December,2018, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Americans Say No To Single Payer Systems and A Texas Judge Says No To Obama 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 talked about idiocy of having a single payer/universal healthcare system in this country. A single payer system is where private insurance companies go away and politicians and government bureaucrats control EVERY aspect of your health care. While it has been implemented in other countries around the world, it has almost always been an absolute failure from a quality, quantity and cost of health care provision:

• In England, recovery from disease and health issues is almost always worse than in the United States.
• In Canada, although everyone has “free” healthcare and health care insurance, the majority of Canadians have to pay extra for their health care since the “free” coverage is skimpy and it does not cover drug prescriptions, dental coverage, and vision coverage.
• As a result, tens of thousands of Canadians leave the country every year to get medical care elsewhere in the world that they cannot get in real time in Canada.
• While Americans wait hours or days to get basic tests (e.g. MRI scans, X-Rays, etc.), Canadians have to wait weeks or months for the same basic health care.

The following posts are just a sample of real data and reality of how bad single payer systems are:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-2018part-2-unfolding-disaster.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/02/februrary-2018-part-2-unfolding.html

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

And in a sense we already have a single payer system in various forms in this country and they fail just like other countries’ single payer systems:

• The Veterans Administration has been a failure for years as the VA executives got rich on bonus payments while veterans had to wait months to see a doctor, with many of them dying while they waited.
• Medicaid provides skimpy coverage with narrow networks and about a third of doctors across the country refusing to take on Medicaid patients.
• Medicare and Medicaid lose tens of billions of dollars every year from criminal fraud and inefficiencies.

Not a pretty sight. And it appears that it is not just me that thinks a single payer system in this country is a good idea:

• According to a NewsMax article by Jeffrey Rodack on December 6, 2018, a recent Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans think that a single payer/universal healthcare system in this country is a bad idea.
• 54% of Americans polled would reject such a healthcare system in this country.
• Only 40% were in favor of such a system for us.
• Sentiment is quite different across political ideals since 85% of Democrats, say it is the government’s responsibility to make sure all have healthcare coverage while only 27% of Republicans say it is the government’s responsibility to ensure Americans have healthcare coverage.

Hopefully the political class in this country take a long hard look at the failure of the single payer model around the world, the failures of this country’s experience with single payer-like system and the reality as uncovered by Gallup that the majority of Americans do NOT want such a system in this country.

2) For those that have not heard, a Texas judge recently ruled the Obama Care legislation as un-Constitutional. His reasoning, according to Bloomberg reporting: “U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that the Affordable Care Act, the signature health-care overhaul by President Barack Obama, needed to be eviscerated after Congress last year zeroed out a key provision — the tax penalty for not complying with the requirement to buy insurance.”

Remember, the original Obama Care legislation forced every American to have health insurance coverage or become a criminal subject to progressively heavier fines as time went by. Most Americans who value freedom found such a requirement, i.e. government and politicians, forcing us to buy something that maybe we did not want, did not need, or could not afford, repugnant to free choice and an extreme overreach of a central, overbearing government effort.

While this was certainly a right call from a freedom perspective, and you know that Democrats will appeal this up to the Supreme Court, I had to laugh at a ludicrous statement made by a Democratic official out in California: “Today’s ruling is an assault on 133 million Americans with preexisting conditions, on the 20 million Americans who rely on the ACA’s consumer protections for health care, and on America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care for all Americans,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Friday afternoon.

My gosh, such drivel on many different fronts:

• First of all, Obama Care was targeted at individuals who did not have employer provided health insurance and who had to purchase insurance on the open, individual insurance market.
• Those who get insurance from their employers do not have to worry about not getting covered because of pre-existing conditions. 
• There are nowhere close to 133 million Americans that a) have pre-existing conditions and b) need to get their insurance coverage on the individual market.
• Thus, his 133 million number is a ridiculous lie.
• Anyone who wants insurance via the Obama Care exchanges can still get it, the ruling just states that they do not HAVE to get it as the original legislation says.
• So those 20 million people he refers to, assuming that the number is right which I believe is inflated by at least 100%, have nothing to worry about since they can still get Obama Care insurance and this ruling is on hold subject to appeals.
• And the most idiotic statement of all, namely that “America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care” as a result of Obama Care could not be any further from reality.
• Obama Care caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred health insurance options resulting in every growing premium and deductible costs, doing the exact opposite of what it was heralded to do, reduce health insurance costs.

As always, single payer systems in other countries and Obama Care in this country tried to resolve a public health issue with an insurance solution and failure was inevitable. Higher costs, lower quality have always been the result. Fortunately, Americans as measured by Gallup and the judge in Texas understand the reality, namely that government meddling in this area of life makes a bad situation worse.

More Obama Care disasters to be discussed in the following posts.

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