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

August, 2017, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Ever Rising Costs Despite the Promises of the Opposite From Obama

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) It is that time of the year when insurance companies file for their next year rates and what has become an annual event, Obama Care insurers and their policies are again headed for double digit increases in costs. Consider the latest realities of Obama Care cost increases as described by a recent article by Joseph Curl on the Daily Wire website:

• According to a new report from the Federal government, some Obama Care policies will see up to a 30% average increase in premium costs in 2018.
• This is obviously a far cry from when Obama repeatedly claimed that an American family would see up to a $2,500 decrease in their annual health insurance premium costs.
• The Department of Health and Human Services reported that customers in Idaho, West Virginia, South Carolina, Iowa and Wyoming are customers of insurers requesting premium AVERAGE increases of 30% and possibly more.
• If the average increase is 30% than obviously some people will see their insurance premium costs increase by more than 30%.
• The Hill has reported that Maryland’s largest insurer, CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, is looking for a rate hike in excess of 50%.
• The Chicago Tribune reported recently that "insurers propose to hike health insurance prices by as much as 43% next year for those who buy coverage through Obamacare exchanges. That's on top of nosebleed-section rate increases of more than 40% for 2017." 
• In New Hampshire, the Union Leader recently reported that premium costs for Obama Care individual insurance policies will rise at least 44% in 2018: “Today’s news about rates is alarming, especially for the 94,000 New Hampshire residents who obtain their insurance through the individual market, but unfortunately, it does not come as a surprise,” New Hampshire Insurance Commissioner Roger Sevigny said.
• In Nebraska, there is only one insurer for the whole state selling Obama Care policies and the average increase for premiums for that sole company in the state will be 16.9% although some people in Nebraska will get increases of over 50%.

How anyone in Congress or anywhere can continue to insist that Obama Care is good for Americans and good for America is a good thing is beyond me. Higher and higher costs, more narrow networks, inferior care, you could not try to make a worse system if you tried.

2) Martin Walsh, writing for the Conservative Tribune on August 1, 2017, continued to report the worsening news for Obama Care customers:

• A new study from the Federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found that 1,332 counties in the United States will have access to only one health insurer on the Obama Care exchanges in 2018.
• This is a whopping one third of all U.S. counties.
• Even worse news is that 40 counties will have NO access to Obama Care insurance company policies in 2018 even though they have to get an Obama Care policy to have any chance of a Federal subsidy. 
• According to the CMS: “The map currently shows that nationwide 40 counties are projected to have no issurers, meaning that Americans in these counties could be without coverage on the Exchanges in 2018. It’s also projected that 1,332 counties — over 40 percent of counties nationwide — could only have one issuer in 2018.” 
• CMS went on to conclude that, “This could represent more than 2.3 million Exchange participants that will only have one choice and may not be able to receive the coverage they need.” 
• The CMS also concluded that Obama Care policies saw their premium costs rise 21.6% in 2017 vs. 2016.

Despite even the Federal government via CMS telling the world that Obama Care is an unmitigated disaster, the bozos in Congress still cannot get their heads together to fix ANY aspect of Obama Care. I hope they are enjoying their five week vacation this month along with their gold plated, taxpayer funded healthcare plans.

3) One last set of bad Obama Care cost news for today, this bad news courtesy of a recent NewsMax article:

• The Kaiser Family Foundation is estimating that some U.S. cities will see the cost of Obama Care health insurance policies rise by as much as 50% in 2018.
• Kaiser tracks insurance costs across 21 U.S.cities.
• The cost of mid-level Obama Care insurance policies will increase by double digit rates in 15 of those cities and decrease in only two of the tracked cities.
• The single Obama Care insurance company in Delaware is proposing raising rates by 12.8% on average.

Now Kaiser did try to justify the rate increases to some extent by saying that the actual insurance policy holders will not have to pay the entire increase since the American taxpayer would help pay for their subsidies, which is likely a correct assertion. But Obama promised to “bend the cost curve downwards,” not just shift costs from the individual to the entire American taxpayer base. Somebody is going to pay for those increases and it is you and I.

Sad, sad news on the Obama Care front: ever increasing premium increases for lower and lower quality and service. More to follow over the next few days as the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care continues to unfold.

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

January, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Eight Reasons To Kill Obama Care Now

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:

We have been talking of the many reasons why ObamaCare has been a disaster from the start which turned it into the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington. Alyene Senger, writing for the Heritage Foundation recently did a nice job of summarizing the eight primary reasons why Obama Care needs to go away:

- Costs - Obama claimed multiple times that his namesake legislation could reduce a family’s annual health insurance costs by up to $2,500 a year. Instead, Obama Care insurance policy holders have seen double digit increases almost ever year in their premiums and higher and higher costs for their deductibles and co-pays. According to an eHealth analysis and report, between 2013 and 2017, the “average nationwide premium increase has been 99 percent for individuals and 140 percent for families.”

And do not forget deductibles. According to analysis done by HealthPocket, the average 2017 deducible for an Obama Care bronze plan is almost $6,100 for an individual policy and a whopping $12,383 for a family policy. This reality points out that less affluent people who can only afford a bronze plan may never get to utilize their policy, or a doctor, since they cannot afford these high deductible levels. The more expensive silver plans will average, in 2017, more reasonable deductibles of $3,572 for an individual and still high $7,474 for a family but the tradeoff is higher monthly premium payments which have been going up by double digits every year.

Not often mentioned in the context of Obama Care is the reality that insurance policy costs for those getting health insurance via their employers have also not been curtailed by Obama Care. According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, family policy premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance plans have gone up by 32% from 2010 through 2016, probably about twice the rate of inflation.

- Choice and Competition: We know that major insurance companies have already gotten out of the Obama Care market or curtailed their presence including UnitedHealthcare and Aetna. 2017 will be the worst year yet for Obama Care insurance company competition as many more companies have dropped than joined and those that remain tend to be bare bones companies that trade off cost for quality of care and access to the better medical options. Things are so bad that more than half the counties in the country now have access to only one or two Obama Care insurance companies, quite the opposite of the Obama boast that the legislation would boost competition and competitive options.

- Failed Exchange Enrollment: The Obama administration claims that 10.4 million people were covered by Obama Care insurance policies in 2016, more than 50% short of the promised enrollment goals, a disaster in itself. But according to the IRS in 2015, that year 12.7 million taxpayers claimed one or more exemptions from Obama Care’s mandate to purchase insurance coverage and another 6.5 million taxpayers paid the penalty rather than sign up for insurance coverage.

Thus, 19.2 taxpayers tried to get out of paying the Obama Care the required fine for not having insurance or just openly decided not to buy insurance, meaning that almost twice as many people tried to get out of buying mandatory insurance than actually bought the Obama care insurance policy.

- Obama Care Exchange Websites: The exchanges were supposed to the easy, efficient way for Americans to buy an Obama Care policy. They were unreliable and difficult to use in addition to not generating near enough customers that were promised. The American taxpayer sent almost $5 billion to the states to set up these state level exchanges but only 11 states and the District Of Columbia set up their own exchanges, the remaining states relied on the Federal government’s exchange. And that Federal exchange cost at least $800 million to build and on its first full day of operation signed up...six people.

- If You Like Your Plan, but the Government Doesn’t, You Can’t Keep It: This title is a play on words of one of Obama's biggest lies when he said over and over that if you like your current insurance policy, Obama Care would not force you to give it up. But that was far from the truth.

Early in the Obama Care era, there were estimates that 6-7 million people lost their existing health insurance policy because of Obama Care. Which means if we look at the true “net” gain in insured Americans, it is not 10 million as Obama claims but only between 3 and 4 million once you realize that the legislation caused 6 -7 million to lose insurance. That number was recently verified to some degree based on analysis by the Associated Press which found that 4.7 million insurance plans across 30 states were cancelled because of Obama Care. Extrapolating that 30 states results to 50 states easily gets back to the 6 - 7 million who lost insurance coverage.

- Co-Op Program: Obama gave 23 states an additional $2.4 billion in taxpayer wealth to create state level “insurance co-ops” to provide insurance policy competition in the 23 states. Within just a few years, 18 out of the 23 co-ops have gone belly up, with the remaining five in danger of following them, so far wasting $1.9 billion and causing hundreds of thousands of co-op customers to frantically seek out other insurance options when the co-ops usually went out of business very quickly.

-Medicaid - The other side of Obama Care disaster, Medicaid, has also been a disaster. Before Obama Care, Medicaid was a creaky, expensive, and low performing government health program. Rather than fix it first, Obama Care dumped about 12 million new customers on this wretched program, making it even more creaky, expensive, and low performing.

These Obama Care Medicaid customers are expected to add almost $1 TRILLION in incremental Medicaid spending in the next ten years for a whopping total Medicaid cost of about $4.8 trillion during the next decade. This comes out to an ANNUAL cost for EVERY American household of about $3,800 just to pay for Medicaid. This is not a good use of taxpayer wealth.

- Limited Access to Providers: Not only have costs gone up because of Obama Care, but access to quality doctor and hospital networks has become more limited over time. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation quantified network sizes for Obama Care plans in 2014, finding that: “Forty-one percent of networks are small or x-small: 11 percent of networks are x-small, meaning they include less than 10 percent of office-based practicing physicians in the area and another 30 percent are small, including between 10 percent and 25 percent of physicians. At the other end of the spectrum, 11 percent are x-large, which we define as networks including more than 60 percent of physicians.

What a mess. Costs up, quality down, Medicaid costs out of control, enrollment targets grossly missed, co-ops  collapsing, it is like you could not screw up more even if you tried. One more review of the unfolding disaster 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:


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

October, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: HIgher Costs, Less Competition, An Alternative and Stories From America

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) Melissa Quinn, writing for the Heritage Foundation on October 17, 2016, provided some upfront and personal stories on ordinary Americans and how Obama Care was screwing up their lives:

• Warren Jones is a veterinarian in Kansas City, Missouri, who has had a health insurance policy with Blue Cross Blue Shield Of Kansas for 15 years.
• In 2014, the year that Obama Care took effect, that policy cost him $318 a month to maintain.
• In 2015, that same policy went up to $394 a month and then to $491 a month in 2016, about a 60% increase in just two years.
• This is the exact opposite of what Obama promised when he claimed that people could see up to a $2,500 REDUCTION in their annual health insurance policy costs.
• In 2017, that same policy will cost him $716 a month, much more than double what he paid just three years ago.
• Despite paying so much more now, his policy no longer has vision and dental coverage and his deductible has also increased to $2,500 a year.
• So he is paying a lot more and getting a lot less as a result of Obama Care.
• Although he does not get his policy via the Obama Care exchange process, even if he did he would not qualify for Federal taxpayer subsidies since he earns too much money.
• And insurance rates, especially for Obama Care policies are going to continue to skyrocket: “A lot of insurers didn’t understand that the market was going to be skewed in terms of income and health status as severely as it was,” Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “Generally, the pool was much worse than anybody expected because of things the administration did that made it worse.”
• Things are not much better in neighboring Kansas where the Kaiser Family Foundation says that six of ten Kansas counties will have only two Obama Care insurers to choose from, a far reach from Obama’s promise that Obama Care would spur competition.
• Before Obama Care was enacted, there were 17 insurance companies operating across Kansas.
• Kaiser also estimates that five states will have only a single insurer issuing Obama Care policies in 2017.
• Rochelle Bird lives in Overland Park, Kansas where she is self-employed
• She has had a non-Obama Care policy from Coventry, a subsidiary of Aetna, for two years.
• In that short time her premiums have gone from $335 a month to $487 while her deductible has increased fivefold, from $1,200 to $6,200.
• And then, adding insult to injury, Coventry then decided to cancel her policy altogether.
• She was not optimistic that she would find a good replacement policy for herself: “I am now faced with the fact that unless something changes, there will be one health care provider presumably with two different health plans that I will have a choice of [while] living in the state of Kansas. That’s absurd. How is that helpful? I’m expecting (a) I’ll pay more, (b) I’ll have less, and (c) I may or may not have the same doctors. Those are always the moving parts.”

Regardless of whether or not you have an Obama Care policy, people across the country are seeing less competition vs. Obama’s promise of more competition, higher premiums despite Obama’s promise of up to a $2,500 decrease in premiums, and higher deductibles. 

2) We listed a bunch of root causes of high healthcare costs above, causes, that if properly addressed, would help reduce healthcare costs and improve the healthcare of every American. But we do not have a monopoly on good ideas to reduce healthcare costs. Consider another Melissa Quinn article from September 12, 2016, that talked about a unique approach for a group of people that is actually reducing healthcare costs:

• Although Deirdre Folley of New Hampshire is one of more millions of Americans nationwide who is considered uninsured, she does not have to pay an Obama Care penalty for not having health insurance.
• Folley and her family are members of Samaritan Ministries which is a so-called healthcare sharing ministry.
• This organization is structured so that members share the cost of each other’s health care expenses.
• This was especially useful to her when her daughter broke her leg which required visits to an urgent care center, a radiologist, and orthopedist which cost her nothing.
• 600,000 Americans are getting healthcare coverage the same way as Folley via Health Care Sharing Ministries.
• According to the article: “Health care sharing ministries facilitate the sharing of medical costs between members, all of whom have shared beliefs. The ministries don’t serve as insurance, but rather when a member has a medical “need,” other members “share” that person’s medical costs.” In some ministries, like Samaritan, members are encouraged to negotiate prices directly with providers to bring down the cost of their medical bills, like Folley did, and they pay in cash before being reimbursed by members of the health care sharing ministry."
• According to Folley, being part of the ministries healthcare model allows them to not violate any of their religious beliefs either: “We didn’t want to buy into a plan where we were most likely going to be paying for abortions or not knowing whether or not we were paying for abortions. With Samaritan, we know we don’t pay for anyone’s abortions, we don’t pay for contraception, we don’t pay for sex changes or counseling for things we would object to. We know that our money isn’t taking part in anything that we have a moral objection to."
• These options are obviously becoming very popular in the face of Obama Care with Folley’s organization almost tripling in size since Obama Care took effect.
• Similar types of healthcare organizations have seen similar growth rates.
• It costs Folley’s family $425 a month for her family of four to be a part of the ministries and she is directed each month where to send that monthly fee directly to another member in need.
• Not surprisingly, the insurance industry is not happy these are not paying customers and users of their insurance policies: “The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has previously warned that health care sharing ministries are not insurance and therefore don’t have the protections of insurance.”
• But given the poor record of insurance companies in the Obama Care world, they really should not be casting too many stones at others looking to keep their families healthy.
• Folley and others like her have not seen the mega cost increases that Obama Care policy holders experienced on their Obama Care policies over the past few years nor the narrowing of the networks of doctors and hospitals they can use.
• And since members pay members directly, there is no profit motive involved as there is with insurance companies which is a big reduction in health care costs right away.

So there are many ways to reduce healthcare costs in this country. Whether it is attacking the root causes of high costs we listed above or organizations like these ministries that are providing low cost, local medical needs financial support to their members, it is a shame that Obama Care more or less ignored what would work in place of what we now know does not work.

3) Let’s finish up today's and this month’s discussion on the unfolding disasters of Obama Care with some quick stories of real Americans that Obama Care has created havoc, stress, and agony for, stories that come from the website: 

www.ourhealthcarestories.com:

CHARLES, OKLAHOMA: 5 of my medications that I have to take everyday went from 60.00 to 90.00. I was given no warning . That is an increase of $180.00 -Those are not the only medications I have to buy. There is no way those kinds of increases are justifiable-- I have many friends that tell me the same thing is happening to them. Insurance companies are trying to re-coop losses by passing these kinds of increases onto the American public. I wonder who is my advocate? Senior citizens like myself cannot afford these kinds of increases. Not to mention my co-pays going up also. Especially when you only find out this ridiculous increase when you go to pay for your medications. I know some people who cannot afford them any longer and they will just do without them.

HARVEY, TENNESSEE: Anchor: Harvey Burniston owns a landscaping company in Butler, and hailed CoveredTN as one of the best decisions the state legislature ever made, splitting insurance costs between the employee, the employer, and the state. Now Burniston says the only plan available is triple the cost. 

Harvey: “A lot of small businesses like myself do not even - they’re not required to have health insurance, [and] I’m not either but I try to do that in order to keep high quality [workers] and take care of my people that work for me. Right now, the average is around $100 a month. When the insurance goes up the least expensive policy we can get is $296 a month, so it’s basically tripling in price.”

EDIE, CALIFORNIA: I am a stage four cancer survivor and I am about to lose my health care plan. When I wrote about my struggle in the Wall Street Journal, the White House directly challenged my account. No empathy was offered and it was suggesting that I was incorrect.

PAUL, UTAH: I learned last week our insurance plan was terminated under the Affordable Care Act, more than 3 1/2 months into our daughter's fight with undifferentiated sarcoma began. The options we are weighing have premiums that are more than double the premiums under our previous plan.

SHEILA: Obamacare takes away from the right to choose the healthcare we want.

Less choice, higher costs, interruption of critical medical care, same sad disasters every 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

October, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Making Up Excuses For Failure, IRS Harassment of Citizens, 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) The October 14, 2016 issue of The Week magazine did an article on the downfall of Obama Care called, “Why Obama Care Is Struggling.” It covers much of the failures we have already discussed this week and adds in a few others along with the very few, and very weak, Obama Care success stories:

• Some of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, and Blue Cross Blue Shield are rapidly pulling out of the Obama Care market because they are losing billions of dollars by being in those markets.
• Only 12.7 million people enrolled in the Obama Care exchanges this year, far short of the forecasted and promised 21 million who should have already enrolled. [Note: not included in the article is the reality that over 1.6 million original enrollees out of the 12.7 million have already been kicked out of their policies because they never paid the first installment of their premiums so the miss relative to the 21 million is even worse.]
• As many as 19% of those customers will have access to only one Obama Care insurer in 2017, very short of Obama's promise that Obama Care would increase competition, not reduce competition to only one provider.
• The main reason cited for the failure is that not enough young people have signed up for Obama Care policies, preferring to pay the penalty for not having insurance.
• While the business case and financials of the Obama Care effort required at least 35% of the enrollees to be aged between 18 and 34, in reality that percentage is only a meager 28%.
• Another problem with the shortfall is that small businesses did not kick employees off of their business insurance plans and onto the Obama Care policies as often as the Obama Care planners and forecasters expected, leaving the Obama Care insurers with older, sicker, and more expensive customers than expected.
• As a result, Obama Care insurance companies either have to hike up premium costs which drives away customers or strip down the benefits of their insurance policies, forcing customers to pay higher prices for less robust insurance coverage which drives away customers so much that many insurance companies decide that from a financial perspective, it is better to be out of the Obama Care world than be in it and take a financial beating.

What a mess, missed customer forecasts, higher premiums, less competition. Now, to be truthful, the article does point out that 20 million more people have health care insurance vs. the times previous to the Obama Care legislation. Also, the percentage of Americans without insurance coverage has dropped from 16% to 9% since Obama Care was passed. But there is a problem with considering the increased quantity of people having healthcare insurance vs. the quality of their healthcare insurance:

• Many of those with Obama Care policy customers are paying more and getting less than what they had with their previous insurance policies, policies that Obama Care outlawed and doomed to termination.
• Which gets us to another point, the 12.7 million who enrolled in Obama Care policies in 2016, were not all people who had not had health insurance before the law was enacted; likely more than half of the 12.7 million just traded their existing policies for Obama Care policies, often under duress, so that the incremental number of Americans insured under Obama Care insurance policies is likely closer to 4 or 5 million.
• Half of those Americans that are now insured as a result of the law, have gotten insurance via Medicaid, a reality that places upwards of 10 million people on a government program that will add tremendous costs to our national debt, provide health care via very narrow networks of less than the best doctors and hospitals, it is a government program that is hurtling towards financial insolvency, is corrupted with inefficiencies and criminal fraud, and if a Harvard study is to be believed, being a Medicaid patient does not make you any healthier vs. not having Medicaid coverage at all.

So yes, Obama Care did increase the number of Americans with health care insurance coverage. But Obama never promised that it would be lousy coverage that costs a lot, has high deductibles, had narrow networks of doctors and hospitals that were not of the highest quality, the reality that we see today. Quality also matters, it is not just quantity that matters.

[Note: the article tries to make the point that “overall government spending on healthcare was $2.6 trillion less last year than what it was expected to be before Obama Care…” This is obviously a ridiculously wrong number. The entire Federal government budget is just under $4 trillion a year so to claim that it is spending $2.6 trillion LESS, not in total, $2.6 trillion LESS, a year on healthcare is obviously either a falsehood meant to make Obama Care look better than it is or a gross typo.]

2) Zachary Tracer, Katherine Doherty, and Tatiana Darie, writing for Bloomberg on October 14, 2016, continued the bad news train coming out of the Obama Care disaster:

• According to an analysis by Bloomberg, 1.4 million Obama Care policy holders in 32 states will lose access to their policies in 2017, forcing them to find other insurance options. 
• Most of the damage is being caused by major insurance companies pulling out of the Obama Care world.
• The search for replacement policies will like lead to fewer insurance policy choices that are more expensive.
• S&P Global Ratings predict that 2017 enrollment in Obama Care insurance policies will be down by 8%.
• Just in Washington DC 7,800 Obama Care customers will lose access to their current policies.
• Kaiser Family Foundation has predicted that at least 19% of people in the Obama Care individual market will have the ability to choose from exactly one provider in 2017.
• In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield will be the only Obama Care option in 95 out of the state’s 100 counties since Aetna and UnitedHealthcare have withdrawn from the state, leaving 284,000 state residents without Obama Care health insurance policies.
• 117,000 residents in Tennessee will lose access to their Obama Care policies.

Another article, another set of implosions.

3) Obama Care from the beginning always had a little bit of the “Big Brother” syndrome ala George Orwell’s 1984. The government was forcing you to buy a product/service that you may or may not want to buy and making you a criminal if you did not heed their warnings and tracking your behavior to make sure you obeyed.

That Big Brother feeling came about again with a current IRS program that was put in place to ensure your compliance. The IRS, the enforcement arm, the “muscle” behind Obama Care is sending out official IRS letters to uninsured Americans (“reaching out” in their words) to remind them (“attracting” in their words) they need to get insured or be fined. The emphasis of the IRS has been to “remind”younger Americans to get insured because in order for Obama Care to work, younger Americans have to subsidize older, less healthy Americans, kind of a cross generational subsidy program from Americans with generally less wealth paying the bills of Americans with generally more wealth to their name.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise and Ways & Means Chairman Kevin Brady recently sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. It stated, “We strongly object to any action by the Administration to improperly use sensitive taxpayer information to identify and harass individuals who have rejected the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by choosing to pay a tax rather than be forced into a health care plan they don’t need and don’t want.” 

Their other concern is that the IRS was using “protected taxpayer information” to conduct the outreach program and that “We do not believe it to be an appropriate tax administration activity, or a good use of scarce taxpayer resources, to use protected return data to direct taxpayers on their personal coverage decisions.”

So yes, Big Brother IRS is watching and like Santa Claus, knows if you have been naughty or nice when it comes to your personal decision on health care insurance, the First Amendment be damned.

4) This next story is great because it shows how out of touch many of the Obama Care architects are relative to the current meltdown of the program and how deep they are into denial. According to David Ruiz, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on August 16, 2016, Zeke Emanuel, one of the more primary and certainly one of the more obnoxious architects of Obama Care, implied that Aetna’s decision to withdrawal from 70% of the Obama Care exchanges markets is not because they were losing money on Obama Care policies but it was to spite the government for not allowing its merger with Humana.

Is he that much out of touch with reality or just pissed off that his work is turning out to be a disaster? Let’s consider some facts:

• Blue Cross and BlueShield have also pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• UnitedHealthcare has pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• Humana and other insurance companies have pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• 17 out of the 23 Obama Care co-ops have gone out of business already because of heavy financial losses.
• We know for a fact that younger, healthier Americans did not sign up for Obama Care in the volume expected which increased insurance company costs more than expected.
• The primary objective of any business executive is to maximize shareholder wealth so no executive would stop operating in a profitable market category if they were maximizing shareholder wealth in that category, i.e. being profitable serving that category.

And despite all of these realities, this sore loser blames Aetna for doing something the whole market has done or is considering doing. By the way, Emanuel provides not proof, no income statements, no Aetna financial disclosures, no Aetna SEC documents, he just accuses them of doing what everyone else is doing. Pathetic.

One last set of 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:


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