April, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Using a Lousy Insurance Plan To Attack a Public Health Problem 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, 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 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.

1) A few days ago in this series we devoted an entire article to the reality that Obama Care never addressed a primary driver of ever rising health care costs in this country: the obesity epidemic sweeping the country. With so many overweight Americans running around, with so many addicted to bad eating and lifestyle habits, the costs to treat their overweight related diseases is a significant burden on the health care cost curve.

But addiction to obesity is not the only addiction driver relative to increasing healthcare costs. Let’s follow up on that theme based on an article from the National Review from March 24, 2017, written by David French, “Health-Care Reform Won't Fix What Really Hurts American Health:”

• Consider that in 2010, almost 50 million Americans did not have health insurance but by 2016, the number had dropped to 27.3 million, hitting a record low of 8.6% of Americans without health insurance coverage, indicating that maybe Obama Care was a tremendous success. 
• However, also consider the reality that despite Americans have more access to insured health care, the nation’s death rate actually increased in 2015.
• Recent research by Princeton economists, Annie Case and Angus deaton, verified that this is indeed the case, more people insured but more people dying, and that this trend is true across many segments of Americans.
• Two factors are driving these higher deaths rates including the reality that, “The obesity epidemic is carrying with it increases in chronic health conditions, including diabetes and heart disease, and make no mistake — obesity is exploding in the United States.”
• Thus, as we said in the earlier post referred to above, Obama Care did nothing to address this root cause of higher and higher healthcare costs. 
• In addition, there are more and more “deaths of despair,” deaths caused by the abuse of drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and that these deaths of despair are increasing across all age groups, another root cause not addressed by Obama Care. 
• It does not matter if you have health insurance if your mindset is self destructive.
• The article quotes a doctor that said, “If it weren’t for addicts, I wouldn’t have a job,” that intensive-care units are overrun across the country with people addicted to drugs, to alcohol, to tobacco, and yes, to food.

More and more Americans are killing themselves and it does not matter that they have insurance. And their attempts to kill themselves, either by drug abuse, food abuse, or too much smoking, was not addressed by Obama Care. If a doctor goes out of business without addicts, shouldn’t that be the objective to reduce healthcare costs rather than trying to figure out who wants a bronze, silver or gold Obama Care insurance policy?

Mr. French so elegantly sums up the problem: “Unless our citizens can find a way to soothe the despair, the great health-insurance debate from 2009 to 2016 may end up a mere footnote in public-health history. At the end of the day, neither the best nor the worst insurance can cause a man to put down his pills, throw out his whiskey bottles, or walk more and eat less. When the human heart aches, an insurance card won’t ease the pain.” 

The problem of ever increasing healthcare costs is a public health care problem requiring a public healthcare remedy, not a half baked Obama Care insurance remedy.

2) There can be no doubt that Obama Care has been a total failure along so many dimensions. It needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Whether the Republicans can come up with something better is still open to debate. 

But leave it to the opposing political party, the Democrats, who were the architects of the Obama Care failure, and who were quick to get hysterical and into liar mode when the Republicans dared to try to fix what the Democrats broke. Consider the following lies and fact checking that proved them lies from leading Democrats, as reported by Andrew Kugle and the Washington Free Beacon on March 17, 2017:

• The lies were debunked by the Washington Post, usually a reliable defender of Democrats and their lies.
• Their debunking was related to the false claims by Democrats relative to the first Republican proposal to replace Obama Care.
• Batty Nancy Pelosi kicked off the lie parade: "Is it an act of mercy to throw 24 million people off of health insurance, so Republicans can hand billionaires a massive new tax giveaway?"
• Just as batty Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz followed up: "But what this bill does is it takes away healthcare from 14 million people in the next year, 24 million over ten years." 
• But the Washington Post called these statements misleading since while the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did say that 14 million fewer people would have insurance under the Republican plan in 2018 it does not mean 14 million people would lose their insurance, just that 14 million might not buy it since it would no longer be against the law not to have health insurance.
• In fact, the CBO actually stated this reality in their report but as always, Democrats ran with a number they did not understand: “"Most of the reductions in coverage in 2018 and 2019 would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate.” Seems that fact and reality got left behind by Wasserman Schultz and Pelosi.
• In addition, the CBO just scored the part of the Republican plan that would eliminate Obama Care, it did not take into consideration any replacement insurance options that would occur and absorb any Obama Care insurance customers that might opt for less oppressive and less expensive new insurance options.
• But the insanity continued with Senator Bernie Sanders stating: "If this legislation is passed and millions of people are thrown off of health insurance, not able to get to a doctor when they must, thousands of Americans will die." 
• The usually liberal friendly Washington Post could not even swallow this statement, giving Sanders’ statement the highest degree of lying possible, four Pinocchios, saying that Sanders was basing his statement off of a faulty Think Progress report that assumed, again, that there would be no replacement installed when Obama Care was killed.
• Senator Tammy Baldwin jumped into the lie fest when she said: “#ReadtheBill & you’ll see #TrumpCare would allow insurance execs to personally make millions off your health care.”
• The proposed Republican plan repeals the Obama Care $500,000 cap on how much insurance companies can deduct on their taxes, it has NOTHING to do with insurance companies’ executives personal tax impacts as Politifact Wisconsin accurately pointed out.
• Tough to tell whether she is lying or is that stupid to understand what applies to an insurance company’s tax bill vs. insurance company’s executive individual tax liability.

Given that Democrats were solely responsible for Obama Care I can see how they might be a little sensitive about its many failures. But lying about the reality and proposed changes does nothing to enhance their credibility and perception that they actually care about what is right for Americans vs. what is right for their bruised egos. Lying and omitting critical information displays a complete lack of integrity.

3) Rather than try to summarize the following analysis of Obama Care, I will just give you a link to the original article. It is an in-depth economic analysis by an economist from Hillsdale College, Casey Mulligan, published back in 2014. Mr. Mulligan does an excellent, easy to understand economic analysis of the damage that Obama Care has done to the country and its economic growth potential by covering such things as companies not hiring and expanding due to the onerous Obama Care regulations and taxes, companies turning full time employees into part time employees since the companies could not endure the Obama Care fees, fines, and taxes, etc. 

His analysis fuels the argument that one of the reasons that economic growth was historically anemic under Obama was because of the simple economic principles and tenets that Obama and Obama Care ignored or spit on.

The link for the entire analysis can be accessed at:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/effects-of-the-affordable-care-act-on-economic-productivity/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=stripes&utm_medium=social&utm_content=03122017

That will do it for today’s unfolding Obama Care disasters: economic principles abused, lies, lies and more lies from Democrats, and using a shoddy insurance solution to resolve a massive public health problem.

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October, 2014 Part 1 - The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - More Americans to Lose Their Policies, But Insurance Companies Might Get Bailed Out and More

Over the past few years, but especially over the past fourteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:

• It has and will continue to increase the national debt.
• It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now.
• It has restricted overall economic growth.
• It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways.
• It has reduced the job growth rate in this country.
• It has turned many full time workers into part time workers or into unemployed workers.
• It has generally increased the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed.
• The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people.
• The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the negative ramifications of the law.
• It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
• It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms.
• It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law.
• It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate any kind of successful program.
• It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves.
• It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.

I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. To see what disasters have popped up over just the past month or so, read on:

1) An article in the Investors Business Daily that was written by Stephen Moore and published on October 1, 2014, highlighted the very real reality that insurance companies that took on Obama Care policies are likely going to receive taxpayer bailout funds as a result of the Obama Care legislation.

The bailout potential is legislation's controversial "risk corridor" program, which is supposed to provide financial "protection" against losses to insurers that sponsor exchange plans. The basis of the concept was to create a pool of funds from the profits of some insurers with ObamaCare plans to offset the losses of others. According to a 2013 analysis by the Society of Actuaries, the risk corridors program "provides a strong incentive for insurers to participate in the health insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable healthcare act.". 

In other words, the Federal government took a lot of the risk out of being an Obama Care policy provider. If a company screwed up its operations or financial results, they could always blame the legislation and get rewarded for not doing the job profitably.

Without these subsidized risk corridors and financial incentives to prop up the Obama Care plans, insurance companies will stop issuing Obama care plans and policies, and the entire program could be derailed.

Mr. Moore’s article goes on to compare this insanity to the insanity that was used to back up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the real estate industry, a back up plan that cost the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. The Federal government guarantee on bad mortgages encouraged bad mortgages to be written by mortgage brokers since they could count on the government to make them whole on defaulted bad mortgages. 

The guarantee against losses on Obama Care enrollees encourages insurers to toss sound underwriting standards out the window, knowing that any bad policy decisions will be financially rewarded by the American taxpayer. Should be interesting to see how Obama and the Federal government try to spin this potential taxpayer hit where the lowly American taxpayer bails out big companies who are in cahoots with the Federal government. 

2) Casey B. Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, recently wrote a piece on how the Obama Care legislation is turning the country into a country of part time workers, based on analyses done by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He ponts out three specific reasons why the law is causing more part time jobs to be caused vs. full time jobs to be caused or retained:

• Obama Care carries an explicit tax on full-time work.
• Obama Care carries an implicit tax on full-time work for those who are ineligible for the Obama Care’s health insurance subsidies.
• Obama Care carries an implicit tax that links the amount of available subsidies to workers’ incomes.

Based on these three factors, the Mercatus analysis and research found that the law will eventually reduce weekly employment per person by about 3 percent—translating to roughly 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers. 

The primary conclusion of their work is that Obama Care and its subsidy and tax structures create strong incentives to work less. It will create an environment that will put millions in a position in where working part time (29 hours or fewer, as defined by the ACA) will yield more disposable income than working their normal full-time schedule. Furthermore, it appears, based on their study, that women will be far more affected then men by this impact on full time employment.

Thus, another piece of freedom slips away. When government policy dictates whether or not you should work full time or part time, that is not a good policy. That choice should be left to the individual with government policy not having any influence on that freedom of choice.

3) David Hogberg’s writing has been referenced a number of times in this blog. Mr. Hogberg writes for Amy Ridenour’s National Center blog and specializes in health care and Obama care issues. His recent writing from October 10, 2014 took a look at how Obama Care was impacting health insurance coverage obtained from employers:

• His analysis was based on research work done by various branches of the Federal Reserve Board.
• The only piece of good news coming out of the research was that the percentage of businesses that are increasing the number of employees covered exceeds those that are covering fewer employees. 
• However, all of the other the other changes to employer plans was bad news for employees.
• The percentage of businesses that are increasing employee contributions, premiums, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums and co-pays far exceed the percentage that are reducing them in every type of business. 
• As for range of services covered and size and breadth of the networks, the differences between the percentage of businesses that are reducing them versus increasing them aren’t as large, but they are still substantial.

So, costs are going up and quality is going down, offset by some increase in the number of employees covered. Not a good report card but not surprising, given all of the other analyses and realities we have reported about this heinous piece of legislation. Obama promised lower costs and higher quality care and like most Federal government endeavors, we got just the opposite: lower quality at higher cost.

4) All opinion polls about Obama Care show a strong majority of Americans who want the law radically changed or terminated altogether. Recent polling shows the same results with even Democratic voters more and more believing that this is a very bad piece of legislation:

• In May, only 6% of Democrats said Obama Care hurt them. But recent polling shows that 15% of Democrats polled said Obama Care hurt them.
• The poll found that only 27% of Democrats say Obama Care has helped them, a slight 4% increase since May. 
• Overall, more than one in five Democrats (21%) said in the long run Obama Care will “make things worse.”

Not a good sign when you core constituents are having growing doubts about the legislation. And that doubt could get larger by the November elections since in the next few weeks, insurance companies in thirteen states and DC are likely going to terminate hundreds of thousands of existing insurance policies as a result of Obama Care mandates that require these polices to fulfill extensive Obama Care requirements: “It looks like several hundred thousand people across the country will receive notices in the coming days and weeks,” said Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

In Virginia alone it is expected that 250,000 existing health policies on the chopping block…forcing people to seek alternative health care coverage in the middle of election season. And we already know what is likely to happen when these people look to buy Obama Care policies:

• Many of those forced out of their current plans and into Obama Care may not be able to keep their doctors or access their favored hospitals.
• They will likely face higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expense, making Obama Care an election issue on the eve of voting.

An other month and another set of disasters: perfectly good insurance policies getting cancelled for no good reason, businesses cutting back on insurance coverage for their employees, loss of freedom in deciding whether to work full time or part time, and other taxpayer bailout for big business highly likely. And we have just begun, more disasters tomorrow and the following days from the piece of legislation that never stops giving…bad news.

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.

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