September, 2016, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Higher and Higher Rates, Less and Less Competition and Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) We have already discussed the many disasters of Obama Care when it comes to delivering actual health insurance policies to Americans.Most of the Obama Care exchanges never came close to achieving their promised enrollment levels and at least one exchange never even got to provide one American an Obama Care insurance policy. More than two thirds of the Obama Care co-ops have already failed dramatically, causing their customers to lose their insurance coverage. And large insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare and Humana have withdrawn from the Obama Care business because it caused them to lose billions of dollars. 

And according to a USA Today article by Nathan Bomey on August 16, 2016, the carnage just got worse. The third largest health insurer in the country, Aetna, has announced that it will be folding down 70% of its Obama Care policies. It will exit all but four states it is currently operating in with Obama Care policies due to heavy financial losses from those Obama Care policies. This will cause thousands of its current Obama Care policy holders to lose their coverage by the end of the year and either go uninsured or seek out other options.

As with UnitedHealthcare and Humana, Aetna blamed its financial loses on the reality that not enough younger, healthier people signed up for Aetna’s Obama Care policies. This caused the company to not be able to suck money out of the healthy and young to service the unhealthy, the economic model that Obama Care is based on. 

Maybe, just maybe, we can now have a discussion on how fatally flawed that economic model is, Obama Care’s architect, MIT’s Jonathan Gruber’s arrogance notwithstanding. Worst piece of legislation ever passed based on a failed economic model and its utterly failed economic assumptions regarding human behavior.
2) So not only are Obama Care policy holders losing their insurance coverage as companies flee the market, those that remain are going to get hit with some massive insurance rate hikes in 2017. Hannah Bleau, writing for the Chicks On The Right website on August 28, 2016, reviewed what state insurance commissioners are seeing when it comes to Obama Care insurance rate requests for 2017:

• Obama Care policyholders in 19 states could see double digit rate hikes in 2017 for their Obama Care policies.
• The double digit rate hikes requested by Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware and Aetna in Delaware (one of only four states it will continue to serve), blamed their massive double digit rate hikes on the reality that the Obama Care subsidy program is expiring.
• The steepest estimates for rate hikes include Tennessee with rate hikes likely to exceed a whopping 51%, Arizona (39%), Montana (35%), Delaware (29%) and Pennsylvania (25%).

What is likely to happen in these and other states is that healthy people who do not think they will have an immediate need for health insurance will drop their now costlier policies and forego these rate hikes altogether. This will further damage insurers’ financial results since they will be stuck serving less healthy customers causing them to raise their rates the following year driving more people out of their policies, forming a classic definition of a death spiral.

3) The iPatriot website recently ran article entitled, “Obamacare Scheme Imploding Ahead Of Schedule!” It covered a lot of what we discussed above with some additional twists of disaster:

• The article cited an article from the Investor’s Business Daily which reported that an Illinois state insurance regulator stated that Obama Care policy premiums could jump as much as 55% next year.
• Specifically, Bronze plans could go up 44%, Silver plans could go up 45%, and Gold plans could go up 55%.
• The article reiterates our discussion above that Illinois is not atypical of what is going on in other states which are also seeing double digit increases in Obama Care policy costs.
• But the article also steps outside of Obama Care’s disasters to discuss another government healthcare disaster, Medicare: “The latest Medicare Trustees report, warns that by 2040 half of all hospitals, 70% of all skilled nursing homes and 90% of home health care services will not be able to survive under Medicare’s increasingly skimpy fees.”

And as hospitals, nursing homes, and home health care services go out of business, the lack of competition will drive prices up even further, leaving poor and middle class families with little affordable health care option for them and their loved ones in just a few decades. This is what happens when you do not attack the root causes of a situation, as we laid out above. You never have any chance at all of resolving the real problem, be it Obama Care or Medicare.

4) Shikka Dalmia, writing for Reason magazine on September 6, 2016, also pointed out that “Obama Care is Failing Spectacularly!” Details from her article include the following realities:

• Obama Care is failing so badly that the attempted fixes might make a bad situation even worse.
• Aetna is pulling out of the Obama Care business in 11 of 15 states after losing about $300 million annually and the fact the company sees nothing in the near future that will reverse that trend.
• Seventy percent of Obama Care co-ops have already gone belly up, a concept that was supposed to provide competition to insurance companies in areas with little insurance competition. 
• The failure of the co-ops have left many counties across the country with only one insurance company option, with Pinal County, Arizona have no one providing health insurance options to that county’s citizens.
• The only Obama Care insurance companies that appear to be hanging in there are those that have long been serving the Medicaid market which have resulted in policies that skimp on benefits and have very narrow and lean hospital and doctor networks, networks that are typically not the best.
• The article debunks the Obama Care supporters’ myth that the exit of the big insurance companies from the Obama Care markets is normal and represents a competitive marketplace: “Obamacare's boosters on the editorial page of The New York Times and elsewhere maintain that the exit of all these biggies is no big deal because it represents the normal weeding-out process of a competitive market. That's a nice try—but no sale! In a functioning market, companies die when their customers take their business to alternative suppliers. In this case, customers are unwilling to purchase the product in the first place given that total enrollment in Obamacare exchanges is 40 percent less than Congressional Budget Office projections last year.”
• The article also visits the death spiral that is going on with Obama Care that we discussed above and in previous posts: “This riskier-than-expected patient pool is forcing insurers to raise premiums, which prices even more healthy people out of the market, which causes more hikes, unleashing a death spiral of adverse selection—exactly as many critics of the law had predicted would happen.”
• Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt also believes that Obama Care is in a death spiral, one that was actually historically experienced back in the 1990s when New York and New Jersey forced insurance companies to not discriminate in their policy writing based on the health status of a person, a policy that failed back then also.

The article concludes that the next President should be very worried when it comes to Obama Care, given how badly it has screwed up the entire health delivery system in this country.

Another month and another set of Obama Care disasters: higher and higher rates, less and less competition, and a death spiral forming. More disasters tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

July, 2016, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama Admits to Failure, Obama Bailouts The Insurance Companies, and More

Earlier this month we did a single post on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been doing this theme for years and years where we have been constantly amazed and depressed about how much havoc this poor piece of legislation has rained down on Americans and how much of a medical, insurance, economic, and operational disaster it has been. We did mention at that earlier post that we only had to devote one day of discussion to the disaster this month vs. the multiple days we have had to do just about every other month for the past four years.

But apparently we spoke too soon. In just the few days since we did that solo post, a number of other Obama Care disasters have hit the fan that we should discuss before next month rolls around. So here goes, with the typical introduction of missed root causes that we always preface our unfolding Obama Care disasters with.

*********************

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) Yesterday, we talked about the reality that 16 out of 23 Obama Care co-ops had already flamed out financially and gone out of business. As a result, they took over $1.7 billion worth of taxpayer wealth down the drain with them and caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their health insurance coverage. We also discussed the reality that six of the seven remaining co-ops are also on the verge of going out of business. 

And now it seems that even Obama has faced the reality that his vaunted co-ops are a disaster. Remember, the co-ops were supposed to serve as a competitive counter weight in geographic areas where there was little competition for health insurance customers, which theoretically allowed those that serve those areas to jack up insurance rates. However, if the co-ops all go out of business, those competitive advantages will never appear.

According to a Wall Street Journal report that was summarized on the Legal Insurrection website, Obama recently proposed that the Federal government step up and “Congress and his White House successor add a government-run, or public, insurance option to the Affordable Care Act and increase federal financial assistance for people to buy coverage [in geographic areas with little or no insurance competition].” Does this not sound remarkably like the original co-op plan, a plan that has had expensive and disastrous ramifications and results? 

Let’s review the Federal government’s track record in the healthcare industry:

• Sixteen out of 23 Obama Care co-ops have already failed and the remaining ones are more likely to fail than succeed.
• Medicare and Medicaid are so criminally infested that together they likely lose upwards of $100 billion a year to criminal fraud and inefficiency.
• Medicaid is so bad that one out of three doctors in the country do not accept Medicaid patients, probably resulting in Medicaid patients not getting access to the best doctors in the country.
• An extensive Harvard study of Medicaid patients in Oregon showed that Medicaid patients were no healthier than comparable people that had no health insurance.
• Obama Care has missed its customer enrollment forecast and promise in 2016 by almost 50%.
• Obama Care policy premiums, deductibles, and co-pays have increased substantially over the past few years despite Obama’s many promises that those costs would go down.
• The Veterans Administration, that operates a network of government run hospitals across the country to serve our veterans, has been found to be inefficient, poorly run and managed, and fatal to many veterans who did not get the care they needed in time.

In this reality Obama actually thinks that the Federal government is capable of operating an effective insurance program across the country? Have we forgotten how horrific it was to sign up for Obama Care health insurance policies via the Obama Care exchanges? Have we forgotten that many of those exchanges, like the Obama Care co-ops, have already gone out of business? Have we forgotten how the Obama Care data systems exposed millions of Americans to identity theft and fraud? Talk about the potential for another unfolding disaster.

2) The Americans For Prosperity website on July 15, 2016 ran an article where it described how the Obama administration was likely illegally bailing out insurance companies offering Obama Care policies even though Congress never approved funding for such an activity. 

Recall, the original Obama Care legislation had provisions for creating a subsidy fund using excessive profits on Obama Care policies from insurance companies doing well under the Obama Care legislation which was given to insurance companies that were not doing well with Obama Care policies. This plan was supposed to ease the industry into the Obama Care world and be temporary, with this subsidy fund expiring after just a few years.

Apparently and allegedly, the administration has been sending billions of taxpayer dollars to various insurance companies after this subsidy program went out of business. A Federal judge recently ruled that this funneling of funds to the insurance companies was unlawful since Congress did not authorize the transfer of taxpayer wealth to the companies.

In addition, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services has also allegedly been sending billions of taxpayer dollars to cover the losses of insurance companies through another provision known as Obama Care reinsurance. According to the article, $3.5 billion has already been sent to the insurance companies as the administration tries to avoid the inevitable: the death spiral of Obama Care.

3) I recently came across one of the more infamous video clips of the Obama Care era. It involved an MIT economic consultant to the Obama administration’s development of Obama Care, Jonathan Gruber. Gruber famously called Americans stupid and how the legislation was written in such a convoluted manner as to make it very hard to understand what the legislation actually did. To view an adjunct member of the Obama administration calling you stupid, go to the following link:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2014/11/obamacare-architect-the-stupidity-of-the-american-voter-is-why-obamacare-passed-video/

4) We often finish off these unfolding disasters of Obama Care by showing real life cases of real life American families who have suffered under the legislation. The sources of these heartbreaking stories comes from the following website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

ED - OHIO: Even after the administration made hundreds of improvements to the troubled Obamacare website, many people are still encountering difficulty.

Ed Anderson, a graphic designer from Columbus, Ohio, who was recently bumped from his wife’s insurance policy for reasons relating to the new law, discovered that his family’s monthly premiums will double even if he chooses the most inexpensive plan available to him through the new federal insurance exchange in his state.

Anderson said he and his wife currently pay a monthly premium of $460 through Blue Cross Blue Shield. But now that he can no longer stay on his wife’s plan, he will have to get his own coverage. The most inexpensive option would cost him a $428 monthly premium. And he and his wife can’t qualify for a federal subsidy because their joint income exceeds the cutoff. The new insurance policy will cost the Andersons an extra $5,000 a year in premiums alone.

“When you’re trying to keep your house, pay car insurance and put your kid through college, it’s tough,” Anderson said. Everything we do is going to be affected by this. Getting groceries, eating out. Going anywhere. It’s just crazy.”

MARK - IDAHO: Mark A. York, a 60-year-old freelance writer in Hailey, Idaho, said he began shopping after he received a letter saying that his current insurance policy would be canceled because it did not meet the requirements of the health care law. In the exchange, he said, he found policies with premiums similar to what he is now paying, $440 a month, but “the deductibles were so high — $4,000 to $6,000 a year — that it defeats the purpose of having insurance."

JOSH - TEXAS: All I have to say is that it's way too expensive. I make 1600 hundred a month they want me to pay 650 bucks a month that's BS I live check to check already I'll be homeless if I get health care. I'm 28 with 1600 a month barely enough to put food on the table pay bills and gas in my vehicle I have to borrow money every month as it is so this would just be ridiculous it's cheaper for me to pay the penalty at the end of the year oh well what do you do

KEN - COLORADO: My wife and I have been on the same health insurance plan for 12 years. The cost of that plan has gone up 110% in the last three years and we had to go with different plan due to the cost. The new plan covers less with higher deductibles. It is due to the Obamacare act. We called BCBS to ask why the cost has gone up each year (that's three calls, one a year) we where told the same each time, to get ready for the new health care act. So much for cheaper insurance. IT IS A SAD, RECKLESS LAW! All those who voted for it should be ashamed for what they did!

P.S. We are now slaves to our government, we now have to buy something from a private company or pay a fine, to live in this country.

That will do it for this month’s review of unfolding disasters from Obama Care. The President finally admits that a major component of his legislation is a disaster that needs to be remedied, the same President tries to illegally and secretly bailout the suffering insurance companies, we are reminded that those who constructed Obama Care thought we were all too stupid to understand what was being forced onto us, and a reminder that many,many Americans are suffering serious hardships from the worst piece of legislation ever passed. More disasters sure to come around by next month.

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

April, 2016, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Crae: INsurance Company Jitters and Massive Co-op Failures

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 start reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Peter Sullivan, writing for The Hill on April 15, 2016, reviewed how some of the major insurers of Obama Care policies are warning that they may pull out of the program, given how unprofitable the policies are for them. Details of his article include the following realities:

• Larry Levitt, a health law expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation is quoted as saying: “Something has to give. Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”
• Unless more healthy and younger people sign up for Obama Care, there is likely to be a need for the insurance companies involved to push for big rates hikes which will make it more unattractive for young people to sign up which leads to a death spiral of increasing costs and dwindling enrollment.
• Mark Bertolini, Aetna CEO, has already publicly stated that the Obama Care policyholders his company are getting are sicker and more costly than expected or forecasted.
• Levitt of Kaiser is on record predicting there will big Obama Care policy cost increases in 2017.
• Some insurance companies may opt to just get out of the Obama Care market rather than fight the continuous battle of annual rate increases.
• The biggest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealthCare, has already withdrawn from two state markets, Arkansas, and Georgia.
• CEO Brad Wilson of Blue Cross of North Carolina, recently stated that his company had lost $400 million due to its Obama Care business: “We're not alone, and I think that that also is evidence to suggest that there are systemic and fundamental challenges that we all need to have a civilized conversation about.”
• He implied that unless his company get the rate hikes they say they need in 2017 that his company might drop out also.
• The Centers For Medicare and Medicaid, which administers the Obama Care law, tried to downplay the North Carolina exit talk but that seems to be a denial of reality, based on the CEO’s public statements, lamely trying to blame the $400 million loss on the company’s computer problems.

Not good news for Obama Care, not when huge companies like Blue Cross and UnitedHealthCare are threatening to get out of the market after sustaining such huge losses. Given that nothing will likely happen to change the status quo of the Obama Care landscape, expect either big costs increases in 2017 for Obama Care policy holders, exits of companies from the Obama Care umbrella because of huge financial losses, or both. This is what a death spiral looks like, and it is very hard to stop a death spiral once it starts.

2) Guy Benson, writing for Townhall on April 15, 2016, also reviewed the death spiral scenario regarding insurer financial losses vs. the need to exit or increase insurance rates:

• The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association released a report in March, 2016 that showed that new enrollees of Obama Care policies had 22% higher medical costs than people that got their insurance coverage from employees, which obviously places financial pressure on the insurance companies offering Obama Care policies.
• According to a report from McKinsey, at the state level Obama Care marketplaces, insurance companies lost money in 41 states and were profitable in only 9 states.

Not a long term sign of hope when sicker people have been using Obama Care policies, resulting in bad financial results in over 80% of the states. Mr. Benson gives a good description of what the Obama Care death spiral will look like: “The "death spiral" begins churning downward when young, healthy people decline to sign up for expensive plans, leaving older, sicker consumers as a disproportionate percentage of health market risk pools. When insurers incur additional losses as a result, they try to compensate by raising rates further (or withdraw from the marketplaces altogether), driving even more of the "desired" consumers away. The problem compounds itself until the risk pools collapse. Given Obamacare's the worse than expected enrollment figures and much-discussed warnings from major insurers, a slow death spiral is by no means out of the question.” 

Probably going to get much worse before it gets a smidgen better, if ever.

3) Richard Pollard, writing for the Daily Caller on April 10, 2016, summarized the current very shaky financial situation of the remaining 11 Obama Care co-ops. Recall from previous posts that Obama Care co-ops were established by the legislation to provide a competitive balance of insurance options in areas of the country that did not have a lot of private insurance competition. The idea was to provide a government funded counterbalance to the scarcity of other insurance competitors.

But readers of this blog know that of the original 23 co-ops established with taxpayer money, 12 of them have already gone bankrupt and out of business. Some of them are under law enforcement investigation for breaking laws. They have been a disaster from day one. As each one has closed, it has created a situation where thousands and thousands of co-op Obama Care insurance policy holders have had to scramble to find replacement insurance and they have wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

And the situation is not much better now for the remaining Obama Care co-ops. Mr. Pollard’s article takes an educated guess at which of the remaining 11 co-ops are viable long term, concluding that upwards of 8 of them are about to collapse themselves due to poor financial results:

• Mr. Pollard starts off with a quote from Thomas P. Miller, senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and former senior health economist for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee: “In general, there’s not a turnaround in sight. The same problems that plagued them before are continuing.” 
• The New York co-op, that has already failed, will leave hospitals and doctors with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
• The Daily Caller analyzed the annual financial reports of all remaining 11 co-ops and predict that 8 of them will be out of business by the end of 2016.
• Their analysis seems right given that the Federal government does admit that 8 unnamed co-ops are being analyzed and watched closely by the Federal government.
• The remaining co-ops with the most losses in 2015 were in Massachusetts, Oregon, Ohio, Connecticut, Montana, Wisconsin, Illinois and New Mexico. 
• Each of these 8 used up 50% of their assets already, assets that were supposed to last for 20 years under the Federal government rules for being funded.
• The Oregon co-op was founded by Sara Horowitz, a long-time New York Democrat political activist and former colleague of President Barack Obama, and in 2015 it somehow had financial operating losses that were greater than all of its assets, not an easy financial failure to accomplish.
• Despite being in desperate financial or bankrupt shape, many of the co-ops paid their executives very well.
• In 2015, the Illinois co-op had assets of $107 but had a net operating loss of $91 million despite paying its CEO almost half a million dollars and another executive almost a million dollars.
• The Connecticut co-op had $112 million in assets but almost half of that worth ($55 million) in net operating losses in 2015, but paid seven executives at least $200,000 each in compensation.
• The Connecticut co-op was supposed to enroll 25,000 customers but ended up enrolling less than 8,000.
• The Massachusetts co-op also did horribly on enrollments, enrolling only 14,000 vs. an expected enrollment of 40,000.
• The Montana co-op in 2014 had $67 million in assets but suffered net income losses of $41 million.
• The Ohio co-op reported that in 2015, its assets were $108 million but net losses last year topped $79 million.
• Wisconsin’s co-op had $37 million in losses in 2014, about half of its $74 million in total assets.
• New Mexico’s co-op had $61 million in assets and a net loss of $23 million.
• Maryland’s co-op saw its original assets of $65 million shrink to $37 million in 2015 and net cash available was negative $5.5 million.
• While the Maine co-op was the only one to operate in the black last year, it still lost about 40% of its asset base in doing so. 

What a mess. Poor management, poor enrollment forecasts, corruption, overpaid executives, financial waste, and worst of all, probably over $2 billion in taxpayer wealth that will never be seen again with little to show in return. But that is the story of the Obama Care legislation, a lot of expense with little to show in return except failing co-ops, failing state exchanges, missed enrollment forecasts, rising premiums, rising deductibles, rising co-pays, insurance company negative results, and a whole lot more unfolding disasters.

Unfortunately, there will be more of the same in tomorrow’s post.

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

June, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Congress Ducks Its Obama Care Edict, Costs Conintue To Go Up, Health Care Access Continues ToGo Down

Every month for the past three years or so we have had to take time out and review the latest insanity and disasters from the Obama Care legislation. Long ago it only took a day or so to cover it all. But then the law starting taking effect and the “unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” made it impossible to contain the bad news, the heartache, the rising costs, and the stress put on American families to just a day or two.

To review the past discussions on this horrid piece of legislation, enter the term "unfolding disaster" in the search box above or just page through previous month's posts on the right side of this page and click on the various references to Obama Care. Very quickly, as your read the past posts, you will see that this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington.

Not only has it disrupted lives, stymied the economy, and increased healthcare costs in this country, it never addressed the various root causes of high healthcare costs. Thus, by never addressing some of the root causes listed below, the legislation has virtually no chance of actually reducing healthcare costs in this country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The healthcare industry in this country needs serious tort reform.
• Federal government crop subsidies lead to our food chain being infested with unhealthy sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
• Current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, lose upwards of $100 billion a year to waste and criminal fraud, billions of dollars that could be used to reduce other healthcare costs in this country.
• Cross state line insurance competition needs to be made easier to do.
• The Obama effort never “followed the money” to actually map out where the high costs paid by Americans for healthcare actually end up.

Since Obama Care never addressed these root causes, we are still going to have those root causes resulting in higher and higher healthcare costs regardless of how well Obama Care is implemented. And since the prime objective of Obama Care was to reduce costs, the legislation will end up being a failure.

So with that gloomy set up, let’s see what Obama Care disasters unfolded in the past month or so.

1) One of the selling points of Obama Care, if there is such a thing, is that the politicians who voted to enact Obama Care, all Democrats, insisted that themselves and their staffs would have to abide by its tenets, what they were subjecting Americans to they would subject themselves to also. Bold talk, fairness and all that.

But of course, as is the case most of the time politicians open their mouths, this too was an empty promise. Congressional people lobbied the Obama administration to exempt themselves from the very law they enacted with the promise they would be forced to abide by.

As a result, a number of efforts are underway to force these Washington politicians to abide by their promise. One of those efforts is the Let Freedom Ring organization that is collecting signatures to do just that. The text of that petition is below and a link to sign that petition is below the text of their following letter:

On Wednesday June 17th, Let Freedom Ring is joining with Tea Party Patriots and other coalition partners to protest bureaucratic arrogance outside congressional district offices next week.

Dear [FIRSTNAME, Ringer],

Congress should not be exempt from Obamacare . When Congress enacted Obamacare with only Democrats voting for it, they did require themselves and the members of their staff to be subject to Obamacare instead of the gold-plated health plans they previously enjoyed at our expense.

But, in the same way that the IRS illegally directed that subsidies and mandates apply to people in states that did not set up State health care exchanges, the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) advised the leaders in Congress to submit deceptive and deceitful applications in order to illegally obtain for Members and their staff, health insurance subsidies that the law allows only for small businesses of less than 50 employees. Depending on how you count, Congress has from 13,000 to 20,000 employees.

Now, members of Congress and their office staff are receiving subsidies illegally, because an unidentified congressional staffer submitted a false application to the Washington, DC Small Business Exchange claiming that the United States Congress is a small business of less than 50 employees.

Unlike other aspects of Obamacare that need the action of Congress and the President or the courts to end unconstitutional and illegal action, this outrage needs only the congressional leadership to withdraw the false application and put Congress into compliance with the text of the Obamacare law.

But they have not done that yet. In fact, the Senate leadership, acting through Sen. Rand Paul, worked to defeat Sen. David Vitter’s motion in the Small Business Committee to subpoena the original false application to reveal the name of the staffer who signed it.

Let Freedom Ring is joining with Tea Party Patriots and other coalition partners to protest this act of bureaucratic arrogance outside congressional district offices next week, on Wednesday June 17.

I urge you to join this protest! 

Sincerely,

Peter Knickerbocker
Executive Director

Colin A. Hanna
President

You can sign the petition at the followng link:

http://webmail.earthlink.net/wam/msg.jsp?msgid=875&folder=0121419fccc7fc590d11eced1bec45969&isSeen=false&x=1809199564

2) A recent article on the Affluent Investor website by Michael Pento lamented the fact that American households should have had a lot more money in their pocket over the past six months or so. Why? Well, the cost of oil fell from almost $100 a barrel in June, 2014 to almost $45 by the end of January, 2015. 

According to his calculations, this dramatic drop in oil prices likely increased the average American’s household disposable income by about $750. This would have added between $100 and $125 billion into the economy, resulting in a substantial growth in the national GDP, an amount that should have increased GDP by half a percentage point. Sounds great, more money in our pockets resulting in greater economic growth.

But that reality never happened. Instead, there was actually economic contraction, not growth in the first quarter of 2015, a quarter that saw oil prices bottom out at half of its $100 run rate. What happened to that gas and oil windfall? According to Mr. Pento: “An increase in what the average American pays in health care costs as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has swallowed all the savings from the fall in gas prices.” Specifically:

• The increase in health care costs passed on by employers with 50 to 99 employees caused likely caused their workers to annually lose $935 in take home pay annually.
• Companies with 20 to 49 workers were out an average of $827 annually.
• Employees with individual insurance coverage now pay an average of $1,081 in annual premiums, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust report which is up a whopping 8.1% from a year ago.
• Although the Obama Care tax on robust company insurance policies, the so-called “Cadillac Plans,” does not take effect until 2018, companies have already started adjusting their employee health insurance plans, switching their current plans to high deductible plans, plans that will and already have also increase employee health insurance costs.
• Additionally, many Obama Care policy holders were hit with high tax bills this past spring when it was determined that their Obama Care subsidies were too high, resulting in additional tax payments and offsetting any financial gains from lower gas prices. 

Thus, just when the economy got a gift in the form of lower oil and gas prices, a gift that should have kick started economic growth, Obama Care unfolds another way to screw up Americans’ lives, ripping the financial gain of lower oil prices from their grasp by replacing it with higher health insurance costs.

3) As most people know, Obama Care was passed without a single Republican vote. Which makes it pretty funny now, according to a recent Associated Press (AP) article that Democrats are now very concerned that high out of pocket costs for Obama Care policies are suppressing the nation’s ability to attain health care.

Which gets us back to a truism of Obama Care that we have talked about for years: the good news is you now have healthcare insurance. The bad news is that you cannot afford healthcare coverage. 

This is being called “underinsurance” which is caused by the rise in the cost of insurance deductibles, the amount of actual medical costs that patients pay each year before coverage kicks in. Congressman Jim McDermott, a Congressional leader on health care, summed up this new Obama Care problem nicely: "We've got some 17 million more people covered ... but they can't access the care they seem to be entitled to. It costs too much to use the care. That's the deceptive part about it."

Several different organizations have recently focused on the issue and came to the same conclusions about Obama Care:

• A Commonwealth Fund study found that 31 million adults were underinsured last year. Half of them had problems with medical bills or medical debt. Seven million were underinsured due to high deductibles alone. "The steady growth in the proliferation and size of deductibles threatens to increase underinsurance in the years ahead," the study concluded.
• A study by Families USA concluded that one-quarter of the people with individual health insurance policies went without health care in 2014 because they could not afford the out-of-pocket costs, especially as it related to high deductibles.
• The Center for American Progress found that employers have begun shifting the increasing burden of health care costs onto workers. 

Just another unfolding Obama Care disaster. You have health insurance but you cannot get health care. Ony in Washington can you create massive new problems while not resolving the initial problem.

Another day, another set of fiascos from the worst piece of legislation ever written:

• Congress continues to do a “do as I say not as I do” as they continue to illegally side step their Obama Care legislation requirements.
• Health care costs continue to go up.
• Health insurance access continues to go down.

More disasters tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

May, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Potential Low Cost Alternative and More Individual Tales Of Obama Care Woes

Ever month for the past fews years we have had to dedicate multiple posts every month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It is without a doubt the worse piece of legislation ever passed passed by Washington, as one can see from our dozens of posts and the hundreds of mini-disasters we have discussed in each of those posts.

The legislation has increased insurance costs, stifled the economy, caused millions of people to lose access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies, increased the national debt, and exposed the many lies and intentional deceptions of this President and his political allies. It is a piece of legislation that has no chance of accomplishing its supposed goal of reducing healthcare costs in this country since it never understood nor addressed the underlying root causes of our high healthcare costs. These root causes include,m but are not limited to:

• Americans eat too much overall and too much of the wrong types of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• Washington laws and regulation encourage additives such as high fructose corn syrup to infest our food supply.
• The medical industry is in urgent need of tort reform.
• Current laws and regulations discourage cross state border insurance company competition.
• Federal healthcare programs today are infested with criminal activity that wastes upwards of a $100 billion a year.
• The Obama administration never “followed the money” to find out where the waste and over charging was in the entire medical industry.
• Without understanding and alleviating these root causes, it makes no difference how many people get Obama Care insurance policies, the costs will keep going up and care will keep going down.

So with this quick background, let’s take a look at what Obama Care disasters have popped up in the past month or so, like we have been doing over the past few days:

1) Most of the damage to Americans insurance plans so far by Obama Care has been to individual insurance plans, not insurance plans obtained from an employer. But in 2018, that could change dramatically since the so-called Cadillac Tax kicks in. This Obama Care tax levies a 40% on insurance plans above a certain threshold. This could cause a large number of employees to change and likely reduce the quality of the current health insurance plans they provide to their employees, given this extra 40% tax that would be levied on top of the cost of the health benefits themselves.

However, according to a recent article by the Heritage Foundation by Robert Moffit, there may be a good alternative. already in use and successful, to combat the extra Obama Care tax and the reduction in quality of employer insurance plans. The alternative is called private health insurance exchanges and include the following features:

• Rather than offering only one type of health insurance program from only one provider, in a private exchange, a company’s employees would have access to a wide array of different insurance policies from DIFFERENT providers.
• This would allow employees to choose a policy that best fits their needs, not settle for just the one option most companies provide today.
• The larger buying power of companies vs. an individual, along with the fact that insurance companies would be competing side by side for that company’s employees health insurance dollars, would, and has been, keeping health insurance costs down.
• In a private exchange world, the employer would make a defined, monetary contribution to a tax-free private exchange group plan chosen by the employee. 
• If the employee opted for a less expensive plan, the employee would keep the difference in savings. 
• An employee who wanted a more expensive plan can use the employer’s contribution along with her own money.
• According to the consulting firm Accenture, there are already 6 million Americans enrolled in private exchange employer plans today, a number that has doubled in one year.
• The enrollment is expected to grow even faster when the Obama Care Cadillac Tax hits.
• A typical example already in place, as outlined in the article, is that for enrollees on Bloom Health’s private exchange, insurance costs are cost 22% less than the national average. 

A creative way of using the free market to curtail costs while increasing options, choices and quality. I am not an expert on private exchanges and have no idea why existing private exchanges reduce health insurance costs but Obama Care exchange policies increase health insurance costs, but it is pretty obvious one exchange approach is working and one is not.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if one of the most dastardly parts of Obama Care, the Cadillac Tax, actually reduced healthcare costs by driving employers to find a free market solution?

2) We will finish off this month’s review of the unfolding disasters of Obama Care with looks at individual Americans’ stories of how Obama Care has disrupted their lives and endangered their health. We will start off with a near tragic story of a family in South Carolina who fought the Obama Care flawed bureaucracy for months to restore their rightful Obama Care health insurance policy for their ailing young son.

The bureaucracy put their son in mortal danger, given his health condition, all because a clerk did not fill in a blank on a form. This is the type of agony, worry, and endangerment this law has imposed on many Americans, a law and underlying process that was never properly tested and vetted because of political expediency.

Rather than me try to communicate this family’s worries and frustrations, go to the following link to read about their sad saga:

http://dailysignal.com/2015/05/06/this-family-struggled-to-secure-health-insurance-under-obamacare-for-their-4-year-old-son/

3) And we will finish off this post with shorter stories of Obama Care frustrations and danger from the website,

www.ourhealhtcarestories.com

MICHAEL - GEORGIA

From Dawson News:

[Michael] Boyette, 28, is married, has one child and another on the way. The Boyettes have insurance through the state through his wife's job. Under the new law, his family's insurance premium has gone up $190 a month, from $350 to $540.

"We have less coverage than before at a higher out-of-pocket expense," Boyette said. "One company, three choices, that was it. This was not what [President Barack Obama] assured me and many others."

JOHN - ARIZONA

The horrible law MUST be repealed and start over by getting the government OUT of the health insurance business. I received a letter from Blue Cross stating that my family coverage would be dropped due to obozocare. I had a very good policy with a low deductible. Great coverage and a very affordable premium. I could not afford the new policy that they were offering which was DOUBLE the premium that I had been paying. I was forced to take a substandard policy with a $3000 dollar deductible PER family member, as this is now all that I can afford. So what was that bold face LIE that obama told us over and over again.
DANIELLE - CALIFORNIA

Aliso Viejo resident Danielle Nelson said Anthem Blue Cross promised half a dozen times that her onco would be covered under her new policy. She was diagnosed last year with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and discovered a suspicious lump near her jaw in early January.

But when she went to her oncologist's office, she promptly encountered a bright orange sign saying that Covered California plans are not accepted.
MARTIN - CONNECTICUT

Connecticut psychologist Martin Klein has plenty of experience dealing with insurance companies. After all, he's been practicing in the state for 11 years and runs two offices, one in Branford and one in Fairfield. But his experience with insurers over the past couple months has surprised even him.

Since 2008, Klein has held an insurance policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Connecticut, the state's largest insurer. The policy offers what he considers comprehensive coverage at a reasonable price. It does not however, meet the minimum coverage criteria set by the Affordable Care Act.

On September 26, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield sent Klein a letter notifying him that his plan would no longer be offered for renewal when it expires in January.

Losing his insurance plan is a big financial blow for Klein. He makes just enough to not qualify for a subsidy on the health exchange, but lives in a New York City suburb where the cost of living is high. Based on his research on and off the exchange, Klein says he would have to pay 50% more to get a plan that he deems comparable to the one he is losing.

Klein says he cannot afford a comparable plan, so he has decided to purchase an HMO with a $12,700 deductible for himself and his family.

What concerns him most about the plan is that it limits him to a narrow network of providers, all of which are in Connecticut. This prevents him from keeping some of his doctors in New York City.

Basically, said Klein, he's going to accept his new policy and, "hope nothing major happens."

PAULA - MARYLAND

My company health insurance renews July 1. We have a high deductible Carefirst plan 2700/5400 for single and family coverage, respectively. My employer pays 50% of individual and 20% of other. We are a small group and employer does not have to offer health insurance under Obamacare. My family premium was $800/month last year, this year the renewal rate is-get ready for this-remember this is affordable-$1,677/month. Even in your wildest dreams this is not affordable.

That will do it for this month’s failures and disasters. Higher taxes on existing plans and more people struggling to cope with the dishonesty, the higher costs, the lower coverage, and lesser quality that has been spawned from Obama Care, the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Washington political class.

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