November, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disasters That Is Obama Care: Less Compeititon, Higher Deducitbles, Higher Premiums

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 been reviewing the 2017 disasters that are starting to arise as a result of the fatal flaws within the Obama Care legislation. Michael Tanner, writing for the National Review on November 2, 2016, gave a good review of just some of the bad news rolling down the road for Obama Care:

• Obama Care has attained less than half of the number of people with Obama Care insurance policies that should have been attained and what were promised.
• Despite not attaining even 50% of the number of insured Americans that were promised via Obama Care exchange policies, those that are insured via Obama Care policies are older and sicker than average, resulting in higher than expected insurance costs which is driving insurance companies out of the market.
• Premiums for the Obama Care benchmark silver plans are expected to rise by about 22% on average in 2017.
• In Arizona, that silver benchmark plan will increase as much as 116%.
• That same plan will go up 69% in Oklahoma.
• But deductibles are also going up quickly with an average family with an Obama Care silver plan facing an annual deductible that is over $7,400.
• A family with a bronze Obama Care plan will face an annual average deductible of $12,393.
• These previous two points prove our point that the good news is that you have health insurance but the bad news is that you cannot use it because the deductible is so high.
• While about 77% of Obama Care policy holders will not have to experience the entire obscene price increases, the American taxpayer will have to pay for the rest of the increases and 23% of Obama Care customers will have to pay the entire increase.
• With so many insurers pulling out the Obama Care market, thousands of Americans now have to find other insurance companies which means that they may have to change their doctors and hospitals….again.

More of the same again to start today: higher premiums, higher deductibles, more stress.

2) We have already talked about how many insurance companies have dropped out of the Obama Care marketplace or significantly reduced their presence, including UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross in certain states, and Anthem. Ali Meyer, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on November 3, 2016, discussed how another large company is rethinking their Obama Care strategy:

• Cigna will not expand its Obama Care footprint as previously planned.
• The insurer lost $91 million on its Obama Care policies in a single year.
• It will still sell Obama Care policies in seven states but will not expand to other states with Cigna CEO David Cordani saying that his company is taking a “cautious and slow” approach to selling Obama Care policies.
• The company had originally planned to expand into three other states in 2017 but decided not to.

Another day another insurance company getting cold feet relative to Obama Care. So much for Obama Care increasing competition as promised by Obama. If anything, it is suppressing competition.

3) Let’s continue to pile on the misfortunes of Obama Care, as discussed in an October 31, 2016 Heritage Foundation article by Edmund Haisimaier and Alyene Senger:

• 66% of the states, 33 in total, will have fewer Obama Care insurers offering coverage in 2017 vs. 2016.
• Arizona and Texas will each be losing six insurers and Kentucky and Ohio will be losing four insurers in 2017.
• Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming will have only one Obama Care insurer for the entire state.
• Thirteen other states will have only two insurers to serve the entire state and in some states those insurers will not be serving the entire state.
• Almost one third of all U.S. counties, 32.8%, will have only one insurer available and 35.9% will have only two options.
• The Obama administration has admitted that Obama Care premiums will increase by an average of 25% in the 39 states that the Obama Care Federal exchange is in use.
• And while 25% looks really bad for a year over year increase, “residents of 10 states using the federal exchange face average premium increases of 40 percent or more: Alabama (58 percent), Arizona (116 percent), Illinois (43 percent), Kansas (42 percent), Montana (44 percent), North Carolina (40 percent), Nebraska (51 percent), Oklahoma (69 percent), Pennsylvania (53 percent), and Tennessee (63 percent)." 
• In at least one state running its own exchange (Minnesota) premiums are increasing by a similar rate (56 percent).

So, millions of Americans will either see great increases in their Obama Care premiums and deductibles in the coming months or they will be in the market for another health insurance policy once they find out that their insurance company is leaving their state. Not quite the great legislation that Obama promised.

4) Sharyl Attkisson, a former CBS journalist and one of the few journalists in this country with a sense of integrity, recently did an interview for the Heritage Foundation with Robert Laszewski, someone she describes as a “policy and advisor analyst for the health insurance industry.” An important excerpt from her interview is included below, with my emphasis added:

Laszewski: The future is not good. The fundamental problem is not enough healthy people have signed up to pay for the sick, and not enough healthy people have signed up because the insurance plans that people are being offered just simply aren’t of good value.

Attkisson: What do customers see as wrong with the insurance product?

Laszewski: The insurance products consumers see are still too expensive in terms of premium. And the deductibles and copays are too high.

Attkisson: Can you explain in simple terms how the insurance companies are losing so much money if they’re charging so much for premiums and if deductibles are so high?

Laszewski: It’s real simple. If you only provide a health insurance plan that the sickest people buy, you can’t charge enough. You can never charge enough.

Attkisson: At it’s core, it was supposed the provide affordable insurance for everybody who needed it.

Laszewski: Yes. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to ensure that whether you were employed or unemployed or self-employed, you would have access to affordable health insurance. For someone who’s not getting a subsidy, who’s paying the full cost of the insurance, it’s likely they are now paying about double what they paid before under the old market, where only healthy people could get in.

A bad piece of legislation that keeps getting worse and worse: less competition, higher premiums, higher deductibles. More unfolding 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

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

September, 2014 Part 5 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Enrollees Continue to Drop Out And Still A Drag On The Economy

Over the past few years, but especially over the past thirteen 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.
• It has generally increase 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 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 a 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.

Let’s see what disasters we can find today.

1) Last month, we did a thorough analysis that showed that the Obama Care effort did not incrementally deliver health care insurance to 8 million Americans as the administration claimed. In reality, depending on what assumptions you use, at best only 800,000 to 1.8 million Americans incrementally got private health insurance as a result of the billions of dollars spent on Obama Care. Those numbers, analysis assumptions, and calculations can be accessed for review at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/08/august-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

A recent blog post on Amy Ridenour's National Blog, written by David Hogberg, also took a look at how 8 million Obama Care signups is really not 8 million signups. His analysis goes as follows:

• Mr. Hogberg quotes reporting by The Hill that government figures show that enrollment has already dropped to 7.3 million, down from the announced 8.0 million.
• The main reason for this large 9% drop already is that the lower number reflects the fact that 700,000 or so people never followed through to pay for their Obama Care policy and thus, they never acquired Obama Care insurance. 
• Mr. Hogberg is skeptical that the 7.3 million number is legitimate since he cites the reality that last month, writer Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily reported that Aetna, the “nation’s third-largest health insurer had 720,000 people sign up for exchange coverage as of May 20, a spokesman confirmed to IBD. At the end of June, it had fewer than 600,000 paying customers.” 
• That would mean that 17% of the drop in the total number Obama care enrollees came from just a single company, Aetna, 120,000 (Aetna’s lost Obama Care customers) divided by 700,000 = 17%.
• Thus, it is highly likely that the 700,000 number drop is too optimistic since if Aetna lost 120,000 customers (almost 17% of all of its Obama care enrollees), than what did the hundreds of other insurance companies lose including health insurance giants like UnitedHealthcare. Cigna, and others, both large and small?
• And this 700,000 drop does not include the 115,000 or more enrollees that are going to lose their insurance coverage since they never should have received it in the first place, per a previous post.

What a mess. The 8 million number was in all likelihood the high water point for Obama Care enrollees. If the number was still at that level, you can be sure that the Obama administration would be bragging about it to support Democrats running for election in November. The fact that they are not bragging is a great indication that there is nothing to brag about and that that 8 million number has dropped like a rock over just the past few months.

2) Allen B. West used to be a Florida Congressman, he lost his reelection bid in 2012 and since then has been an active speaker and commentator on all things political, including Obama Care. A recent online post by him cited the feelings and pessimism of a number of people in the health care industry relative to the negative ramifications of Obama care:

• Health economist John Goodman recently stated that three Federal Reserve Banks, in Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta, have surveyed the businesses in their Fed area and roughly one fifth of the employers are saying they cut back on employment: “Roughly one fifth are saying they’re moving from full time to part time. More than one in ten are saying they’re doing more outsourcing – all this because of the new health care reform.”
• Goodman has gone on to say: “And so we see this everywhere that people are restricted, they’re pushed below 30 hours, they count as part time and when they’re part time, the employer doesn’t have to provide health insurance. Even among full-time workers, their take home pay is going to go down because one thing that almost all the employers are doing in response to Obamacare is raising the deductibles, raising the co-payments and making the employee pay more of the premium.”
• Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, recently stated: “For the smaller employers — those that have between 20 and 49 employees — you get a negative impact on jobs, you get a negative impact on wages in those jobs. What this means for small business as a whole is over $22 billion of earnings gone for their workers and 350,000 jobs.”
• Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation: “You have a kind of a natural cliff there, that keeping your employees under that magic number relieves employers of the mandate to provide insurance. The 30-hour cutoff is how the administration determines whether you’re full time or part time."
• Tevi Troy of the American Health Policy Institute: “Yes we are going to see increased cost to employers who are trying to provide health care for their employees, but employers don’t just take that lying down.”

So here you have the expert opinions of an economist who specializes in health care, a former government executive, a think tank executive, and an industry spokesperson who all come to the same conclusions: Obama Care is killing small businesses ability to grow, hire, and expand which is a primary driver of the nation’s anemic economic growth since the last recession.

As with the enrollment numbers above, if Obama Care was growing the economy or at least not stifling it, I am sure the Obama administration would be shouting at the top of their lungs that the legislation has been good for the economy as we approach the November elections. Their silence on the regarding the economy and Obama Care speaks volumes in this political season.

That will do it for today. Only two disasters but they are significant. More proof that the original Obama Care numbers were highly inflated relative to reality and the continuing reality, according to the economic numbers and subject matter experts in the field, the legislation is killing small business growth and overall economic growth.

More disasters to follow for the next few days.

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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

August, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care, Part 1: Attrition Sets In and Dental Work is Not Covered

Every month since last August we have had to do multiple posts every month in order to keep up with the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Federal government under any previous Presidential administration. Runaway costs, dysfunctional or non functioning websites, high potential for identity theft, less coverage for more cost, cancelled insurance policies, etc., it was a failure in every way imaginable.

And those failures have continued to unfold every month, which is why we are going to take a few days now to cover what has happened just since last month’s disaster updates. Before we do that, let’s do a quick reminder of where the program is from a numbers perspective:

• The Obama administration claimed that about 8 million Americans signed up for an Obama Care health care insurance plan during the initial sign up period.
• However, recent research from reputable sources found that it is likely that only between 80 and 90% of those who signed up actually followed through and paid for and bought a policy.
• If we take the midpoint of that range and assume only 85% followed through with payment, that 8 million sign up number is really only 6.8 million real policy holders.
• But other reputable research found that only about 57% of those who signed up for an Obama Care policy were previously uninsured, the other sign ups already had health insurance coverage and just churned out to an Obama Care policy.
• Thus, the actual number of INCREMENTAL Americans with health insurance via Obama Care is 57% of 6.8 million or around 3.9 million people.
• That means that 2.9 million Americans were not incremental insurance policy holders, they just churned from an existing policy into an Obama Care policy.
• Somewhere between 5 and 6 million people had their current health insurance policies cancelled as a result of Obama Care, policies that often were perfectly fine and acceptable to those carrying those policies.
• If we assume a best case view from the Obama Care perspective and assume all of the 2.9 million people who were not incremental to the Obama Care numbers came from this pool of 5-6 million people, than the net number of Americans who lost health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care is between 2.1 and 3.1 million people (5 or 6 million less 2.9 million people).
• Thus, we have to take the 3.9 million people that were truly incremental because of Obama Care and subtract out either 2.1 or 3.1 million, ending up with a net gain in insured Americans of between 800 thousand and 1.8 million.
• Thus, after years of trying, billions and billions of dollars spent, we may have gotten incremental, expensive, and narrow insurance coverage to less than two million Americans.

Only in Washington can the nation spend billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth and end up with a problem that is hardly any better than when before the program started. Insane.

That is where we stand today. Let’s take a look at what disasters have come to the surface since we last talked about Obama Care:

1) In early August, 2014, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Federal entity responsible for administrating Obama Care, announced that letters had been sent 310,000 Obama Care customers notifying them that they have to fix errors within their Obama Care applications by September 30, 2014 or their Obama Care health insurance coverage will be cancelled. 

These 310,000 customers are part of almost 1 million Obama Care customers who submitted applications but whose applications had citizenship and immigration information that did not match up with Federal records. CMS has admitted that 450,000 cases out of the 1 million have already been resolved, but it’s not clear how many of those “closed” cases resulted in more canceled policies.

Thus, of those 3.8 million incremental Obama Care policies we calculated above, that number will likely go down even further as CMS likely cancels out hundreds of thousands of more policies for not having proper information on the applications. Which raises an interesting question: it is not how high Obama Care enrollments can go but how low will they sink.

2) But it is not only faulty applications data and information that are reducing the number of incremental Obama Care sign ups. Aetna, the country's third-largest health insurer and an Obama Care participant, reportedly had 720,000 people signed up for Obama Care coverage as of May 20. However, by the end of June, Aetna had fewer than 600,000 paying Obama Care customers, a decrease of about 16% in a month and a half.

Even worse for Obama Care supporters, Aetna says it expects even more people to cancel out of Obama Care policies by the end of the year, expecting to be left with "just over 500,000." If their prediction comes true, than they would have seen more than a 30% drop off in Obama Care policy enrollments in less than eight months after hitting their high water mark of 720,000: "I think we will see some attrition ... We're already seeing it. And we expect that to continue through the end of the year," CEO Mark Bertolini said in a July 29 conference call.

Cigna, another major Obama Care insurer it is also seeing some attrition but not as much as what Aetna is owning up to. Cigna has publicly stated that it expects is Obama Care policy enrollment to shrink from 300,000 down to 280,000, about a 7% decrease.

Now some of those cancelled polices may have occurred because people got a job that provided health care insurance, causing them to cancel their now unnecessary Obama Care coverage. However, given that the economy is still pretty sluggish and the unemployment rate has been basically unchanged for a long time, the possibility that a large majority of those cancelled policies were caused by job finders is small.

Far more likely scenarios, scenarios that we have already extensively discussed, is that Obama Care policy holders found out that:

• They were paying more and getting less than what they expected relative to premiums.
• They were shocked when they found out how high Obama Care policy deductibles were.
• They were disappointed that Obama care policies had very restrictive lists of approved doctors, hospitals, and drugs, opting to not pay for coverage that restricted their choices.

Those are likely the real reasons why people are dropping out of Obama Care policies and the reasons why even that calculated 3.9 million number we estimated above is far more likely to continue to shrink in the coming months.

3) One of the major selling points of Obama Care was that insurance companies could no longer deny insurance coverage to anyone who had a pre-existing condition. However, the law was possibly deficient in laying out what type of coverage would be provided. 

It seems that one way insurance companies are minimizing their financial exposure to this new law that requires them to take on all customers, regardless of the likely cost to the insurer, is that the insurance companies simply jack up the cost that customers have to pay for expensive treatment and drugs for their pre-existing conditions. In other words, “we are happy to insure you but the premiums and deductibles for your condition are going to be really expensive to you.” 

The situation has gotten so bad that the Associated Press recently reported that more than 300 patient advocacy groups have signed a letter addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to complain about some insurer tactics that "are highly discriminatory against patients with chronic health conditions and may ... violate the (law's) nondiscrimination provisions."

The good news is that you now have an Obama Care policy that covers your pre-existing condition. The bad news is that you cannot afford the costs within the parameters of that policy. Insurance companies are not stupid. Forcing them to take on expensive customers with chronic pre-existing conditions is not good for the company’s financial bottom line so that they will take whatever steps necessary to stay within the letter of the law and still remain financially viable. The writers of the Obama Care legislation were too stupid to recognize this reality.

4) What would an update be without some personal news on how Obama Care is messing with the lives and health of Americans. An Indiana man, who purchased health insurance through Obama Care’s Federal exchange, says he was assured he had dental coverage without any waiting period. 

To be sure, he actually recorded several conversations he had with Federal call center employees, all of whom guaranteed him that he had immediate Obama Care insurance coverage to take care of any dental problems. However, when it became apparent that he needed some serious dental work, the Obama Care insurer who provided the policy and who was collecting a monthly premium denied the claim, stating that there was a one year waiting period on his Obama care policy. This denial was made despite him being assured by the Obama Care call center employees that he was covered.

As a public service, he is now others about getting misleading information form the Obama Care processes and to be sure what they are actually buying from the Obama Care health insurance exchanges: “You might be very surprised you’re not covered when you were told that you were.” 

The news report covering his problem can be viewed at:

http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/16/indiana-man-thought-covered-obamacare-needed-visit-dentist/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

Another day, another screw up of an American’s life, brought to you by Obama Care, the continuing unfolding disaster. 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2013, Obama Care Disaster Update, Part 3: Higher Costs, Imploding Data Systems, and Americans Dying Sooner

This is the third post in this month’s series on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. There is a lot to cover this month since October 1 marked the first day that Obama Care health insurance exchanges were open for business. Or not open for business, given what a disaster they were for the most part. And this was only a part of what we are learning about the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Washington political class.

The first two posts in this series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update_7011.html

1) Six days after the health insurance exchanges started operating, CNBC reported that its insurance industry sources were reporting that as few as 1 in 100 applications on the Federal exchange contains enough information to enroll the applicant in a plan. Some of the problems involve:

• How the exchange’s software collects and verifies an applicant’s data.
• Some of the insurance companies involved with the exchanges are stating they are receiving incomplete data from the government’s website or that the files are corrupted and unreadable in some way.
• That means the people in every batch who haven’t provided enough or correct information must be contacted for additional data to ensure they qualify for the insurance they want to buy, all this despite the fact that the Federal government has already spent over $600 million on this website effort.
• Even worse, many people might think that they actually have competed the process and are secure in assuming they are covered for health problems when in fact their registration process never got finalized and they are, in reality, uninsured.

An industry expert summed up the problems in a very succinct way: “It is extraordinary that these systems weren’t ready,” said Sumit Nijhawan, CEO of Infogix, which handles data integrity issues for major insurers including WellPoint and Cigna, as well as multiple Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates.

Extraordinary, unbelievable, disgusting would all be correct adjectives for a Washington effort that took three years and $600 million dollars to not work as promised.  A 1% success rate, I could have done better even with my limited technical ability and done better for far less money.

2) Consider the following analysis of Obama Care health care costs that was done by the Americans For Prosperity organization using official Federal government press release data, keeping in mind that President Obama promised that Obama Care would save the typical American family about $2,500 a year in health insurance costs:

• According to the analysis and data from the Health and Human Services organization of the Federal government, health insurance rates for younger American men will increase by an average of a whopping 97% in 2014.
• The health insurance rates  for American women won’t increase as dramatically, but will still increase by a still whopping 55 to 62%. 
• In the worst possible cases, premiums will increase as much as 279% next year.
• However, these numbers are nowhere on the website. In fact, HHS and Secretary Sebelius are praising Obama Care saying these premiums are actually less. How could that be?
• Following in the footsteps of the crazy budgeting process in DC, HHS is actually using baseline health insurance premium analysis. Premiums are less than what  the Congressional Budget Office originally predicted, so ObamaCare “saved” Americans money. Tell that to the individuals who will be paying more for insurance next year.
• Worse yet, supporters of ObamaCare argue that the premium increases don’t matter because individuals aren’t really paying these premiums. They’ll receive tax credits that offset the costs. That’s true…for some people. Individuals between 100 and 400% of the Federal poverty level will received tax credits to assist with the purchasing of insurance. But 400% of the federal poverty level is only $46,000 a year in income for an individual.
• That isn’t much comfort for a 27 year old that has to pay for these increased premiums yet doesn’t qualify for a tax credit. In Indiana, premiums will increase 53% for a 27 year old male and thousands of them won’t qualify for the subsidies. Only 44% of those between 21-30 years of age in Indiana even qualify for subsidies. In Arkansas, it’s even worse. Premiums are up 247 percent and 53 percent won’t qualify for a subsidy.

So much for Obama’s promise that an average family will see its annual health care costs go down by about $2,500. Not even close.

3) One of the very serious accusations of this whole Obama Care process is that it will be a paradise for identify thieves. Well, it looks like that fear might becoming a reality already. 

A Minnesota insurance broker told the Star Tribune  that he had recently received an email that contained a load of confidential information on more than 2,400 insurance agents, including info like names, Social Security numbers and business addresses.
The source of this identify theft bonanza? An unnamed staffer at MNsure, Minnesota’s new Obama Care health exchange online marketplace. 

The MNsure employee had accidentally sent the email to the wrong person. Which is bad enough but why is such information being sent out on the Internet in an unencrypted format, even if it was sent to the right person? 

The Star Tribune reported:

An official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it had mishandled private data. A MNsure security manager called the broker, Jim Koester, and walked him and his assistant through a process of deleting the file from their computer hard drives.

Koester said he willingly complied, but was unnerved.

“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” he said. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”

Good question, how can anyone in America be sure their personal information is safe given that the minions in Washington have faulty computer systems up and not running that can be easily hacked for identify thieves’ easy usage and abuse?

4) 10,535 pages of final Obama Care regulations have so far been published in the Federal Register/ 10,535 pages. Does anyone think that 1) any sitting member of Congress read any of these pages, never mind all of them, 2) would have even understood them if they had read them, and 3) have any idea what negatively dramatic impact over 10,000 pages of Federal regulatory gibberish has on Americans and American businesses? 

Before you answer these questions, keep in mind that two of the most important pieces of legislation passed by Washington in the past fifty years, were less than 34 pages long. The Voters’ Right Act was about two pages long and the Civil Rights Act was about 34 pages long but each had far more positive impacts than 10,000 pages of Obama Care regulations can even dream of having. 

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”  Over 10,000 pages of regulations is not paring things down and will accomplish very little. 

5) The Washington Examiner recently ran an article that covered the results from a recent survey of 200 leading health professionals. In its national  2013 Health Care Survey of top health care professionals, Coupa Software (The company provides cloud-based finance applications for many of the nation’s health care providers and is especially focused on waste in the health care system) found that health care professionals are worried about a number of setbacks that the health law could result in. Asked to list the “negative impacts,” of which they could pick several, here’s what Coupa found:

– “Quality of health insurance policies will suffer.” - 53%
– “Quality of care will go down.” - %51
– “The law is overly complicated.” - 49%
–  “Insurance exchanges will be poorly managed.” - 42%
– “The law still allows insurance companies to be the middleman.” - 37%
– “Too complex for businesses.” - 32%
– “Americans will die earlier.” - 19%

Other findings include both good and bad anticipated outcomes from Obama Care, with the bad severely outweighing the good:

• Their survey found that the health care professionals expect that many inefficiencies, such as unnecessary emergency room visits, will be fixed under Obama Care.
• While 93% of the professionals in the survey cited negative impacts, 74% also found positive outcomes from the law, the biggest being the availability of health insurance to those who don’t have it.
• Any specific support for the law is offset by the overall view of the law by the health care community since the poll found that 56% oppose most or all of  Obama Care’s provisions, only 6% favor all of the law, and 38% favor most of it.

Overall, a bad omen when top health professionals see far more downside than upside on average, especially when a whopping one in five think that more Americans will die earlier as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite of what the legislation intended. But unintended consequences has been a specialty of the Washington political class for a very long time.

A sign-up process that might not be fixable despite spending over $600 million on its development, higher premiums, high identify theft risk, 10,000 pages of probably non-decipherable regulations, and at least some doctors that think the legislation will kill Americans sooner rather than later. You cannot make this stuff up unless you are a Washington politician. More unbelievable fallout 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Obama Care - Still Constitutional And Still A Disaster - Following Up On Loose Ends

A few weeks ago we did an extensive four day series on how disastrous Obama Care is and how bad it will be for the country if allowed to fully deploy. The legislation never understood the root causes of our escalating health care costs and thus, never put together the right solutions for addressing and resolving those root causes.

Besides this obvious shortcoming, we extensively covered the many other reasons why this is one of the worst written and worst thought out laws in the history of the country. It has and will continue to stifle economic growth, it will raise taxes on every American, it will end up rationing health care, and will reduce individual freedom and liberty for every American.

And worst of all, it will not come close to meeting its fundamental goal since ten years from now, according to the Congressional Budget office, tens of millions of Americans will still not have health care insurance coverage.

It is not a pretty picture with little, if any, redeeming positive aspects. Unfortunately, four posts were not enough to cover all of the bad news. We need today to cover the latest bad, and some good, news of what is going on relative to Obama Care (the bad news) and what is going on relative to lessening government intervention in the industry (the good news):

- Anyone with a basic understanding of economics, marketing, or life knows that the best way to keep prices low and competition sharp in a marketplace is to have lots of vibrant, hungry competitors. Obama Care does the exact opposite.

According to an article from the New York Times that was reprinted in the August 26, 2012 issue of the Tampa Bay Times, the exact opposite effect is going on as a result of this law. The article starts by pointing out that Aetna, one the nation's largest insurance companies, is buying Coventry  Health Care, primarily hedging their bets that if Obama gets reelected, Obama Care is unlikely to go away. Coventry is a large provider of Medicaid and Medicare services.

Additionally, Wellpoint is purchasing Amerigroup and Cigna has already bought out HealthSpring. All of these purchases are driven by Obama Care. Thus, rather than increasing competition in the health care business and driving down costs naturally, Obama Care is causing the market to consolidate, giving increased power to fewer companies, which has to restrict competition and drive up costs.

Remember how politicians talked about the five largest banks and how they "were too big to fail?" Same thing is going on in the health care business. Government, politicians, and giant private companies colluding to scratch each others' backs for their own mutual good and to the detriment of lowering costs and helping out Americans.

- One aspect of Medicare that we have not talked about is the Medicare Advantage program. Medicare Advantage allows senior citizens to step up the medical care that get in their elder years by splitting the the cost with the Federal government when they purchase private health insurance.

This allows  them to avoid using the traditional single-payer Medicare process and have more flexibility and control over their medical needs and decisions, all of which is a good thing. Seniors shop and compare various insurance options, back to our competition theory from above and how it increases effectiveness while decreasing costs, and chose the plan that best meets their personal needs. Almost 25% of seniors already avail themselves to this choice option for their Medicare coverage, a percentage that has been growing larger over time.

From a private health insurance company's perspective, Medical Advantage provides them additional flexibility in the coverage they offer, which in turn has resulted in better benefits and service over traditional Medicare. A recent Harvard University analysis found that due to these characteristics, Medical Advantage is actually 9% more cost-effective than traditional Medicare.

Everybody wins. Citizens get better and more flexible health care services, insurance companies like the program and compete for it, and the program is cost effective, exactly what the country is trying to do with its high health care costs. Great idea and good implementation.... until Obama Care came along.

In order to keep the apparent costs of Obama Care down and to fund its components, the legislation was written so that it slashed $156 billion from the Medical Advantage program over the next ten years. Obama has apparently argued that Medical Advantage is too expensive, which is nonsense since according to the Harvard researchers, it is more cost effective than regular Medicare.

If anything, Obama should be learning what makes the Medical Advantage program more cost effective and taking those lessons and applying it to the larger Medicare universe, not slashing and burning what is working better today. Idiocy.

Now, the Obama administration tried to hide this insanity by starting a pilot program to cover the decimating of the Medicare Advantage destruction Obama Care had wrought. However, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a study saying this experimental program is a disaster and should be terminated. The New York Times did an article covering this sham (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/health/policy/gao-says-medicare-test-project-is-wasting-8-billion.html) on April 22, 2012. The Times article agreed with the GAO's findings, while also citing other authorities, showing how this experimental program does not come close to matching the effectiveness of today's Medicare Advantage plans.

The insanity of this legislation never stops. The one component of Medicare that might actually be working effectively and efficiently and Obama wants to kill it by drying up its budget.

- The Wall Journal Street recognized the economic and reality fallacy of Obama Care fully two years ago when they insightfully and correctly wrote the following passage, before the rest of the world found out how Obama Care was going to take over $700 billion out of Medicare:

"The drastic reductions in Medicare reimbursements under ObamaCare will create havoc and chaos in health care for seniors. Many doctors, surgeons and specialists providing critical care to the elderly—such as surgery for hip and knee replacements, sophisticated diagnostics through MRIs and CT scans, and even treatment for cancer and heart disease—will cease serving Medicare patients. If the government is not going to pay, then seniors are not going to get the health services, treatment and care they expect.

Everyone should know by now that Medicare suffers dramatic long-term deficits and unfunded liabilities, and is in need of fundamental, structural reforms. But effectively refusing to pay the doctors and hospitals that provide the medical care the program promises to seniors is no way to solve that problem."

Again, we keep coming back to the fact that Obama Care never understood the myriad of underlying root causes of our escalating health care costs and the implications of the legislation's unintended bad consequences.

- One aspect of the legislation that we failed to cover over the initial four posts is the insanity of exemptions that the Obama administration has granted. Since the law was signed in March, 2010, over 1,500 waivers to the law's components were granted, delaying compliance with the law  until a later date.

If you do some simple math you find that since the law was signed, on average, almost 13 exemptions were granted to the law's provisions EVERY WEEK on average from the day it was signed. This comes out to more than two exemptions being granted every BUSINESS DAY since it was signed. No one can make the case that this was a well written law if you have to grant so many exemptions to the law's provisions in such a prolific manner.

- There actually is a little good news on managing health care costs floating around that Obama Care has not yet destroyed. A recent edition of Business Week contained an article regarding some good work New York state is doing with its Medicaid program.

New York, like most states, has had a rough economic over the past few years, putting pressure on the state government to run more leanly and cost effectively. New York has overhauled its Medicaid program, a big, big budget item, so that a lot of its Medicaid effort is via private insurance entities. Unlike many other states, New York has set out a risk/reward program for the private Medicaid providers in its state.

If a private Medicaid insurer in the state does not meet performance criteria over a three year period, they can have their contract with the state terminated. If they exceed performance measures, they get financial rewards. New York currently has 45 state Medicaid programs in operation in the state so the competition for Medicaid program approval and performance is high.

What is the result of promoting competition and actively managing the root causes of health care service? New York's Medicaid programs score higher on a whole range of health care criteria, including primary care, ambulatory care, breast cancer screening, and cholesterol control, than other large population states including Florida, Illinois, and California. New York encourages competition which enhances health care delivery while Obama Care wants to kill competition.

- One last piece to finalize the designation of Obama Care as the worst piece of Washington legislation that was ever written. The following video link contains a face-to-face confrontation between Paul Ryan and President Obama a few years ago where Ryan takes apart the program, highlighting many of the negative aspects of Obama Care that have since unfolded:

http://janmorganmedia.com/2012/08/ryan-faces-obama-and-takes-obamacare-down-in-six-minutes/

Ryan is logical, prepared, and correct, he most eloquently states what we have proven over the past five posts relative to Obama Care: yes, it is Constitutional but it is also a disaster that will not work, will increase taxes, will increase the government bureaucracy, will significantly increase our national debt, will stifle our freedom, will restrict health care service, and will stretch the nation's current health care infrastructure until it breaks.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment