August, 2018, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure Of The Single Payer Health Care System and Why There is NO Such Thing as Free Health Care

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) We have often discussed the reality that single payer/government run healthcare in England, so-called socialized medicine, is a disaster. Government bureaucrats decide who lives and dies, there are long and dangerous wait times in ERs, treatment wait times are excruciating long, and medical results are always less robust than in the U.S. 

Dr. Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit, Phd, writing for the Heritage Foundation on August 13, 2018, laid out a perfect illustration why socialized medicine is almost always expensive and a failure, which sounds a lot like Obama Care’s qualities. But first, a look at some of the real numbers the authors talk about and how government run healthcare makes a bad situation worse:

• Depending on the assumption set used, this country will be looking at a doctor shortage of anywhere from between 43,000 to 121,000 doctors within 12 years.
• A root cause of this shortage is the reality that doctors today spend more and more time on non medical, regulatory, and administrative activities, leading to frustration, burnout, and premature retirements.
• Socialized medicine increases these frustrations while reducing the freedom to treat patients the way doctors are trained to treat them while capping their compensation.

So single payer health care plans, government control over health care decisions, make it difficult to get enough supply of high quality doctors to enter the field, making health care quality even worse, as we recently saw in England during the recent flu season:

• Back in October, 1975, a British politician, Labor Minister David Cohen, had a rare insight into why his government’s actions, in this case the creation of socialized medicine and a single payer government run healthcare system would fail miserably: “The health service was launched on a fallacy. First, we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service- it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”
• Fast forward to the winter of 2018 where a very bad strain of influenza hit the country.
• British hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed which is not surprising since a survey conducted by the British Medical Association found that 82% of its members felt their workplaces were understaffed, which is not surprising given the point we made above about doctors not wanting to stay in the field due to overt government interference in the medical process.
• Listen to one doctor describe his personal flu experience: “I came on to shift yesterday afternoon and there were patients literally everywhere. The corridor into the hospital was so busy we couldn’t have got a cardiac arrest patient through it into the resuscitation room. To say staff were at the end of their tethers would be a complete understatement.”
• This pre-existing doctor shortage situation in a single payer system combined with the flu outbreak resulted in 50,000 surgeries being cancelled because limited resources were diverted to flu patients.
• This in turn further endangered those that needed the surgery, likely making their medical conditions more expensive and dangerous to treat later.
• By March, 2018, British emergency rooms had 15.4% of their patients waiting over four hours before seeing anyone for treatment.
• This was the worst performance ever recorded.
• Back in the real world, the number of ailing British citizens waiting 18 weeks or more for treatment increased by 35%, from 128,575 in 2016 to about 362,000 in 2017 to 490,000 patients in 2018. 
• Thus, half a million people in this single payer government run system had to wait four and a half months to get treatment.
• Even worse, 2,755 sick folks had to wait OVER A YEAR to get treatment.

Long delays, poor quality, high costs, yeah, that is working out great. And yet despite this British reality and the unfolding disasters of Obama Care, some American politicians still want to bring single payer healthcare to America despite the failure of such a system across the world.

2) One of the stupid reasons put forth for single payer systems is that healthcare under such a system is free! Yes,under this reasoning free healthcare jumps out of the sky and no one pays for it! Amazing!

Of course this is plain stupid. Nothing is free in life including healthcare. While those eventually receiving healthcare services do not pay under this system at that time everyone paid for the services via their taxes. 

Check out the following link to get a simple straightforward explanation why saying healthcare is free in a single payer system is absolutely stupid:

https://libertyvideonews.com/reality-check-there-is-no-such-thing-as-free-healthcare/

That will do it for today: there is still no free lunch in the healthcare world and the single payer/government controlled system is still a road to shoddy and dangerous healthcare. More to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

July, 2016, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Costs Likely To Conintue Rising, Customer Base Likely To Continue Shrinking and The Obama Administration Likely to Continue To Break The Law

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) Haley Johnson, writing for the Conservative Daily News website on June 28, 2016, reviewed the dire warnings about Obama Care in 2017 that were recently pronounced by the very person that helped Obama Care when she worked in the Obama administration. Marilyn Tavenner was once the head of the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services and helped launch Obama Care.

When she was recently asked what the immediate future held for Obama Care policy premiums costs, she replied: “I’ve been asked, what are the premiums going to look like? I don’t know, because it also varies by state, market, even within markets. But I think the overall trend is going to be higher than we saw previous years … that’s my big prediction.”

Whoa, hold on there! When she was rolling out Obama Care, didn’t her boss, the President claim that the annual costs for health insurance for families could down up to $2,500 a year? Didn’t he promise that the legislation would “bend the cost curve” of health care downwards? And now that very same person, who currently leads a health industry organization of insurers, is telling us that those promises are not going to come true? Horrors!

Of course, that is sarcasm. We have often shown how the cost of health insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays have gone up substantially under Obama Care, the exact opposite of what was promised. 

Anyone with a lick of common sense five years ago would realize that the Obama Care requirement that insurance companies must take anyone customer on and give them insurance coverage regardless of their current health condition was a recipe for disaster, as pointed out by Ms. Tavenner: “The problem with the exchanges … is people are still kind of seeing this as, ‘I use insurance when I’m sick, but I may not need it when I’m no longer sick."

Tavenner also correctly pointed out that the initial programs Obama Care put in place to cushion the blow of insurance companies having to accept anyone applying even if they had a pre-existing condition are going away. Once that financial crutch is removed, the Obama Care insurers will need to increase their premium rates even more to cover this new shortfall, further increasing Obama Care policy costs.

But again, anyone with a spec of common sense could see this coming years ago. We talked about it in this blog for months at a time. And now a former Obama administration insider is telling us the same thing: Obama Care will not reduce anyone's health insurance costs in any way and the shock of continually increasing deductibles, premiums, and co-pays is going to get worse not better in the coming year or so.

2) Well, maybe we do not have to wait a year to see if Ms. Tavenner’s predictions come true. According to an article for Breitbart that was written by Caroline May on July 14, 2016:

• An amazing 1.6 million Obama Care customers have dropped their Obama Care coverage already this year.
• This drop of 1.6 million customers happened in the remarkably short timeframe from late January, the end of the annual enrollment period, and the end of March, according to data from the Federal government.
• 12.7 million customers had enrolled in Obama Care policies prior to January 31, 2016 but that number dropped to 11.1 million customers just two months later, an almost 13% decline.
• The measurement for the drop is the number of people who signed up for an Obama Care policy during the enrollment and who were still paying their premiums and keeping their policy active by the end of March.
• Remember, the original estimate is that by this time, Obama promised that about 20 million Americans would have healthcare coverage via Obama Care policies, so having 11.1 million now means that the program has missed its objective by about 50%.
• And that assumes that no other Obama Care policy holders terminated their accounts in the past four months which would make that 13% drop even worse.

Now it could be that some of those in the 1.6 million got health insurance via a new job, or got health insurance coverage from a spouse’s new job, or qualified for Medicaid. Or more likely, Ms. Tavenner was right and these Obama Care customers decided that the increases in premium costs for Obama Care policies was just not a good value despite the fact that 85% of Obama Care customers get an average subsidy of $291 a month. 

With a handful of the remaining Obama Care co-ops under financial duress, a lot more Obama Care policyholders might be dropping out of the program before long, leaving the promise of 20 million people covered by Obama Care policies even further out of view. You cannot claim that you ran a successful program when you missed our own program objective by 50%.

3) We mentioned above and in previous posts how the programs set up to provide subsidy help in the initial years of Obama Care to help insurers financially ease into the Obama Care insurance world were expiring, putting additional financial stress on Obama Care insurers. Some of these insurers, seeing the writing on the wall of terminating subsidies and negative financial results from Obama Care policies, have already withdrawn from the Obama Care exchanges.

Alexander Hendrie, writing for the Americans For Tax Reform website on July 7, 2016, pointed out that Congressional committees recently issued a report that alleged that the Obama administration was illegally using taxpayer money to secretly, and probably illegally, to bailout Obama Care insurers. 

The report was put out by the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It accuses the administration of illegally funding Obama Care’s “Cost Sharing Reduction” (CSR) program for years despite the objections of IRS officials.

Key findings of the Congressional report, as written by Mr. Hendrie, include the following accusations:

-The administration initially submitted a CSR appropriations request for Fiscal Year 2014, but later withdrew it and began making payments illegally. As the report notes, Obama Care created CSR payments, but they have never been appropriated for. The Constitution explicitly makes clear that the power of the purse lies with Congress and the Executive cannot spend taxpayer money without Congressional approval.

-CSR payments were created as one way to artificially hide the true costs of Obama Care through a web of government spending programs. CSR payments would be given to an insurance company based on the income of an enrollee and the plan they purchased. Assuming certain criteria were met, the insurance company would receive federal dollars as an incentive to keep co-payments, deductibles, and other out of pocket costs low.

-After officials from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) withdrew the CSR appropriations request, the administration begun illegally shifting funds from a separate appropriation. The administration has refused to provide the legal memorandum that led to this decision even in the face of Congressional subpoenas.

-IRS officials expressed concern that this method of funding CSR payments was illegal so were briefed on the memorandum. As the report notes in an interview with one IRS official at the meeting, they were not permitted to take notes or keep a copy of the memo:

“We were given a memo to read. We were instructed we were not to take notes and we would not be keeping the memo, we’d be giving it back at the end of the meeting.”

-Following this meeting, IRS officials continued to have concerns that the CSR payments violated federal law and raised concerns with IRS Chief John Koskinen. As the report notes, these concerns were heard, but ignored:

“The IRS officials’ concerns that this course of action violated appropriations law were noted, but not addressed or ameliorated by OMB’s legal memorandum.”

-Shortly thereafter, DoJ and Treasury officials officially approved the decision to use an unrelated appropriation to make CSR payments.

Since Congress launched its investigation, multiple Obama government agencies have undertaken a concerted effort to hide the truth by refusing to provide, or unlawfully redacting documents, refusing to answer questions or allow witnesses to testify, and selectively applying the law. In at least one case, the Obama administration pressured a witness into not revealing information, and in another case the administration prevented a witness from answering questions.

As the report notes:

• The Department of the Treasury improperly withheld and redacted documents without any valid legal basis to do so.
• The Department of Health and Human Services improperly withheld documents without any valid legal basis to do so.
• The Office of Management and Budget improperly withheld documents without any valid legal basis to do so.
• The Department of the Treasury failed to search for records responsive to the committees’ subpoenas.
• Treasury used regulations and Testimony Authorizations to prohibit current and former IRS employees from providing testimony to Congress about the source of funding for the CSR program.
• Treasury officials selectively enforced the law by allowing witnesses to answer certain questions prohibited by the authorizations without objection
• HHS counsel prevented witnesses from answering substantive questions regarding the CSR, citing the need to protect “internal deliberations” and “confidentiality interests”
• Witnesses were instructed not to reveal the names of White House and DoJ officials involved in decisions regarding the cost sharing reduction program.
• The Department of the Treasury pressured at least one witness into following the restrictions set forth in his Testimony Authorization after the witness questioned Treasury’s ability to limit his testimony.
• OMB prevented a witness from answering factual questions regarding the dates or times of a meeting or conversation, refusing to invoke a legal privilege to justify withholding the information from Congress.

Breaking the law, illegally bailing out the insurance companies, tampering with potential witnesses, and failing to provide the requested documents to Congress, sounds about right when describing the worst piece of legislation ever enacted and the most lawless administration in my lifetime. And of course, the American taxpayer ends up paying the insurance company for this lousy piece of legislation.

4) One last piece of ObamaCare nonsense for today. I usually do not reference random pieces of writings that are sent through my email, I almost always want to rely on professional, legitimate, and identified news sources and government findings for our discussions in this blog. But the following, unsourced description of what Obama Care is does hit a home run in showing how inane the logic was in putting it together. It boils down the 2,000 pages of the legislation and the 10,000 ages or so of regulations as related to Obama Care to four succinct points: 

1. In order to insure the uninsured, we first have to un-insure the insured.

2. Next, we require the newly un-insured to be re-insured.

3. To re-insure the newly un-insured, they are required to pay extra charges to be re-insured.

4. The extra charges are required so that the original insured, who became un-insured, and then became re-insured, can pay enough extra so that the original un-insured can be insured, so it will be free-of-charge to them. 

Crazy and illogical and passed by the U.S. Federal government.

That will end our Obama Care review for both today and this month, things have been a little slow in this area. But we now know that a former, high ranking Obama Care insider predicts that costs will go up and not down as Obama constantly promised, that current Obama Care customers are dropping out of the program at a very quick rate, and that the lawlessness of the Obama administration extends and continues in this area with regard to blackmailing insurance companies with taxpayer money to stay in the program and continue to provide Obama Care policies. The unfolding disasters continue to unfold.

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

June, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Hearbreaking Stories From Real Americans And How Obama Care Screwed Them

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.

Today, we will solely focus only on the heartbreaking stories of how Obama Care has created chaos with the health care, health insurance, and medical help of American families, endangering the very lives of some Americans because of the tenets and idiocy of the Obama Care legislation. The source of these stories is the website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

MARLYS, TEXAS: ‘I am one of those Democrats who wanted it to be better… I wouldn’t be able to go to the doctor I’ve been going to for years’ “Marlys Dietrick, a 60-year-old artist from San Antonio, said she had high hopes... But she said they have been turned off by high premiums and deductibles and would rather pay the fine. ‘I am one of those Democrats who wanted it to be better than this,’ she said. … ‘I wouldn’t be able to go to the doctor I’ve been going to for years,’ she said. ‘That is not a deal.’”

MICHAEL, FLORIDA: It starts with the Black Hole.. What the hell is a Black Hole. We were told in Feb 2014 When we moved to the greatstate of FL that we could not get Insurance because we were in the Black Hole. Yep it's like you died and no one will help you. That coupled with a job market that won't hire people over 50. STRIKE TWO. Now comes the real fun Tax's at the end of the year. I am being told that with us not having Insurance we are going to get fined $350+ each a month for not having it. How the hell do you get Insurance with no job or income. Explain that to me...Now fines on top of it HOW do you expect us to pay that also... Mr Obama HELP......

WALTER, CALIFORNIA: The district has one of the nation’s highest proportions of residents who get health insurance through individual policies, instead of from an employer, and many have learned their policies are being canceled because they don’t comply with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Walter Niles is one of them. The self-employed biotechnology consultant with a doctorate in neuroscience was notified in September that his policy was being canceled. The coverage offered through Covered California, his state’s new insurance exchange, has left him unsatisfied.

“I’m paying more and getting less,” said Niles, 59, who leans Republican yet also says he voted twice for President Barack Obama. “It is fundamentally a worse plan.”

STEVE, WASHINGTON: My out of pocket co-pays have almost tripled... :{ !!!

GARY, ARIZONA: Obamacare has affected my wife and I financially. We both work for Maricopa County, Arizona. I am retired military and both my wife and I waive healthcare provided by our employer choosing to use our military healthcare, TRICARE, to cover our medical needs. I pay TRICARE a quarterly premium to enjoy their "Prime" benefits, which includes access to military doctors and clinics..The County used to pay my wife and I $50.00 each every pay period that we waived their coverage. The stipend was paid to encourage those that could go elsewhere for healthcare to do so in order to reduce the risk to the County's program, which is a self-funded plan. Under Obamacare, the stipend became illegal and was ended for my wife and I, which cost us a total of $200 per month. We have never fully recovered from that loss as government wages have been frozen for five years now. So now our annual take home pay is $2,400 less than it was thanks to Obamacare.

DEBORAH, CALIFORNIA: From the LA Times: 

"All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it," said Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester. "I'm infuriated because I was lied to."

Supporters of the healthcare law say Obama was referring to people who are insured through their employers or through government programs such as Medicare. Still, they acknowledge the confusion and anger from individual policyholders who are being forced to change.

Cavallaro received her cancellation notice from Anthem Blue Cross this month. The company said a comparable Bronze plan would cost her 65% more, or $484 a month. She doubts she'll qualify for much in premium subsidies, if any. Regardless, she resents losing the ability to pick and choose the benefits she wants to pay for.

"I just won't have health insurance because I can't pay this increase," she said.

ROBERT, TEXAS: Policies bought before the law was passed were “grandfathered in” and can remain in place, she said.

But that apparently doesn’t lock in the cost of premiums or deductibles, said Robert Kecseg, an investment adviser in Lewisville. Kecseg, 61, said he bought a plan before Obamacare took effect. But the insurer that provided the coverage went out of business.

When he went to buy new insurance, he found that the cost was much higher. He had paid an annual $10,000 deductible before 2012. Now he pays double.

“It’s pretty spectacular,” he said.

The Kecsegs also faced a medical emergency this year that proved expensive, he said. In May, he suffered facial paralysis and had to be rushed to a hospital during a family reunion in Las Vegas. The emergency room care cost more than $3,000, he said.

“We’re paying it off over time,” he said.

“My wife says she’s had her uterus removed, so we’re not really likely to have need for that,” he said. “But we’re going to pay for it.”

LEO, VIRGINIA: ---From the Washington Post--

Rosalie Lacorazza, 42, and her husband, Leo Scott, 42, received a letter a few weeks ago from CareFirst notifying the Arlington couple about coming changes to their coverage. Lacorazza, an independent consultant, and Scott, who heads a small start-up company, pay about $450 a month for a health plan that allows them to choose their own doctors. Their out-of-pocket costs are capped at $2,800.

The Sept. 30 letter from CareFirst informed the couple that their plan does not meet the new requirements of the health-care law. As a result, “your current plan will cease upon your anniversary date” of March 1, the letter said.

The couple were given three options: apply for a new plan on the federal exchange, with coverage to begin Jan. 1; temporarily remain in their current plan beyond that date; or do nothing, in which case they would eventually lose coverage.

Lacorazza logged on to HealthCare.gov twice and got far enough to review insurance plans. Her initial search shocked her. The first plan with comparable deductibles was going to cost the couple nearly $2,100 a month. The second one would cost about $1,200 a month. The couple hasn’t decided what to do.

“In the end, if we’re forced to take a plan that is three times as much as we currently pay, and we like the plan we’re in, and if his promise was that we could keep our plan, that’s breaking his promise."

Cancelled policies, higher deductibles, higher premiums, lost coverage, paying for coverage that is totally not needed, paying more and getting less, higher co-pays, lost access to preferred doctors, etc. What a lousy piece of legislation from a lousy set of Washington politicians. How anyone can read these stories and the other unfolding disasters from Obama Care and STILL claim that this is a good law is either living in alternate universe or is a Washington politician who has protected themselves from the scourges of this law.

More disasters next month from the legislaiotn that never seems to stop ruining American lives and the American economy.

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