December,2017, Part 3,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Real Life Obama Care Horror Stories From real Life Americans

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.

As we often do in this series, let's finish this month's Obama Care disaster review with some real life stories of disaster from real life Americans to see how badly Obama Care affected people at the family and individual level. As always, our source of these tragedies is from the following website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

RICHARD, MONTANA: I'm currently paying $229 per month on a plan from Humana that does exactly what I want. It'll keep me from going broke if something bad happens.

That Humana plan does not comply with ObamaCare. So it will be cancelled at some point. Originally it was scheduled to be cancelled at the end of 2014, now I'm not sure if it will be extended to 2016 or what.

The least expensive policy I could find that complied with Ocare was about $500/mo. and that was for this year. My understanding is that compliant policies for 2015 will be about 20% higher. I hope I can keep the current policy for next year, but I don't know. I am displeased.

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

MICHAEL, VIRGINIA: About 5 years ago, I changed my health plan to an HSA through Anthem, to reduce my costs. We had just had our daughter, and the reduced plan seemed perfect in my favor. Gradually, that planned increased to 535/month by August 2010 - No thanks.

I switched to GoldenRule in 2011, and we enjoyed a 249/month plan, keeping my HSA. We have a 5k deductible. It increased yearly to 281, 317, and then 392 after adding my newborn son. Then the "Letter" came in August, something like "...due to rising healthcare costs...518/month."

The increases on my plan previously were in the 13% range, and suddenly it goes up 32% and we're in perfect health.

I scream when I hear the President say, that costs have not gone up as much as previous years...and I wonder who he's talking about. Any other plans I have investigated, just 1 in my current price range, are 10-20% higher for the same coverage, deductible, etc.

MICHAEL, NORTH CAROLINA; From the Charlotte Observer: 

Michael Hood, 46, who lives near Winston-Salem, is another of the Blue Cross customers who is suffering sticker shock after receiving a recent renewal letter.

He and his wife, who is expecting their third child, now pay $324 per month for a plan with a $10,000 family deductible. The comparable plan suggested by Blue Cross for next year would cost $895.27 per month with an $11,000 family deductible. Their annual payment would rise from $14,000 to $24,000.

Self-employed as part owner of a medical device distributorship, Hood said he and his wife “try to live a healthy lifestyle and keep our medical costs down.” They chose the high-deductible plan to keep their premium low.

Hood said his income is about $85,000 a year, which would mean he might be able to qualify for a subsidy. He said he checked the online marketplace, which has been operating only sporadically this week, and didn’t think it looked like his family would be eligible.

One of the pluses of any new plan is that it will cover maternity care, which his current plan doesn’t. But “is that really worth paying $1,000 a month more for?”

“I’m angry that legislation has been passed that is forcing me to purchase something that otherwise I would not have to purchase,” Hood said.

MARIA, CALIFORNIA: Maria Berumen, a tax preparer in Downey, was uninsured for years because of preexisting conditions. The 53-year-old was thrilled to find coverage for herself and her husband for $148 a month after qualifying for a big government subsidy.

She jumped at the chance in early January to visit a primary-care doctor for long-running numbness in her arm and shoulder as a result of bone spurs on her spine. The doctor referred her to a specialist, and problems ensued. At least four doctors wouldn't accept her health plan — even though the state exchange website and her insurer, Health Net Inc., list them as part of her HMO network.

"It's a phantom network," Berumen said.

It was no surprise to her family doctor, Ragaa Iskarous. She has run into this problem repeatedly with other patients in the last month, the doctor said. "This is really driving us crazy."

TOM, LOUISIANA: Obamacare has required my insurance carrier to double my premium beginning Jan 2015. I will no longer be able to afford the premium. The reason the premium is being raised is to provide coverage required by Obamacare but for which I have no need. Obamacare is forcing me to forgo insurance I chose, and can pay for to having no insurance at all. I will have to cancel my insurance but I will send the bill to the fool of a senator who voted for the law, Mary Landrieu.

EMILY, FLORIDA: I'm a retiree that worked for a Fortune 500 Company and had Wonderful Insurance Coverage which included Medical, Hospital, Dental, Rx, Vision and Mental Health. Due to Obamacare I lost my Insurance because of the Employee Mandate.

I have Epilepsy, as a result I find myself in the emergency room often and admitted to the hospital all to often. Also, my prescription drugs cost are very high. The ACA did not meet my needs and what came close was not affordable and deductibles were very high. I took a policy on my own which was 3 times what I contributed through my employer but I had to cancel it because I could no longer afford it. So I have no insurance except Medicare. I had to go to the Hospital last week for 5 days, I don't know how I'm going to pay the bill.

Higher premiums, higher deductibles, narrow doctor networks, cancelled policies, paying for unneeded insurance, the list of Obama Care seems endless. Which means next month we will probably be back with more disasters from the disastrous legislation that keeps on giving.

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

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

May, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Small Businesses Want It Repealed, Competition Continues To Disappear, and Gruber Insanely Blames Trump

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 many small businesses have been crushed by Obama Care’s requirements and regulations. It has caused their costs to increase, they have had to reduce staff or change staff from permanent to temporary ino order to survive, their taxes have gone up, or they just went out of business because of the regulations. 

Thus, it is not a surprise that in a recent poll, 60% of small business owners said they want Obama Care repealed:

• According to Philip Hodges, writing for the Eagle Rising website, a February survey of 700 small business owners found that 60% of them wanted Obama Care repealed.
• The primary reason given for their position is skyrocketing insurance premiums that was caused by a lack of competition in the Obama Care insurance market as large and smaller insurers fled the Obama Care market, unable to make a profit in that market.
• Quoting a CNBC article: “It is a trend affecting business owners in all states. Ross Coulter, 49, and his wife, who run a two-person public relations firm in Dallas, have been hunting for a new health insurance plan after Humana notified them it was discontinuing their current one. They had no immediate plans to slow their search after the House vote. They are looking for an affordable replacement by July 1 for the high-deductible plan, for which premiums are $900 a month for the couple and their three children. The only plans that are comparable would be a $400- or $500-a-month increase,” says Coulter, who is now considering options like a Medi-Share plan, run by Christian Care Ministry, in conjunction with a cancer-coverage policy.
• CNBC went on to report on a situation that we have covered many times before, namely that Obama Care policies are so expensive that customers buy the high deductible plans to reduce their monthly premium payments but then cannot afford the deductible payments when they need the insurance because the deductibles are so high: “When Paula Muto, a vascular and general surgeon in Lawrence and North Hanover, Massachusetts, looked into unpaid bills in her solo private practice recently, she found that many were for patients who had high-deductible plans. It was the people with insurance, that couldn’t pay the deductibles, that weren’t paying us,” she says.”

The unfolding disaster that is Obama Care continues to unfold disasters.

2) One of the people most associated with the disaster known as Obama Care is one of the so-called architects of the plan, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. Obviously, as an architect of such a disaster, it is not unexpected that he would name others of the failures of this wretched piece of legislation.

But at some point, you can stretch that blame game too far in who you blame for the failures as Gruber recently did when he blamed, of all people, Donald Trump for the failures of the law. Let’s keep in mind that Gruber’s work and the passage of Obama Care was over seven YEARS ago, much before Trump became President less than five MONTHS ago.

Come on Professor Gruber, insurance companies were fleeing the Obama Care policy market long before Trump became President. Enrollment numbers were falling 50% short of your promises long before Trump became President. Premiums and deductibles of Obama Care policies were skyrocketing long before Trump became President. Obama Care state co-ops were failing long before Trump became President. The law was already in place long before Trump became President and he has made no changes to that law since becoming President.

Wow, you know you are desperate to place blame and deflect attacks on your reputation when you are blaming someone retroactively seven years. Pathetic. Not not unexpected when you consider that Gruber considered Americans too stupid to understand the law he helped create: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass,” Gruber stated during one health care conference.

Another time, Gruber self-admitted that the Obama administration pushed through the so-called Cadillac tax, a tax on certain premium health care plans, “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance plans.”

Surprised that he did not blame Trump for the American voter being stupid.

3) According to a recent Associated Press article, the carnage of health insurers leaving the Obama Care market is continuing:

• After pulling out of several states previously, after losing $450 million on Obama Care policies, giant insurer Aetna announced that it will also pull out of Nebraska and Delaware next year after expecting to lose $200 million on Obama Care policies this year.
• This will further increase the number of counties across the country that have only one Obama Care insurer operating in that county in 2018.
• With access to only one Obama Care insurance company available, insurance industry experts expect the costs of those Obama Care policies to increase due to lack of competition.
• Things continue to get bad in Iowa with Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross leaving the state and another Iowa insurer, Medica saying that its "ability to stay in the Iowa insurance market in any capacity is in question at this point."
• When Humana pulled out of Tennessee, it left 16 Tennessee counties with NO Obama Care insurance options, a void that has since been filled by only one other company.
• Blue Cross-Blue Shield is now the only Obama Care insurer in one third of the country’s 3,100 counties.

So much for the Gruber and Obama promise that Obama Care would result in a robust competitive environment that would drive down the cost of insurance for all Americans.

The disasters continue to unfold: lack of competition, disasters for small businesses, and the blaming of Donald Trump for something he had absolutely nothing to do with. More disasters to follow shortly.

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

October, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: HIgher Costs, Less Competition, An Alternative and Stories From America

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) Melissa Quinn, writing for the Heritage Foundation on October 17, 2016, provided some upfront and personal stories on ordinary Americans and how Obama Care was screwing up their lives:

• Warren Jones is a veterinarian in Kansas City, Missouri, who has had a health insurance policy with Blue Cross Blue Shield Of Kansas for 15 years.
• In 2014, the year that Obama Care took effect, that policy cost him $318 a month to maintain.
• In 2015, that same policy went up to $394 a month and then to $491 a month in 2016, about a 60% increase in just two years.
• This is the exact opposite of what Obama promised when he claimed that people could see up to a $2,500 REDUCTION in their annual health insurance policy costs.
• In 2017, that same policy will cost him $716 a month, much more than double what he paid just three years ago.
• Despite paying so much more now, his policy no longer has vision and dental coverage and his deductible has also increased to $2,500 a year.
• So he is paying a lot more and getting a lot less as a result of Obama Care.
• Although he does not get his policy via the Obama Care exchange process, even if he did he would not qualify for Federal taxpayer subsidies since he earns too much money.
• And insurance rates, especially for Obama Care policies are going to continue to skyrocket: “A lot of insurers didn’t understand that the market was going to be skewed in terms of income and health status as severely as it was,” Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “Generally, the pool was much worse than anybody expected because of things the administration did that made it worse.”
• Things are not much better in neighboring Kansas where the Kaiser Family Foundation says that six of ten Kansas counties will have only two Obama Care insurers to choose from, a far reach from Obama’s promise that Obama Care would spur competition.
• Before Obama Care was enacted, there were 17 insurance companies operating across Kansas.
• Kaiser also estimates that five states will have only a single insurer issuing Obama Care policies in 2017.
• Rochelle Bird lives in Overland Park, Kansas where she is self-employed
• She has had a non-Obama Care policy from Coventry, a subsidiary of Aetna, for two years.
• In that short time her premiums have gone from $335 a month to $487 while her deductible has increased fivefold, from $1,200 to $6,200.
• And then, adding insult to injury, Coventry then decided to cancel her policy altogether.
• She was not optimistic that she would find a good replacement policy for herself: “I am now faced with the fact that unless something changes, there will be one health care provider presumably with two different health plans that I will have a choice of [while] living in the state of Kansas. That’s absurd. How is that helpful? I’m expecting (a) I’ll pay more, (b) I’ll have less, and (c) I may or may not have the same doctors. Those are always the moving parts.”

Regardless of whether or not you have an Obama Care policy, people across the country are seeing less competition vs. Obama’s promise of more competition, higher premiums despite Obama’s promise of up to a $2,500 decrease in premiums, and higher deductibles. 

2) We listed a bunch of root causes of high healthcare costs above, causes, that if properly addressed, would help reduce healthcare costs and improve the healthcare of every American. But we do not have a monopoly on good ideas to reduce healthcare costs. Consider another Melissa Quinn article from September 12, 2016, that talked about a unique approach for a group of people that is actually reducing healthcare costs:

• Although Deirdre Folley of New Hampshire is one of more millions of Americans nationwide who is considered uninsured, she does not have to pay an Obama Care penalty for not having health insurance.
• Folley and her family are members of Samaritan Ministries which is a so-called healthcare sharing ministry.
• This organization is structured so that members share the cost of each other’s health care expenses.
• This was especially useful to her when her daughter broke her leg which required visits to an urgent care center, a radiologist, and orthopedist which cost her nothing.
• 600,000 Americans are getting healthcare coverage the same way as Folley via Health Care Sharing Ministries.
• According to the article: “Health care sharing ministries facilitate the sharing of medical costs between members, all of whom have shared beliefs. The ministries don’t serve as insurance, but rather when a member has a medical “need,” other members “share” that person’s medical costs.” In some ministries, like Samaritan, members are encouraged to negotiate prices directly with providers to bring down the cost of their medical bills, like Folley did, and they pay in cash before being reimbursed by members of the health care sharing ministry."
• According to Folley, being part of the ministries healthcare model allows them to not violate any of their religious beliefs either: “We didn’t want to buy into a plan where we were most likely going to be paying for abortions or not knowing whether or not we were paying for abortions. With Samaritan, we know we don’t pay for anyone’s abortions, we don’t pay for contraception, we don’t pay for sex changes or counseling for things we would object to. We know that our money isn’t taking part in anything that we have a moral objection to."
• These options are obviously becoming very popular in the face of Obama Care with Folley’s organization almost tripling in size since Obama Care took effect.
• Similar types of healthcare organizations have seen similar growth rates.
• It costs Folley’s family $425 a month for her family of four to be a part of the ministries and she is directed each month where to send that monthly fee directly to another member in need.
• Not surprisingly, the insurance industry is not happy these are not paying customers and users of their insurance policies: “The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has previously warned that health care sharing ministries are not insurance and therefore don’t have the protections of insurance.”
• But given the poor record of insurance companies in the Obama Care world, they really should not be casting too many stones at others looking to keep their families healthy.
• Folley and others like her have not seen the mega cost increases that Obama Care policy holders experienced on their Obama Care policies over the past few years nor the narrowing of the networks of doctors and hospitals they can use.
• And since members pay members directly, there is no profit motive involved as there is with insurance companies which is a big reduction in health care costs right away.

So there are many ways to reduce healthcare costs in this country. Whether it is attacking the root causes of high costs we listed above or organizations like these ministries that are providing low cost, local medical needs financial support to their members, it is a shame that Obama Care more or less ignored what would work in place of what we now know does not work.

3) Let’s finish up today's and this month’s discussion on the unfolding disasters of Obama Care with some quick stories of real Americans that Obama Care has created havoc, stress, and agony for, stories that come from the website: 

www.ourhealthcarestories.com:

CHARLES, OKLAHOMA: 5 of my medications that I have to take everyday went from 60.00 to 90.00. I was given no warning . That is an increase of $180.00 -Those are not the only medications I have to buy. There is no way those kinds of increases are justifiable-- I have many friends that tell me the same thing is happening to them. Insurance companies are trying to re-coop losses by passing these kinds of increases onto the American public. I wonder who is my advocate? Senior citizens like myself cannot afford these kinds of increases. Not to mention my co-pays going up also. Especially when you only find out this ridiculous increase when you go to pay for your medications. I know some people who cannot afford them any longer and they will just do without them.

HARVEY, TENNESSEE: Anchor: Harvey Burniston owns a landscaping company in Butler, and hailed CoveredTN as one of the best decisions the state legislature ever made, splitting insurance costs between the employee, the employer, and the state. Now Burniston says the only plan available is triple the cost. 

Harvey: “A lot of small businesses like myself do not even - they’re not required to have health insurance, [and] I’m not either but I try to do that in order to keep high quality [workers] and take care of my people that work for me. Right now, the average is around $100 a month. When the insurance goes up the least expensive policy we can get is $296 a month, so it’s basically tripling in price.”

EDIE, CALIFORNIA: I am a stage four cancer survivor and I am about to lose my health care plan. When I wrote about my struggle in the Wall Street Journal, the White House directly challenged my account. No empathy was offered and it was suggesting that I was incorrect.

PAUL, UTAH: I learned last week our insurance plan was terminated under the Affordable Care Act, more than 3 1/2 months into our daughter's fight with undifferentiated sarcoma began. The options we are weighing have premiums that are more than double the premiums under our previous plan.

SHEILA: Obamacare takes away from the right to choose the healthcare we want.

Less choice, higher costs, interruption of critical medical care, same sad disasters every month.

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

October, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Making Up Excuses For Failure, IRS Harassment of Citizens, 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 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) The October 14, 2016 issue of The Week magazine did an article on the downfall of Obama Care called, “Why Obama Care Is Struggling.” It covers much of the failures we have already discussed this week and adds in a few others along with the very few, and very weak, Obama Care success stories:

• Some of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, and Blue Cross Blue Shield are rapidly pulling out of the Obama Care market because they are losing billions of dollars by being in those markets.
• Only 12.7 million people enrolled in the Obama Care exchanges this year, far short of the forecasted and promised 21 million who should have already enrolled. [Note: not included in the article is the reality that over 1.6 million original enrollees out of the 12.7 million have already been kicked out of their policies because they never paid the first installment of their premiums so the miss relative to the 21 million is even worse.]
• As many as 19% of those customers will have access to only one Obama Care insurer in 2017, very short of Obama's promise that Obama Care would increase competition, not reduce competition to only one provider.
• The main reason cited for the failure is that not enough young people have signed up for Obama Care policies, preferring to pay the penalty for not having insurance.
• While the business case and financials of the Obama Care effort required at least 35% of the enrollees to be aged between 18 and 34, in reality that percentage is only a meager 28%.
• Another problem with the shortfall is that small businesses did not kick employees off of their business insurance plans and onto the Obama Care policies as often as the Obama Care planners and forecasters expected, leaving the Obama Care insurers with older, sicker, and more expensive customers than expected.
• As a result, Obama Care insurance companies either have to hike up premium costs which drives away customers or strip down the benefits of their insurance policies, forcing customers to pay higher prices for less robust insurance coverage which drives away customers so much that many insurance companies decide that from a financial perspective, it is better to be out of the Obama Care world than be in it and take a financial beating.

What a mess, missed customer forecasts, higher premiums, less competition. Now, to be truthful, the article does point out that 20 million more people have health care insurance vs. the times previous to the Obama Care legislation. Also, the percentage of Americans without insurance coverage has dropped from 16% to 9% since Obama Care was passed. But there is a problem with considering the increased quantity of people having healthcare insurance vs. the quality of their healthcare insurance:

• Many of those with Obama Care policy customers are paying more and getting less than what they had with their previous insurance policies, policies that Obama Care outlawed and doomed to termination.
• Which gets us to another point, the 12.7 million who enrolled in Obama Care policies in 2016, were not all people who had not had health insurance before the law was enacted; likely more than half of the 12.7 million just traded their existing policies for Obama Care policies, often under duress, so that the incremental number of Americans insured under Obama Care insurance policies is likely closer to 4 or 5 million.
• Half of those Americans that are now insured as a result of the law, have gotten insurance via Medicaid, a reality that places upwards of 10 million people on a government program that will add tremendous costs to our national debt, provide health care via very narrow networks of less than the best doctors and hospitals, it is a government program that is hurtling towards financial insolvency, is corrupted with inefficiencies and criminal fraud, and if a Harvard study is to be believed, being a Medicaid patient does not make you any healthier vs. not having Medicaid coverage at all.

So yes, Obama Care did increase the number of Americans with health care insurance coverage. But Obama never promised that it would be lousy coverage that costs a lot, has high deductibles, had narrow networks of doctors and hospitals that were not of the highest quality, the reality that we see today. Quality also matters, it is not just quantity that matters.

[Note: the article tries to make the point that “overall government spending on healthcare was $2.6 trillion less last year than what it was expected to be before Obama Care…” This is obviously a ridiculously wrong number. The entire Federal government budget is just under $4 trillion a year so to claim that it is spending $2.6 trillion LESS, not in total, $2.6 trillion LESS, a year on healthcare is obviously either a falsehood meant to make Obama Care look better than it is or a gross typo.]

2) Zachary Tracer, Katherine Doherty, and Tatiana Darie, writing for Bloomberg on October 14, 2016, continued the bad news train coming out of the Obama Care disaster:

• According to an analysis by Bloomberg, 1.4 million Obama Care policy holders in 32 states will lose access to their policies in 2017, forcing them to find other insurance options. 
• Most of the damage is being caused by major insurance companies pulling out of the Obama Care world.
• The search for replacement policies will like lead to fewer insurance policy choices that are more expensive.
• S&P Global Ratings predict that 2017 enrollment in Obama Care insurance policies will be down by 8%.
• Just in Washington DC 7,800 Obama Care customers will lose access to their current policies.
• Kaiser Family Foundation has predicted that at least 19% of people in the Obama Care individual market will have the ability to choose from exactly one provider in 2017.
• In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield will be the only Obama Care option in 95 out of the state’s 100 counties since Aetna and UnitedHealthcare have withdrawn from the state, leaving 284,000 state residents without Obama Care health insurance policies.
• 117,000 residents in Tennessee will lose access to their Obama Care policies.

Another article, another set of implosions.

3) Obama Care from the beginning always had a little bit of the “Big Brother” syndrome ala George Orwell’s 1984. The government was forcing you to buy a product/service that you may or may not want to buy and making you a criminal if you did not heed their warnings and tracking your behavior to make sure you obeyed.

That Big Brother feeling came about again with a current IRS program that was put in place to ensure your compliance. The IRS, the enforcement arm, the “muscle” behind Obama Care is sending out official IRS letters to uninsured Americans (“reaching out” in their words) to remind them (“attracting” in their words) they need to get insured or be fined. The emphasis of the IRS has been to “remind”younger Americans to get insured because in order for Obama Care to work, younger Americans have to subsidize older, less healthy Americans, kind of a cross generational subsidy program from Americans with generally less wealth paying the bills of Americans with generally more wealth to their name.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise and Ways & Means Chairman Kevin Brady recently sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. It stated, “We strongly object to any action by the Administration to improperly use sensitive taxpayer information to identify and harass individuals who have rejected the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by choosing to pay a tax rather than be forced into a health care plan they don’t need and don’t want.” 

Their other concern is that the IRS was using “protected taxpayer information” to conduct the outreach program and that “We do not believe it to be an appropriate tax administration activity, or a good use of scarce taxpayer resources, to use protected return data to direct taxpayers on their personal coverage decisions.”

So yes, Big Brother IRS is watching and like Santa Claus, knows if you have been naughty or nice when it comes to your personal decision on health care insurance, the First Amendment be damned.

4) This next story is great because it shows how out of touch many of the Obama Care architects are relative to the current meltdown of the program and how deep they are into denial. According to David Ruiz, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on August 16, 2016, Zeke Emanuel, one of the more primary and certainly one of the more obnoxious architects of Obama Care, implied that Aetna’s decision to withdrawal from 70% of the Obama Care exchanges markets is not because they were losing money on Obama Care policies but it was to spite the government for not allowing its merger with Humana.

Is he that much out of touch with reality or just pissed off that his work is turning out to be a disaster? Let’s consider some facts:

• Blue Cross and BlueShield have also pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• UnitedHealthcare has pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• Humana and other insurance companies have pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• 17 out of the 23 Obama Care co-ops have gone out of business already because of heavy financial losses.
• We know for a fact that younger, healthier Americans did not sign up for Obama Care in the volume expected which increased insurance company costs more than expected.
• The primary objective of any business executive is to maximize shareholder wealth so no executive would stop operating in a profitable market category if they were maximizing shareholder wealth in that category, i.e. being profitable serving that category.

And despite all of these realities, this sore loser blames Aetna for doing something the whole market has done or is considering doing. By the way, Emanuel provides not proof, no income statements, no Aetna financial disclosures, no Aetna SEC documents, he just accuses them of doing what everyone else is doing. Pathetic.

One last set of unfolding 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.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w