Pit Stop portable toilets, plus the new $830,977-a-year Poop Patrol to actively hunt down and clean up human waste.”
• But beyond the popper squad, the city has budgeted $700,000 for a 10 person needle cleanup squad to cleanup the drug needles strewn about city streets.

Would one ever expect to see numbers like this in a modern American city? Pretty disgusting numbers with no relief insight. What is the great idea that the incoming mayor, Landon Breed, wants to implement to combat this problem? She wants to ask non-profit organizations serving the 7,500 homeless souls in the city to ask their constituents to stop pooping in the streets. Yeah, that will work.

As always, the numbers show just how ineffective and useless our politicians. Numbers do not lie but politicians do. More numbers to follow.

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

August, 2018, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care:Short Term and Long Term Ways to Fix What Washington and Obama Care Have Broken

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) Our last two posts about Obama Care have discussed, as always, the unfolding disaster that is indeed Obama Care. From narrow doctor and hospital networks, to higher and higher premiums, co-pays, and deductibles to the failures of single payer healthcare systems around the world to lower life expectancies in this country, it is not a pretty sight. 

So today, we will deviate a little bit from this misery and talk about some good things that are happening regarding health care. There are solutions out there, both small and short term and large and long term, so let’s be a little more optimistic in today’s discussion.

Let’s start with a recent article from the League Of Power website which summarized some of the short term positive efforts Trump has taken to relieve the failure of Obama Care:

• Trump has loosened and enhanced the health insurance options known as short term policies or STLDs.
• These policies are designed to bridge the gap between times when someone is not able to get a regular, permanent health insurance policy.
• Under Obama Care, any use of an STLD policy could last only three months since Obama Care wanted to and forced Americans to purchase Obama Care policies which were usually more expensive and forced Americans to get coverage for health situations that would never happen to them.
• But STLDs usually have lower premiums (often one third the cost of an Obama Care policy), lower deductibles, and more and different options than the standard, one size fits all Obama Care policies.
• Given the positive aspect of STLDs, Trump extended the time that they could be used to a full year and allowed them to be renewed up to 36 months. 
• This extension allows Americans to have less expensive health insurance that better fits their needs while giving them an adequate time to shop around for a real policy, time that Obama Care never allowed.
• Trump made Health Savings Account (HSAs) much more attractive financially to help Americans pay for their health insurance and general health needs.
• As with short term policies, Obama and Obama Care tried to take this important tool out of the hands of Americans in the fight against high health care costs.
• Trump increased the number and types of people who can use an HSA, how much money can be used to fund an HSA, and the ability of kids to inherit HSA funds from their parents.
• The best part is that HSA funds can be used for any sort of medical ailment since it is basically a cash savings plan whereas the number of Obama Care policies on the market gets smaller and smaller.
• Trump has loosened the tight controls and regulations on the states so that the states have much more flexibility to tailor medical plans like Medicaid to fit the needs of their particular citizens rather than being forced to live under the Federal one size fits all of Obama Care.
• This has resulted in more efficient, cheaper and better health care plans for Americans in need of medical help and insurance.
• This is also a first step to allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines, forbidden under Obama Care, which attacks one of the root causes listed above.
• Trump is also now allowing people with related small business characteristics to band together and form business insurance pools for their employees health insurance needs.
• The heavier bargaining power of these pools results in lower costs for the businesses’ employees with higher quality care than with Obama Care policies.

Thus, finally some good news when it comes to Obama Care, the dismantling of Obama Care’s tenets is the best possible news for Americans in need of affordable, quality health insurance. 

2) But Trump is not the only one trying to find ways to unravel the disaster of Obama Care and improve the cost, efficiency, and effectiveness of our country’s health care. A new book by Charles Silver and David Hyman, “Overcharged - Why Americans Pay Too Much For HealthCare” is an in-depth look at what is going on in America’s healthcare industry today but more importantly, how to fix what ails it with a bottoms-up, consumer driven, free market approach. 

I fill not go into detail on how they would fix what is broken, they needed a whole book to do so. Let me just do two things. First, let me cite two examples they cited of the craziness of what we deal with now and what Obama Care did not fix:

• Example #1 - “After a brief overnight stay in a local hospital for snake bite treatment, Eric Ferguson was hit with a bill for $89,227. How could this possibly happen?”
• Example # 2 - “A year after Dr. Paul Davis’s daughter was given a urine test, she received a bill for the test (but never received the results). The cost? Over $17,000. For a urine test? How can a lab charge so much?”

Insanity. Their book tries to find ways that would fix such insanity. 

Second, it has received very favorable reviews from some very important people:

• ”The biggest threat to America’s prosperity and even its solvency is the mismatch between the amazingly and increasingly competent science of medicine and the amazingly and increasingly incompetent pricing and allocation of it. Now come Silver and Hyman to frighten us with the facts and to point to ways the biggest player in the healthcare game - the government - can stop making matters worse.” George Will, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and author.
• “This blood-boiling book will have you ready to root for serious change in our medical system where the patient - not third parties - is in charge.” Steve Forbes, chairman and editor in chief, Forbes Media 
• “Overcharged shows the outrageous prices and anti-competitive practices in U.S. healthcare are not the consequence of free markets but of big government.” Eamonn Butler, director, Adam Smith Institute.
• “Apologists dismiss each heartrending failure of the National Health Service [single payer government healthcare system in England] as what you get from trying to do socialized medicine on the cheap. “Overcharged” reminds us that profligate socialism is no better.” Damile Hannan, member of the European Parliament.

Soundly researched, original thought on how to fix what Obama Care could not.

3) One last piece of good news for hope. The Medium.com website recently put out their way to fix the American healthcare system. Before giving you that link, consider some stats they provided:

• Average premiums for individual insurance rose a whopping 105% in the first four years of Obama Care, breaking Obama’s promise that Obama Care would “bend the cost curve.” At the time of the promise we assumed he meant it would be bent down, not up.
• The average monthly premium went from $232 to $476.
• As the price went up, the number of people carrying Obama Care policies went down due to the increasingly unaffordable costs of such policies.
• Fewer people overall had individual policies in December, 2017 than when Obama Care took effect in December, 2014.
• The number of small businesses offering health insurance plans to their employees dropped 24% between 2012 and 2016.

Dreadful, dreadful numbers that we have reviewed dozens and dozens of times. But Medium thinks it has a cure for what ails our healthcare system which can be accessed at:

https://medium.com/@consensusgroup2018/the-health-care-choices-proposal-policy-recommendations-to-congress-a4660182d830?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRReE4yTmlPV1V4WkRNeiIsInQiOiJaXC9IdWwyY1ZvVVVNUFBsMVlKTFh0bXcyOHlsbFRxVFdsMG9kRUtNUVRBQUlKM21KSHY5bEVuQW1CcDhhem9UeEhQdmpSeVZHbGJrb2pJOVo3Ujc1QTUzUGl2YmJYbFFDTEhpdTF3WG56R2pnbExXWWxtdmNtU2lKOVMwRTkxRksifQ%3D%3D

That will do it for this month’s review of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. But hopefully we left you with some hope until next time. There are ways to fix the system, that Trump is already doing and which other, smart, non-politician people have analyzed that do it without relying on inept and greedy politicians and the lobbyists and drug companies that feed on them. 

It will not be easy but the alternative of doing nothing, or going with a single payer plan where crazy, incompetent people like Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Walters and the 500 other Washington dingbat politicians control your healthcare and life, is not pretty.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

August, 2018, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure Of The Single Payer Health Care System and Why There is NO Such Thing as Free Health Care

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) We have often discussed the reality that single payer/government run healthcare in England, so-called socialized medicine, is a disaster. Government bureaucrats decide who lives and dies, there are long and dangerous wait times in ERs, treatment wait times are excruciating long, and medical results are always less robust than in the U.S. 

Dr. Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit, Phd, writing for the Heritage Foundation on August 13, 2018, laid out a perfect illustration why socialized medicine is almost always expensive and a failure, which sounds a lot like Obama Care’s qualities. But first, a look at some of the real numbers the authors talk about and how government run healthcare makes a bad situation worse:

• Depending on the assumption set used, this country will be looking at a doctor shortage of anywhere from between 43,000 to 121,000 doctors within 12 years.
• A root cause of this shortage is the reality that doctors today spend more and more time on non medical, regulatory, and administrative activities, leading to frustration, burnout, and premature retirements.
• Socialized medicine increases these frustrations while reducing the freedom to treat patients the way doctors are trained to treat them while capping their compensation.

So single payer health care plans, government control over health care decisions, make it difficult to get enough supply of high quality doctors to enter the field, making health care quality even worse, as we recently saw in England during the recent flu season:

• Back in October, 1975, a British politician, Labor Minister David Cohen, had a rare insight into why his government’s actions, in this case the creation of socialized medicine and a single payer government run healthcare system would fail miserably: “The health service was launched on a fallacy. First, we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service- it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”
• Fast forward to the winter of 2018 where a very bad strain of influenza hit the country.
• British hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed which is not surprising since a survey conducted by the British Medical Association found that 82% of its members felt their workplaces were understaffed, which is not surprising given the point we made above about doctors not wanting to stay in the field due to overt government interference in the medical process.
• Listen to one doctor describe his personal flu experience: “I came on to shift yesterday afternoon and there were patients literally everywhere. The corridor into the hospital was so busy we couldn’t have got a cardiac arrest patient through it into the resuscitation room. To say staff were at the end of their tethers would be a complete understatement.”
• This pre-existing doctor shortage situation in a single payer system combined with the flu outbreak resulted in 50,000 surgeries being cancelled because limited resources were diverted to flu patients.
• This in turn further endangered those that needed the surgery, likely making their medical conditions more expensive and dangerous to treat later.
• By March, 2018, British emergency rooms had 15.4% of their patients waiting over four hours before seeing anyone for treatment.
• This was the worst performance ever recorded.
• Back in the real world, the number of ailing British citizens waiting 18 weeks or more for treatment increased by 35%, from 128,575 in 2016 to about 362,000 in 2017 to 490,000 patients in 2018. 
• Thus, half a million people in this single payer government run system had to wait four and a half months to get treatment.
• Even worse, 2,755 sick folks had to wait OVER A YEAR to get treatment.

Long delays, poor quality, high costs, yeah, that is working out great. And yet despite this British reality and the unfolding disasters of Obama Care, some American politicians still want to bring single payer healthcare to America despite the failure of such a system across the world.

2) One of the stupid reasons put forth for single payer systems is that healthcare under such a system is free! Yes,under this reasoning free healthcare jumps out of the sky and no one pays for it! Amazing!

Of course this is plain stupid. Nothing is free in life including healthcare. While those eventually receiving healthcare services do not pay under this system at that time everyone paid for the services via their taxes. 

Check out the following link to get a simple straightforward explanation why saying healthcare is free in a single payer system is absolutely stupid:

https://libertyvideonews.com/reality-check-there-is-no-such-thing-as-free-healthcare/

That will do it for today: there is still no free lunch in the healthcare world and the single payer/government controlled system is still a road to shoddy and dangerous healthcare. More to follow.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

August, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Foricng The IRS To Return Stolen State Money and Medicaid Is Killing The Truly Needy

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) As readers of past Obama Care disaster posts, we know that Obama played fast, loose, and often illegally with the Obama Care tenets and rules. According to a recent article from the PJ Media website by Tyler O’Neil, we have another example of such shenanigans where Obama treated actual, passed legislation as mere suggestions that could be violated whenever he deemed it appropriate to do so:

• A Federal judge recently ruled that the IRS has to return $839 million to six states because it was illegally collected under the auspices of the Obama Care law.
• According to the article: “In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had unlawfully required six states — Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Texas, and Wisconsin — to foot the bill for health care providers, paying a fee that Obamacare clearly exempted them from.”
• The legislation imposed a fee on any excess profits insurance companies were supposed to earn from Obama Care forcing Americans to buy health insurance for themselves from those companies.
• Although the fee was supposed to come from the insurance companies, the Obama administration forced the state governments to pay those fees, a clear violation of the wording and intent of the law that was passed.
• According to Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry: "Obamacare has always been an economic house of cards, and this ruling has again exposed it for what it is: a money laundering scheme. This is a prime example of the deep administrative state doing something that Congress expressly forbid. Even though the Affordable Care Act forbid imposing the Health Insurance Providers Fee (HIPF) on states, the federal government found a way to do it anyway." 

Obama violating the centerpiece of his administration? Horrors! No, not really. We have shown any number of times how Obama ignored the legislation that bears his name, illegally delaying and changing the law’s tenets to suit his whims. For a detailed look at his past history of changing or ignoring passed legislation, both as it relates to Obama Care and other laws and Constitutional principles, go to:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2016/11/retro-2-obama-presidency-end-of-error.html

2) One of the basic lynch pins of Obama Care was to expand the number of able bodied Americans who could get healthcare and health insurance under the Medicaid program. Medicaid was originally designed to provide basic health care to the truly needy in our country: the disabled, the blind, the really, really poor. Obama Care basically eliminated those restrictions and said as long as you do not earn more than 400% of the poverty level wage level then you could sign up for Medicaid.

We have previously made the analogy of Medicaid to a 50 year old pick up truck. The truck was built back in the mid-1960s and was designed with a towing power of 2 tons. Fifty years later, Obama comes along and without doing any enhancements to the truck, now expects it to pull five tons. Much like the truck that is going to break down trying to pull the extra weight, the same thing has happened with Medicaid. It was never fixed to handle the additional tonnage (i.e. the addition of able bodied people to the Medicaid rolls) and it has now resulted in increased suffering and death, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do:

• According to another Tyler O’Neil article on the PJ Media website on March 4, 2018, a recent study estimates that 21,904 needy Americans have died waiting to get on Medicaid rolls while millions of able bodied people got Medicaid support ahead of them.
• The study was done by the Foundation For Government Accountability and it estimated that, “At least 21,000 needy people have died while waiting for Medicaid coverage, while 13 million able-bodied adults received coverage from Medicaid in the states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, an explosive new study revealed Tuesday. At least 247,295 people are currently on waiting lists to enroll in Medicaid.”
• The research director for the Foundation, Nic Horton, stated that: "This really is a tragedy. Medicaid was designed as a safety net for the truly needy. But it's become bloated and lost its focus. ObamaCare expansion is perhaps the best example of this: nearly 13 million able-bodied adults have been added to welfare while truly needy individuals on waiting lists die before ever getting the services they needed."
• The studied estimated that 21,904 have died while on the Medicaid waiting list and this number includes only 12 of the 32 states that expanded Medicaid under Obama Care, making the 21,904 estimate extremely conservative.
• While Medicaid was designed to serve the truly disabled and needy, the study found that while there are currently 10.7 million disabled persons on Medicaid, Obama Care has caused Medicaid to now also handle 29.2 million able bodied adults.
• Much like the 50 year old truck we discussed above, the program cannot handle the additional load of Obama Care people since it was not designed to do so.
• As a result, we end up with situations like that of Skylar Overman, a 12 year old from Little Rock who has a rare neurological condition that requires 24 hour care.
• After 10 years, she is still on the Arkansas Medicaid waiting list but in the meantime, as a result of Obama Care, over 300,000 able bodied Arkansas adults have been accepted into the program since the Federal government via the Obama Care legislation pays the states more money for these types of Medicaid enrollees.
• Across the country there are more than 650,000 truly needy Americans on Medicaid waiting lists while millions of able bodied adults have gotten onto the Medicaid pick up truck.

Just another disaster from the litany of unfolding disasters from Obama Care. A law that was supposed to hep Americans actually kills and prolongs the suffering of truly needy Americans. Insanity.

To get a get breakdown on a state by state basis of how many are truly needy are still on Medicaid waiting lists and the number of Obama Care newly minted Medicaid patients who jumped the line, go to:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obamacare-medicaid-scandal-21904-truly-needy-people-died-waiting-behind-13-million-able-bodied-adults/

Ignoring the law and killing Americans, just two more unfolding disasters of Obama Care. More to follow.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

August, 2018, By The Numbers, Part 1: The Current Status of Numerical Lying By Our Politicians

On a semi-regular basis we do a post under the theme, “By The Numbers.” Under this theme we analysis the crazy ways that politicians use numbers, from making them up outright, to using them inappropriately, to using them to lie to us. The problem for them when they do that is it is so easy to show how either stupid they are or how conniving they are. 

As an FYI, as you read my analysis of the misuse of numbers, keep in mind that I have a masters degree in statistics and for most of my life have been involved in analyzing numbers and stats. Politicians misuse of numbers and statistics is taken as a personal and professional affront to me and my profession.

1) Politifact bills itself as an unbiased research organization that analyzes statements and claims by politicians and then reads out whether those statements were correct, wrong or misleading. In reality, they are a left leaning, liberal leaning fact checking group that I have exposed any number of times over the years for their misuse of data and numbers. So when they say a very liberal, almost socialist Democratic politician, is wrong in the use of her numbers, you know that the transgression is especially bad.

So let’s look at how bad Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez failed in her use of numbers during a recent interview:

• In a recent PBS interview, Ocasio-Cortez really loaded up on numbers by claiming that, “everyone has two jobs” and “people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family."
• This statement was so wrong, so off the wall, that Politifact gave it it’s worse rating for lies, “pants on fire”: “In our review, we found many reasons why unemployment is low, and not for the overwork that Ocasio-Cortez cited. The biggest factors include strong economic confidence and the long-running economic recovery.”
• “Everyone has two jobs” was also found to be nonsense since according to the Department of Labor, 148 million employed Americans have only one job while only six to seven million Americans who have more than one job, not “everyone.”
• Thus, a very small percentage of Americans are holding more than a single job, another big lie from Ocasio-Cortez.
• But Politifact was not done, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics which says that only 310,000 American workers out of 150 million working Americans are working 70 to 80 hours a week, a percentage that is not even worth calculating: “It’s also worth noting that on average, Americans aren’t working more today than they have been in the recent past. The average number of hours worked in the private sector has hugged tightly to about 34.5 hours a week since 2006, except for a dip during the Great Recession.”

When a clearly liberal leaning fact checking organization says a Democrat lied so much that her pants were on fire, it is pretty obvious that this politician was making up statistics and fake realities as she was going along. And while politicians like Ocasio-Cortez lie, the numbers never do.

2) But Ocasio-Cortez was not the only political type making up numbers. Chelsea Clinton was also pulling numbers out of thin air at a recent conference. She was talking about abortion rights, which is certainly her right, but then tried to apply numbers that were just out of control: “Whether you fundamentally care about reproductive rights and access rights – because these are not the same thing – if you care about social justice or economic justice, you have to care about this. It is not a disconnected fact that American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to the economy, right? The net, new entrance of women – that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973.”

Thus, according to her logic, the right to an abortion allowed more women to enter the workforce and contribute $3.5 trillion to the economy over a 36 year period. It is so easy to prove how this is a net loss to the country and society on a financial basis using real data as opposed to Chelsea making up numbers:

• About 50 million Americans were aborted since the Roe Vs. Wade verdict in 1973 until 2009.
• Thus, over 36 years, on average, about 1.4 million infants were aborted annually.
• Let’s split the 36 years in half and assume about 25 million Americans would have been in the workforce today if they had not been aborted.
• The average American worker earns a little over $50,000 a year in their jobs but the phantom 25 million people we are talking about above would have been younger, less seasoned, likely earning less than the average American worker.
• Thus, let’s assume the average earnings of those 25 million would be earning 20% less, about $40,000 a year today.
• Thus, multiplying the 25 million workers by their $40,000 annual salaries, these 25 people if they had not been aborted would be contributing $1 trillion a YEAR to the American economy. 
• So, Chelsea claims that the 50 million people aborted before being born allowed their moms to add $3.5 trillion to the U.S. economy over a 36 year period but we just showed that if half of those aborted had been born they likely would add $1 trillion to the economy in a single year now.
• And going forward, those 25 million people would be moving along their career paths, increasing the amount they contributed to the economy and the other 25 million souls who were aborted in the second half of the 36 year period would be entering the workforce and adding to the amount that the aborted souls would be adding to the economy for decades to come.
• And not only would the 50 million people would be adding to and growing the economy today, those first 25 million people earning $40,000 a year would be adding $150 billion a year to the cash strapped Social Security and Medicare programs.

Thus, even when Chelsea makes up numbers, they cannot match a conservative and realistic view of what those 50 million aborted souls could realistically be contributing to the economy. 

This analysis is not meant to convince anyone if aborting souls is a good economic choice or good moral choice. The analysis is meant to point out how political types make up numbers that have no basis in reality when put under even a simple logic and math calculation. Which is why whenever someone like Chelsea hypes a number, you are far better off assuming that those numbers are pure garbage because historically those numbers were, pure garbage.

3) Usually during our monthly discussion on “Political Class Insanity” we talk about the death and maiming numbers coming out of Chicago every weekend. The south and west parts of the city are infested with gang violence and gun violence despite having some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country. A few weekends ago, over 70 Chicago residents were shot and a dozen were killed over the three day weekend.

In the most recent weekend, 23 people were shot and two died as a result of their wounds just between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Ironically three people were shot at a so-called "peace event" in broad daylight. Those shot ranged in age from 15 years old to senior citizens. These are real numbers that real politicians have not idea how to cure. 

Thus, nothing new today. Political types make up assertions, facts and numbers without any basis in reality (Ocasio-Cortez), they make up numbers that are easily shown to be nonsense (Chelsea Clinton), and they stand by as the numbers show more and more people being killed for no reason. Always trust the numbers, never trust a politician.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w