May, 2013 Obama Care Update, Part 1: Its Going To Be A Train Wreck and Other Impending Disasters

Okay, we have tried to stay away from the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care but the tidal wave of bad news is about to overwhelm us. Thus, we need to take some time out to review how much worse the ramifications of Obama Care is likely to be or have been already. Be forewarned: The bad news is so bad that this will take well more than one post.

1) Senator Charles Schumer from New York has long been a strong advocate for Obama Care. There are video clips back in 2009 and 2010 that show his strong argument that Obama Care legislation would reduce health care costs. This reduction in the nation’s health care costs was the major selling point of the law and the reason to push it through before anyone could read and analyze the impacts.

Well, apparently that argument no longer holds water. Consider recent the remarks of that same Senator in an interview he gave to the NBC news affiliate in Rochester, New York:

Our insurance department is empowered to protect families and we’re going to watch them like a hawk to make sure they do, because if they don’t, these rates could go through the roof … It’s in part because of Obama Care, but health care costs have been going up in double digits for years and years and years. The good news is in this bill, there’s a way to stop it.

Couple of observations:

• Insurance rates “could go through the roof...It’s in part because of Obama Care.” But, Senator, you promised insurance rates would not go up because of Obama Care.
• Yes, health care costs have been going up by double digits for years but this legislation was supposed to stop it not contribute to it. What happened?
• What is the good news in this bill that is supposed to stop the escalating costs? So far, none of the supporters of the legislation have been able to find this so-called “good news,” including yourself. Please share the “good news” for those of us that have not yet seen the light.

More double talk as hysterical Obama Care supporters try more and more convoluted logic and double speak to justify their votes and support for this disastrous legislation. Three years later they still have not explained how this thing is supposed to reduce costs, possibly because they have no clue how it is supposed achieve that magic.

2) Montana U.S. Senator, Max Baucus, another early and rabid supporter of the Obama Care legislation, was much clearer than the good Senator from New York in describing what Obama Care will likely resemble. He called it a “train wreck.” “Train wreck” is never a good adjective when describing anything and it takes on an especially bad connotation when one of any legislation’s main supporters gives it that designation.

3) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was one of the prime drivers of Obama Care and helped shove it through the Senate without allowing enough time for anyone to understand what was in it, so he has been an advocate of the legislation from Day 1.

He and other Democrats were the ones that established the financial parameters and forecasts of the legislation, they told us what the cost would be, and how much it would reduce health care costs to individuals and the nation. The Republicans had nothing to do with the numbers and estimates, they were shut out of the process by Reid, Pelosi, and Obama.

However, as time has gone by, things have started to unravel with regard to the numbers:

• A bill that was sold to the nation as one that would cost under $900 billion in the first ten years now has an official price tag that is about double the original estimate just three years later.
• A main positive revenue contributor to the entire legislation was supposed to be the long term care aspect of the bill, the CLASS process. That process has already been shut down far short of its positive financial contribution to the overall financials.
• Another main positive contributor to the legislation’s financial projections was supposed to be the tax on medical devices. But 17 Democratic Senators, who originally voted to approve Obama Care, now want to repeal that tax since medical device manufacturers are putting pressure on them to do so in order to save their device businesses. If the tax is repealed, another positive financial contributor to the legislation will be shut down.
• Today and in the next few days we will cite other examples that illustrate the deteriorating condition of the Obama Care business case and financials.

How does Washington fix this disaster regarding the financials? Seems, if you are Harry Reid, you fix it like they fix everything in Washington, just spend more money, have more good money follow bad money down the drain. Consider the highlights from a recent radio interview Harry Reid gave to a Nevada radio station, as summarized in a May 5, 2013 article by The Hill:

• Reid said he actually shares peers’ concerns that Obama Care could become a “train wreck” if not implemented properly.
• Reid warned that citizens will not be able to choose health insurance plans on government health exchanges if the Federal government lacks the resources to establish them up and educate the public. Code word alert: “lack the resources” usually means they government needs to spend more money.
• “Max said unless we implement this properly it’s going to be a train wreck, and I agree with him,” Reid said, echoing the warning delivered last month by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.).
• Wait for it…Reid warned the Federal government is not spending enough money to implement the law because of Republican opposition to Obama Care. Remember, the Republicans had nothing to do with setting up the law and the financial parameters but somehow it is their fault that this legislation is costing far more and delivering far less than Reid, Obama, and Pelosi promised.
• “Here’s what we have now, we have the menu but we don’t have any way to get to the menu,” Reid said. Maybe they should not have spent so much taxpayer money on developing the menu and more on actually addressing the root causes of our high health care costs.
• The shortage of funding to implement the law has forced President Obama to shift funds from other parts of the law, according to Reid. In other words, they screwed up the financial impact forecasts so badly that some of the other potential positive aspects of the legislation that were promised will not occur since they are shifting funding around to fulfill the exchanges and public education needs.

So let’s summarize Mr. Reid’s comments for him: “I believe in the bill and took credit for getting it approved without the help of any Republicans. I and other supporters put together all of the financial impacts and forecasts of the legislation without any help from the Republicans. Now that it is falling apart and costs are skyrocketing while potential positive aspects of the legislation are being abandoned, it is the Republicans’ fault. In order to fix what the Republicans screwed up, we need to spend a boat load more money to get Obama Care off the ground”

What a pathetic attempt at legislation, what a train wreck, and ducking the blame for the whole disaster.

4) Consider the latest poll findings as reported in a recent Politico article that further illustrate the floundering popularity of Obama Care:

• According to a monthly poll done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Obama Care‘s support amount among Americans is now down at 35%.
• This low level is tied with its lowest level of support since it was enacted in March, 2010.
• The poll found that only 35% of Americans view Obama Care ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ favorably, down 8 percentage points since Election Day, 2012.
• The poll actually found that with just a few months until the key provisions of the law go into effect, more than 40% of Americans don’t even know that it is on the books.
• About half of that 40% believe it has already been repealed by Congress or overturned by the Supreme Court.
• The rest of that 40% aren’t sure what is going on.
• Just over half of Americans, 53%, say that they approve of efforts by opponents to change or stop the law “so it has less impact on taxpayers, employers, and health care providers.”
• In another measure of dwindling support, about one in three respondents believe that the law’s opponents should accept that it is the law of the land and stop trying to block its implementation, down from January’s finding of support at 40%, i.e. those supporting the legislation has dropped over 17% in just four months.

At least Americans are starting to understand how bad this legislation is and how ignorant they still are about what it all means, a disgrace against all of those politicians who wrote legislation and supported but their education job has been so pathetic.

5) We will leave you with one last piece of bad news relative to the legislation today and then continue on tomorrow. Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a Democrat who unsuccesssfully ran for a Congressional seat in South Carolina, recently showed that she couldn't get away from the Obama Care fast enough in the run up to the election she was in. She publicly called Obama Care “extremely problematic,” which is political code word for holy moly, this is going to be a real problem that I do not want to be anywhere near when it explodes.

First Baucus, then Reid, now Busch, the rats are starting to jump ship and leaving us all behind holding the Obama Care bag. Which is a specific topic we will review tomorrow, the secret negotiations in Washington that the political class is having to exempt themselves and their top aides from the throes of the bill that they put together but personally want no part of.

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

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, February Update, Part 2: Killing Marriages, Killing Work Hours, and More

Just when you thought we could stay away from the devastating effects of Obama Care, another set of bad surprises pop up. We thought we had contained the damage in a series of posts from earlier this year that began with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-devastation-that-is-obama-care-part.html

Yesterday's post was Part 1 of a February update to that original series of Obama Care posts. Today is the second half of that update.

Unfortunately, more bad news has arisen:

1) One of the biggest reasons why Obama Care is falling apart is that the creators never understood the root causes of our high and escalating health care costs. Until you understand the root causes, you cannot develop the right solutions to address those root causes and anything you try to do without that basis is probably doomed to failure:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kinds of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• The Washington political class subsidizes these bad habits by paying American farmers to grow unhealthy food and making tobacco farming more lucrative via Federal subsidies.
• Government regulations inhibit health care insurance competition across state lines.
• Obama Care never included any major tort reform to remove unnecessary legal expenses out of the system.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to quantify who and what entities were making obscene profits off of obscene health care costs.

Without understanding the root causes of high health care costs, Obama Care turned into nothing more than a poorly structured, poorly run and poorly financed health care insurance program, not a comprehensive health care industry reform program. That is why some components of Obama Care, e.g. the CLASS program, which was supposed to provide long term care for Americans, have already been shut down because of their failure to address the true causes of our problems.

Which brings us to the next component of Obama Care which is about to be shut down even before the whole piece of legislation is implemented. According to a February article from the Washington Post:

• Tens of thousands of Americans who cannot get health insurance because of a preexisting medical condition will be no longer be able to get coverage from an Obama Care program because funding for that program is running out.
• These so-called “high-risk pools” will be closed to new applicants no later than March 2, depending on the state.
• According to an HHS spokesperson, the closing of the program to new applicants is being taken in order to protect the interests of those who had already signed up for the program, about 135,000 people.
• The program launched in 2010 and was supposed to last until 2014 but now will be shut down in the coming weeks because of a lack of funds.
• In another back handed slap at bad government forecasting, the original business case assumed that about 375,000 people would sign up for the program. However, only 135,000 enrolled, about a third of the expected enrollment, but the cost of servicing this one third is far higher than what was expected, causing the shutdown of the system to new enrollees
• In a moment of rare candid honestly from a Washington bureaucrat, that same HHS spokesperson is quoted in the article: “What we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.” Could not agree more.

Another Obama Care program blows its forecasts, exceeds its budget, and does not deliver what it promised to deliver. Par for the course.

And let’s do some simple math to see why this is another epic failure. The article states that between nine million and 25 million Americans are uninsured and have a preexisting health problem. If the current program has 135,000 enrollees and they have blown through $5 billion in three years or so, then the cost of insurance coverage for these enrollees comes out to about $37,000 per person or about $12,000 a year per person. If we take the mid point of the uninsured estimates, we end up with 17 million Americans (9 plus 25 divided by 2) who are uninsured because of preexisting health conditions.

Thus, using the results of this program, the average cost ($12,000) times the number needing insurance (17 million) comes out to an annual cost of over $200 billion a year. There is no way the country and the Federal government could afford this cost. This one program alone would eat up about 8% of the entire 2012 revenue stream of the Federal government:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

Which gets us back to our original point, you have to reduce the root causes of the high health care costs in this country, the root causes that cause these preexisting conditions. You cannot paper over them with complicated and expensive Obama Care insurance programs that just do not work since “what we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.”

2) Another perverse incentive of Obama Care is to make marriage less palatable for Americans and American families in the lower income ranges. Consider the opinions of two experts on the matter:

• Former Obama Treasury Department executive David Gamage was quoted The Wall Street Journal last year: “Consider a couple with children in which one of the parents earns most of the family’s income. If the couple marries, the family would lose thousands of dollars of subsidies that could otherwise be used to pay for health insurance for the children and the lower-income spouse. If the couple is already married, divorce may be their only option for obtaining affordable insurance for their children and the lower-income parent.”
• Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute testified in front of a Congressional hearing:“Health insurance premium credits in the new law are linked not directly to income, but to the poverty line, resulting in a particularly steep marriage penalty for low-income Americans. With $10,890 as the poverty line for one person and an additional $3,820 for a spouse, marriage means less government help with health insurance.

Thus, despite the President’s claim in his recent state of the union message that he wanted to strengthen families (“We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples,”) because that is best for Americans and American families, his health care reform disaster does just the opposite, financially incenting people not to get married or to get divorced.

3) We have reported on the many instances where private businesses and companies are cutting the hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week due to the asinine Obama administration ruling that anyone working 30 hours or more a week is considered a full time employee relative to Obama Care, forcing them to provide full health insurance coverage to these employees. Since many of these businesses’ business model, particularly those in the restaurant industry, cannot support these extra, onerous costs, they have cut their employees hours. Now these Americans still do not have health care insurance AND they have fewer hours to work and lower take home pay.

But this situation is not restricted just to private businesses and restaurant businesses:

• The Virgina Pilot newspaper reported on February 8, 2013 that thousands of part-time state workers will see their weekly working schedules reduced to no more than 29 hours a week going forward. The reason given for the drop in hours is that under Obama Care employees working 30 hours a week or more receive health care benefits, which would cost Virginia tens of millions of dollars a year. The new policy will mean a pay cut for many part-timers, including adjunct college professors.
• The Huffington Post reported back in November, 2012 that Youngstown State University will reduce the hours of part-time employees to ensure that the university is not required to provide them with health insurance coverage under Obama Care. Adjunct professors and lecturers would see their payable hours reduced to that magic number, 29 hours a week or less. Reason given for the decrease: onerous costs of Obama Care.
• We have already reported on how the Community College Of Allegheny County will cut the hours for some instructors to avoid paying for their health insurance coverage under Obama Care’s 30 hour rule, cuts that are affecting about 400 employees.

Again, insanity. These people will still not be able to afford health care insurance and will see a cut in take home pay nonetheless.

4) The Portland Press ran an article on February 18, 2013 that questioned the assertion made when Obama Care was passed that health care costs would go down. Many organizations, states, and politicians who supported the passage of the bill are now backpedaling on the potential devastating affects it may have on their constituents:

• State insurance regulators in California, recently sent a letter to the Obama administration in a recent letter to express their fears and concerns about "rate and market disruption."
• Oregon's insurance commissioner predicts that the new Obama Care regulations could push up premiums for younger Americans by as much as 30% and urged administration officials to slow the rollout of the new regulations.
• Insurance regulators in California, Oregon, Rhode Island and several other states have asked the administration to phase in the new requirement over several years in order to not jolt the insurance market or America.
• An advocate for consumers in their 20s, Young Invincibles, is also worried, sending a letter to administration officials suggesting that additional steps may be needed to protect young people from rising premiums. Remember, one of the insane aspects of Obama Care is that insurance costs for older Americans is reduced at the expense of raising insurance costs for younger Americans, those that are far more likely to have lower personal wealth than older Americans.
• Following up on that point, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that insurance costs for those who buy insurance coverage on their own probably will be 10-13% higher in 2016.

The article lays out a scenario that is very likely to occur in 2014 for many Americans, especially younger Americans:

• As health insurance rates come down for older people, the insurance rates will likely increase for consumers in their 20s.
• If that happens, young, healthy people could elect not to get health insurance and pay the small penalty if AND when they actually get caught by the IRS.
• This is the logical personal financial path for them to take since the cost of their insurance will be going much higher than the relatively minor fine they MIGHT eventually face.
• That, in turn, would leave an older, sicker population in the insurance pool on average, which typically inflates premiums and will leave millions of Americans without health care insurance.

In other words, the entire Rube Goldberg structure of this idiotic legislation will come tumbling down in bad financials, sick Americans, and much higher national debt.

Unfortunately, the bad news keeps oncoming from this massive, ill-conceived, complex, doomed to failure piece of legislation. But we should not be surprised, experts and news outlets have been correctly predicting this coming doom for years. For a nice synopsis of this history, consider going to the following link for a detailed, but easy to read, trek through the past few years to see what was predicted to fail is now actually failing:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/obama-concedes-obamacare-didnt-do-anything-for-rising-health-care-costs/

I am sure this is not the last set of disasters we will cover relative to Obama Care. Unfortunately.

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

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, Part 1: Pending Health Exchange Disasters, Senators Say "Just Kidding" And More

As we move through this new year, we are about to face the reality of Obama Care as its many taxes, regulations, and insanity cascade down on us and our struggling economy. We have not talked about Obama Care’s implications for a while, having been preoccupied with regular political class insanity, the fiscal cliff, the fallacy of gun conrol, and the eight part series on how stupid it is to raise taxes on any American, given how wasteful and inefficient our Federal government is today.

But before reviewing the latest approaching Obama Care fiascos, let's review the basic problems we have discussed way too many times in this blog:

1) Obama Care never identified or addressed the primary root causes of our nation's escalating health care costs:

Americans eat too much and Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food - These two interrelated causes have many underlying drivers, not the least of which is Federal government farm subsidies. These subsidies have incented American farmers to grow way too much corn, corn that ends up as cheap but unhealthy corn fructose which ends up in just about everything Americans eat.

Americans smoke too much - This problem is exacerbated by the Federal government, with the American taxpayer paying and incenting tobacco farmers over $190 million a year in Federal subsidies to grow more tobacco which ends up killing more Americans.

Americans do not get enough exercise - Americans exercise so little that a recent article in the August 17, 2012 issue of The Week magazine discussed a global study which found that Americans "ranked among the most physically lazy countries in the world," with 40% of American adults rarely engaging in any physical activity or exercise.

Americans are getting older - Rather than mobilizing resources to aggressively go after new cures and treatments for aging diseases, e.g. cancer, dementia, etc., Obama Care instead just introduces a massive new Federal bureaucracy and taxation system without a focus on disease eradication.

Tort Reform - The legislation contains none of the previously successful medical tort reform that some states have already shown to reduce health care costs, an omission due to the fabulous lobbying efforts of the ABA.

Health Insurance Competition - The legislation does nothing to break down the state line barriers that inhibit insurance company competition across state lines.

The legislation never "followed the money." - In other words, when we go into for a simple medical test that takes only a handful of minutes to perform, e.g. a blood test, but end up paying hundreds of dollars for the simple test, Obama Care never took the time to understand where these outrageous amounts of money flow, who benefits from the outrageous fees, understand how much of these fees are reasonable and unreasonable, and how to control the flow.

2) The legislation does little to curtail current wasteful spending of existing massive Federal government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which easily lose well over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

3) The legislation will not contain health care costs, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that the gross cost of the legislation is almost double what was estimated just a few years ago, the head actuary of Medicare and Medicaid recently estimating that Obama Care will add more than $300 billion to the national debt in the first ten years, and the one sub-program that was supposed to be a positive contributor to the legislation's financials, the CLASS program, has already been shut down for being ineffective.

4) The legislation is written so poorly that companies have already set plans in motion to curtail hiring, change full time employees to part time employees, and cancel existing company health care plans in order to dodge the taxes, regulations, and burdens imposed on them by the legislation. This legislation and the ensuing actions by companies are likely a primary driver to our continuing high unemployment rate.

A whole series of previous Obama Care problems can be viewed beginning with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/08/obama-care-still-constitutional-and.html

But we will have to spent more than the next week catching up with the disaster that is Obama Care. It is coming at us quickly and it will likely increase medical costs, decrease medical care availability, and crush our struggling economy. Don’t believe this? Consider the following revelations that have come to light over the past few months from reputable, nonpartisan sources as the wave of Obama Care begins crashing upon us.

The following facts and reality, both today and the following posts, are in no particular order. All of the news is bad so we are just going to plow through all of it until we cannot take it anymore.

1) Reuters and CNBC reported on December 13, 2012 that only fifteen states have decided to set up their own, so-called health care exchanges as created under Obama Care. These exchanges are theoretically supposed to provide low cost, readily available health care insurance for those Americans who need it. Under the legislation, the states can establish and operate these exchanges or pass on the option, in which case the Federal government would step in and run a Federal health care exchange within the state.

Thus, by October 1, 2013, the Federal government will have to step up and put in place a functioning health care provisioning service in about two thirds of the country, far more than they thought it would have to do. That’s just ten months from now.

According to the article, administration officials say that is possible: "I am confident that states and the Federal government will be ready in 10 months, when consumers in all states can begin to apply," Gary Cohen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, testified to a House panel.

Remember, that:

• The data systems to do this are not in place or possibly not even being developed.
• The methods and procedures are not close to being in place.
• The customer service functionality and service representative training is not close to being in place.
• The payment process functionality is not close to being in place.
• Adjusting and customizing all of these factors to make sense and hang together at the individual state level will be a monster undertaking.

Given that this is the same government that after decades/centuries still cannot operate a fiscally sound postal system, cannot seal our leaky borders, loses over two hundred billion dollars a year to waste and criminal fraud in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs, fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders, and cannot protect its foreign embassies, I find it highly doubtful that it will be able to handle this massive effort to provide any kind of decent service via health care exchanges within ten months.

No matter what you think of Obama Care, administratively it is going to be a disaster come October 1, 2013. It will be a failure from a procedure perspective and probably a financial perspective at the Federal level since I am pretty sure the original business case and plans for the exchanges did not have the majority of states saying “thanks but no thanks.

An expert in the field, Dennis Smith, who heads health services in Wisconsin, a state that has decided not to pursue its own exchange, summed up the challenge quite politely: "I don't envy them for the job that they have. At the end of the day, you're trying to connect a buyer to a seller. And the fundamental things required to do that are not yet in place."

And that is why most states opted out, it will be a disaster since nothing exists at the Federal level to do this.

2) One of the greatest ironies of the entire Obama Care fiasco is the recent news that eighteen Senate Democrats, the very people that voted to pass the legislation, recently sent a letter to Obama asking that a key revenue provision of the law be stripped out. This revenue/tax provision assessed a 2.3% tax on the gross revenue of medical device manufacturers.

It seems that many of these medical device manufacturers are in the home states of these eighteen Senators. They have been exerting pressure on their elected representatives since this tax will likely do one of four things:

• Put them out of business.
• Curtail their hiring and employing of American citizens in order to pay the additional tax.
• Curtail their research and development efforts.
• Force them to move manufacturing jobs overseas in order to stay financially viable, further hurting a bad unemployment picture.

None of these options will make for happy constituents and voters back home and thus, these politicians are scrambling to protect their jobs in the next election by asking that Obama cave on this tax, a tax they voted for in 2009.

Their position means one of two things, neither of which is very flattering:

1. These eighteen Senators never actually read the legislation they voted to approve, (ala Nancy Pelosi’s infamous quote, “we have to pass the legislation to see what is in it), making them derelict in their duties. What else does a politician do except read, understand, and vote on pending legislation?
2. Or, even more scary, they actually did read the legislation and were too ignorant to understand how badly this will impact their citizens back home, i.e. they never understood the basic reality, businesses have to make a profit and will adjust their business operations (hire fewer people, curtail expansion, go offshore) when an expense like taxes gets higher. Basic economic ignorance.

Whatever the cause, they are now scurrying like rats leaving a sinking ship, trying to get their ill thought out votes reversed. Given that Obama Care’s CLASS provision and 1099 provision have already been overturned, two provisions that were supposed to be cash flow positive to the entire legislation, if this medical device tax is actually delayed or terminated, the net cost of Obama Care would go even larger since its three main revenue producing provisions would have been ended.

Thus, our national debt would skyrocket even more and we still would not have solved the root causes of our escalating health care costs. All because eighteen politicians were derelict in their duties or just plain ignorant of what their vote would do.

3) In light of the message that has finally gotten through to these eighteen Senators, consider what is actually happening on the front lines of the medical device industry, according to recent news reports:

• In northern New Jersey, Andre DiMino operates his family’s medical device company ADM Tronics, which his father founded decades ago. The company has never had to lay anyone off but will do so by lying off three employees (out of twenty) in 2013 as a result of the Obama Care medical device tax.
• The Uresil, LLC company in Skokie, Ill. has already laid off six employees, “primarily related” of the tax. It had previously never laid off any employee: "We had never laid off anybody. We bought the company in 2004, never had a layoff. In fact, even during the recession, we added jobs. ... It wasn't until this tax hit us that we had to do it," stated President Lev Melinyshyn. He also stated that he has had to deeply cut back on research and development in order to protect the jobs of his remaining employees.
• But it is not just the small device companies that are cutting back. Michigan-based Stryker Corporation, a company with 20,000 employees, laid off 1,000 workers in anticipation of the tax in 2012 since it will see a $100 tax million bill dumped on them in the first year of Obama Care: "We would rather put this money towards jobs, innovation, clinical research and priorities that will create value-added medical technology for patients while helping us partner with hospitals to deliver cost effective solutions," CEO Kevin A. Lobo said in a statement.
• The industry’s trade association, The Advanced Medical Technology Association, estimates that the tax ultimately could cost the U.S. economy up to 43,000 jobs.

All for a piece of legislation that has virtually no chance of ever succeeding on any level for any problem for any reason.

That’s enough bad news for today. A massive Federal bureaucracy that does not exist today but needs to be up and running within ten months, eighteen gutless Senators looking to cover their ill thought out votes and protect their political careers, and small and large companies getting hammered and possibly destroyed by an Obama Care tax, resulting in less domestic manufacturing and higher unemployment.

Unfortunately, as we go through this week and next, this is not the only bad news that is about to crash down on all of us as a result of this disastrous piece of legislation.

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

Obama Care: Still Constitutional and Still A Major Disaster: Part 1 - Root Causes Of High Health Care Costs and The Gutting Of Medicare

We have not talked about Obama Care for a while, our review of the latest slime, sleaze, morality, and corruption of American political class taking up five of our recent posts. However, that does not mean the bad news of Obama Care has not continued to come to the surface. While it may be Constitutional, it is still a disaster along every dimension imaginable: costs, problem solutions, freedom, and fiscal irresponsibility.

But before reviewing the latest, let's review the basic problems we have discussed way too many times in this blog:

1) Obama Care never identified or addressed the primary root causes of our nation's escalating health care costs:

• Americans eat too much and Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food - These two interrelated causes have many underlying drivers, not the least of which is Federal government farm subsidies. These subsidies have incented American farmers to grow way too much corn, corn that ends up as cheap but unhealthy corn fructose which ends up in just about everything Americans eat.
• Americans smoke too much - This problem is exacerbated by the Federal government, with the American taxpayer paying and incenting tobacco farmers over $190 million a year in Federal subsidies to grow more tobacco which ends up killing more Americans.
• Americans do not get enough exercise - Americans exercise so little that a recent article in the August 17, 2012 issue of The Week magazine discussed a global study which found that Americans "ranked among the most physically lazy countries in the world," with 40% of American adults rarely engaging in any physical activity or exercise.
• Americans are getting older - Rather than mobilizing resources to aggressively go after new cures and treatments for aging diseases, e.g. cancer, dementia, etc., Obama Care instead just introduces a massive new Federal bureaucracy and taxation system without a focus on disease eradication.
• The legislation contains none of the previously successful medical tort reform that some states have already shown to reduce health care costs, an omission due to the fabulous lobbying efforts of the ABA.
• The legislation does nothing to break down the state line barriers that inhibit insurance company competition across state lines.
• The legislation never "followed the money." In other words, when we go into for a simple medical test that takes only a handful of minutes to perform, e.g. a blood test, but end up paying hundreds of dollars for the simple test, Obama Care never took the time to understand where these outrageous amounts of money flow, who benefits from the outrageous fees, understand how much of these fees are reasonable and unreasonable, and how to control the flow.

2) The legislation does little to curtail current wasteful spending of existing massive Federal government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which easily lose well over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

3) The legislation will not contain health care costs, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that the gross cost of the legislation is almost double what was estimated just a few years ago, the head actuary of Medicare and Medicaid recently estimating that Obama Care will add more than $300 billion to the national debt in the first ten years, and the one sub-program that was supposed to be a positive contributor to the legislation's financials, the CLASS program, has already been shut down for being ineffective.

4) The legislation is written so poorly that companies have already set plans in motion to curtail hiring, change full time employees to part time employees, and cancel existing company health care plans in order to dodge the taxes, regulations, and burdens imposed on them by the legislation. This legislation and the ensuing actions by companies are likely a primary driver to our continuing high unemployment rate.

We could go on with other examples of idiocy and fiscal dangers that we have already discussed in this blog but you get the idea. When you do not address the root causes of any problem, your chance of actually resolving the problem is almost nil. This is the case with Obama Care.

This is a horrible piece of legislation. And the depths of the dangers just keep bubbling to the surface.

- One of the supposed selling points of Obama Care and the main reason we were supposed to pass it was that the legislation would provide for health care insurance for EVERY American once it was fully implemented. However, a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report says that under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022, ten years from now.

Thus, if the CBO is to be believed, and Obama, Pelosi, et al relied on the original CBO analysis to force through Obama Care, then a primary tenet and objective of Obama Care, all Americans will be covered by health care insurance, will go largely unfilled. The CBO's analysis estimated that there are currently 53 million Americans without health care insurance. By leaving 30 million people uninsured when the legislation is fully rolled out, the legislation will have missed this target by over 50%. Pitiful.

And it probably will not even hit this low coverage result. As we have reported many times in this blog, American companies have publicly announced that they will seriously consider dropping their existing health care insurance policies they currently fund for their employees and retirees under Obama Care. Why? Obama Care makes it a better business decision and financial decision to pay a smaller Obama Care fine for not having employee health insurance coverage than to continue their existing programs, an action that will likely result in millions and millions of more Americans not having health care insurance.

- Not only is Obama Care likely to screw up the health care coverage that tens of millions of Americans get from their employers, but it is also likely to really devastate Medicare. The Wall Street Journal reported on this gutting of Medicare under the Obama Care legislation two years ago:

 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703649004575437311393854940.html

Their article focused on the findings of Richard Foster who was the head actuary of Medicare at that time, a person who probably knew more about the numbers driving Medicare than anyone else anywhere. Mr. Foster's findings and analyses led to the following conclusions:

• Medicare payment rates for doctors and hospitals serving elderly Americans will be cut by 30% over the next three years under Obama Care
• By 2019 Medicare, payment rates will be lower than under Medicaid. 
• At the end of the 75-year forecast window for the Medicare, Medicare payment rates will be one-third of what will be paid by private insurance, and only half of what is paid by Medicaid.
• Obama Care chops $818 billion out of  Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) over the next ten years.
• Combining these cuts with cuts to Medicare Part B brings the total cuts to $1.05 trillion over the first 10 years and $4.95 trillion over the first 20 years.
• Mr. Foster's analysis also concludes that 50% of senior Americans with Medicare Advantage will lose their plan because of these cuts.
• These cuts do not include unforeseen cuts that Obama Care's 15 member "death panel"of unelected bureaucrats might impose in the future to keep costs under control

No one argues that Medicare and Medicaid costs need to be gotten under control. But funding Obama Care with arbitrary cuts to Medicare does not eliminate the cost issue, it just moves the costs elsewhere within the Federal bureaucracy. All it does it make medical care for America's elderly more difficult to provide and find without solving any of the underlying root causes of the problem to begin with.

- While the Wall Street Journal article is a little dated, a new CBO analysis and report from late July is not. It reinforces these findings from the Journal article, updating them for current estimates but reaching the same conclusions, namely that Obama Care arbitrarily guts Medicare funding according to the following budget cuts:

•A $260 billion payment cut for hospital services.

•A $39 billion payment cut for skilled nursing services.

•A $17 billion payment cut for hospice services.

•A $66 billion payment cut for home health services.

•A $33 billion payment cut for all other services.

•A $156 billion cut in payment rates in Medicare Advantage.

•$56 billion in cuts for disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments.

•$114 billion in other provisions pertaining to Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP.

Note: CBO report details are available at:

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43471-hr6079.pdf


Different year, different analysis, same conclusion. The Heritage Foundation, pulling information from the 2012 Medicare Trustees report concluded: "The impact of these cuts will be detrimental to seniors’ access to care. The Medicare trustees 2012 report concludes that these lower Medicare payment rates will cause an estimated 15 percent of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies to operate at a loss by 2019, 25 percent to operate at a loss in 2030, and 40 percent by 2050. Operating at a loss means these facilities are likely to cut back their services to Medicare patients or close their doors, making it more difficult for seniors to access these services."

Boy, it just keeps getting worse. Didn't anybody in Congress or the White House consult with the Medicare and Medicaid experts to find out ahead of time what Obama Care would do the the health care of senior Americans from the experts who would know best? Obviously not.

Yes, Obama Care is Constitutional. But it is also a disaster that does not address the root causes of our escalating health care costs, will leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured, will add to our skyrocketing national debt, and will likely deprive funding to existing health care programs that serve our senior citizens. And worst of all, we have more bad news to report int tomorrow's post, the nightmare continues.

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/

Obama Care - "What Could Possibly Go Wrong"

Unfortunately, Obama Care and its related failures continue to haunt the country as we wait for the Supreme Court to render its verdict on the Constitutionality of the legislation. We have discussed this horrible law many times in this blog and the many negative impacts it is having on the country:

• From politicians accusing those opposed to this flawed legislation of being racists, dividing the country even more,
• To the ballooning costs of implementation that will dramatically increase the national debt,
• To the basic fact of life that it will not work since it did not address the root causes of our high health care costs.

Today, we will review the latest news, failures, and commentary about the law and end this blog with a short, sarcastic review of the entire process entitled, "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"

So what is the latest bad news regarding Obama Care:

- Several months ago, the Obama administration canceled one of the show pieces of the legislation when it terminated the CLASS program. The CLASS program was supposed to provide affordable long term care to Americans under the Obama Care umbrella.

Unfortunately, it was more expensive than private long term care insurance programs and for those higher costs, contained fewer and less robust benefits than the typical private long term care policies.

Thus, the administration canceled the program for having a much, much lower enrollment rate than expected. More ominous, this program was one of the few financially positive aspects of the Obama Care business plan, initially showing a large positive contribution to the overall Obama Care financials. With its failure and termination, Obama Care's financial viability also takes a major hit.

Not to be outdone, last week the Obama administration terminated another major component of the law due to embarrassingly low participation rates. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services canned a program that offered a $100 incentive to insurance brokers and agents for recommending eligible people to Obama Care’s Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP).

PCIP was intended to be a stop gap way to cover people with pre-existing or chronic conditions prior 2014, when insurance companies will be prohibited from excluding people based on health conditions. Although this situation was hyped as a major concern and need for Obama Care, consider some of the program's and administration's numbers and decide for yourself if this was truly a dire situation requiring such a program (numbers courtesy of a recent Heritage Foundation analysis and publication):

• The Obama administration originally claimed on its website, http://www.healthcare.gov/law/resources/reports/preexisting.html  that as many as 129 million Americans might be suffering from pre-existing conditions and might need a program like PCIP.
• Out of these 129 million people, the Medicare actuaries forecasted that 375,000 people would enroll in PCIP. This forecast is only about .3% of 129,000,000, making one wonder if the 129,000,000 was really an accurate number.
• But actual results were far worse, with only 56,257 actually enrolling in the program. Thus, only 15% of the forecasted 375,000 people came to fruition. The percentage that enrolled vs. the claimed universe size of 129,000,000 is too small to calculate.
• And this 56,257 number and low 15% fulfillment number occurred only because of loosened enrollment requirements and lower premiums.

You cannot claim you know what you are doing when you put your universe of need at 129,000,000 and only 56,257 enroll in your program after you made it easier to enroll. You also cannot claim any credibility with any number or forecast that Obama Care produces, given their horrific track record of CLASS and PCIP forecasts.

- A New York Post article last week contained an interview of Dr. Scott Gottlieb and his view on what Obama Care might end up doing to older, poorer Americans who are eligible for either Medicare or Medicaid. The article identifies Dr. Gottlieb as a one time senior official at the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services and an American Enterprise Institute resident fellow.  

In the article, Dr. Gottlieb warned that under Obama care, disabled seniors who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid will receive inferior care since Obama Care will shuffle them off of the Medicare rolls and onto state run Medicaid rolls and pay the states handsomely to do so. This will inject more money into the ailing Medicaid program and make the Medicare cost problems seem less severe. According to the article, California and New York have already started this process.

While these actions might make the government programs' financials look better, Dr. Gottlieb claims that the people moved off of Medicare onto Medicaid are likely to suffer a significant drop off in the quality of care they receive in the less robust state Medicaid programs. In his words, these elderly and sometimes disabled Americans "will be uprooted from the tried-and-true Medicare fold and “herded” into state-run Medicaid plans as another phase of Obama care grips the nation."

Furthermore, in Dr. Gottlieb's words: "It’s hard to see how they’ll be better off in bare-bones, and sometimes poorly-run state Medicaid plans than by getting access to Medicare options they were entitled to before Obama care."

This gets back to one of the fundamental problems with Obama Care. Its creators never identified and solved the underlying root causes. As a result, we end up with financial accounting tricks to shift revenues and costs without attacking the underlying causes of our problems. We end up with more bureaucracy, high and growing costs, accounting shenanigans, and worse care for millions of Americans.


- Now that he is leaving politics, Congressman Barney Frank is speaking out and criticizing President Obama's approach to healthcare. In a recent article on Forbes' website (http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/04/17/barney-frank-obamacare-was-a-mistake/), the soon-to-be-ex-Congressman sends out a message that maybe the political class in Washington overreached with Obama Care and that is why it is turning into a colossal failure in the eyes of many Americans. Consider two of his quotes from the article:

• "I think we paid a terrible price for health care. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after [Republican] Scott Brown won [Sen. Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts], I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform but certainly not health care."
• "Obama made the same mistake Clinton made. When you try to extend health care to people who don’t have it, people who have it and are on the whole satisfied with it get nervous."

Maybe, just maybe, if Obama, Pelosi, and Reed had done their homework and identified the root causes why less than 15% of Americans did not having health care and crafted their solution to addressing that 15% rather than upending the health care lives of the 85%, as Frank suggests, we might now have an effective solution that is smaller in scope, larger in success, and without the cost and bureaucracy we are ending up with.

Great legislation. Another major component of Obama Care bites the dust, an expert in the field says elderly and disabled Americans will suffer in their health care options just to save the financials of two government bureaucracies, and a Democratic Congressman now identifies what most of us already know, that Obama Care was an unnecessary overreach.

These latest new items just reinforce what we already knew, Obama Care is a health care program that:

• Will force us to purchase government health care insurance and will fine and criminalize us if we don't,
• Will cause millions of us to lose our corporate health care insurance coverage as a result of the legislation,
• Will be so intrusive into our lives that it will seriously affect our life decisions of employment, marriage, retirement, and death,
• Was written by a Congressional committee whose chairman said he didn't understand all of it,
• Was passed, by the most narrow of margins, by our Congressional people, most of whom never read it but exempted themselves from its tenets,
• Has greatly contributed to the high unemployment levels in this country due to the uncertainty, extensive regulations, and additional taxes it has imposed on all businesses and the economy,
• Has already approved over 1,500 waivers to Obama's political friends and allies,
• Was hyped by the Speaker Of The House who actually, mistakenly, or deceptively proclaimed hundreds of thousands of new jobs would be magically created almost overnight,
• Was signed by a President who once smoked and may still smoke, an action that is a major contributor to our high health care costs,
• Will have little chance of being successful since it never identified the root causes of our health care problems,
• Will have its funding administered by a Treasury Secretary who didn't pay his taxes and by a Senate Majority Leader who has not delivered a Senate budget for three years,
• And will be financed by a country that's almost broke and which is that much closer to actually being broke as a result of the legislation.

What could possibly go wrong? Such a deal.


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/

Thud, Another Obama Care Program Crashes To Earth

It does get tiring reporting on the constant failures of Obama Care, a piece of legislation that is turning out to be one of the worst laws ever passed by the political class in Washington. On the heels of the two year anniversary of the passage of the legislation, we know for fact the following atrocities that have occurred as a result of this law:

1. The original, ten year gross cost of the legislation, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), was pegged at around $940 billion. The two year update review estimate of the cost has been revised upwards almost 100%, with the latest ten year view of costs coming in at just over $1.76 TRILLION.
2. The CBO has stated that this cost will likely go higher when it reviews its estimates again since that annual estimate will contain ten years of costs/expenses and ten years of government revenue/taxes. The original estimate was intentionally deceptive since it included only six years of costs/expenses and ten years worth of government revenue/taxes.
3. Rather than reduce the Federal deficit by $130 billion or so in the first ten years like President Obama promised, Obama Care, according to a credible and detailed analysis done by the head actuary of Medicare and Medicaid, estimates that the national debt will increase by over $300 billion in the first ten years as a result of the passage of Obama Care.
4. President Obama also promised that those Americans who liked their current health care insurance coverage from their employers could keep it. The latest CBO report now estimates that this promise is also starting to collapse. It estimates that possibly 4 million Americans will lose their existing coverage, even if they like it. Other credible sources estimate that tens of millions of Americans could lose their employer provided health care coverage, given how poorly this legislation was written.
5. Obama Care is suppressing economic growth since it is well documented that many businesses are holding off hiring new workers until they figure out what the financial implications of expanding their employee base is under the law. Others are intentionally keeping the number of employees under 50 or are turning some permanent employees into temporary employees in order to stay under 50 permanent employees to avoid the steep penalties laid out by Obama Care. All of these actions suppress hiring, reduce economic growth, and help keep unemployment high.
6. We have documented the many ways in which Obama Care will significantly impact and control personal life decisions of Americans when it comes to marriage, retirement, health care coverage, and job selection. These impacts and controls on our life decisions are not consistent with living in a democracy.
7. Obama Care has or will intrude in two major facets of many lives when it forces all Americans to purchase health care insurance (turning ordinary Americans into criminals if they do not purchase) and when it imposes secular requirements on religious tenets and beliefs, truly not the characteristic of an enlightened government and political class within a democracy.
8. We also know that Obama Care was written so poorly  that some Americans that could easily afford to pay for their own health care insurance will get free, taxpayer-subsidized financial support since the law screwed up how it classifies certain types of income.
9. The CLASS component of the law was 1) supposed to provide reasonable and quality long term care support for older Americans and 2) offset the cost of Obama Care by upwards of $85 billion in the first ten years. The legislation was written so poorly that the CLASS market offerings were deemed to be more expensive and less beneficial than existing private market long term care plans. As a result, within two years of touting its profitability potential, the Obama administration has shut down the program, theoretically wiping out a lot of its supposed positive financial impacts.
10. The legislation was written so poorly that in less than the first two years of its existence, the Federal government had to grant over 1,500 waivers to companies, unions, and other organizations, exempting them from the early impacts of the law. Thus, on average, three waivers were granted every business day since the law was enacted. You cannot claim you enacted effective legislation when you exempt three American organizations EVERY DAY from complying with the legislation.
11. It is also obvious that this legislation will not work because it did not understand the root causes of our escalating health care costs. Americans eat too much (leading to obesity and heart related diseases), Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans do not exercise enough, Americans smoke too much, and Americans on average are getting older (leading to more age-related diseases). These are public health related root causes that Obama Care barely addresses while trying to solve the overall problem, and its root causes, with ineffective  taxation/government bureaucracy/criminal actions.

And the latest thud from Obama Care, a thud that will get us to a "dirty dozen" of reasons why this is the worst legislation ever imposed on Americans, turns out to be the "Early Retirement Reinsurance Program (EERP)." EERP was a short term Federal program to help employers pay for health insurance for early retirees age 55 and older until they’re eligible for Medicare. It was designed to be a bridge until Obama Care's health insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014. It was budgeted for $5 billion and was put in place in mid-2010.

I use the past tense to describe the program since by the end of 2011, a mere 18 months or so after it began and at least 24 months before it was supposed to end, the program ran out of money. By mid-December, 2011, 95% of the money had been paid out to unions, companies, non-profits, and other government entities, and the Federal government had to stop taking claims as of December 31, 2011.

Some observations:

• The United Workers Union received the largest payout from the $5 billion fund, $387 million, according to a Bloomberg article. Could this be a further bailout of the auto industry, another political favor from the Obama administration to union voters?
• Two of America's largest and more profitable companies, AT&T and Verizon, both received over a quarter of a billion dollars from the fund. Is this the best use of tax payer money or just another corporate welfare benefit at the expense of the American taxpayer?
• If you read a recent government document that describes why the program is being shut down, it shows that almost half of the $5 billion went to state and local governments. Shouldn't those government entities tax their own constituents to cover their misspending and not get bailed out by all taxpayers?
• What happens to the smaller companies and unions that were counting on this program as promised by the political class and probably did not have the resources and lobbyists to get their share of the $5 billion? I would bet many of them made personnel decisions based on the promises of Obama Care and this support program. Now, given the incompetence of the writers of the Obama Care, companies, and more importantly, their early retirees, are out of luck and maybe out of health insurance coverage.

As with the other components of Obama Care, this ill fated program did not address and resolve the root causes of high health care costs. It just redistributed wealth within the country to pay certain parties for a rising expense. It did not fundamentally reduce the root causes of escalating costs in the industry, keeping it consistent with every other component of this law.

This is just another example of how poorly Obama Care was conceived and written, how pathetic its time and cost estimates are, and how out of touch with reality those in Washington are. This is a support program that falls flat on its face less than half way through its expected life. A support program that will leave plenty of Americans without health care insurance that was promised. A support program that may have been a union vote generator for the political class. A support program that was just another form of corporate welfare. A support program that subsidizes poor fiscal management by certain government organizations.

Just another Obama Care program that does nothing to address the real causes of our health care problems. It just swooshes around, via taxes and bureaucracy, the current health care expenditures in this country without fundamentally reducing those expenditures. Pathetic problem solving skills and remedies.

Time to start over with a real problem solving approach as laid out in Step 28 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Root causes will continue to be out of control, now and if and when Obama Care is implemented. You cannot solve lung cancer by taking more aspirin, you have to address the underlying root causes. You cannot solve our health care problems without addressing the underlying public health and aging issues facing the country.

Thud.


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/