October, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Five Obama Care Policies In Five Years and Doctors Not Being Doctors

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 America does not have enough doctors to adequately satisfy the needs of sick Americans. That shortage was made more dramatic once Obama Care was implemented since its' hassles and idiocy led to many doctors retiring earlier, deciding that they did not want to deal with the hassles of dealing with government red tape and bureaucracy associated with Obama Care’s intrusion into the healthcare market.

Well, according to an article in the September 11, 2017 issue of Businessweek, now it appears that the front of the pipeline for doctors in this country is also getting smaller, which will make the number of doctors in this country even tighter in years to come:

• A 2016 survey of 17,000 medical school graduates by the Physicians Foundation found that 13.5% of them stated they planned to be in non-doctor/patient or non-clinical jobs within three years, with many of them going into business or research.
• This is up from 9.9% in 2012.
• Another study of doctors from Merritt Hawkins asked doctors if they were to begin their educations again, would they enter the medical profession and 25% said they would enter another field.
• This 25% is up threefold from the 8% that answered the same question in 2006.
• The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that by 2030, the country will be short 100,000 doctors or about 2,000 per state on average, with rural areas being hit especially bad.
• These medically trained but non-practicing doctors are being hired by consulting companies, going back to get their MBA degrees, or starting their own businesses but are not seeing sick patients, often because of the hassles of actually treating patients or the desire for bigger dollars not treating patients.

Thus, Obama Care’s impact and the administrative headaches and rules/regulations it brought with it at best is not helping resolve the current doctor shortage and at worse (more likely) has made and is making the doctors shortage worse with no solution in sight.

2) Michelle Malkin is a well known political commentator, blogger, and writer. One of her latest pieces shows a real life example of how one American family, her own, has been raked over the coals by Obama Care. In her case, she has had four different insurance carriers since Obama Care went into effect:

• She and her husband just got the fourth cancellation notice of their health insurance policy since 2013.
• Their first cancellation came from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in 2013 since Obama Care tenets made their preferred and then current policy from Anthem invalid.
• It did not matter that they liked their then current high deductible policy since it fit their family needs and included a wide ranging network of doctors that their family needed and liked.
• Their second plan from Rocky Mountain Health Plans died in August, 2015 which in a way was a good thing since they did not like it since it did not cover their kids’ health needs and was not accepted at their local urgent care clinic.
• This second plan died since the insurer pulled out of their market area because they could not make money.
• Their third plan was cancelled in August, 2016 since the insurer claimed that it was pulling out of their Colorado market because it would “no longer offer your current health plan in the State of Colorado,” i.e. it could not make a profit in Colorado. 
• The Malkin family then enrolled in the Bronze HSA EPO plan offered by the Minneapolis startup, Bright Health.
• Less than a year later, Bright Health told them that their plan would be discontinued on January 1, 2018.
• When they went looking for a new policy for the fifth time since 2013, they found that the cheapest plan they could get would raise their monthly premium cost from $944.86 to over $1,300, and this is a high deductible plan which means that they will have to satisfy an annual deductible that is likely to be over $13,000 a year.
• Malkin goes on to point out that her home state of Colorado is not the only state experiencing the disaster that is Obama Care: “Premiums for individual health plans in Virginia are set to skyrocket nearly 60 percent in 2018. In New Hampshire, those rates will rise 52 percent. In South Carolina, individual market consumers will face an average 31.3 percent hike. In Tennessee, they’ll see rates jump between 20-40 percent.”

So it is not only the unknown average Americans family that is getting slammed every day by Obama Care, it is famous, higher earning Americans like Malkin that also are getting whipsawed by a terrible piece of legislation. And yet, Washington politicians have no clue or energy or will to fix what is a horrible situation. 

Malkin concludes her piece by summing up the frustration that her and millions of other Americans have experienced as a result of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care: “There are an estimated 450,000 consumers like us in Colorado and 17 million of us nationwide — small-business owners, independent contractors and others who don’t get their plans through group coverage, big companies or government employers. The costs, headaches and disruption in our lives caused by Obamacare’s meddling meddlers are real and massive.

But we’re puzzles to corporate media journalists who’ve never had to meet a payroll and don’t even know what is the individual market.

We’re invisible to late-night TV clowns who get their Obamacare-at-all-costs talking points from Chuck Schumer.

We’re pariahs to social justice health care activists and Democrats who want us to just shut up and subsidize everyone else’s insurance.

And we’re expendables to establishment Republicans who hoovered up campaign donations on the empty promise to repeal Obamacare — and now consider amnesty for immigrants here illegally and gun control higher legislative priorities than keeping their damned word.

We’re the canaries in the Obamacare coal mine. Ignore us at your peril, America. You’re next.”

And idiots like Senator Bernie Sanders and others want Washington to control everyone’s healthcare needs via a single payer system, not just those in the individual insurance market. One look at what Washington did to the individual health insurance market, and families like Malkin’s via Obama Care, should be enough proof that Washington and a single payer system are both insanity and the height of idiocy. More disasters 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

November, 2016, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Higher Premiums, Higher Deductibles, and More Taxes

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, 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 co-pays 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) We have already talked about how major insurance companies (UnitedHealthcare, Humana, others) were dropping out of the Obama Care exchanges since the law is so bad that these companies were losing billions of dollars by offering Obama Care policies. Although Obama claimed that Obama Care would increase competition in the health insurance industry, the exact opposite happened: fewer and fewer companies are part of the Obama Care network of insurers.

Warner Todd Huston, writing for Breitbart on November 2, 2016, told the world that the abandonment of Obama Care is continuing:

• Anthem, Inc. is now also seriously thinking about dropping out of the Obama Care world.
• Anthem Chief Executive Officer Joseph Swedish explained the situation: “If we do not see clear evidence of an improving environment and a path towards sustainability in the marketplace, we will likely modify our strategy in 2018. Clearly, 2017 is a critical year as we continue to assess the long-term viability of our exchange footprint.”
• If Anthem does drop out of offering Obama Care policies, 889,000 Americans in 14 states will lose their current insurance policies.
• The reason for Anthem possibly dropping out is quite simple, according to Sweden: “The financial performance in individual ACA compliant products has been disappointing as membership has been short of our original expectations.”
• Anthem missed its latest earnings estimates as its costs were higher than expected.

Another one bites the Obama Care dust.

2) Obama often claimed that Obama Care would reduce annual health insurance policy costs by up to $2,500 per family. That promise proved to be either a lie or pure ignorance on his part since we have reported often through the years that policy premiums and deductibles have gone up significantly over time, not down by up to $2,500. 

Bob Ryan, writing for the Business Insider website on October 26, 2016, outlined what the ghastly cost increases will be for Obama Care policy holders in 2017:

• The Obama administration via the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) recently announced that the cost of Obama Care policies will increase by an average of 25% in 2017.
• HHS based the 25% average increase estimate by looking at the insurance costs in each state for a 27 year old non-smoker purchasing the second lowest cost silver Obama Care policy, about the middle of all Obama Care options.
• Only two states will see average decreases in Obama Care policies in 2017 (Indiana and Massachusetts).
• Every other state will see increases (HHS did not provide estimates for seven states).
• Arizona, (116%), Oklahoma (69%), and Tennessee (63%) will see the greatest increase.
• Minnesota (59%), Alabama (58%), Pennsylvania (53%), and Nebraska will also see the most whopping increases in 1017, a far cry from seeing up to a $2,500 decrease in their annual premium costs.

Now, supporters of Obama Care, the few that still remain, will point out that 77% of Obama Care policy holders will not absorb the entire increase since they will get increased subsidies to cover some of the increases. But consider three realities:

• 23% of Obama Care policy holders will have to absorb the entire increase in their insurance costs since they do not qualify for subsidies.
• While the 77% of those with subsidies will not pay for the entire increases in their policies, those costs do not magically disappear, they are being paid by the American taxpayer via the Federal government, increasing the national debt.
• Many people stuck with Obama Care policies used to have policies that were much cheaper and focused only on their own, specific health needs but Obama Care required every insurance policy to have features and requirements that many people did not need but which pumped up the cost of their Obama Care replacement policies regardless of what subsidies they may be getting.

Another year, another set of disgusting increase in premium costs of Obama Care policies.

3) Robert Moffit, writing for the Heritage Foundation on November 2, 2016, pointed out some other problems with the implosion that is Obama Care:

• As we previously discussed, the average increase in the cost of premiums of Obama Care policies will go up a whopping 25% in 2017.
• But the premiums are not the only problem in 2017, the deductible levels are also skyrocketing.
• For the lowest cost bronze plan, a single person will face a whopping deductible of $6,000 and a family will face a deductible of $12,393.
• For a silver plan Obama care policy, a single policyholder will face a deductible of $3,572 while a family will face a deductible of $7,474.
• Thus, it is false advice when Obama Care supporters say that an American could find a bronze plan Obama Care policy for less than a $100 a month since a single person who went that route, probably because they are in a lower income bracket, would still face a likely insurmountable deductible bar of $6,000 before that policy gave them any benefit.
• Given how badly Obama Care is performing, the governor of Minnesota (a state that is going to see 50% to 67% increases in Obama Care policy premiums in 2017), Mark Dayton, wants to lay another tax on all Minnesota residents to pay for Obama Care premiums for a minority of Minnesota residents, those that are Obama Care customers, a tax that would come to about $150 per family per year.
• Hillary Clinton wants to add another subsidy to low income Obama Care policy holders but that plan, according to the liberal the Commonwealth Fund, will add a whopping $90 billion to the national debt just in 2018.
• This $90 billion comes out to an additional tax load of about $800 per every American household.

More of the same. Increased premiums, increased deductibles and the same old political thinking that never works, just raise taxes. The way to tame ever increasing healthcare costs is to attack the root causes of high healthcare costs listed above. Raising taxes resolves no root causes. More Obama Care disasters tomorrow.

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

August, 2016, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Higher Costs, Less Choice, More Hassles

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, 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 co-pays 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Remember all of the promises that were made about Obama Care in the beginning: many more people would be able to get much cheaper but higher quality health insurance policies in a very easy way via Obama Care exchanges. We have shown many, many times over the years that the exact opposite came true: the health insurance policies were more expensive and getting more expensive over time, the quality of the coverage was decreasing, and it was difficult if not impossible to navigate the exchanges’ computer systems to actually sign up for a policy.

Well, a new report from Employee Benefit Research Institute backs up our view of reality years after Obama Care took effect by finding that more and more small businesses are finding that they cannot afford to provide health insurance benefits to their employees. In 2015, only 22.7% of businesses with less than ten employees offered health insurance to their employees compared to 35.6% that offered health insurance in 2008, just before Obama Care was passed. 

Businesses with between 10 and 24 employees saw the percentage of small businesses offering health insurance drop from 66.1% to less than 50% in that same time span and small businesses with between 25 and 99 employees so the percentage offering health insurance drop from 81.3% to just 73.5%. Thus, it appears that Obama Care, relative to America’s small businesses, had the exact opposite of what was promised and intended: health insurance became tougher and more expensive to obtain for employees of America’s small businesses.

In essence, the study concluded: “For many smaller employers, the business, labor/employment, and healthcare environments may have all changed the cost-benefit calculation against sponsoring health coverage—greater costs and risks, with reduced differentiating, attraction and retention benefits.” In other words, Obama Care may have caused the business environment to look at the provision of health insurance for employees as more expensive with less return for the money.

2) As always, we bring up the sad reality that Obama promised dozens and dozens of times that the Obama Care legislation would reduce the cost of health insurance for the average American family up to $2,500 a year. As always, we have constantly shown what a lie or deception that vow was.

And a recent article in the LA Times again shows how far off Obama was with that promise/lie. The paper reported that the premiums for Obama Care policies in California will rise 13% in 2017. This is more than three times the increase of the past two years and probably more than six times the rate of inflation. 

The article by Melody Petersen and Noam Levey also recalled how the California Obama Care exchange had boasted that they had helped insure hundreds of thousands of people in that state while keeping costs down….until 2017. Premium costs had increased 4% in 2016 and 4.2% in 2015 as compared to the 17% likely increase in 2017.

The exchange blamed a number of factors for the large rate hike including the rising costs of medical care, including expensive specialty drugs and the end of a financial mechanism that held down rates for the first three years of Obama Care. In other words, in 2017 we will see the real, market based costs of health insurance in California and the cost is skyrocketing, the exact opposite of what Obama promised would happen.

Blue Shield of California asked for an average 19% increase in its Obama Care policies and Anthem asked for an average increase of 16%. These are the two largest companies offering Obama Care policies in the state. The article correctly points out that some policyholders may need to drop down to a lower cost insurance policy based on these cost increases. However, doing so would reduce the quality of care and may require them to find a whole new set of doctors as per their new policy, definitely a hassle.

Jamie Court, the president of the Consumer Watchdog organization in Santa Monica summed the mess nicely: “We’re paying more for less. Insurers are limiting access to doctors and hospitals while also demanding a higher price.”

But according to the article, California is not alone in this problem. They reporters cite a study of 14 metro areas that have already announced their 2017 Obama Care premium plans and found that the average increase will be 11%, more than five times what inflation has been. The changes in average premiums range from a decrease of 14% in Providence, R.I., to an increase of 26% in Portland, Ore., according to the analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

None of these high increases should be a surprise. As we have often pointed out, the legislation never attacked the root causes of high healthcare costs in this country, most of which are listed above. Despite being years from when the legislation passed, Americans are still obese, out of shape, smoking too much, not exercising enough, etc. so it is no surprised that costs are still skyrocketing, the base causes are still out of control. And Obama's promise of reducing annual premium costs by $2,500 a year looks more and more absurd everyday.

3) Some Blue Shield organizations and Unitedhealthcare have already announced that they are dropping all of their Obama Care policies going forward or most of them. They have found that the costs of serving Obama Care policy holders were much higher than expected, resulting in significantly negative financial impacts to their business. This has had the double whammy of forcing existing Obama Care customers to find other insurance options and reducing competition in the markets served by these companies, causing costs to rise more easily in the absence of competition.

And now a recent article on the Daily Caller website states that another major insurance company, Humana, would be existing the Obama Care market due to negative financial results. 

4) Let’s end today’s review of the unfolding disasters of Obama Care with some real life stories of real life Americans and how Obama Care has hurt them financially and healthwise. The source of these stories is the website, www.ourhealthcarestories.com. This is what is really going on underneath all of the high level numbers:

KATE, NEW MEXICO: We own our own business and pay for our own healthcare. As of January 1, 2014 the cost of a comparable healthcare policy tripled and our old policy was cancelled. We have been unable to afford the cost increase and as of May 2014 we have no insurance at all. This has been a very frustrating situation for us.

DEAN, PENNSYLVANIA: From Newsmax: Dean Griffin liked the health insurance he purchased for himself and his wife three years ago and thought he'd be able to keep the plan even after the federal Affordable Care Act took effect.

But the 64-year-old recently received a letter notifying him the plan was being canceled because it didn't cover certain benefits required under the law.

The Griffins, who live near Philadelphia on the Delaware border, pay $770 monthly for their soon-to-be-terminated health care plan with a $2,500 deductible. The cheapest plan they found on their state insurance exchange was a so-called bronze plan charging a $1,275 monthly premium with deductibles totaling $12,700. It covers only providers in Pennsylvania, so the couple wouldn't be able to see the doctors in Delaware whom they've used for more than a decade.

"We're buying insurance that we will never use and can't possibly ever benefit from. We're basically passing on a benefit to other people who are not otherwise able to buy basic insurance," said Griffin, who is retired from running an information technology company.

YVETTE, MAINE: "The least expensive of the new federal healthcare options will cost her $14,400 a year."

That will do it for today’s unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Higher costs, less choice, more hassle, worst legislation ever. And more of the same tomorrow.

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

December, 2015, Part 6, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Death Spiral Talk and Realities

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 it 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, 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 health care 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 health care 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 health care 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 but with a big exception: 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 health care 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 deductibles and co-pays 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.

Let's conintue looking at the fiascos of the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) A recent article by Bloomberg summarized many of the Obama Care problems and disasters that we have been reviewing:

• UnitedHealth’s recent announcement that it might withdrawal from offering Obama Care policies in the near future is a potential sign that Obama Care is imploding onto itself.
• While UnitedHealth’s Obama Care policies represent only about 6% of the Obama Care policies issued so far, if a large insurance carrier like UnitedHealth care cannot be profitable with Obama Care, expecting to lose half a billion dollars in 2016 with Obama Care policies, it makes one wonder if smaller carriers can ever be profitable within the Obama Care framework.
• According to Larry Levitt, a health care insurance expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation: “The ACA [Obama Care] marketplaces are not yet profitable for most insurers. It’s going to take enrollment growth, especially among healthy people, to make it an attractive market for insurers. If enrollment stagnates, we could very well see insurers thinking twice about their participation.”
• As we have discussed, not enough healthy people signed up Obama Care policies, healthy people whose good health and payments were supposed to be used to subsidize the less healthy Obama Care insurance policy holders.
• According to the Robert Johnson Foundation, of the 24.1 million Americans who would be eligible and who could benefit from an Obama Care subsidy, only 8.6 million have actually signed up for an Obama Care policy, less than 40%.
• Overall, according to McKinsey, insurers lost $2.5 billion on their Obama Care policies in 2014 despite getting subsidies from programs like the law’s risk corridors.
• One of the problems that was forecasted long ago, is that sick people have signed up for Obama Care policies since under the law they cannot be turned away, received the expensive treatment and medical care that they needed, and then dropped their policy, knowing that they can sign up again anytime they want in the future.
• As late as last March, 2015, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was sticking close to its original enrollment estimate for Obama Care of over 20 million people being enrolled in an Obama Care policy by 2016.
• Now, the CBO does not believe it will attain more than about half of the original forecasted enrollment and the March estimate, instead seeing Obama Care enrollment in the 9.4 million to 11.4 million range, about half of what was expected and promised.

While Anthem is a much larger Obama Care player than UnitedHealth, its chief financial officer, Wayne DeVeydt recent said his company would be “patient” relative to its Obama Care business, i.e. they are willing to stick around for a while, unlike UnitedHealth. But being patient is far from being exciting and happy.

2) A recent Breitbart article by Andrew Mark Miller on November 24, 2015 highlighted the five bad headwinds beating up Obama Care:

1. Insurance companies are withdrawing in droves - Possibly an overstatement but with the death of over half of the Obama Care co-ops and the high potential of UnitedHealth pulling out of the Obama Care market, the trend is not good. If another major company should decide to bail out and the remaining co-ops shut down, than droves is the appropriate term.

2. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” was a cruel lie.

Obama continually promised Americans: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” After millions of Americans had their plans cancelled, Obama’s infamous fabrication was named the 2013 PolitiFact Lie of the Year. In fact, three Obama and Obama Care lies made the top ten list of their lies in 2013.

3. Still waiting on that $2,500 in savings Obama promised you? Beside continually promising that if you liked your current insurance policy, doctor and hospital you would be able to keep it under Obama Care, his other big deception was his continual promise that American families would see up to a $2,500 reduction in their annual insurance costs. Instead, premiums have increased, not decreased, deductibles have risen, and quality and choices have deteriorated.

4. Obama care customers say their plans are “useless” due to soaring deductibles. Not only have premiums gone up under Obama Care but deductibles have also risen leading to the problem that “you now have health insurance but you cannot afford health care." The New York Times recently described this type of experience Obama Care customers: “The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.”

That same article reported that more than half of the Obama Care policies in effect have deductibles above $3,000 a year, making many of them useless for many Americans.

5. The Obama care “death spiral” conservatives warned about is real. According to Breitbart and the Obama Care death spiral: “Basically, too many sick people are signing up, and too few healthy people are doing so. This causes prices to surge, and that causes fewer healthy people to sign up. The death spiral continues until the insurance program collapse completely. The 20.3 percent price increase for 2016 is probably the cause of the current round of the Obscure death spiral.”

A former U.S. Senator from Montana once described Obama Care as “Train wreck.” Turns out that was one thing that any U.S. politician has gotten right in decades. It is a train wreck and that wreckage discussion will continue tomorrow.

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, 2015, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Insurance Companies Get Richer and Bigger and State Exchanges Implode

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 it 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, 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 but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

Today and probably for the next few days, we will look at the latest disasters from Obama Care, including the gathering evidence that Obama Care policy holders are in for a big and ugly financial surprise in their 2016 costs along with some personal stories on how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families.

1) Yesterday, we briefly touched on the reality that Obama Care is killing competition in the insurance and healthcare industries, a process that is likely to increase consumer costs while simultaneously reduce quality and choices. Chriss Street writing for Breitbart on July 26, 2015 provided some more details on the killing of competition and the reasons why health care costs will go up even faster as the range of competitors dwindles:

• Anthem insurance recently announced it was buying Cigna insurance for a whopping $54 billion. 
• This will make Anthem the largest insurer in the state of California.
• Anthem will have 40% of the California insurance when the merger is done, surpassing the current market leader, Kaiser, which has 35% of the state market. Thus, two giant insurance companies will control 75% of the insurance market in California.
• The five largest health insurance companies in the country will end up as three evenlarger companies once the large mergers are complete.
• The health insurance stock prices have tripled in some cases since the passage of Obama Care, far surpassing the growth of the overall stock market. The S&P Health Care index is up 305% since Obama took office.
• Since Obama took office, the rise in stock prices for healthcare companies has been the fastest growth rate in history.
• While overall economic inflation was .8% in 2014, health care spending grew six times as fast at 5.0%, something that was supposed to slow down under Obama Care.
• Even worse, prescription drug spending was up a whopping 13.0% in 2014.
• In 2014, health care spending in the country relative to our GDP was 17.8%, up from the 16% level when Obama took office.
• According to the article, “Influence Alley,” as printed in the National Journal, the American Health Insurance Plans organization, the industry’s lobbyist, spent $102.4 million to lobby Congress relative to the Obama Care legislation.
• And life could get even more lucrative in the next few years since, as we have previously reported, many states are likely to grant insurance rate requests that are quite high: New Mexico’s largest insurer, Health Care Service Corp, has formally asked for a premium increase of 51.6%, Tennessee’s largest insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, wants a 36.3% increase, Maryland’s largest insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, has asked for a 30.4% increase, and Oregon’s top insurer, Moda Health, wants a 25% increase.

So, in summary, the health insurance companies are getting richer, in all likelihood stockholders in many insurance companies are getting rich as merger mania spreads in the industry, costs for consumers are going up which makes them poorer, and healthcare costs for the country continue to skyrocket. Everyone see the problem with this reality? All caused because Obama Care rewarded insiders and lobbyists and never addressed the root causes of our high healthcare costs.

2) An Associated Press (AP) article by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar from July 26, 2015 pointed out another gross failure of Obama Care, the so-called state-based and run health insurance exchanges that were online marketplaces where consumers could log onto the exchange website and shop for and purchase insurance.

The highlights of their failure includes the following realities:

• Many of the states exchanges ended up with higher than expected costs and lower than expected enrolment, causing many of them to consider turning over their operations to the Feds, shutting down, or merging with other co-ops in other states.
• Hawaii's Obama Care exchange received $205 million in Federal startup grants, spent about $139 million, enrolled 8,200 customers at a whopping cost of about $17,000 per customer, and is imploding so fast that it is turning over its responsibilities to the Federal government.
• Twelve states and the District of Columbia have their own state level Obama Care exchanges and about half of them are under severe financial strain despite getting a total of almost $5 billion in taxpayer grants to get operational. Experts estimate about half face financial difficulties.
• According to a recent statement by Hawaii Governor David Ige: "The viability of state health insurance exchanges has been a challenge across the country, particularly in small states, due to insufficient numbers of uninsured residents." But wasn’t Obama Care supposed to be so good that people would flock to sign up and those that did not want insurance also sign up to avoid being fined?
• Covered California, the state of California exchange, missed its signup target by 20% this past year.
• To help cover their financial shortfalls, Justine Handelman, policy chief at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association thinks that the idea of the exchanges could actually make health care LESS affordable, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do: "Our biggest concern is that you may see many states looking to enact taxes and fees, and that makes health care less affordable." 
• Hawaii is the third state exchange defaulting to the Federal Obama Care exchange system, following Nevada and Oregon, which made their switch last year. 
• Minnesota's MNsure exchange cut its budget, also saw a shortfall in their recent set of enrollees, the legislature and governor have proposed no viable plans to fix the process, and Governor Mark Dayton has stated that MNsure's fate is on the table, including the option of shifting operations to HealthCare.gov.
• The U.S. attorney in Boston has subpoenaed records dealing with Massachusetts’ Health Connector, the Massachusetts exchange.
• Colorado officials are considering changes to its exchange ranging from pooling call centers with other states to folding down everything and defaulting to the Federal exchange. And the Colorado exchange is viewed as one of the most financially solvent of all state exchanges
• A Federal government audit found that the state of Maryland used taxpayer funded grants from Washington to pay for $28.4 million in costs that should have been allocated to the state's Medicaid program. 
• Vermont is also trying to fix its processes that has had major technology and system issues from the start.

What a mess. Billions of dollars wasted with little benefit in return, the incompetence at the state level exchanges appears to be as bad or worse than the incompetency at the Federal level. And remember, the Federal exchange system was barely working, requiring much more spending to fix it. What happens when multiple states start dumping their enrollee requirements onto the creaky and icky Federal exchange system? Probably more chaos, more identity theft issues and problems, and more taxpayer money spent and wasted.

The Obama Care legislation. The worst piece of legislation ever written and a piece of legislation that continues to unfold into new disasters every month. More disasters tomorrow.

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, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Fake Poeple Get Insurance, Real Peopel Get Huge Premium Hikes, and More

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 it 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, 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 health care 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 health care 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 health care 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 but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

Today and probably for the next few days, we will look at the latest disasters from Obama Care, including the gathering evidence that Obama Care policy holders are in for a big and ugly financial surprise in their 2016 costs along with some personal stories on how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families.

1) Obama Care information systems and data processing procedures have been a disaster from day one. Most of what was supposed to work at the beginning did not work, privacy of personal information was often non-existent and many called the security protocols an identity thief’s paradise.

Now, in addition to previous problems, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found a potentially additional data problem. According to the Associated Press, the GAO made up eleven fictitious people and attempted to put them through the Obama Care processes to see if these non-existent people could actually sign up for Obama Care policies and receive taxpayer funded subsidies. Here is what happened:

• All eleven of the fictitious people actually were able to sign up for Obama Care policies even though their personas, documentation, and personal information were completely fraudulent.
• In addition, all of them were automatically re-enrolled when the window for Obama Care policy sign ups came around last fall.
• While six of those fake people eventually were sent termination notices by the Obama Care process, the GAO was able to get all but one reinstated by calling the Obama Care consumer service center.
• But it gets better. The GAO was even able to get the monthly subsidies bumped higher during the call to get them reinstated.

Thus, the bottom line is that the Feds failed 91% of the time to identify fake people getting insurance via the Obama Care Federal exchange.That is almost as bad as the TSA failing to identify fake bombs and weapons 95% of the time when their procedures were recently tested.

Now, granted, a sample size of eleven is really small and is not statistically applicable to all Obama Care exchange enrollees. But given the problems Obama Care specifically and the Federal government in general has with building any kind of quality data processing system, I would lay odds that there are many, many other fake people enrolled in Obama Care policies and the American taxpayer is paying for the fraud in a very big way.

2) The Cato Institute has never been a big fan of Obama Care, namely because Cato is a big fan of minimal government and maximum freedom while Obama Care is the exact opposite. But Michael F. Cannon, writing for Cato in July, 2015, astutely pointed out that even Slate, a pro liberal, pro Obama, website is finally coming around to the realization that Obama Care might not be such a great financial situation that they might have hoped it would be.

He quoted the writer of the Slate article, Helaine Olen, with coming to the following realizations, realizations that we have been discussing in this blog for the past four years or so:

• "Last week Oregon’s insurance commissioner, Laura Cali, announced that the state had approved a 25 percent premium increase for the largest health insurer on the state’s exchanges. The second largest insurer did even better: It received permission to boost its monthly charge to consumers by 33 percent."
• "And that sounds like a relative bargain compared with Minnesota  and New Mexico, where the Blue Cross Blue Shield family is looking for increases of more than 50 percent. Even if the final numbers are lower than the asks, it seems quite likely these states will approve substantive premium increases."
• "The problem is simple. As Trudy Lieberman reported this month in Harper's , the ACA made a decent stab at solving the problem of Americans lacking insurance. Unfortunately, the bargain struck to get the bill to a point where lobbyists for the hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries to sign on, or at least not fight it, did not adequately address the issue of overall medical costs."
• "And that’s where the consumer comes in. Someone is “it,” the party paying the bill. And that “it” is increasingly you, whether you receive insurance on the exchanges or from an employer."

“Did not address the issue of overall medical costs.” I love that quote since we have been beating that horse since day one. If you never understand the root causes of a problem, in this case high medical costs, you will never resolve the issue you are facing. A good starting point of the root causes are listed above, all of which got no or minimal attention in the entire Obama Care development process. 

And now Ms. Olen and Slate finally realize what many of us have been yelling about for so many years. Obama Care is a health insurance solution trying to resolve a public health issue and that is why it will eventually implode onto itself, possibly crashing the economy with it as high medical costs and now high government costs associated with Obama Care run rampant and unresolved.

3) One last piece of Obama Care insanity today, more to follow tomorrow. The best way to lower costs, under simple economic theory, is to have a wide array of competitors vying for the business of customers. High levels of competition make competitors more efficient and cost effective driving out costs in order to compete better in the marketplace and to keep a decent level of profitability. Product offerings improve and grow, costs to end users go down, and quality improves.

But if anything, Obama Care did the exact opposite. We have already discussed any number of times that hospitals, doctor offices, and other health care providers have been consolidating, buying each other up, and generally reducing the amount of competition. This is the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do. It was supposed to drive more competition and thus reduce costs to the end user. Instead, we have fewer competitors, and as we see above, costs are going up substantially, a reality now recognized even by Slate.

And now the consolidation and reduced competition has hit the insurance company industry big time. According to an article in Bloomberg by Megan McArdle that was summarized in the August 7, 2015 issue of The Week magazine, giant health care insurer Anthem concluded a deal to purchase health care giant Cigna for $48 billion. Yes, $48 billion.

This merger comes on the heals of a $37 billion merger that combined Aetna and Humana. McArdle rightly lays the merger mania at the feet of Obama Care and its tonnage of paperwork and rules and regulations that are expensive to implement. This also allows the now giant health insurers to better compete with the now giant health providers relative to pricing and billables. According to The Week article:

• “For consumers, it means our health care will increasingly be delivered by only a few big players.”
• “As insurers and hospital networks supersize, patients will get the role of ‘tiny human standing on the ground between them.’”

Tiny human vs. supersized hospitals and insurers. Guess who does not make out well in that situation. Thus, as with most government programs, the so-called cure is often worse than the status quo, leaving the original situation worse off than before politicians got involved. Obama Care is no different: less choice, probably lower quality at a higher price.

More Obama Care news tomorrow and I can guarantee you it will not be any better than what we discussed today.

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