September, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Higher Costs, Fewer Competitors

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) One of the supposed selling points of Obama Care, as constantly promised by Obama, was that the legislation would greatly reduce health insurance costs and bend downward the cost curve of medical costs in this country. We have written constantly in this blog how the legislation failed miserably on both of these counts. Rather than going down upwards of $2,500 a year as Obama promised, health insurance costs have grown by significant double digits every year since enacted. Regular medical costs have continued to increase far greater than the overall rate of inflation.

A recent Bloomberg article that appeared on the Newsmax website presented another example of how horribly Obama Care failed to control any kind of medical and healthcare costs:

• Fidelity Investments now estimates that a 65 year old American retiring in 2017 will need to spend $275,000 to cover his or her health care expenses for the remainder of their lifetime.
• This is 6% increase in ONE year vs. 2015 despite Obama Care being in effect for years and years.
• And this number does NOT include dental care, long term care, or nursing home care.
• This Fidelity estimate is close to the annual 5.5% increase for medical care that Health View Services research predicts for the next decade.
• The big drivers of higher and higher medical costs according to the Health View Services research are an annual increase of 7.2% for Medigap insurance premiums and an annual increase of 8% for Medicare Part D.
• All other components of medical and health care, according to their research will all grow faster than the current rate of inflation.

If Obama Care was going to bend the cost curve downwards as a primary objective, then these sobering research results from Fidelity and Health View Services are pretty damning in showing what a failure Obama Care has been.

2) Let’s take a quick trip to Iowa and see what is going on there with Obama Care policy premiums. According to a recent article on the Convention of States website, the only insurance company selling Obama Care policies in that state is looking for a whopping 57% increase in insurance premiums in 2018.

If that is not bad enough, the 57% is 13% higher than the rate hike they asked for just two months ago. This indicates that the Obama Care insurance market in Iowa is deteriorating faster and faster. So not only is there only one Obama Care insurer in the state, despite Obama’s promise that Obama Care would spur competition, the lone remaining competitor is looking for a huge increase, hardly bending the cost curve that Obama promised.

3) But Iowa is not alone in this jam. According to a recent Washington Free Beacon report, as listed on the Right Alerts website:

• The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that a majority of U.S. cities that it tracks, 71%, will see Obama Care premiums rise by double digits in 2018.
• A lot of this increase is driven by competitors leaving the Obama Care market.
• According to Kaiser: “The foundation analyzed data in the 20 states and in Washington, D.C. that had submitted rate filings to examine how much premiums were rising and how many insurers were participating on the exchanges.The study evaluated the cost of Obamacare’s second-lowest silver plan. Roughly 71 percent of enrollees have this type of coverage. The second-lowest silver plan is one of the most popular plan choices on the marketplace and is also the benchmark that is used to determine the amount of financial assistance individuals and families receive,” the report states. Of the 21 major cities that were evaluated by Kaiser, 16 will see a double-digit increase in the silver-plan premiums next year. Across these 21 major cities, based on preliminary 2018 rate filings, the second-lowest silver premium for a 40-year-old nonsmoker will range from $244 in Detroit, MI, to $631 in Wilmington, DE, before accounting for the tax credit that most enrollees in the market receive. Only one city will see their premiums decline, while in some cities premiums will increase as high as 49 percent in 2018."
• Kaiser also found that the number of insurance companies participating in Obama Care policies is also declining with 120 insurers in 2014 in the areas Kaiser studied but that has dropped down only 97 insurers today.
• Besides losing money on Obama Care policies, companies dropping out and those asking for huge premium rate increases cite the uncertainty of future subsidies and taxes on premium revenue.

What a mess, higher costs and fewer competitors. The exact opposite of what Obama promised. More unfolding disasters to follow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

April, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Rising Costs, Too Few Docotors, and More

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) With more people getting insurance, one would have hoped that the backers and writers of the Obama Care legislation would have seen the obvious and put a plan in place to get more doctors into the industry to handle the newly insured. But alas, hoping that the political class and this Presidential administration do anything right is usually a false hope. 

The country is now faced with a severe doctor shortage throughout the nation, a shortage now made more acute by Obama Care. While Obama focused so much, and so poorly, on getting more people insured, he failed to realize that increasing the demand for a product or service should be matched by an increase of those supplying the product or service. Failure to do that increases prices, costs, and results in unfilled promises, in this case, unfulfilled medical care.

The shortage of general practitioner doctors across the country looks like the following:

• Phil Miller, a representative of the physician search firm,Merritt Hawkins, recently estimated that “some 65 million people live in what’s essentially a primary care desert.”
• One third of the states have less than half of the primary care doctors that are needed.
• Connecticut has only 15% of the needed primary care doctors it should have, Missouri has only 30%, Rhode Island has only 33% Alaska has only 35%, and North Dakota has only 37% according to Federal government estimates.
• Many other states have more doctors than North Dakota on a percdentage basis but still fall short of the 50% rate for primary doctors needed in their state.

And while this current primary doctor shortage has been building for years and prior to Obama Care, Obama Care made it that much more acute and was never addressed by the legislation. So we may now have the insane and ironic situation where an uninsured person now has health insurance but cannot use it because there are no doctors available to treat that person and allow them to use their insurance.

2) The President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Ms. Marilyn Tavenner, recently predicted that the country should expect a “stark rise” in Obama Care health insurance rates in 2017. We have already discussed the serious and double digit health insurance rates of Obama Care policies in 2016 earlier this month. Now an expert in the field is predicting similar double digit rises next year.

And what makes her an expert? Ms. Tavenner’s previous job involved rolling out the entire Obama Care legislation and operations when she was a top executive in the Obama administration. Thus, she has seen the this disaster from inside government and inside the insurance industry. Tavenner’s exact quote is as follows: “I’ve been asked, what are the premiums going to look like? I don’t know, because it also varies by state, market, even within markets. But I think the overall trend is going to be higher than we saw previous years. That’s my big prediction.” 

Tavenner identified several factors driving the higher insurance costs of Obama Care policies, most of which we have already identified and discussed in detail:

1. Obama Care has done nothing to reduce overall medical costs and drug costs so insurance rates are a by product of these higher costs.
2. Obama Care capped insurance company profits in certain areas.
3. Obama Care set forth a ton of regulations that caused additional costs to be incurred in the industry.
4. Obama Care required the Obama Care insurance carriers to accept anyone who applied even if they had serious pre-existing health conditions.
5. The influx of younger and healthier customers to insurance companies never occurred.

Too bad Tavenner never said anything when she was an Obama agent, government employee, and Obama Care facilitator; speaking up then would have prevented millions of Americans from losing their current insurance policies and access to their favorite doctors and hospitals, it would have saved the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars, and would have prevented a myriad of other problems. 

3) We often end these blog posts with stories of real Americans relative to Obama Care. These are sad stories that make the bad numerical results we often discuss relative to Obama Care more human as these Americans saw their premium costs go way up, their deductible levels go way up, they lost access to their favorite doctors and hospitals, and ended up paying more in fines, fees, and Obama Care taxes. The source of these real life tragedies is:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

RICHARD - MONTANA: I'm currently paying $229 per month on a plan from Humana that does exactly what I want. It'll keep me from going broke if something bad happens.

That Humana plan does not comply with ObamaCare. So it will be cancelled at some point. Originally it was scheduled to be cancelled at the end of 2014, now I'm not sure if it will be extended to 2016 or what.

The least expensive policy I could find that complied with Ocare was about $500/mo. and that was for this year. My understanding is that compliant policies for 2015 will be about 20% higher. I hope I can keep the current policy for next year, but I don't know. I am displeased.

MICHAEL - MICHIGAN: Insurance broker Michael Harp said small businesses, part of what's known in the industry as the "small group market," are used to seeing health insurance premiums climb about 10 percent a year, but it's never before been this dramatic. For Extreme Dodge to have kept deductibles and out-of-pocket costs at last year's levels, he said, would have cost the dealership almost 50 percent more than last year.

Harp says what is happening at this dealership is representative of the other small businesses he deals with. Businesses with 50 or fewer employees currently provide health insurance to about 17 million U.S. workers, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

He said the biggest surprise to him in how the law impacts small business clients is "how many people are losers versus winners. … There are some people who do come out ahead, but I would say the overwhelming majority, they're paying much higher rates and they have lower benefits."

RODNEY - MICHIGAN: Rodney noted that his yearly premiums have gone up by almost $1000 since ObamaCare's implementation began. 

Rising costs, doctors shortages, and more, the legislation that keeps on giving out bad news. More unfolding Obama Care 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

August, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care, Part 2: 2015, Costs Still Going Up, Doctors Shunning The Legislation, and Americans Hating The Legislation

Every month since last August we have had to do multiple posts each month in order to keep up with the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Federal government under any previous Presidential administration. Runaway costs, dysfunctional or non functioning website, high potential for identity theft, less coverage for more cost, cancelled insurance policies, etc., it was a failure in every way imaginable.

And those failures have continued to unfold every month, which is why we are going to take a few days now to cover what has happened just since last month’s updates. Before we do that, let’s do a quick reminder of where the program is from a numbers perspective:

• The Obama administration claimed that about 8 million Americans signed up for an Obama Care health care insurance plan during the initial sign up period.
• However, recent research from reputable sources found that it is likely that only between 80 and 90% of those who signed up actually followed through and paid for and bought a policy.
• If we take the midpoint of that range and assume only 85% followed through with payment, that 8 million sign up number is really only 6.8 million real policy holders.
• But other reputable research found that only about 57% of those who signed up for an Obama Care policy were previously uninsured, the other sign ups already had health insurance coverage and just churned out to an Obama Care policy.
• Thus, the actual number of INCREMENTAL Americans with health insurance via Obama Care is 57% of 6.8 million or around 3.9 million people.
• That means that 2.9 million Americans were not incremental insurance policy holders, they just churned from an existing policy into an Obama Care policy.
• Somewhere between 5 and 6 million people had their current health insurance policies cancelled as a result of Obama Care, policies that often were perfectly fine and acceptable to those carrying those policies.
• If we assume a best case view from the Obama Care perspective and assume all of the 2.9 million people who were not incremetnal to the Obama Care numbers came from this pool of 5-6 million people, than the net number of Americans who lost health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care is between 2.1 and 3.1 million people (5 or 6 million less 2.9 million people).
• Thus, we have to take the 3.9 million people that were truly incremental because of Obama Care and subtract out either 2.1 or 3.1 million, ending up with a net gain in insured Americans of between 800 thousand and 1.8 million.
• After years of trying, billions and billions of dollars spent, we may have gotten incremental, expensive, and narrow insurance coverage to less than two million Americans.

Only in Washington can the nation spend billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth and end up with a problem that is hardly any better than when before the program started. Insane.

That is where we stand today. Let’s follow up our conversation and discussion from yesterday and see what additional disasters have come to the surface since we last talked about Obama Care:

1) One of the main objectives of Obama Care was to reduce the cost of health insurance and thus, theoretically, make it more widely available. In fact, the President promised that the average American family would see a $2,500 annual savings in their health insurance costs every year. 

That may have been the legislation’s objective but that is not what is likely to happen. The wonderful website, Bankrupting America, on August 6, 2014 did a great summary of how much health insurance premiums and rates are likely to INCREASE in 2015, not decrease by $2,500:

• Florida state officials recently announced that Florida Blue, the state’s largest health insurer, would be raising its Obama Care policy premiums by an average of 18% for 2015. 
• Overall, Florida health insurance rates are likely to go up between 11 and 23%. According to state officials, “Fourteen companies, including three new insurers, are planning to sell to Floridians through healthcare.gov in 2015. Of the 11 returning plans, eight filed average rate increases ranging from 11 to 23 percent, and three filed rate decreases ranging from 5 to 12 percent. Florida Blue, the largest insurer, is raising its premiums by an average of 18 percent. Humana proposed an average 14 percent increase for its HMOs, while Molina proposed a 12 percent average rate decrease.”
• According to recent reporting in the New York Times: “in their requests for 2015, some of the exchange’s most popular companies are asking for double-digit rate increases. MetroPlus is asking for an average increase of 18.5 percent, including 28 percent for customers in its high-end Platinum plan. Empire HealthChoice H.M.O. is asking for an increase of 18 percent, and Health Republic, conceived by the Freelancers Union, is asking for a 15 percent average increase, including nearly 19 percent for some customers.”
• The Obama Care policy purchasers in North Carolina tended to be older and less healthy customers than what was expected. For example, North Carolina Blue Cross initially sought to have a marketplace customer pool of about 50% being 34 years old or younger. But only 32% of those that signed up for state Obama care policies matched this younger demographic. As a result, North Carolina Obama Care customers are likely to see increases in 2015 to make for this bad mix that befell insurance companies selling Obama Care policies in the state. 
• A recent analysis and report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 27 states and D.C. have already released Obama Care premium rate increases for 2015, with Nevada having the highest average increase, 36%, and the average increase across all of the studied states being about 7.5%. 
• So far, Iowa is also among one of the states with the highest average premium rate increases for 2015 with Obama Care policies in that state expected to raise rates by an average of 11.5% with the range being between 8.7 and 14.3%.
• At these rates, the cost of an average Obama Care policy in Nevada will double in cost in less than three years, less than seven years in Iowa, and less than 10 years across the national average.

You cannot claim the legislation was successful when the cost of insurance is doubling in cost in such relatively short times. Thus, it has to be concluded that Obama Care failed in both its promise of reducing health insurance costs and its ability to support Obama’s claim that health insurance rates would go down dramatically in cost, not double in cost.

2) A story on the NPR website from August 4, 2014 examined a problem that we have been discussing for months: Obama Care insurance policies are many times so narrowly focused on very few doctors and hospitals that even though Obama care policy holders now have health insurance, they may have trouble getting health care.

The article centered on doctors in the state of Connecticut but you can be sure that what is happening there is happening around the country. They discussed the situation of a doctor in Hartford. Dr. Doug Gerard usually gets reimbursed about $100 for a patient he might see that has private insurance. However, a similar patient needing similar care with an Obama Care policy might give the doctor only $80 for the same level of attention and treatment.

As a result, Dr. Gerard only accepts patients from one of the three insurance companies serving Obama Care policies in Connecticut and that one provided him the highest reimbursement of the three: 

"I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates. You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on."

Thus, customers of two of the state’s Obama Care insurers are out of luck when it comes to using the services of this doctor and apparently, many others in the state. And this type of behavior is not restricted to just doctors. Hospitals are also being more selective, especially high end, specialty hospitals, with some of them not accepting customers of low reimbursing Obama Care policies. Conversely, the insurance companies themselves are not allowing better, usually more expensive hospitals into their networks in order to keep costs down but allowing medical care to suffer.

Again, the good news is you now have health insurance. The bad news is that the insurance policy is so inadequate that you cannot get health care. 

Why is this happening? As we have said countless times, Obama Care never attacked and tamed the root causes of our ever escalating health care costs. It mistook public health and other issues for a deficiency in health insurance coverage. By focusing on health insurance coverage, ignoring the root causes of higher and higher costs, all it did was to move costs around within the country’s health care market without reducing them.

3) One last unfolding disaster for today, we continue the disasters review again tomorrow; According to the recent polling on the view of Obama Care by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

• 53% of Americans now have an unfavorable opinion of Obama Care.
• This is up a whopping 8% from the previous month's poll results.
• This is the largest unfavorable opinion of Obama Care in the survey's four year history.
• Only 37% of people actually have a favorable opinion of the law.
• Those polled also felt Washington should spend more time on issues like the economy, the federal budget deficit, education and immigration rather than health care.

Thus, not only did the Washington political class screw up again, passing legislation that does not do what it is supposed to do but costing billions of dollars to fail, but focusing on an issue that the rest of America finds secondary in their lives.

Costs are going up, not down as promised. People are getting health insurance but are having trouble getting health care. A strong majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of the legislation and think it should be a secondary priority of Washington. How many ways can you screw up? In the case of Obama Care, countless. And we will count some more 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2014, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 2: Higher Costs Continue, Another State Exchange Bites The Dust, and More

This is our second post in this month’s update series of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. For years and especially the past nine months, we have done a monthly review of all the idiocy, costs, an d ineffectiveness of the legislation known as Obama Care. It is a piece of legislation that was supposed to lower health care costs in this country but in general has caused health care costs to spike upward while destroying many of the good assets of the health care industry in this country. 

To review past discussions of this disastrous legislation just browse the menu on the right side of this page of put the phrase, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. The following news articles and analyses are just the most recent findings and unintended bad consequences of the worst piece of legislation ever written.

1) A recent study by the Manhattan Institute found that Obama Care will actually increase the cost of health insurance more expensive rather than less expensive in this country: 

• Obama Care will increase the underlying health insurance premiums by 41% on average. 
• The greatest increases will be for young healthy males who are the guinea pigs for subsidizing others who are generally older and sicker than young healthy males.
• Obama Care subsidizes will primarily benefit those nearing retirement, another indication that younger Americans are being used to subsidize the health care of older Americans, an age group that is usually wealthier than younger people just starting out in life and their careers.
• Overall, 41 states plus D.C. will experience health insurance premium rate increases. 
• According to Forbes, commenting on this Manhattan Institute analysis, “This nearly-complete analysis finds that the average state will face underlying premium increases of 41 percent. Men will face the steepest increases: 77, 37, and 47 percent for 27-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and 64-year-olds, respectively. Women will also face increases, but to a lesser degree: 18%, 28%, and 37% for 27-, 40-, and 64-year-olds.”
• In addition, the eight states that will experience the largest premium increases are southern and western states: Nevada (179 percent increase), New Mexico (142 percent increase), Arkansas (138 percent increase), North Carolina (136 percent increase), Vermont (117 percent increase), Georgia (92 percent increase), Dakota (77 percent increase) and Nebraska (74 percent increase).

Thus, another third party analysis of reality, confirming what we have pointed out previously from other third part, impartial analyses, Obama Care is doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do, it is raising and not lowering the cost of health care and health insurance in this country. This is a far throw from what the President promised, I.e. that the average family would see an average $2,500 reduction in their annual health care insurance premiums.

2) But some people would correctly point out that the above mentioned analysis did not take into count the Federal government subsidies that the legislation provides to lower income Americans. For that point of view, consider the following graph from an analysis done by Forbes:






The Forbes analysis came to similar conclusions:

• For those Americans aged 27, Obama Care will raise their health insurance premiums 52% on average for males (going from $133 a month to $201 a month) and 22% for females.
• This is to be expected since the Obama Care legislation is based on forcing younger Americans to pay more for insurance they are far less likely to need to subsidize older and sicker Americans who are much more likely to need health care and insurance.
• Once the Federal subsidies are figured in for those that are eligible, the increase for 27 year old males is still a whopping 41% while the female cost actually goes down a little by 5%.

In no case to we come close to the Obama promise of a $2,500 a year decrease in health insurance premiums.

3) Let's stay with this increasing of health insurance premiums trend by reviewing once again a recent University of Minnesota analysis of what impact the legislation will have on consumer costs. Although we have discussed the findings in previous posts, it is worthwhile going over them again since this is a third analysis that proves again what we just proved above, namely that Obama Care is a cost increaser and not a cost decreaser.

The University of Minnesota analysis forecasted the insurance cost increases at the national level and in 10 key states into the future:

• The Annual Cost Of An Obama Care Individual Exchange Health Plan Will Increase $1,375 Within 5 Years.
• The Annual Cost Of A Family Obama Care Exchange Health Plan Will Increase $4,198 Within 5 Years. 
• The Largest Cost Increase For An Obama Care Individual Exchange Health Plan ($1,677) Within 5 Years Will Be In New Hampshire.
• At The National Level, 489,000 MORE Individuals Will Be Uninsured Within The Next 5 Years compared top when the legislation was enacted.

Only in Washington can you pass legislation that is supposed to dramatically reduce costs and get more people health insurance and end up with dramatically higher costs and fewer people covered by health insurance, at least according to the University of Minnesota study, and many other scholarly analyses.

4) According to a recent Associated Press news report, the bureaucracy of managing and administering the entire Obama Care process is still really screwed up:

• At least 2 million newly Obama Care insured Americans are at risk since of being in trouble with the IRS and law according to a recent government report.
• Government officials determined data from Obama Care application forms do not match what was in other government records, which could affect how much consumers pay for their health plans or if they are even legally eligible for benefits and Obama Care subsidies.
• And this estimate could actually be too low, meaning that millions of Americans may not be eligible for the subsidies they are receiving.
• That would make them liable for repaying those subsidies at tax time next year or be prosecuted for perjury if they intentionally put misleading information on their Obama Care applications.
• This is worst news than what government officials told The Washington post a few months ago that more than 1 million of those enrolled in Obama Care plans may have received incorrect subsidies, and that the government was unable to fully fix the errors. 
• And it gets worse since a recent survey done by Roll Call reported that, based on its 50-state survey, at least 2.9 million Americans who signed up for Medicaid as part of the Obama Care enrollment process STILL have not had their applications processed, many of which are over six months old. 

What a mess and what a disgrace. Three years lead time and billions of dollars spent and still the political class and Federal government could not get it right, from an embarrassingly bad website design that failed immediately to paying out taxpayer wealth to millions of people who may not deserve it under the legislation’s guidelines to still not being able to process peoples’ applications six months or more after they were submitted. I am not sure you could have done a worse job of implementation if you were trying to screw it up.

5) One last disaster from Obama Care for today, as if the first four were not enough. After spending about $130 million to build a faulty website, Maryland state government officials decided to flush good money after bad and voted to spend $43.5 million more to transition the state’s health insurance exchange site to new technology that is supposed to fix the original enrollment snafus.

According to the Associated Press, the additional funding includes a $29.3 million, five-year contract with Xerox to host this new technology that has already been used in Connecticut’s health exchange Obama Care. Another $14.2 million, three-year contract was approved for Deloitte to handle software licensing, whatever that means.

Fortunately, Maryland officials claim that more Federal money will not be requested to fix the botched website process. Which is only right since the American taxpayer had already given the state of Maryland received $180 million to fund its botched Obama Care health insurance exchange.

That will do it for today, more disasters to follow and review tomorrow. Through all of these realities and analyses a few things become crystal clear:

1. The Federal government and the political class that operate it are totally inept when it comes to implementing anything of any magnitude. Obama Care and the latest scandal in the Veterans Administration and its poor health care treatment of veterans are just two examples of this principle of incompetence.
2. The unintended consequences of the legislation are far more devastating then if nothing had been done, e.g. higher insurance costs, less freedom, lower health care quality and coverage, etc.

More of the same 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

March, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Bonus Post 1: Religious Freedom Going Down, Costs Going Up, and Pelosi Ducks An Inspector General Function

I know I promised that yesterday would be the final update on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. But since we finished writing yesterday’s post, more disasters have risen to the surface. Thus, we decided to take not one more day but two more days, call them bonus posts, to finish up what a mess Obama Care continues to create just over the past 30 days. 

This will definitely be the last posts for this month on the subject. Not because we covered everything but because it is too depressing to linger on the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever to hold office.

1) One of the truly dangerous parts of Obama Care is that it destroys the religious freedom of individuals and institutions whose religious tenets prohibit them from supporting certain or all kinds of abortion and contraceptive methods. Once a government can destroy certain rights and liberties of certain groups of citizens it will have no trepidations of destroying the rights and liberties of all citizens when the destruction suits its needs.

That is why an upcoming Supreme Court case is so important from a freedom of religion perspective. One of Obama Care’s requirements is that employers who provide health coverage to their employees must pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs and contraception. And for many Americans, paying for those drugs violates their personal and religious consciences. The government is saying, “We are going to force you to do something that is against your moral principles,” says Wayne Hepler, owner of Seneca Hardwood Lumber in Pennsylvania.

Hepler and his family want to continue providing health insurance for their employees without being forced to violate their consciences. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, they’re challenging the government’s freedom destroying mandate. And it’s not just champions of religious liberty who should be worried.

As we stated above, a government gone wild on a certain set of individuals is sure to go wild on others, a position also taken by Carrie Kilesar, Mr. Hepler‘s daughter and part owner of the company: “Any time that you see someone else’s rights being violated, that should be a concern. You know, if religious freedom isn’t particularly important to an individual, they could still see that if you could violate one right, what’s to keep another right from being violated?”

A Federal judge ruled in favor of Seneca Hardwood Lumber last year, giving the family temporary relief from the mandate for now. They, along with more than 300 plaintiffs across the country who are also challenging the mandate, are waiting to see what the Supreme Court does after it hears oral arguments in two similar cases on Tuesday. 

We wish them luck since destroying parts of the Constitution and destroying the religious freedom of law abiding, hard working citizens for a lousy piece of legislation that has no chance of being successful is the epitome of insanity.

2) This past week we have previously discussed the real possibility that Obama Care policy holders will see a major jump in their insurance costs in the near future as Obama Care fails to do what it promised: reduce health care insurance costs for millions of Americans. 

This likelihood was reemphasized by a Reuters news article that recently appeared on the NewsMax website on March 22, 2014, whose highlights included the following:

• Consumers holding Obama Care health plans could see double-digit price hikes next year in states that fail to attract enough younger, healthier enrollees for 2014, according to insurance industry experts. 
• WellPoint sells plans on 14 Obama Care exchanges and expects health insurance rates nationwide to be higher: “Looking at the rate increases on a year-over-year basis on our exchanges, and it will vary by carrier, but all of them will probably be double digit plus," said Ken Goulet, president of WellPoint's commercial business, recently speaking in front of investors in New York.
• Premium increases for the Obama Care policies are expected to outpace those in the employer-sponsored market, which serves about 170 million people.
• Industry officials and independent analysts say the lack of hard data will mean huge variations in premiums, with increases ranging from the high single-digit percentages in some states to as much as 30% in others.
• Lower than expected Obama Care enrollment is a leading indicator of big price hikes in over a dozen states, where younger and healthier residents are not signing up as fast as expected. This is critical since Obama Care prevents insurers from charging sick people higher premiums and thus, the legislation’s financial model requires the participation of healthy young people to offset the cost of covering policyholders with preexisting conditions. 
• As we have discussed many times, government data estimates only 25% of new Obama Care enrollees are in the younger demographic of adults aged 18 to 34, well below the White House's 38% target that is required for fiscal sanity.
• Larry Levitt, a policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tracks healthcare trends and he predicts that most states will see premium increases of 7% to 10% in 2015.
• In 16 states, Obama Care sign-ups represent less than 10% of the potential marketplace population, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study of enrollment data released by the administration on March 1. Analysts say those markets could skew toward older, sicker members, which raises the likelihood of high rate increases.
• Which brings us back to another broken promise/lie of the President and Obama Care. This legislation was supposed to REDUCE the cost of health care in this country, not raise it by double digit increases. The President himself promised that Obama Care would reduce the annual health insurance costs of an average American family by $2,500 a year, not increase it. 
• Even Kathleen Sebelius, the HHS secretary and main manager of the whole disaster, recently said that health insurance costs will go up in 2015. 

Viewed just on this reality, no one can really claim that Obama Care is anything but a failure when measured against its own benchmark of reducing health care costs for every American.

3) According to a Washington Examiner article from March 7, 2014, 73 Federal government inspector generals are supposed to root out waste, fraud and inefficiency in the executive branch of the Federal government. Using thousands of auditors and inspectors, the IGs issue hundreds of investigative and audit reports a year that have sent crooks to jail while at the same time saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. They are the unsung heroes among a Federal government that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Thus, given the disaster that is Obama Care and its busted information systems, high probability of identity theft, and billions of dollars wasted for no results, it's particularly disappointing and bewildering to see House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi playing politics with the tremendously reasonable proposal of Congressman Peter Roskam to create an inspector general for Obama Care. 

In fact, given how massive, ineffective, and inefficient Obama Care is, it is very surprising that it did not come out of the gate with its own inspector general function to begin with. However, as soon as the Illinois Republican made his proposal, Pelosi made clear her opposition to it. 

When asked about the Roskam proposal at her daily news conference, Pelosi said: “No. Each of the committees of jurisdiction has oversight, so the Congressional oversight is something that I support. Each of the agencies of government that are implementing the law, the Affordable Care Act, have their own inspectors general. I think that the system has enough appropriate oversight. I don't see any reason to go to that point.”

The Examiner article correctly points out that there are indeed oversight committees of Congress for all 73 of the departments and agencies that presently have IGs. However, none of those entities control one-sixth of the U.S. economy or trillions of dollars in Federal spending, making Pelosi’s opposition strange and baffling.

This is especially baffling since Pelosi had previously supported creation of new and special IGs for the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well for the Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP), the Federal relief effort to victims of Hurricane Katrina and the intelligence community. In all of these cases, the varying Federal agencies involved all at their own IGs but Pelosi still wanting an overarching IG appointed to look at the entire effort.

Pelosi was speaker of the House when Congress approved the $700 billion Wall Street bailout in 2008 which included a Special Inspector General for the program. As Congressman Roskam pointed out, that IG effort has “identified $5.3 billion in restitution and savings, including $533 million in direct taxpayer savings. In comparison, the healthcare law is estimated to cost $1.8 trillion when fully implemented, dwarfing TARP's cost to taxpayers.”

Is it just a coincidence that every one of those IG proposals Pelosi pushed for came when a Republican President was in the White House? Why is it only for this massive effort, when a Democrat works in the Oval Office and is responsible for the biggest Federal entitlement program ever created, that Pelosi thinks an IG is unnecessary?

Give that Pelosi, who famously said of Obama Care that “we have to pass it so you can see what’s in it” implying she had no clue what was going on, and given that Obama Care was written behind the closed doors of Pelosi’s office in cahoots with health care industry lobbyists, could it be there’s something in Obama Care that she fears an Obama Care IG will expose? 

It has been my experience that whatever Nancy Pelosi says, just the opposite is true or likely to happen. Meaning that the need for an Obama Care Inspector General must be of the utmost priority and importance.

So let’s review: 1) religious and Constitution rights still under fire and attack by Obama Care, 2) more proof that Obama Care insurance policy costs will likely rise dramatically in cost within the next year, and 3) what is Nancy Pelosi hiding by opposing an Inspector General function for Obama Care? Just another day of unfolding disasters for the law.

Tomorrow is guaranteed to be the last update this month, a writer and nation can only take so much bad news at once.

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

October, 2013 Obama Care Disaster Update, Part 1: Insurance Prices Are Up and Data Systems Are Down

Although we took a few weeks off from discussing the disaster that is Obama Care, the overwhelmingly bad news that has occurred since its October 1, 2013 rollout requires us to revisit this disaster. It is failing in so many ways: nonfunctional software, higher costs for existing people with insurance, data integrity, identity theft, etc. that not to review its failings would be a disgrace.

There is so much news to cover that we will not go into as much detail of the fiascos as we might usually do, that would take weeks to get through. We will hit the highlights/lowlights to give a sense of why this atrocious piece of legislation needs to be either repealed or massively overhauled.

1) 34 states were so scared of Obama Care that they opted out of creating their own so-called health care exchanges, as allowed by the law, and passed that responsibility along to the Federal government. Unfortunately, as we and many others predicted, the Federal government has not been able to build as simple, functioning website to execute one function, allow people to sign up for health care insurance.

According to news reports, the Federal website fails to load drop-down menus and other critical elements for users that successfully gain entrance, often does not confirm if a person has actually successfully completed the sign up process, and generally prevents uninsured Americans in the states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates. For this basically nonfunctioning website, the American taxpayer has already paid over $634 million for basically nothing.

And as with all government contracts, it has managed to overrun its budget at $634 million, by an amazing factor of seven. When the company who won the contract to build the Obama Care Federal exchange website was identified back in 2011, the contract stipulated that the cost of development could be as high as $94.7 million. Thus, the Federal government has already spent seven times what the original cost estimate was and STILL does not have a working website. Disgraceful.

Consider two benchmarks of success against which we measure the failure of the Obama Care Federal exchange website. Facebook received its first investment in June 2004 and operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in expenses in June 2010. Twitter was created in 2006, and spent only $360.17 million over the next five years until a $400 million investor boost in 2011. 

These two complicated web efforts spent far less in more years than the Federal government has already spent with the distinction being that they were fully functional sooner and for far less money. But to say the political class can run government functions that are fully functional for far less money are words that have never been uttered.

2) But maybe the supporters and implementers of Obama Care should have known this was likely to happen all along, given how badly the main company who built the Obama Care Federal exchange failed in Canada, according to an October 10, 2013 story from the Washington Examiner. 

That story reported that Canadian health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obama Care health exchange websites,  for nonperformance and missed deadlines.  CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s online medical registry.

The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011 but more than a year later was still not in operation. Other companies were eventually hired who were able to fix what this Obama Care data systems provider could not.

Three troubling issues here. Did someone in the Federal government procurement process know how incompetent this company was and still went ahead and awarded them the contract? The Federal government had three years to put this process and computer system in place, why did it fail so miserably on the first day and continues to fail? And finally, why did we send hundreds of millions of dollars to a foreign company? Were there no American companies that could have done the job? The whole episode smells of incompetence and shadiness.

3) We have previously reported on how many Americans are seeing the costs of their current health care insurance skyrocket as a result of Obama Care. The Heritage Foundation documented three recent examples of just how much those insurance costs are going up for Americans:

- George Schwab of  North Carolina was recently notified in a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield on September 23 that his current health insurance plan doesn’t meet Obama Care’s benefit requirements and would have to be terminated at the end of the year. While Blue Cross did suggest a comparable plan, it was $980 more than what he now pays.

“The President told the American people numerous times that  ‘If you like your current coverage, you can keep it,’” Schwab told The Charlotte Observer. “How can we keep it if it has been eliminated? How can we keep it if the premium has been increased 430 percent in one year?”

- Michael Yount and his wife, a retired couple in North Carolina, buy their individual insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield and pay about $380 a month with an $11,000 deductible. 

But they were recently informed that their new insurance plan will be THREE times the price, costing them $1,124.50 a month, The Christian Science Monitor reported. The couple said they plan to drop out of formal health insurance, pay the penalty, and “self-insure.”

- Cindy Vinson in California “will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy,” reports the San Jose Mercury News. She is an Obama voter who was surprised by the personal impact of Obama Care. “Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.” 

Who did she think was going to pay for it? Given that Obama Care does not resolve the underlying root causes of our high health care costs, all it does is move existing costs in an unworkable Rube Goldberg manner so that everyone pays more but the underlying problem and related costs never get resolved.

Losing a current policy, paying much more for a replacement policy, and going self insured, three things that any health care reform effort should not do but what Obama Care is doing.

4) According to a recent Washington Post story: 

Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch…Robert Laszewski, a health-care consultant with clients in the insurance industry, said insurers were complaining loudly that the site, www.healthcare.gov, was not working smoothly during frequent teleconferences with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services before the exchange’s launch and afterward. “People were pulling out their hair,” he said.

Which raises the question that if just about everyone knew this rollout was going to bomb, why did the Obama administration go ahead with a rollout that actually bombed? Could it be politics overrode common sense? If this aspect of Obama Care had also been delayed like many, many other aspects of the legislation that have already been delayed or terminated, it would have been a political nightmare for Obama. It would have provided further proof that the Federal government was unable to manage such a complicated, and unnecessary, process and that the associated legislation needed to be scrapped.

Thus, rather than do the right thing, the administration rolled out a disaster on a wing and a prayer, neither of which held up. Now the American taxpayer is probably paying big bucks for overtime, crisis fueled data programming resources in order to fix what never should have gone live. Americans who might actually have wanted to sign up for insurance may decide it is not worth the hassle even if the system is adequately fixed in the future since their first attempt to sign up was a frustrating failure. When politics overrides common sense there is never a good outcome.

Given all of the hassles, how many people have successfully signed up for Obama Care through the Federal process? No one knows and/or no one is telling. You can bet if this process was successful, the Federal government and Obama would be touting its victory. However, no touting has to mean no victory, for either the government, the American taxpayer, and the unresolved problem of high health care costs in this country.

We are just getting started, more to come on the following days on the unfolding Obama Care disaster.

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