May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 1: What Failed and What Should Have Been Done

While we have spent the past few weeks recording the latest month’s worth of American political class insanity, have taken time to review the travesties and embarrassments from our nation’s idiotic tax code, and asked the question what would happen if Washington passed a law that no one obeyed, insanity coming out of the whole Obama Care effort has also been unfolding. 

We have spent many posts each month since last August trying to keep up with the idiocy of Obama Care and those that wrote it and continue to support it in the face of real world realities. Note: these previous posts can be accessed by the menu at the right hand side of this page. These realities continually to paint this legislation as the worst piece of legislation ever produced by Washington by the most inept set of politicians ever to sit in office in Washington. 

Before going into the details of the latest Obama Care disasters, let’s review the known disasters and review why Obama Care has no chance at all of fixing the problem of ever escalating health care costs in this country. A summary of what we have uncovered, discussed, and analyzed include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and wasted on a Federal Obama Care website that did not initially work despite having three years of preparation.
• Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and wasted on state level Obama Care websites that never worked or initially did not work despite having three years of preparation.
• The Obama Care websites were designed so poorly that they have been called an identity thief’s paradise and an identity thief’s “wet dream.”
• The expected long term cost of implementing Obama Care has more than doubled since the initial estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) when the legislation was originally passed.
• Even ten years down the road, the CBO estimates that tens of millions of Americans will not have health insurance coverage despite the fact that the whole purpose of Obama Care was to make sure EVERY American had low cost health insurance coverage.
• The legislation will conservatively add over one trillion dollars to the national debt load over the next ten years.
• In 45 states, expert actuaries estimate that the average cost of health insurance will ACTUALLY GO UP despite the promises made by Obama Care advocates that the legislation would substantially reduce health insurance costs. In fact, one of Obama’s biggest lies, note I did not say only lie, was that the average American family would see their health care costs go down by $2,500 a year.
• Speaking of lies, the President was awarded the Lie Of The Year in 2013 by the usually Obama-friendly Washington Post for his lie, uttered many, many times, that if you liked your current health insurance plan or your current doctor, you would be able to continue to keep that favored insurance plan and doctor.
• Millions of Americans lost access to their current health insurance plans as a direct result of the legislation, a loss that most did not want or anticipate, given the Obama administration’s lies.
• Many of those millions of Americans who lost access to their current plans as a result of the legislation found that Obama Care plans were seriously flawed relative to their life situation with many, many of them losing access to their doctors, their favorite hospitals, life saving and life improving drugs, and experiencing substantial increase in health insurance premiums AND deductibles.
• Top doctors and top hospitals have opted out of serving those covered by Obama Care insurance policies, denying top quality health care treatment to millions of Americans. i.e. the good news is that you have health insurance coverage, the bad news is that you cannot get health care treatment.
• The President and his administration many, many times broke the law and violated the Constitution by unilaterally altering implementation and rollout dates established in the law.
• The President and his administration many, many times broke the law and violated the Constitution by unilaterally changing the tenets and the requirements established in the law.
• The training for the so-called Obama Care navigators, those people that would help Americans sign up for Obama Care, received very sparse training and were never criminally background checked despite having access to Americans’ highly personal data, providing another avenue for identity theft. In fact, at least a handful of navigators were found to have serious criminal backgrounds.
• The whole operation is supposed to be managed by the IRS, one of the most inept Federal government organizations around, leaving little doubt that Obama Care will also not be run properly, efficiently or effectively.
• Many individual American citizens who dared to criticize the Obama Care legislation, both famous Americans and ordinary Americans, found themselves in turn being investigated by the IRS, likely for daring to criticize aspects of the legislation, a direct violation of the First Amendment rights.
• The legislation infringed on the freedom of religion rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution by forcing religious and non-profit organizations to violate their religious tenets or be in violation of Obama Care’s tenets.
• The legislation is forcing many businesses to put expansion plans on hold as a direct result of the legislation, contributing to the continued anemic economic growth over the past few years.
• The legislation has forced many lower margin businesses to turn their permanent workers into part time workers, working less than 30 hours a week, in order to financially survive the law’s dictates, further stunting national economic growth.
• Even worse, the law has forced at least hundreds and hundreds of companies to lay off American workers as a result of the additional business and financial burdens the legislation places on their businesses’ operations.
• The administration has insulted every American by giving special financial treatment to members of Congress and their staffs from a financial perspective but has not done the same for the rest of America, creating a tide of resentment that those who passed the stupid law do not have to abide by the stupid law they passed.
• The President and this legislation have endangered the financial well being of Medicare by proposing that $700 billion be stripped out of the Medicare program in the next ten years to make the Obama Care business case and benefits look better than they are.
• Obama Care insurance companies have already started to indicate that 1) they may have to significantly raise Obama Care premiums in 2015 given the likely sub-optimal mix of younger and healthier Obama Care policy owners and older, less healthy Obama Care policy owners and 2) these same insurance companies might be entitled to bailouts, ala General Motors and the major banks several years ago, as a result of a deal they got included in the legislation to protect their companies’ profitability.

What a mess on so many levels. The saddest thing about the whole disaster is that the legislation has virtually no chance of resolving the problem of ever escalating health care costs because the legislation never attacked the root causes of those high costs. If you do not understand the underlying problem, you have no chance of ever resoling that problem. And that is why Obama Care will eventually implode and fail but still severely damage the economy, Americans' health, and our freedoms and liberties.

What are those root causes? They include the following:

1. Americans eat too much.
2. Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, much of which is the result of the government subsidizing the infection of our food chain with too much fattening high fructose corn syrup, courtesy of its misguided crop subsidy programs.
3. Americans smoke too much, helped in part by the government subsidizing the growing of tobacco over the years to the tune of billions of dollars, artificially keeping the wholesale cost of tobacco products low.
4. Americans do not exercise enough, resulting in the most overweight and obese nation in the world.
5. The medical tort system is in need of drastic reformation, reformation that when executed at the state levels reduced health care costs.
6. Cross state border competition restrictions imposed by the government reduces in state competition for health care insurance policies, increasing costs.
7. The administration never took the time to understand where the money goes once a person pays for a medical treatment, I.e. they never “followed the money” to see where the true underlying costs are, costs which then could be attacked and reduced.
8. The bureaucracy to operate our current health insurance system adds layers and layers of cost and reviews to the health care industry, adding even more to overall costs.
9. The government’s current, large, health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, lose tens of billions of dollars every year to criminal fraud, lost dollars that could be used to attack these root causes at no additional cost in the form of consumer and business taxes.
10. America is aging which means there is likely to be a growing prevalence of age related diseases in the future (e.g. certain types of cancers, dementia, Parkinson’s disease), all of which will overwhelm our health care infrastructure, a situation not addressed by the Obama Care legislation.

Creating a massive and inefficient Rube Goldberg government process based on a piece of legislation that was well over 2,000 pages does nothing to address these root causes. That is why it will fail and fail dramatically and expensively. 

Over the next week or so, we will review additions to the above list of Obama Care disasters and failures that have arisen in just the past month or so. However, before we get into some of that new depressing news, tomorrow we will try and take a more optimistic view of what could be done to address the true root causes of our high health care costs and what is actually being done outside the realm and capabiity of the Washington political class. 

There is hope but that hope is based on absolutely nothing coming out of the Washington political class. Remember, their policies and legislation have helped create the problem we are in the middle of now.

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, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: The Chutzpah Train, Its Not Obama's Fault, No Accountiability For Failure and More

This is our fourth post this month that is covering the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been doing this series on a monthly basis since last August and on a periodic basis for three years. The damage that this legislation is doing to our economy, the health of our nation’s citizens, the job creation process, and countless other areas of concern easily makes this the worst piece of Washington legislation ever enacted. And it is becoming clear it was enacted by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever.

We probably will not be done covering the past thirty days or so of insanity and idiocy from this law today. It is so bad that we will probably need to go at least a few more posts to cover the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

1) Kathleen Sebelius is the head of the Health and Human Services Department of the Federal government. She was the leader in the operationalizing of the law and its rollout. Given what a disaster the whole endeavor has been, let’s take a quick review of how poorly she did in her job:

• Despite spending over $600 million and having over three years lead time, the Obama Care Federal health insurance exchange website was a total disaster when it launched late last year.
• Many of the state level Obama Care health insurance exchange websites are as bad or worse than the Federal website.
• The information systems supporting Obama Care have been described as a hacker’s paradise and a hacker’s wet dream, endangering the privacy and financial security of millions of Americans.
• The system’s data flows were incomplete, wrong, or sent to total strangers.
• There were no facilities or abilities to do analyses of the types of people who were signing up, whether or not they were actually paying for insurance, and a bunch of other logistics shortcomings.
• The so-called Obama Care navigators were never subjected to background checks, resulted in criminals and illegal aliens having access to families’ personal information, making identity theft very easy.
• Deadlines and other dates were unilaterally cancelled or postponed because the operations were not ready for prime time.

Let’s cut it off here, you get the idea. In a real job in real life, she would have been fired long ago. But she still is in the same position that she was in when all of her failures started to pile up.

But the really sad thing is that there are actual people in the political class who still think she is doing a good job and should keep her position. The following clip is a video snippet of the Maryland Governor, Governor O’Malley stating that she is doing a fine job and should keep her job. He must not have been paying attention over the past five months of disasters:

http://libertyalliance.com/2014/03/gov-omalley-says-sebelius-good-job-wait/

What does one have to do, how incompetent does one have to be to get fired from a government position? Amazing.

2) Let’s stay with Sebelius a little longer. The Obama Care exchange website should have been up and bug free five months ago. My gosh, they spent over $600 million and had three years to get it right but they did not.

At this point they should be in a strictly maintenance mode, a mode that should be quite inexpensive relative to the development mode. But inexpensive is a word that rarely describes the Washington political class.

In an amazing act of chutzpah, Ms. Sebelius has asked for an astonishing $1.8 BILLION for the website needs in the next fiscal year budget. Let’s do some simple math to show how insane this request is:

• At $1.8 billion a year, this comes out to a business work day rate of spending $720,000 a DAY on the Obama Care website in a year.
• This comes out to spending an incredible $80,000 an HOUR on the website, a website that should already have been developed and bug free.
• For another perspective, if you had spent $2,400 a day every day since the day Jesus Christ was born, you still would not have spent $1.8 billion.

Unfathomable how the Washington political class can be so incompetent at such a high rate of wasteful spending, especially when it comes to Obama Care.

3) Let’s stay on the chutzpah train as the President hops on. Before reviewing what he said on a recent Spanish television town hall meeting, lets recall that 1) he promised over the years that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by about $2,500 and 2) he also promised back in September, 2013 that: "You're going to be able to purchase high-quality health insurance for less than the cost of your cellphone bill”

At that recent Spanish-language town hall, President Obama was asked a question from a viewer who said his family could not afford a $315 a month Oba,a Care health care insurance premium since his family was making $36,000 a year. This premium rate would be more than 10% of his pre-tax family income, certainly very expensive.

Rather than accept the blame that he was wrong when he promised that the average family would see thousands of dollars in savings on health insurance and that the cost of health insurance under Obama Care would be about the cost of a monthly cell phone bill (which is certainly nowhere close to $315 a month), he actually had the chutzpah and gall to blame the caller, who the President felt did not do a good enough job of prioritizing what that family was spending money on: 

“If you looked at their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill, other things they're spending on, it may turn out that, it’s just they haven’t prioritized health care.” 

Unbelievable, is this person, the President of the United States, living in a state of denial? The legislation is bad and to blame, it is not the millions of American families across the country that spend too much on their cable bill, telephone bill, food, shelter, etc. God forbid it is anything that President Obama was involved in that caused a problem.

The actual interview where he blames the viewer and others for their bad priorities can be accessed at:

http://www.nrsc.org/blog/obama-obamacare-is-affordable...-if-you-cancel-your-cell-phone-and-cable?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=20140312_p-ocare-is-affordable-if-you-cancel-cable-and-cell_facebook&utm_content=p

4) A March 17, 2914 article from Bloomberg reviewed the survey results from Bankrate relative to Obama Care:

• 34% of survey respondents without insurance say they plan to stay that way, even after being told that the new law requires them to get covered or pay a penalty. 
• Of the 1,249 respondents without insurance, people age 18 to 29 were in fact the least likely to say they will remain uninsured, with just 28% making that claim.
• For those aged 50 to 64, the figure was 33% and for those aged 30 to 49, 39% said they would stay uninsured. 
• There's no correlation with education since the survey found that about one-third of every group, from high school dropouts to people with graduate degrees, say they'll remain uninsured. 
• The decision to stay uninsured isn't about political leanings since although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say they'll uninsured the difference was only 7%, 29% to 22%; the biggest difference being for uninsured independents, the biggest voting bloc, 41% of whom said they won't get insurance.

Thus, after three years of discussion, debate, news headlines, subsidies, television and other mass media advertising, Presidential and First Lady interviews and pleading, we are still looking at one third of uninsured Americans having already decided that they are not going to get health insurance coverage. 

Lousy job by the Obama administration in selling the program to America but just a lousy piece of legislation that no amount of selling could overcome? A good piece of legislation, like a good product or a good service, would have sold itself on its benefits. Nothing apparently is selling Obama Care.

In any case, whatever the cause, the legislation cannot be viewed as anything than a failure when it comes to its primary objective: providing low cost health care insurance to EVERY American. As the Congressional Budget Office has forecasted and this Bankrate survey supports, millions of Americans will still be without health insurance years down the road, contrary to what this President promised. But a broken promise from this President is nothing new.

More disasters tomorrow, if you can stand it.

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 6: A Hacker's Wet Dream, More Than Glitches, and Premium Costs Still Skyrocketing

This is our sixth, and not final, post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The first of those posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.htm

From there you can read the sordid tales of woe, hardship, and failure in subsequent posts that Obama care is forcing down the nation’s collective throat. And those tales of failure continue below:

1) As expected, since the Obama administration did not require its Obama Care’s “navigators” or advisors to be run though a criminal background check, many knowledgeable people have called the whole Obama Care sign up process an identity thief’s paradise since criminally inclined navigators will have easy access to a person’s private information.

The first documented case of that happening was described by an article in the Laurence, Nebraska Laurence World Journal. Rosilyn Wells — the Director of Outreach and Enrollment for the Heartland Community Health-care Center (HCHC) – is “the only full-time Affordable Care Act navigator in Lawrence,” despite the fact that:

• Her financial history includes a bankruptcy in 200
• In 2007, there was a civil charge against her from a local check cashing business called Midwest Checkrite for writing a bad check.
• She is more than $1700 behind on her state tax bill,
• She has an outstanding arrest warrant in a neighboring Kansas county.

This is the person that will have access to local residents’ names, addresses. birthdates, social security numbers, and other personal and financial information. To add insult to injury, her employer, Heartland Community Healthcare Center, is an approved Obama Care health provider which means there is a severe conflict of interest that could lead to her sub optimizing people’s health care choice by steering them to her employer rather than another provider that is better suited. 

Major conflict of interest, owes back taxes, and has an outstanding arrest warrant but still serves as an Obama Care navigator. Very scary.

2) The Heritage Foundation is running a program where people can communicate their experiences that Obama Care is having on their own family’s insurance situation by sending in emails, Tweets, photos, etc. to the Foundation. A sample of their responses so far include the following, unscientific sample (note: a lot of the responses including computer screen shots of what they were currently  paying and what they will pay under Obama care to prove that they were not making the numbers up):

• Wendie Sanders sent in a screen shot that shows her insurance going from $1008 a month to $1,980 a month, about a 98% increase.
• Kristalyn N. showed a photo depicting the fact that her health insurance is going from $255 a month to $536 a month.
• Michelle R. sent in a screen shot that showed her monthly cost going from $553 to $639, an almost 16% increase. However, what is even worse, her deductible amounts went from $750 to $2,000 for each individual and from $2,300 to $4,000 for the family.
• Janney Warren’s family insurance costs went up a whopping  $690 a month.
• Andrew Herdon’s computer screen shot shows his family insurance costs going from $270 a month to $810 a month in 2014.
• Teresa Bryan’s insurance company dropped her policy as a result of Obama Care and her replacement policy through Obama Care will cost her $495 a month, up from the current $214 a month.
• Zeemuse reported that her sister’s monthly insurance cost for her and her daughter is going from $200 to $600 a month, her doctor visit copay is going from $30 to $60 and her hospital copay is going from $100 to $500. The sister is going to go without insurance and take her chances since she cannot afford the increases. By not paying a whopping $7,200 a year she can easily afford the penalty. The $7,200 is about 19% of her PRE-TAX income so it is no wonder why she would drop out.
• A number of respondents sent in a picture of a form letter they had all received from Human which showed a side-by-side comparison of their current plan, that runs about $406 a month, and what the plan will morph into under Obama Care whose monthly cost will jump to $808 a month. This is an annual increase in cost of almost $5,000.

You get the idea. Just these people above we see that their annual increases range from $1.032 for Michelle R. to almost $6,000 for the Herdon family. And in many cases the monthly cash outlay is just part of the Obama Care pain since the levels of their policy deductibles have also gone up substantially.

Yes, maybe some of these people will get an Obama Care subsidy. But many, if not most, will not qualify or will not come close to getting enough of a subsidy to offset these substantially higher costs. Thus, rather than reducing the average American family’s annual health insurance cost by $2,500 as promised by Obama, these Americans will be lucky if they can keep the increases under control, never mind paying $2,500 less.

3) The Obama administration has come under much deserved criticism for every aspect of this horrid law. Despite the criticism, I find it interesting that it has not fought back from a PR perspective along two components:

1. First, during the last Presidential election, Obama defended Obama Care by trying to undercut Romney, saying that Obama Care is based on the same health insurance business model that Romney introduced in Massachusetts. If that is the case, why hasn’t Obama paraded out examples from Massachusetts showing how successful that business model was and that is what we can expect from Obama Care? Could it be there are no success stories from the mini-Obama Care experiment in Massachusetts?
2. Second, we are being overwhelmed by people’s stories across the country suffering sticker shock from the impact and increases being caused by Obama Care. Why hasn’t Obama and Sebelius paraded out some people who actually saw their health care insurance rates go down by the promised $2,500? Maybe types of these success examples also do not exist?

Just saying…

4)  The Washington Examiner on October 14, 2013 had a short summary of more sticker shock trauma on American’s health insurance costs:

• CNNMoney reported that one family “found a bronze-level plan for roughly $357 a month, after their subsidy, which they could swing. But it comes with a $12,600 family deductible.”
• A research group, American Action Forum,  found that a 30-year-old male nonsmoker “will see his lowest cost insurance option increase 260%.”
• Some people who already buy their own insurance are receiving cancellation notices and offers for expensive new policies. The Christian Science Monitor reported on a North Carolina family who had been buying Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance for $380-a-month. “BCBS is offering them a new plan for three times the cost, $1,124.50 a month, still with an $11,000 deductible,” reports the paper.
• A California couple said that the Obama Care policy suggested to them included a 40% increase in their doctor's office co-pay. “Our co-pay skyrocketed from 0 percent to 40% and the maximum out-of-pocket increased an additional $2,300,” according to a letter in the Fresno Bee.
• Kaiser Health News found a lack of competition in some pockets of the country. “Eighteen percent of counties have only one insurer offering plans and 33 percent of counties have only two insurers competing.”

More of the same: higher month insurance costs, high rate hikes, higher deductibles, higher co-pays, etc. What a fiasco.

5) Let’s close today not with my opinion but with the opinions of industry experts with regards to the Obama Care exchange sign up processes and systems:

• The House of Representatives Oversight committee sent a letter to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius's reminding her that her staff had assured members of that the Obama Care exchanges were "proceeding on schedule and did not identify any problems like the ones now being experienced on HealthCare.gov." 
• Technology experts have viciously panned the Federal government's Obama Care website, which handles 36 state exchanges with anti-virus software creator John McAfee saying the Obama Care website is a "hacker's wet dream." 
• "Any modern Web company would be well prepared for a launch of this scale," RackSpace chief technology officer John Engates told the Washington Post. "We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of people and we’re not talking about complex transactions.”
• In an interview with CBS News, online database programmer Luke Chung said that despite him personally supporting Obama Care, he believes the government's website is an embarrassing failure: "It looks like nobody tested it. It's not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that." 
• Politico reporters Brett Norman and Jason Millman warned that Obama Care's technical woes are far from over: "The glitch-plagued Obama Care rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology problems could thwart the Obama administration's goal of getting 7 million people enrolled in the new exchanges by the end of March,"  
• Tech expert Dan Schuyler helped build the Utah Obama Care exchange. He told Politico that if HHS does not fix the federal healthcare.gov website within three or four weeks, "those at the back of the line will not have coverage." 

A hacker’s wet dream, glitch plagued, ashamed, embarrassed, technology problems, etc. Remember, this is a website signup process that cost over $643 million to develop and it is a total disaster. Maybe the fact that HHS did not put this out for competitive bidding may have had something to do with the glitches, Just saying…

In real life, many people would have been fired already for this type of less than shoddy work. Should be interesting to see if that reality exists inside the Beltway and we see someone get their career axed for this incompetence.

Until then, the Obama Care incompetence train wreck review continues 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