September, 2014 Part 4 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Temporary Workers, Failures of Single Payer Models, Chaotic Data Systems and More

Over the past few years, but especially over the past thirteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:

• It has and will continue to increase the national debt.
• It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now.
• It has restricted overall economic growth.
• It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways.
• It has reduced the job growth rate in this country.
• It has turned many full time workers into part time workers.
• It has generally increase the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed.
• The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people.
• The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the ramifications of the law.
• It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
• It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms.
• It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law.
• It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate a successful program.
• It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves.
• It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.

I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

Let’ see what new disasters of Obama Care we can find today:

1) Amy Ridenours National Center Blog recently carried a story written by Project 21’s Kevin Martin. Many people, seeing the disaster that is Obama Care, are now clamoring for a so-called single payer system in this country, a system in which the government controls each and every aspect of health care delivery. 

A sane person, knowing the reality of government’s ineptness, would say that this is a very bad idea. And based on the disastrous health care the government has provided to our veterans in a pseudo-single payer system, that reality of government incompetence in the health care field became crystal clear. However, for those that still cling to the false utopia of a single payer system, consider the research and realities that Mr. Martin presents:

1) Canada has had a single payer government controlled health care system for a long time. Keeping that in mind, consider the fact Angela Johnson, president of Medical Confidence, Inc., has just written a new book entitled “Step by Step Guide to Navigating your way through Canada’s Health Care System and Minimizing Your Wait Time.” The book is billed as “a first of its kind and must read for Canadians, providing them with 14 valuable tips to overcome these issues and minimize their wait times.” If you have to read a book in order to understand and cope with medical wait times, maybe the single payer system is not the most efficient way to deliver health care.

2. Let’s stay with Canada’s single payer system. In Canada’s capital, Ottawa, Mr. Martin writes that “1,195 children and youth are waiting for mental health outpatient and outreach services at CHEO and the Royal, up 10 per cent from 1,082 a year ago,” according to an article in the Ottawa Citizen. The wait time for mental health treatment Canada could be up to a year. Not a good situation when our mental health needs might go a year before being addressed, never mind cured.

3. Great Britain also has a single payer system. It’s National Health Service (NHS) recommends that no cancer patient should wait more than 62 days to start treatment. That does not mean you will be treated within 62 days, the 62 days is just a recommendation.

However, the Daily Mail recently reported just over 9,900 British cancer patients waited longer than that in the first six months of 2014. Like the mental health patients in Canada, waiting for cancer treatments is never a good thing since according to a recent  article in the journal, Radiotherapy and Oncology, where the researchers assert that for breast cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 1.0% per month of delay” and for head and neck cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 3.7% per month of delay”.

4. Staying in Great Britain, the Daily Mail reported in August that the “number of patients languishing on NHS waiting lists for operations is at its highest for six years…There are 3.2 million people awaiting surgery – a rise of 700,000 compared with 2010.” Not only are their 3.2 million people on the wait list for surgery, 809,000 patients were waiting for a diagnostic test and 15,600 operations were cancelled at the last minute in the second quarter of 2014. And these numbers may be an under count due to errors and incomplete records. Delays, cancelled tests, sounds just like our own government’s mistreatment of our veterans.

The single payer model is not a solution to our nation’s ever escalating health care costs for the simple reason that the Obama Care model is a failure: both approaches fail to address and resolve the underlying root causes of high health care costs:

1. Americans eat too much.
2. Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
3. Americans do not exercise enough.
4. Americans smoke too much.
5. Americans are aging and being afflicted more and more with aging diseases, e.g. dementia, Parkinsons, etc., diseases that are not addressed by Obama care.
6. Government health care systems, e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, are infested with inefficiencies, waste, and outright criminal fraud, resulting in the wasting of upwards of $100 billion a year, $100 billion that could be spent on health care and cure research.
7. The American health care system is in need of significant and common sense tort reform.

Until you address and resolve these root causes, Obama Care, single payer systems, or any other government bureaucratic approach will fail miserably. Obama Care proves this point exquisitely.

2) Adding onto the root causes of our high health care costs, a recent article in the July 11, 2014 issue of The Week pointed out that one in ten U.S. deaths of working age Americans are due to alcoholism. More than half of these preventable deaths are due to binge drinking.

There is likely high medical costs involved in liver treatment and transplants and other alcohol induced medical conditions that add to our high health care costs. Thus, one of the nation’s and Obama's top priorities should have been a national public health effort to reduce the incidence of alcoholism, in addition to reducing the incident of smoking. Both public health efforts, if successful, would have had the major effect of reducing health care costs and the cost of health insurance. Unfortunately, Obama Care gives little attention and focus to both of these major root causes.

3) According to a recent New York Times article that was summarized in the September 12, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, the number of American workers employed through temp agencies has skyrocketed to a record 2.9 million workers. These workers now make up a record 2% of the nation’s workforce.

However, this should not come as surprise since this trend was predicted long before it came true, another ugly consequence of Obama Care. The law’s tenets often make it financially better for a small business to hire only temporary workers, given the law’s fines and penalties. This stresses out families and workers who desire full time work but who are stuck settling for part time and temporary work as businesses try to stay both in business and legal under Obama Care.

4) There is no disagreement that the roll out of Obama Care’s data systems programs, websites, and processes was an unqualified disaster. The Health and Human Services Inspector general has found a good reason why that was so: The entire effort was badly coordinated, with $800 million spent and spread out over 60 contracts with 33 different companies. 

You cannot possibly get something done efficiently and effectively when so many different entities are involved and the overall coordination, what little there was, is handled by an incompetent company, CGI Federal, a company that was relieved of its duties a few short months after the disastrous roll out. CGI was paid a quarter of a billion dollars just to be relieved of duties by Accenture Federal Systems who was paid an additional $45 million to clean up the CGI mess.

5) Everything about Obama Care was poorly thought out and executed even worse. Whether it was the online website headaches and failures, the negative impact on business hiring, employment and the negative impacts on the economy, the increased threat and reality of identity theft, the stress and heartache of cancelled policies, the complete missing of the underlying root causes of our high health care costs, etc., you probably could not have done a worse job at legislating in this area if you tried.

As a result, we are no closer to taming high health care costs than when the legislation was passed despite spending billions of dollars and screwing up millions of lives over the past four years or so. The entire disaster was nicely summed up in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial piece that touched on the many obvious and more salient points of the entire fiasco:

Whether the Affordable Care Act lives up to its name depends on how, or whether, you consider its consequences for the wider economy.

Millions of people pay a significant portion of their income for health insurance so they and their families can get good health care when they need it. The magnitude of their sacrifices demonstrates the importance that people ascribe to health care.

The Affordable Care Act attempts to help low- and middle-income families avoid some of the tough sacrifices that would be necessary to purchase health insurance without assistance. But no program can change the fundamental reality that society itself has to make sacrifices in order to deliver health care to more people. Workers and therefore production have to be taken away from other industries to beef up health care, or the workforce itself has to get bigger, or somehow people have to work more productively.

Although the ACA helps specific populations by giving them a bigger slice of the economic pie, the law diminishes the pie itself. It reduces the amount that Americans work, and it makes their work less productive. This slows growth in both personal income and gross domestic product.

In further expanding the frontiers of redistribution, the ACA reduces the benefits of employment for both employers and employees. Employers that don’t provide health insurance are either subject to large penalties based on the number and types of employees that they have, or are threatened with enormous penalties when they get the opportunity to expand their business. 

About a quarter of the nation’s employees, more than 35 million men and women, currently work for employers that don’t offer health insurance. These tend to be small and midsize businesses with employees who already make less than the average American worker. The result of penalizing businesses for hiring and expanding is going to be less hiring and expanding.

Another sixth of the nation’s employees—almost 25 million people—are in a full-time position that makes them ineligible for the law’s new and generous assistance with health-insurance premiums and cost sharing. They are ineligible for subsidies simply because they are working full time and thereby eligible for their employers’ coverage. Because the only ways for them to get the new assistance is to move to part-time status, find an employer that doesn’t offer coverage, or stop working, we can expect millions of workers to make one or more of those adjustments.

Most people wouldn’t give up working merely to qualify for a few thousand dollars in assistance. But it is a mistake to assume that nobody is affected by subsidies, because there are people who aren’t particularly happy with working, planning to leave their job anyway, or otherwise on the fence between working and not working. A new subsidy is enough to push them over the edge or to get them to stop working sooner than they would have otherwise.

So much stress, aggravation, and failure for so little upside. And the sad part is that this time next month we will be back with more disasters and no successes from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted, legislation that was enacted by the worst set of Washington politicians ever put in office.

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

Why There Will Not be Another British Invasion (And That Is Good News!)

For those of you that, like me, came of age in the 1960s, you remember the so-called British invasion of that time. Great musical groups came to the U.S. from Britain and brought some great British rock and roll sounds with them including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Freddie and The Dreamers and who knows how many more. These "invasion" years were great times and great music.

But today, and in a different context, I think we can confidently say that there will not be another British invasion anytime soon and that is good news. Why? Consider the details from an Associated Press article from October 19, 2010 entitled, "UK's Cameron Announces Military Austerity Plan:"

• British Prime Minister David Cameron announced a sweeping military austerity plan for the British government to help reduce the national debt of the country.
• The country will reduce its armed forces by thousands of troops and a whopping 25,000 civilian staff.
• It will delay a program to upgrade its traditional nuclear defenses.
• While two new aircraft carriers will be built, one will be mothballed immediately and the other will not have enough aircraft for it to be serviceable until 2019, only because construction contracts and budgets have already been committed. In the universal and  perverted government budget process, it is less expensive to build the carriers and not use them than it is to stop building them. At least they thought through the process.
• Numerous military bases will be closed.
• The country's nuclear weapon stockpile will be reduced 25% from 160 warheads to 120 warheads.
• The changes would reduce the overall defense budget by 8% over current levels within four years.
• The new defense budget will still be more expensive than the recommended NATO guidelines.
• Planned expenditures to replace Britain's four nuclear-armed submarines will be delayed until 2016 and the number of warheads on each of the new submarines will be reduced, saving almost $1.2 billion.
• Cameron stated that Britain's military will refocus its defense efforts on its special forces and develop expertise to repel cyper threats.

Wow! A politician that has the courage to challenge his country's military-industrial complex, understands that the out sized and in many cases, unnecessary, military expenditures were helping to inflate an unacceptable national budget deficit, and realizes that the military Britain has in place today is ill-equipped to counter the new security threats in the world today. Kudos to Mr. Cameron for doing the right thing for his country vs. doing the right thing for his campaign donors and political future.

What could the U.S. learn from this positive and strategic effort in Britain?

• We should be able to downsize our out sized international military deployment by bringing home our 50,000 or so troops in Germany, our 10,000 or so troops in Britain, our 27,000 or so troops in South Korea, and our 50,000 or so troops from Japan. The Iron Curtain is down so we need much fewer troops stationed in Europe, South Korea has one of the strongest economies in the world so let them defend themselves against the North Koreans, and Japan is now an ally so there is no need to occupy their land. Realize that these deployments are from another age and era and are no longer necessary.
• Bring home the remaining 50,000 troops in Iraq as Obama the candidate promised to do but Obama the President has failed to do, with him just continuing the plan of deployment that Bush had in place.
• Stop recruiting new people for the armed forces and use attrition to reduce the hundreds of thousands of troops returning from around the world, substantially reducing military deployment costs and personnel costs.
• Refocus some of these freed up troops to counter the Islamic terrorism threat now facing the country in so many different ways including nuclear terrorism, biological terrorism, chemical terrorism, home grown terrorism, and cyber terrorism. As you can see, our biggest national security threat today and for the immediate future is terrorism, not the Iron Curtain, not North Korea's traditional military capacity, and not the potential of Pearl Harbor II.
• Close unnecessary military bases, doing it through another Base Closing Commission if the current members of the political class do not have the courage to do it themselves, further reducing the military budget.
• Delay or cancel new weapons systems, naval ship building, and other military build programs that do not address the terrorism threats listed above regardless of the impact on a local economy.
• Improve, enlarge, and redeploy special forces troops to counter foreign based terrorism threats, avoiding massive foreign military intrusions like Iraq and Afghanistan wherever possible.

Taking these steps would reduce our deficit spending, reduce our meddling in other countrys' affairs, and focus our armed forces on real threats, not past threats. It would help clean up our election processes since there would be less money available to give out as earmarks in exchange for re-election campaign contributions.

If we achieved Britain's target of 8% reduction in military spending, we would be able to trim about $60 to $70 billion out of our huge military budget. I believe that 8% is a conservative estimate since we have so much more wasted resources deployed under our Defense Department budget. In fact, if our defense spending was in line with the NATO benchmark of 2% of a country's gross domestic product, our defense budget would be about $280 billion or about $420 billion less than it currently is. Thus, an 8% reduction seems to be very doable and a little on the low side.

Why would we not do this? Because it does not appear that we have the forward thinking, problem solving politicians that Britain has. Obama has been in office for almost two years and nothing has changed relative to what the Bush administration would have done it if was still in control. The defense budget is still way too big, our troop deployment around the world is still too extensive, we are building and planning weapons systems that nobody thinks will be useful in the terrorism world we live in today, and most of our troops are trained and deployed to fight the types of wars we are highly unlikely to face any time soon. As a result, we spend a lot of money for less protection than we probably had years ago. Not a good deal but a deal I do not see changing anytime soon, based on the current administration's actions and plans and the lack of backbone of our current political class.

Thus, it is good we will not be seeing another British invasion soon since they are focused on evolving their national defense resources so that they more effectively and more efficiently protect their nation from today's threats, and are far less likely to invade any nation under this progressive strategy. Maybe we can take a hint from Mr. Cameron and his associates and ensure that the United States does not do any invasions either while simultaneously increasing the protection per defense dollar spent.


Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.



Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

Why Is The United States Zigging While The World Is Zagging, Economic Policy Wise?

I recently noticed that a lot of the world's major economies are making major and similar economic policy decisions:

• In a recent article on the Spanish News website, Debbie Parker wrote an article outlining the economic steps that Spain is undertaking to spur an economic recovery. According to their labor minister, Celestino Corbacho, Spain will make major cuts in government spending in order to quickly reduce the massive Spanish government debt. Spain has an unemployment rate of 20% but the government feels that cutting government spending is the quickest way to get their economic house in order.
• According to a September 15, 2010 Associated Press article, the French government just voted to delay the retirement age of French citizens to 62 years of age as one way to rein in government spending. The article also reported that Germany will shortly do the same thing, raising its retirement age from 65 to 67.
• The same article reported that many of the royal families across Europe are also seeing their budgets being cut because of government cut backs in spending.
• On August 16, 2010, the New York Times reported that Denmark, which had long been considered the best place in the world to lose your job, has cut the current four year period for unemployment benefits to two years to "help mend its finances after the financial crisis." The article reported that Danish market research had shown that the longer a person goes without any job, the harder it is to find work. The study also found that unemployed Danes are mostly likely to get a job shortly after receiving their first unemployment checks and again just before their unemployment benefits run out four years later.
• On August 8, 2010, the New York Times reported that the new government in Great Britain was making significant government spending cuts in an effort to get their economy up and running again. The initial plans calls for cutting up to $130 billion over five years.
• The USA Today reported on September 13, 2010, that the Cuban government would lay off up to 500,000 government workers and try to increase the private sector of the economy to absorb the laid off workers in order to get government spending under control.

Obviously, most of the world has recognized that outsized government spending and huge national debt is not conducive to growing their national economies and creating jobs. Laying off government workers, cutting down on government entitlements by raising retirement ages, and slashing unemployment benefits are their best economic tools to creating a vibrant economy.

Now consider what the American political class wants to do:

• Some politicians are calling for more government stimulus spending, and the increased national debt that goes with it, even though most stimulus spending to date has been ineffective, wasteful, and in many cases, spent on idiotic programs with no chance at all of creating work for Americans.
• Congress and Obama recently increased unemployment benefits despite the fact that many economists and smart people understand that long periods of unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to find work, any kind of work. The latest Danish studies prove this hypothesis.
• No one in the American political class has the courage and leadership skills to champion the raising of the United States retirement age, fearing that they would lose votes and endanger their job for life in Congress even though they all know that Social Security will help bankrupt the country in its current form and that raising the retirement age is just one of several strong steps that need to be taken to shore up the system.
• Rather than confront the problem head on and start cutting excessive government spending now, the political class and Obama are hiding behind a Presidential commission that is examining what and how to change to get government spending under control, a commission that will not even report its findings for several months, never mind actually making cuts.

In several past posts we have reviewed U.S. government economic statistics from the 1940s. These numbers show that Truman and the other politicians had the guts to reduce government spending by almost 68% from 1945 to 1948 which:

1. allowed the U.S. economy to grow 21% over that period.
2. successfully absorbed millions upon millions of returning servicemen into the private sector of the economy.
3. kept unemployment below 5% despite the rush of new workers into the economy.

Thus, as the rest of the world zigs in its economic recovery plans, the Obama administration zags to the old, failed polices that have not worked so far despite what we know about our history. Who is right? We will not know but lets hope we find out quickly before the American political class zags us right back into a recession while the rest of the world grows their economies as a result of incenting the free market to create innovation and jobs, not via Cash For Clunkers-like failures, but through true economic growth.

If the President and others in the political class need any ideas on how to mimic the programs that others are following, they need only to read several steps in "love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

• Step 1 would systematically reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years.
• Steps 9 through 12 would fix both Social Security and the Federal employee pension plans in order to make them solvent for the long term.
• Step 30 would bring back almost all foreign deployed U.S. troops as a precursor to greatly reducing our defense budget.
• Step 44 would prohibit the Federal government from spending any taxpayer money on any program or project that did not significantly impact a significant amount of citizens from five different states, leaving those programs to be funded by the impacted states or allow them to wither and die.

Bottom line is that Europe and Cuba get it, the right prescription for recovery is to get government out of the economy as much as possible and their politicians have shown the courage and fortitude to force this medicine down the collective mouths of their countrymen and women. Unfortunately, I fear that our politicians do not have that kind of courage and fortitude which, if true, does not bode well for our economic recovery.



Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/