February, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Higher Costs, Lower Quality, More Agony

For over a year we have had to dedicate multiple posts each month to cover the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. If you follow all of the disasters from this legislation that we have discussed, you cannot help but conclude that this is the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington. 

Millions and millions of Americans have been forced off of their current and preferred health insurance policies. Millions have lost access to their preferred doctors. Millions have lost access to their preferred hospitals. Millions are paying higher premiums and deductibles than before. Over a trillion dollars will be added to the national debt. Unemployment and underemployment has been made worse because of the law’s criteria. Economic growth has been stifled. Millions of Americans are now at a much higher threat of identity theft as a result of the poor data system processes of the law. Many Americans now have health insurance, at a higher cost, but are having trouble getting access to health care as doctors are retiring earlier as a result of the law and many doctors are not accepting the lower payments they will receive from Obama Care insurance customers. And after tens years, there will likely still be tens of millions of Americans who do not have health insurance coverage despite the purported objective of Obama Care.

And as we have pointed out dozens and dozens of times, the legislation will never be successful because it never addressed the underlying root causes of our high health care costs in this country. Obama put forth an insurance solution to a public health problem:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans drink too much alcohol.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• America’s food chain is infected and infested with high fructose corn syrup and sugar.
• America is aging making citizens much more likely to be victims of aging diseases such as dementia and Alzheimers.
• Medical practice tort reform is needed nationally and has been shown to work at the state level.
• Cross state border insurance company competition needs to be encouraged.
• The Federal government loses tens of billions of dollars every year via Medicare and Medicaid through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud, money that could be used to make America healthier, not criminals wealthier.

In the face if these ten root causes, Obama chose to ignore all of them and put n place a Rube Goldberg like government bureaucracy that has no chance of succeeding. To prove this point, let’s take a couple of days and look at the latest unfolding disasters being spawned by Obama Care:

1) We have already discussed the failure of the second largest Obama Care health co-op in the country, CoOportunity Health in Iowa. These co-ops were supposed to be an Obama Care shining star, providing inexpensive healthcare insurance alternatives to traditional insurance companies. CoOportunity took on many more customers than expected with a mix that was sicker than expected. This resulted in payouts for sick customers that overwhelmed premium payments.

David Hogberg, writing for Amy Ridenour’s national blog on January 30, 2015 provided some additional details of the failure:

• According to Mr. Hogberg, CoOportunity lost $146 million in taxpayer money before it went bankrupt.
• According to the Des Moines Register: “Federal officials wouldn’t let CoOportunity charge enough in premiums to cover those people’s costs and the carrier wound up losing piles money before dropping out in October.”
• Ironically, CoOportunity was a victim of Obama’s illegal move to allow some people keep their existing insurance programs despite Obama Care deadlines and schedules, which forced co-ops like CoOportunity to settle with customers that were uninsured and likely had a higher incidence of sickly, and more expensive, customers.
• Of the remaining 23 co-ops, Mr. Hogberg foresees a lot of problems.
• A recent report from rating company A.M. Best found that only one -co-op had NOT incurred financial losses by the 3rd quarter of 2014.
• The total financial losses across all of the 24 co-ops is about a quarter of a billion dollars.
• But this should not be a surprise since back in July, 2013, the Inspector General of the Health and Human Services released an analysis of 16 co-op applications. The analysis found that that there was “little evidence of private monetary support in any of the 16 applications we reviewed. Additionally, 11 of the 16 co-ops reported estimated startup expenditures in their applications that exceeded the total startup funding ultimately provided by CMS.” 
• So far taxpayers have been hit with over $2 billion in funding for these co-ops even though two years ago it was already known that they were financial time bombs. Fortunately, the funding for these failed experiments has been shutdown to avoid further wasting of money.

Just another unfolding, and expensive, Obama Care disaster.

2) The following covers ground that we have already touched on but it is good to review on a regular basis some of the many reasons why Obama Care has been a dismal failure with no chance of success. The following synopsis comes from an article written for the Heritage Foundation by Alyene Senger that reviewed five major reasons why Obama Care needs to be repealed:

• Obama Care increases the nation’s health spending by a disgusting $1.8 TRILLION over the next ten years despite the fact that it was supposed to “bend the cost curve," and reduce the high costs of health care in this country. Part of the payment of the $1.8 TRILLION comes from unprecedented cuts in Medicare to the tune of $700 billion. These cuts will likely result in senior citizens seeing a drop in the quality and amount of access they have to health care in the very years they need it most.
• Rather than increase the chances of people getting health care coverage, Obama Care has socked those that already had insurance coverage by forcing upwards of seven million Americans, who purchase individual insurance plans, to lose access to their current health care insurance, insurance that they were perfectly happy continuing with. But that is not the end of the damage. The Heritage Foundation estimates another four million Americans lost access to their employer provided health insurance coverage just in the first half of 2014. Finally, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over 7 million Americans will access to their current employer provided health insurance by 2016.
• Millions of Americans have lost access to their preferred doctors and hospitals as a result of Obama Care. A study by McKinsey and Co. found that 48% of all exchange plan networks were deemed to be “narrow,” i.e. had fewer doctors and health care options than average, and of these 48% narrow networks, 40% were classified as “ultra-narrow.”
• Despite the President’s vocal deception that Obama Care would reduce the cost of health insurance coverage, in 2014, the first full year of Obama Care, health insurance policies obtained in Obama Care exchanges were more expensive than comparable plans from 2013 in the individual insurance market in 42 states.
• Obama Care contains 18 separate tax increases, fees, and penalties, intended to remove $770 billion from the economy over a ten year period. This removal will not resolve the issue of every climbing healht care costs and will stifle job creation, innovation, new business start-ups, and existing business expansion.

High costs, higher debt, fewer choices, more taxes, Medicare cuts, more stress for Americans and their families, no chance of being successful. Seems like you could not have designed a more perfect failure if you were trying.

3) We are concluding every Obama Care update this week with examples of real life people going through real life trauma as a result of this legislation. You can see and experience other tales of woe at:

www.ourhealhtcarestories.com

MARGIE - NORTH DAKOTA As if they have not stolen enough of our SS with obamacare my insurance has really hit me hard. I was paying $70.00 for my Diabetic Insulin every 90 days, now it costs me $800.00 every 90 days for the same product.

STEPHEN - NEW JERSEY Business premiums went from $1600 to $2900 for two families while our deductible nearly doubled to $5000. The pressure on our business to produce is ridiculous. I work constantly. We are dropping it if it goes up again.

JANETTE - CALIFORNIA The chiropractor who expects her premiums to rise, the 60s-something company manager who has to pay for maternity coverage, the Simi Valley contractor and many others who make at least $46,000 a year -- they all pound away at the same rhythm.

They say the middle class is once again getting tattooed, this time by President Barack Obama's health care reform.

"However you look at it, the son of a gun lied to us," said Janette Ramsey, a Bakersfield business owner with a weekend home in Ventura. She's losing her current coverage and expects to pay $50 more a month for a policy with nearly double the deductible.

"I think it's an abomination," she said. "... I'm going to pay more and get 100 percent less."

EMILIE LAMB - I’ve had to take a second job in order to pay for my ObamaCare plan. Given my health problems, the physical and emotional drain that this puts on me is difficult to bear. It’s also made it much more difficult for me to care for my ailing mother, who depends on me for help.

To read more about Emilie's situation, go here: 

http://nypost.com/2014/02/03/betrayed-by-the-president-and-obamacare/

Also, see Emilie speak about her hardship in this video from AFP: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ibO2D9vt0 

Sad, sad stories of suffering Americans as a consequence of this ill defined failure of a law. Higher costs, lower quality, more pain and agony that was really unnecessary for a law that has no chance of working since it never addressed the root causes of the problem. But again, not unexpected since problem solving has never been a skill that the American political class possesses to any degree. More unfolding disasters tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

December, 2014, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care:The Government Knows What's Best, Obama Care Tax Subsidy Crisis, Gruber Tangles Himself Up, and More

It is the middle of another month, which means it is time for another set of monthly update posts on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have written extensively on this subject for a number of years now, finally evolving our writing into a monthly update series beginning in the summer of 2013.

The first post in this month’s update series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/12/december-2014-part-1-unfolding-disaster.html

This is the fifth post in this month’s disaster update.

It is our contention, backed up with dozens of blog posts and hundreds of examples, that Obama Care is easily the worst piece of legislation ever produced and enacted by the Washington political class. To prove out point, just review previous posts by entering the search term, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above or just browse through the previous monthly posts over the past years to find out why this law is so bad.

Below are just a few of the many failings of the law:

• While the law did get health insurance coverage for millions of uninsured Americans, it also caused millions of Americans to actually lose their current health care insurance coverage.
• Rather than decrease the annual cost of health insurance for Americans households by $2,500, as promised by President Obama, on average, it actually increased the cost of household health insurance.
• Rather than being able to retain access to their preferred doctors, hospitals and drug treatments, millions of Americans lost access to their preferences despite Obama’s promises that they would not lose that access.
• Despite the promise that the number of emergency room visits would go down, the volume of visits has gone up.
• The law made a doctor shortage crisis even worse.
• The law’s weak data systems operations placed millions of Americans at a high risk of identity theft.
• The law has resulted in the American taxpayer subsidizing abortion expenses despite the promise that Obama Care insurance policy subsidizes would not allow taxpayer money to subsidize abortions.
• The law never addressed the underlying root causes of high health care costs in this country (e.g. a fat, sugar, and salt infested food chain, smoking addictions, lack of exercise, aging diseases, etc.) and thus has no chance of actually doing what it was supposed to do, reduce health care costs in this country.
• The law has stunted economic growth and employment growth throughout the economy.
• The law will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt despite the Obama promise that it would actually reduce the national debt.

This is probably just a partial list of the bad things this law has done to the country. Let’s read on to see the latest disasters from this disastrous piece of legislation. 

1) Robert Moffit and Kenneth Manyari-Magro, writing for the heritage Foundation, did some nice summary work from a numbers perspective on how badly Obama Care has performed and is performing:

• While more Americans have insurance now than before Obama Care was enacted, the cost has been staggering, quite possibly over $5 billion already spent just on the online exchanges.
• While the Obama administration originally crowed that 8.6 million Americans had received health care insurance under the legislation, that number quickly dropped down to 7.1 million when 1.5 million people never followed through with payment after their initial interest in obtaining Obama Care insurance coverage.
• That 7.1 million was recently downgraded to 6.7 million when the administration “mistakenly” included Obama Care policies that were strictly dental policies and had nothing to do with other medical care.
• But in the first two quarters of 2014, the Heritage Foundation writers estimate that 3.8 million Americans LOST insurance coverage as a direct result of Obama Care so that 6.7 million number discussed above should really be reduced by 3.8 million to 2.9 million to get the true, incremental impact of Obama Care. [note: more recent estimates from other sources peg the current number of Americans who lost insurance coverage As a result of Obama Care closer to six million, making the true, incremental impact of the law only 700,000.]
• Going back to the original 8.5 million administration estimate of people who got health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care, 6.1 million or about 71% of that 8.5 million were new enrollees to Medicaid, a poorly run, low quality government operated health insurance program.
• Looking forward, the administration has already dropped its forecast for total Obama Care enrollees in 2015 from 13 million to between 9 and 9.9 million, upwards of a 30% reduction.
•  So not only are fewer people enrolling than promised, costs are going up. An analysis of insurance premiums between 2013 and 2014 found that in individual health insurance markets premiums increased substantially in the vast majority of states. 
• For persons age 50, who benefit from younger people paying more than their actuarial risk would entail, premiums in 13 states went up by 50% or more. The House Ways and Means Committee found that families unable to access employee-based insurance coverage lived through, on average, a 24.4% increase in their premiums.
• In 2014, the deductible for an Obama Care Silver plan in the Federal health insurance exchange was nationally over $2,700 on average, compared to the average annual deductible of just over $1,000 for employer based health care insurance plans. 

Higher costs, lower registration numbers, sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A very bad piece of legislation.

2) The Red State website recently ran some news on a new regulation proposal from Health and Human Services (HHS). Moe Lane wrote on November 22, 2014 that HHS is thinking about adapting a policy that would allow the Federal government to automatically choose your Obama Care policy for you: “Here’s a Friday Obamacare news-dump for you: In a 300-page regulation proposal released late this afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is considering changing Obamacare’s auto-renewal rules so that, within the health law’s exchanges, instead of being automatically renewed into your current health plan, you’d be moved into the lowest cost plan from the same service tier.”

Thus, rather than you taking responsibility for your health care insurance and let the auto-renewal keep you in the same Obama Care policy you currently have, the government wants to take over and automatically downsize you to a cheaper policy as the default for annual renewal. Thus, if you are no careful, you could end up with a different policy every year with a different set of forms and procedures, a different set of doctors, a different set of hospitals, a different set of drug coverage options, etc.

Why would the government want to do this? Simple: since it is highly likely that your current policy cost will go up every year making it politically dangerous for supporters of Obama Care, the government wants to downsize you to cheaper plans to make it look like costs are not going up as fast and to avoid political fallout for politicians. 

But besides the issue and hassle we just discussed of having different medical networks, doctors, etc. every year, cheaper usually means not as good from a quality of coverage and care perspective. Thus, it is not a stretch of the imagination that a malady that is covered this year under your current Obama Care policy would not be covered next year when the government automatically shifts you to a cheaper policy that does not cover the same malady. At that point your health and family financials could take a serious hit, all to satisfy a government and political mandate, your health and needs be damned.

3) We have always maintained that Obama Care never went after the root causes of our nation’s high health care costs. One of the biggest root causes is the reality that Americans, on average, are overweight and many are obese. 

According to an article from the Wall Street Journal that was summarized in the June 13, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, according to a 2014 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, there are about 2.1 billion obese people in the world, about 30% of the entire world’s population. 87 million of them live in the Untied States. 87 million.

Imagine how much health care costs would go down if somehow, via an effective and long term public health initiative, we could get rid of the obesity in this country. There would be fewer heart attacks and heart disease issues. There would be far fewer diabetes instances and related health care costs. Other obesity related diseases and ailments would plummet. And if your reduce the demand for any product or service, in this case medical service for obesity related ailments, the immutable laws of economics say the cost of those products and services has to come down.

Even if Obama Care got twenty million Americans new health insurance coverage, the root causes of high health care costs, e.g. massive obesity in this country, would still exist and still be driving up health care costs.

4)  David Hogberg, Ph.D. is senior fellow for health care policy at the National Center for Public Policy Research who has written extensively on the fallacies and disasters of Obama Care. He recently did an extensive piece where he took the Congressional testimony of Jonathan Gruber and laid it up against the reality of Obama Care and the impacts we have seen so far from the legislation.

For example, during his testimony, Gruber claimed people that obtained their Obama Care insurance from the Federal online health care exchange are supposed to receive tax subsidies/credits to help pay for their insurance premiums. However, Mr. Hogberg points to a video from January, 2012 where Gruber publicly states: "If you're a state and you don't set up your exchange, then your citizens don't get their tax credits.”

This is just one of the many areas that Mr. Hogberg covers where Gruber gets himself, and the bigger Obama Care picture, tied up in lies, deceptions, and hypocrisies. Rather than me trying to do justice to his analysis, I refer you to his original work and analysis at:

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA668.html

That will do it for this month’s unfolding disaster s that is Obama care. It continually amazes both us and the nation that one piece of legislation is so bad that years and years after it was passed we still find enough new disasters every month to write about it across four or five days. It is the piece of legislation that keeps on giving in new and odious ways. I am sure that we will be back next month, same time, but with an entirely new set of disasters to contend with.

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