January, 2019, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Why Trump's Dismantling of Obama Care is A Good News Story

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.

We talk a lot about how bad Obama Care is and deservedly so. It kicked millions of Americans off of their existing and satisfactory healthcare plans. It denied access to their favorite doctors and hospitals. It raised premiums and deductibles while reducing coverage and options. It’s data systems operations exposed millions of Americans to increased identity theft threats. It caused many doctors to leave the profession, worsening an already bad doctor shortage. It added trillions of dollars to the national debt. It treated a public health problem as an insurance problem, leading to its inevitable failure.

Fortunately, there has been some movement to fix this monstrosity of a law to give Americans a break financially and medically regarding their health and health insurance:

• Let’s start with the following link which does a good job explaining why Obama Care was never going to work in the first place:

https://www.libertyplanet.com/articles/why-obamacare-was-never-going-to-work/

• Deroy Murdock, writing for the National Review on October 26, 2018, explains how the Trump administration is trying to fix what Obama broke.
• By signing the “Right To Try” legislation, Trump okayed the rights of terminally ill Americans to try experimental drugs not yet approved by the FDA in a last attempt to save their lives, an act that will positively affect over one million sick Americans a year.
• According to Trump this act will stop the following desperate practice: “People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure. I want to give them a chance right here at home.”
• Sadly, only 22 Democrats voted for this act in the House, raising the question why the other 169 Democrats would not give sick Americans a chance at life?
• Congress eliminated the individual mandate penalty that Obama Care imposed, a penalty that fined and made criminals out of ordinary Americans if they did not choose to obtain healthcare insurance, which according to Trump: “People are paying a lot of money for the privilege of not paying a lot of money for bad health care. And we’ve ended it.” 
• Trump signed legislation that killed Obama Care’s Independent Payments Advisory Board, also known as the “Death Panel,” which would have rationed health care in this country based on costs.
• Last June the Trump administration re-established “association health plans," which will allow entrepreneurs, small employers, and civic organizations to ban together to get reduced insurance groups rates from insurance companies, plans that extend across state lines, something that Obama Care killed.
• The Trump administration extended the length of short-term, limited health insurance plans from three months to one year, with renewals permitted up to three years. 
• According to the article, the cost savings from these short term plans are significant because of this extension: “For example, according to E-Health, the average lowest premium for an Obamacare plan for a 40-year-old woman is about $4,200 per year,” Trump noted. “By contrast, the average lowest premium for short-term coverage for this individual is about $1,300 a year — a savings of $3,000,” or 69 percent off.”
• These short term plans are cheaper because they are more customized and narrow to a person’s individual health needs: “Every Obamacare plan must include pediatric vision coverage — even if the policy holder is childless, sterile, and mortally terrified of small, screaming objects.”
• Trump now requires hospitals to post their prices for health care online so that customers can finally shop around for the best prices for their hospital needs and force hospitals to become more efficient because of the visibility of their costs.
• In addition, the President signed two pieces of legislation that increase drug price transparency: “Our great citizens deserve to know the lowest price available at our pharmacies. They’ll be able to see pricing. … And as they start leaving certain pharmacies, those pharmacies will be dropping their prices.”
• Trump removed so-called “gag clauses" on Medicare Part D drug plans so that now pharmacists can tell patients about more cost effective drug options.
• The current administration sped up the FDA drug approval process, so much so that in 2017 the FDA approved over 1,000 generic drugs, the most in its history, which should reduce Americans’ drug costs.
• The administration has already approved seven state waivers that give states more flexibility to serve their sickest patients by allowing insurance companies to lower premiums: “We have approved seven state waivers that provide federal assistance to help states pay for the sickest patients and allow insurers to keep premiums lower, all without increasing taxpayer burden,” Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), wrote last week. “These waivers appear to be working. For example, Wisconsinites will see their individual market premiums decrease by an average of 11 percent, due to the waiver.”
• The administration loosened the reins on Health Reimbursement Accounts, allowing employers to more easily deposit up to $1,800 into an employee's HRA account each year to offset healthcare costs, killing a stupid Obama Care ban on such plans.

All good steps, much of which begin to address the root causes of high healthcare costs we listed above. A lot more has to be done: we need public health efforts to get Americans to stop smoking, start eating right, start exercising and doing a number of other things to address this public health problem. But fortunately, the overbearing, one size fits all monstrosity and bureaucracy of Obama Care is starting to fall away and being replaced with more rational, effective, and efficient processes.

Keep in mind that Obama Care was supposed to “bend the cost curve” of ever increasing healthcare costs. Obama himself promised that many American families would see upwards of a $2,500 reduction in their annual health insurance costs. Instead, according to HealthCare.gov, average annual individual insurance premiums increased a whopping 105% from 2013 to 2017, from $2,784 to $5,712. 

But given the above changes, Obama Care premiums are actually expected to decrease 1.5% in 2019, the first decrease ever, with customers in Pennsylvania seeing a 16% decrease and those in Tennessee seeing a 26% decrease. More insurance companies are entering the individual insurance market, for the first time since Obama Care went into effect. 

So something good is going on. It is just a shame that Obama Care delayed the good news for seven years, causing havoc and financial strain on millions of Americans in the process.

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

Janaury, 2015, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Gruber and Presidential LIes, A 2017 Price Tsunami, And Taxing/Stifling Innovation

We spent the week or so reviewing the latest insanity from the Washington political class. Wasteful spending by many different government entities but especially the Defense Department,  fraud riddled government programs, government programs that seem to always be over budget and under delivering, and a whole array of other insanity and idiocy.

We stayed away from the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care since that piece of legislation deserves its own, dedicated set of insanity posts. For many years, but especially over the past two years, we have written extensively on the myriad of disasters that this law keeps spawning. To review these past disasters, enter the search term  "the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care" in the search box above.

Today is the second in the two part update to the Obama Care disasters that began yesterday:

1) Most people who follow the Obama Care legacy of disaster and deceit know who Jonathan Gruber is. He was a highly paid, MIT economist that is now generally viewed as one of the architects behind the Obama Care legislation. His economic models helped pave the way for the fiasco of Obama Care.

He was also the one who has been caught on video tape discussing how stupid Americans were and how the whole process of developing the legislation was done in the most non-transparent manner possible in order to hoodwink the public and get the legislation passed. His arrogance and condescension landed him in the front of Congressional committees where he was forced to eat a tremendous amount of humble pie and crow.

But apparently his history of talking too much is still catching up with him. In recently discovered videos and documents of his words, it turns out that most people working on the Obama Care legislation knew up front that Obama Care would be tremendously expensive and that the so-called cost control components of the legislation were merely mirages to hoodwink the country into getting the law passed.

In a 2009 interview, Gruber flatly states: “Why should we hold 48 million uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don’t yet know how to control costs in a politically acceptable way? Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control.” In other words, lets lie now to get the legislation enacted and worry about the costs later, if at all, since we do not know how to control costs today.

But that was not the public message that Obama went forth with. He stated flatly that his legislation would “bend the cost curve” and not add “one dime to the national debt.” In other words, they all lied since we now know that Gruber knew and as did everyone else pushing this disaster that the cost control aspect was pure fiction, courtesy of Gruber’s inability to keep his mouth shut and his ego under control.

But the lies go on, still courtesy of Gruber’s big mouth: “The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full cost.’” In other words, we are talking about a version of what Palin got crucified for, ”death panels.” Here is a primary architect of Obama Care basically admitting that at some point in time, the government and the politicians that operate it will determine whether you and I are entitled to health care treatment.

That my friend is a definition of a death panel. Bureaucrats making life and death decisions for you despite the fact you were told that death panels were not a reality within the Obama Care realm. It is cost control via health care denial,  death panel and government edict. Thus, Obama on down lied about this also. They knew years ago that they had no clue how to control costs but said they did and never admitted that care denial was their only answer to cost control.

2) Speaking of cost control, Stephen Parente recently wrote about what is going to happen to Obama Care insurance costs in 2017 in his article, “Lull Before The Obama Care Rate Storm.” He points out that the rate increases on Obama Care policies were higher this year but not outrageously higher: “Americans visiting Healthcare.gov to purchase 2015 health-insurance plans are finding a nice surprise: Average premiums for the cheap “bronze” plans have increased only by 3.4% and premiums for the middle-of-the-road “silver” plans are rising by 5.8%, according to the American Action Forum. Where are the double-digit premium increases that so many predicted?”

Now this is still bad news in a sense since the President stated, in what is likely another of his many lies and deceptions, that the average American family would see a $2,500 annual decrease in their insurance policy costs once Obama Care was in effect. Obviously, the undelivered promise of a $2,500 decrease is a far cry from single digit increases.

But this disconnect gets far worse in a year or two. The legislation established two, temporary programs that make Obama Care policies far cheaper than the reality of the market: risk corridors and reinsurance. Without going into the gory details, the Obama administration is using taxpayer dollars to subsidize Obama Care insurance policy costs, administered through these two programs, until the end of the year 2016.

Beginning in 2017, these two programs are scheduled to disappear and the insurance companies will set their Obama Care policy costs based strictly on market conditions without the crutch of taxpayer support. According to Mr. Parente,  “This is why premiums on Healthcare.gov are cheaper than many predicted. The taxpayer’s generosity allows insurance companies to hide the true cost this time in 2016. That’s when you’ll see the real spikes.”

What happens when the taxpayer subsidies go away, which they will likely do since it is unlikely that the Republican controlled Congress is going to allow Obama to extend those subsidies beyond their current termination dates? Well a recent study from the University of Minnesota’s Medical Industry Leadership Institute took a shot at estimating the impacts of the subsidy withdrawal to insurance companies. Their forecasts are chilling from a family budget perspective:

• Bronze plans could increase 45% for families, to about $13,000 from $9,000.
• Individual plans could see a 96% spike, to nearly $4,000 from $2,000.
• Other plan types, silver, gold and platinum, will see smaller, but still significant, increases but they are already very, very expensive.
• Premiums for cheaper plans will increase at a faster rate because their deductibles will likely decrease to meet ACA regulations starting in 2016.
• The study’s authors and analysts estimate that premiums will continue to rise after 2017 at higher rates than they did BEFORE Obama Care was enacted. In other words, the legislation made a bad situation worse in  the long run.
• They go on to estimate that as costs go up, fewer and fewer people will pay for the now higher priced policies and will either move to cheaper, less comprehensive policies or terminate their insurance coverage altogether, the exact opposite of what Obama Care intended.

Now, whose number and forecasts should one believe, these from the University of Minnesota or Gruber’s MIT based forecasts? Given that Gruber’s models and lies have not worked out well or accurately, I would place my bet on the University of MInnesota’s models and forecasts since 1) many of them are already coming true and 2) their assumptions in 2017 are based on the reality of the legislation as it is written, i.e. those subsidies to insurance companies are going to go away.

So, higher costs and less people insured, the exact opposite of what the legislation set out to do. But so typical of Washington laws, they never attain their objective and usually make a problem situation worse. And in 2017, when premiums are skyrocketing and people are dropping their coverage, the root causes of our high health care costs, causes that we have listed numerous times in this blog, will still be present and still driving up health care costs.

Mr. Parent closes his article with a good description of the rock and hard place the legislation is in: “This leaves the Affordable Care Act in a precarious position. It was sold on the promises of affordability and universal coverage, yet neither promise can be kept after 2017. America’s debate over health-care reform is only getting started.”

3) One of the most negative aspects of Obama Care is that it has placed a tax on so-called medical devices to help pay for the legislation’s staggering costs. As a result, with less money to invest, medical device companies have been reducing their research and development expense, have restricted hiring or have already laid people off (with one comprehensive study estimating that 33,000 jobs have already been lost due to the tax), and have sought cheaper manufacturing options overseas, all because the taxes from Obama Care have impacted their operating profits.

This will have long term impacts across the board.The economy will grow less since more manufacturing would have left our shores. Unemployment will go up since hiring is constricted or reduced to keep expenses under control. And more importantly, with a reduction in research, life saving or life improving technologies in the medical device world may go undiscovered or delayed, making life more miserable for those the need help.

How real are these concerns? Quite real, if you believe the article recently written by Sean Hackbarth for the Heritage Foundation, “Medical Device Pioneer: If Medical Device Tax Existed When I Started I Wouldn’t Have Been As Successful.”

The pioneer is named Dr. Tom Fogarty and he is the inventor of the balloon catheter that is used to open blockages in blood vessels. His invention has probably been used millions of times to help get the blood flowing again in people's clogged blood vessels, saving lives, reducing health care costs, and making life more enjoyable for those with this  type of problem. Last year he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in a ceremony at the White House.

But he recently penned an article in USA Today where he made the common sense argument against the medical device tax of Obama Care: “There is no way I could have had the same impact if the tax on medical devices was in place when I started over 50 years ago.”

In another interview, this one with last fall with the Silicon Valley Business Journal, he explained how and why investment in American device startups has dried up along with the innovation  that these start ups might have brought to market: “It has had an absolutely huge impact. Nothing will start in the United States because of that tax. It will all go offshore. You can't start a business and pay taxes when you're not making any money. It's a non-starter. [The 2.3% tax applies to revenue not income.]”

That will do it for this update on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We found more lies from Gruber and this President regarding cost containment and death panels, we can expect gigantic health insurance rate increases in less than two years, and Americans are losing out on what science and technology can bring to our lives and to reducing health care costs as a medical device tax is stifling innovation, inventions, and better lives besides hurting economic growth. Three big disasters from the biggest disaster of a law ever passed by Washington. 

Stay healthy my friends, you cannot afford not to an Obama Care world.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

September, 2014, Part 7, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - This Months Wrap Up Fiascos

This is our seventh and hopefully last update to our continuing series that looks at the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. For years, and especially over the past thirteen months, we have had to dedicate many posts each month to cover the fiascoes and heartache that this insipid piece of legislation has generated. This law has increased health care costs, increased taxes, increased unemployment, depressed economic growth, created serious identify theft opportunities for criminals, and created other disasters that are too numerous to mention here.

All of these disasters have been incurred for very little upside to what ails the health care system in this country. The legislation never understood and thus, never attacked, the underlying root causes of our health care problems. Obama Care just made a bad situation even worse.

Let’s see if can wrap up this month’s disaster today and make the pain stop….at least until next month.

1) A new analysis and report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York proved that Obama Care is having a significant negative impact on employers' health care coverage, employment, and even on consumer prices. The report, entitled “August 2014 Empire State Manufacturing Survey and its Business Leaders Survey” states how "how the ACA [Obama Care] is affecting businesses and how businesses are responding to the new legislation.”

Other findings include:

• The manufacturing companies surveyed foresee a median increase of 10% in their health care coverage costs from 2013 to 2014, and the service firms reported a 9% increase. Both surveys predicted a 10% increase in 2015.
• Almost 40% of the manufacturing firms said Obama Care has increased their per-worker health benefit costs "a little" this year, and 34.9% said "a lot." 
• For service firms, 38.4% said "a little" and 20% said "a lot."
• Over 84% of manufacturing companies making modifications report that they are raising deductibles and almost 79% are increasing co-pays.
• Service firms that are making modifications found that 76.5% are raising deductibles, and 79.4% are increasing co-pays.
• Almost 22% of manufacturing firms said they are reducing the number of workers they employ, 19.3% are raising their proportion of part-time workers, 19.3% are increasing outsourcing, and 36.4% are raising the prices they charge customers.
• For service firms, 25% are raising prices, and 20.2% are increasing their proportion of part-time workers.
• A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia showed similar results, with many firms increasing their part-time workers and outsourcing, raising employee contributions to health care coverage, deductibles, and co-pays, and raising the prices they charge customers.

No surprises here, based on previous reporting we have done: fewer full time workers, higher prices, higher insurance premiums and deductibles, and the stifling of economic growth. Tough to argue what a lousy piece of legislation this is from an employment and economic perspective, at least in the eyes of the Federal Reserve Board.

2) Computer hackers infected a Healthcare.gov computer server this summer, again raising the specter of easy identity theft within the Obama Care computer systems. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is demanding a key Obama Care official testify before his committee after the Obama administration revealed hackers had successfully breached HealthCare.gov.

The entire open enrollment process starts up again in a month or so so having hackers getting into the same systems that will support the open enrollment so close to the new enrollment season has to make any American leery about giving up their personal information to a less than secure computer process.

3) One of the many false promises Obama put forth in support of the Obama Care disaster was that there would be little, if any, incremental increase in the Federal national debt burden as a result of Obama Care. However, a Washington Examiner article by Phillip Klein on September 3, 2014 puts lends some serious credence to the fact that his comment on the debt was another lie or false promise since by 2023, all levels of U.S. governments will be spending $2.5 trillion a year on the nation‘s health care. That will be a 78% increase from the $1.4 trillion that is spent today. 

It is very difficult/impossible to believe that adding over a trillion dollars a year to government budgets, just to cover health care costs, will not dramatically increase the national debt. Thus, another Obama and Obama Care promise exploded, the minimizing the impact on the national debt is pure fallacy.

4) The website, www.humanevents.com, recently ran an extensive summary of the many negative impacts and attributes of Obama Care. While it covers many of the disasters we have discussed in this series, I strongly recommend you go to the following link for another in-depth perspective on how bad this legislation really is:

http://humanevents.com/2014/09/17/obamacares-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-autumn/?utm_source=iacfbp&utm_medium=fbpage&utm_campaign=IAC

Their analysis pulls information from a wide and diverse set of sources. A sample of their sources include the following insights and warnings:

- From Watchdog.org: The Manhattan Institute, a think tank that studies health care issues among others, found that older men (around age 64) are the only general group benefiting from lower rates than before because of the ACA. Young men (around age 27) are suffering the most from higher premiums as a result of Obamacare — an average 67 percent monthly increase.

- The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that the top-selling insurance provider in Minnesota in the first year of Obama Care health exchanges is bailing completely out of the Obama Care market going forward: Golden Valley-based PreferredOne had set the lowest premium prices in the nation last year and signed up nearly 6 in 10 consumers who shopped on the MNsure exchange. But the insurer’s CEO, Marcus Merz, said this week in a letter to the exchange’s leaders that “continuing to provide this coverage through MNsure is not sustainable.

The move could portend higher health care premiums in the year ahead and is the latest setback for an exchange that suffered persistent technical problems in its debut year. “That’s a huge blow to MNsure,” said Allan Baumgarten, an independent Twin Cities health care analyst.

- From USA Today reports: Premiums for employer-paid insurance are up 3% this year, but deductibles are up nearly 50% since 2009, the report by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows. The average deductible this year is $1,217, up from $826 five years ago. Nearly 20% of workers overall have to pay at least $2,000 before their insurance kicks in, while workers at firms with 199 or fewer employees are feeling the pain of out-of-pocket costs even more: A third of these employees at small companies pay at least $2,000 deductibles.

From the Wall Street Journal: University of Chicago economist Casey B. Mulligan foresees an economic impact that will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and that’s just lost income and productivity incidentally wiped out by ObamaCare, on top of its explicit and hidden direct costs… The Affordable Care Act is weakening the economy. And for the large number of families and individuals who continue to pay for their own health care, health care is now less affordable.

More expert opinions, more bad news for America’s health, families, and health care.

5) Sarah Palin was ridiculed when she correctly predicted that Obama Care involved a death panel component that would tend to shut down or restrict medical treatment for older Americans. Was she crazy? 

We have already reported on the fact that the Federal government is going to pay doctors who counsel patients on the options of getting medical treatment at an advanced age. The Obama Care legislation included the creation of a panel to look at costly treatments, usually the type that apply to older, sicker Americans, to see if they were needed and cost effective.

And if those two developments were not creepy enough, consider what one of the main architects of the Obama care legislation recently said in an interview in The Atlantic: “I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop."

This quote came out of the mouth of Ezekiel Emanuel in The Atlantic, a primary developer and proponent of the legislation, a clear statement that age 75 is a good time to check out of life. He want on to say: “That’s how long I want to live: 75 years. This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well.” And, at older ages, “We literally lose our creativity.”

If the creator of the legislation thinks we should all check out at age 75, does anyone still think that Sarah Palin was crazy?

6) Let’s wrap up this post and this month’s unfolding disaster review of Obama Care with a simple story of how the legislation has failed to rein in health care costs, the primary objective of the whole effort in the first place. NBC 4 New York television station in New York City recently reported that last August, Baer Hanusz-Rajkowski, of Bayonne, New Jersey accidentally cut his finger with the claw-end of a hammer. 

He waited a few days for the wound to heal but the cut didn’t seem to be closing. Thus, he went to the Bayonne Medical Center emergency room to see whether or not he should get stitches. The nurse practitioner determined no stitches were necessary, he says, and no other treatments such as X-rays were done besides a tetanus shot and a band aid.

As a result of this simple interaction, he was charged an obscene and amazing amount of over $8,800 for the whole encounter at the hospital. This included $180 for the tetanus shot, $242 for sterile supplies (i.e. a band aid), several hundred dollars for the nurse practitioner’s services (which likely lasted only a few minutes), $8 for antibacterial ointment, and a whopping $8,200 to cover the emergency room visit. Unbelievable.

This is what happens when you do not understand the underlying root causes of a problem: any solution you come up with is likely to fail since whatever you do, the underlying problems continue to fester. Obama Care never understood the root causes of our high health care costs and thus never resolved the problem of $242 for a band aid and $8,800 for a simple hospital visit for a simple problem. Those ridiculous and obscene costs continue to haunt the country today in spite of Obama Care, and in many cases, because of Obama Care.

That will do it for this month’s Obama Care disasters. I would like to hope that we will never visit this topic again, that all of the possible disasters have already been covered. The odds of that happening are as good as any Obama Care promise actually coming true. See you next month, same time, same disastrous 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:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2014, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 3: Costs Still Going Up, deaths Panels on The Horizon, and Dying While Waiting

Yes, the world has been a mess lately. Fighting in the Gaza Strip, downed airliners, Russians fighting Ukrainians, the economy still stagnant, Iraq being torn apart, Syrian civil war still killing thousands, veterans still not getting the proper medical treatment, a border that is a humanitarian crisis, etc. In the background though, has been the continuing and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

We have had to devote many posts every month to this fiasco since last August. The fallout from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by Washington just keeps on giving and messing up Americans’ lives. This month is no exception. We will probably need most of this week to cover it all, that is how bad the law is many, many months after it was rolled out in such a disastrous manner last fall. 

As with previous months, we will likely stop talking about it this month not because we ran out of material but because it can get so depressing going over the damage the legislation is doing to lives, health, freedom and the economy.

This is our third update post for this month’s Obama Care disasters. The first post can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/07/july-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

1) The Washington Examiner ran an article on July 10, 2014 by Philip Klein that discussed the coming rate increases that Obama care policy holders are likely to experience in 2015. Highlights from that article include the following:

• One driver of higher premium costs in 2015 is the fact that Obama Care policies must offer a certain, large set of benefits and services regardless of the specific needs of a specific customer, a set of benefits that is expensive and often unneeded but required by the law.
• The second cost amplifying reason is that insurers are now required to accept anyone who applies, including those with pre-existing conditions, so that their costs go up which means everyone’s premiums eventually must also go up. 
• Obama Care also limits the amount that insurers can charge older and sicker patients relative to younger and healthier patients, driving the costs up for the latter group who end up subsidizing the care of older, sicker customers.
• Obama Care will collect over $100 billion in taxes on insurance plans between 2014 and 2022. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the taxes “would be largely passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums for private coverage.”
• A June, 2014 detailed county-level analysis of insurance premiums by Avik Roy and a team at the Manhattan Institute found that, on average, individual market premiums jumped by 49% in 2014 as compared to 2013, likely due to the reasons listed above.
• A PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis of premiums across 18 states in which insurers have submitted filings for next year, found that in 2015, rates would be going up in those states by an average of more than 7%. 
• In six of those states, increases are likely to be in the double digits.
• According to eHealth, a website for purchasing medical coverage, the average monthly rate for health insurance premiums in Indiana was $172 in 2013. But by 2015, according the PricewaterhouseCoopers study, the state average will be $514, about three times higher after Obama Care is implemented.
• On top of all of these upward forcing pressures, the only factor keeping the rates from not going higher is the fact is that insurance companies have responded to Obama Care by reducing the choice of doctors and hospitals offered in their plans. This helps cap costs but results in increasingly narrow and inferior medical care and choices.

No surprises here to anyone who has read our ongoing commentary on Obama Care. Many other analysts and researchers have come to the same conclusion, namely that Obama Care is doing the opposite of what the President promised it would do. It is causing insurance costs to spike higher rather than decrease an average of $2,500 a year for an average American family.

2) We have seen the ever widening scandal at the Veterans Administration where it appears that the Federal government has been quite inept in providing care to our veterans. The fear, of course, is that the same incompetence and huge expense will occur as Obama Care rolls out and costs us much more with minimal benefit in return.

A recent report out of Great Britain adds more evidence to the argument that governments and politicians are quite incapable of operating a nationwide health system in an effective and efficient manner. Details of their latest nationalized health care scandal includes the following details:

• The Royal College of Surgeons recently issued a report claiming that the British National Health Services (NHS) is denying life-saving operations because of age discrimination in defiance of the law. 
• Recently uncovered documents prove for the first time that across large areas of the Britian no patients above the age of 75 are “receiving surgery for breast cancer or routine operations such as gall bladder removal and knee replacements.” 
• This should not come a surprise since nine years ago, back in 2005, the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a research report that predicted exactly what this latest report asserts: older citizens could be denied health care services because of a lack of funding combined with their advanced age. NICE concluded that it would just not be economically expedient to provide care for these older (and sicker) citizens.
• Because of budget considerations, the 2005 NICE report suggested that “patients could be denied certain health treatments because of their age.”

Can you say death panels? Maybe Sarah Palin was right after all. It is apparently happening in Great Britain when the government started running out of money to operate is version of nationalized health care. Given the ever escalating cost of Obama Care and the shoddy treatment of out vets relative to Federal government managed health care, who is to say the same thing will not be going on here as costs go up but funding levels cannot keep up. 

3) The saddest part of Obama Care is the reality that some Americans have already died as a result of the legislation. The Heritage Foundation recently reported on a recent fatality caused by Obama Care:

• A Nevada woman with a brain tumor who sued Nevada’s Obama Ccare exchange contractor for delayed coverage died recently as a result of complications from her illness.
• The woman, Linda Rolain, was among 150 Nevadans suing the contractor Xerox for lack of coverage via the Obama Care processes.
• Ms. Rolain’s lawyers issued the following statement as a result of her death: “We are worried that this is the first of many Nevadans who have life-threatening issues that may end up in such tragic circumstances.” 
• Rolain was diagnosed with the brain tumor in early 2014 but was unable to receive treatment for her cancer for months after her diagnosis due to enrollment problems with the state’s Obama Care exchange, Nevada Health Link.
• Her husband, Robert Rolain, asserts that his wife’s tumor went from treatable to fatal as they awaited coverage. 
• According to Las Vegas insurance broker Pat Casale, who helped Rolain with her enrollment issues, he knows several people who are “in serious need of care” but aren’t receiving it despite the fact that they’ve paid Obama Care insurance premiums: “This poor lady was told in January that she needed immediate attention. Her doctor said if she had begun treatment in March, he might been able to give her quality of care, and she might have lived longer. She had no chance because of the delay.”

This is what happens when politicians decide they know what is best for us, people die that did not need to die. Obama Care, even though it is a horrible piece of legislation, was not ready for reality when it was prematurely and selfishly rolled out last fall. 

The Federal government and the politicians who operate it had billions of dollars and years for the preparation of the program and still could not get it done. As a result, people are dying as they wait for the Obama Care mess to somehow mend itself, a miracle that is not likely to happen anytime soon or at anytime at all.

People are dying, costs are going up, and a clone of Obama Care in England has basically devolved into a death panel medical system. And there is more to come in the next few days, the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

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