October, 2016, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Insurance Company Exits, The Silence of Hillary, and An Illegal Bailout Stopped

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) Over the past two days we have been reviewing how Obama Care is imploding across the country. It was a piece of legislation that was doomed to failure from Day One and now that reality is coming to past. Today and tomorrow we are probably going to sound a little redundant as we continue to review the implosions but it is important to understand how wide and how deep this disaster is becoming. So bear with us as we continue to document the impacts of the worst piece of legislation ever produced by Washington.

Let’s see what Michael F. Cannon had to say for the Cato Institute on August 30, 2016:

• It is now impossible to purchase an Obama Care policy in Pinal County, Arizona as ALL Obama Care insurance carriers have pulled out of the Obama Care market there, leaving 10,000 people without health insurance coverage.
• Aetna and Blue Cross had considered staying in the county if they could get an 86% and 65% increases in insurance premiums respectively approved by the state of Arizona but even then decided that even those huge increases in premium rates would not be enough to be profitable.
• The highly touted co-op concept also fizzled in the county since the Arizona Obama Care co-op went out of business like sixteen of its brethren did across the country.
• In a sad irony, those residents of Pinal County are still going to have to pay Obama Care fines for not having insurance even though it is impossible for them to buy Obama Care insurance policies in their county now.

So much for Obama's promise that the legislation would increase competition and reduce costs, it worked so bad that it eliminated ALL competition from the county, the exact opposite of the promise.

Mr. Cannon reminds us of Obama’s promises back in the early days of the legislation: “In 2009, President Obama promised that under Obamacare, “it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition” or “to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most” or “to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime.” Obamacare would place a “limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses” and require insurers “to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies.”

Weighty promises, none of which became true for people across the country who are losing access to most, if not all, Obama Care insurance carriers so it makes no difference if their costs of illness are limited or they get free services if they cannot even get a policy. The unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

2) Reason magazine, via an October 3, 2016 article by Peter Suderman, came up with a very interesting observation: even though Obama Care is imploding in glorious and disastrous ways, Hillary Clinton has been very, very quiet of the mess. In 15 out of 16 speeches she has given over the past month, she only mentioned Obama Care once and that was because Obama was in the audience. 

As a politician who until recently thought that Obama Care was a great accomplishment, maybe she looks a little foolish with that statement given that:

• The state of Minnesota state government announced that Obama Care premium rates would go up between 50% and 67% in 2017, with state officials calling it “an emergency situation.”
• A few weeks before Minnesota admitted Obama Care was coming off the rails in their state, Tennessee officials declared that its Obama Care exchange was “very near collapse.” That state approved rate hikes for Obama Care policies in 2017 of more than 40%.
• In Arizona, the majority of state counties will be served by only one Obama Care insurer with at least one county being served by NO Obama Care insurers.
• In at least four other states, the entire state in 2017 will be served by only one Obama Care competitor: Alaska, Alabama, Wyoming and Oklahoma.
• Janet Trautwein, the head of the National Association of Health Underwriters, a trade group for insurance brokers, was recently quoted in the The New York Times, "Employer markets are fairly stable, but the individual insurance market does not feel stable at all….In many states, the individual market is in a shambles."
• Even Obama realizes to some degree that things are coming apart with his recent suggestion that the Federal government become an insurance company, an idea we have already debunked and ridiculed yesterday.

No wonder Hillary has been quiet as things have unraveled, she is on record defending what is a rapidly sinking ship, as summarized in the Reason article: “Clinton's silence is telling. Crucial elements of Obamacare are on teetering on the brink of collapse, and the only solutions that its backers have on offer involve spending more public money and giving the government even greater power over health coverage and care. Is it any surprise she doesn't want to talk about it?” If she had a solution, this would be a great time to step into the breech. Given her hesitation, it must assumed that she has no solution.

3) Things have gotten so bad that the Obama administration tried to an end run around the wording of the law and illegally funnel money to insurance companies in a last ditch effort to keep them financially sound and in the Obama Care world. 

Fortunately, their efforts were uncovered and ruled illegal by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Chris Jacobs, writing for the National Review on September 29, 2016 did a great job explaining how things went down: “...the reinsurance funds collected from employers had two – distinct purposes: first, to repay Treasury for the $5 billion cost of a separate program in place from 2010 through 2013; and, second to subsidize insurers selling Obamacare plans to high-cost patients during the law’s first three years. When collections from employers turned out to be less than expected, HHS [the Obama administration] prioritized the second objective to the exclusion of the first – an action that, according to the GAO, violates the plain text of the statute. As the opinion noted, “the fact that HHS’s collections ultimately fell short of the projected amounts does not alter the meaning of the statute.” The memo continued that, because agencies must “‘effectuate the statutory scheme as much as possible’ . . . HHS continues to have an obligation to carry out the statutory scheme using a method reflective of the specified amounts even though actual collections were lower than projected.” As a result, the GAO concluded that the Department has no authority to divert to insurers approximately $3 billion in reinsurance contributions that should be allocated to the Treasury.” 

Nice try if illegal. But we should not be surprised, the Obama administration has illegally changed the law and delayed tenets of the law many, many times. This attempt to illegally divert billions of dollars to insurance companies smacks of desperation and crony capitalism.

Another day, another set of Obama Care failures 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:

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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.

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October, 2015, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Sedentary Americans, Diabetes Epidemic, Obama;s Lies, 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 it 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 but with a big exception: 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 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.

For the past several days we have been reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington. Today's review will end this series of Obama Care updates until next month:

1) We have often made the claim, including in the preceding paragraphs, that Obama Care will never succeed in reducing the nation’s healthcare costs because the law never addressed the underlying root causes of those ever rising costs. The legislation and Obama tried to resolve a public health issue with a hokey insurance solution that is bound to fail and fail in an expensive manner.

As an example of why this is a public health issue, consider a recent Wall Street Journal article that was summarized in the May 8, 2015 issue of The Week magazine. According to the article, 28% of Americans were TOTALLY sedentary in 2014. TOTALLY means that they did not participate in a single physical activity such as lifting weights, running, yoga, bowling, or even stretching. 

These results come from a survey by the Physical Activity Council which estimated that 83 million Americans age 6 or older did nothing to maintain their personal physical fitness throughout 2014, an increase of 18% since 2007. Is it any surprise then that obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other expensive to treat illnesses are driving up the cost of healthcare in this country? 

These medical afflictions could all be addressed if America would start doing some exercising. Instead of launching a public health initiative to drive down the demand for healthcare services, and by driving down demand the price and costs of healthcare would also come down, we are stuck with a failing insurance system via Obama Care that leaves the public health driver of costs unaffected. Insane.

2) Let’s continue on the whole public health issue them for this next discussion. Based on recent analyses and data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, half of all U.S. adults are suffering from diabetes or are at risk of getting diabetes in the near future. Yes, one out of every two Americans are currently or getting close to being in a diabetic state, a condition that has driven up health care costs in this country and will likely continue to drive those costs in the future. 

As we stated in the previous point and in other posts, this is an unaddressed public health issue that Obama Care did nothing to remedy. According to the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, most of these cases are Type 2 diabetes, which is caused by, surprise, surprise... poor diet and a lack of exercise. Sound familiar, public health issues, not an insurance issue.

The government study, recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also found that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians were more than twice as likely to suffer from diabetes as white people. Thus, not only have we identified an overall root cause of rising healthcare costs, we have also found where to focus a public health campaign to alleviate that problem.

Fix the root causes and the reduction in the demand for health care services will drive down the cost of providing healthcare services, it is simple logic and simple economics. But nothing with Obama Care is simple or logical and that is why it is a failure.

3) The large majority of Americans who got health care coverage as a result of Obama Care got it because they were now eligible for Medicaid coverage, the lowest form and probably lowest quality of health insurance available today. But coverage is coverage, right? Better than no coverage, Right? 

Wrong. As Peter Suderman from Reason magazine points out back in mid-2013, those people with Medicaid coverage are not healthier or better off with similar people that do not have Medicaid coverage along several important health measurements. A test/control study in Oregon published by the New England Journal Of Medicine found that Medicaid has “no measurable effect on any of the objectively measured physical health outcomes the study examined.”

This study took advantage of a unique situation in Oregon relative to Medicaid patients. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment randomly picked over 6,000 state citizens to be covered by Medicaid and and a similar and large control group of state citizens that were not covered by any insurance including Medicaid. The study then went back after two years to compare the health profiles of the test/Medicaid covered group and the control, non-Medicaid covered group.

What they found is very interesting and unexpected:

• Those with Medicaid coverage did NOT have healthier blood pressure readings, did NOT have better cholesterol levels, and did not have better diabetic blood pressure control vs. the control group.
• Those with Medicaid coverage did not use the emergency room any less than those without Medicaid coverage.
• Those with Medicaid did see some reduction in their out of pocket healthcare costs vs. the control group.
• However, total spending on healthcare by those Medicaid patients, the majority of which is paid for by taxpayers, shot up significantly without any apparent improvement in overall health. 

In other words, Medicaid, the main insurance provider source under Obama Care, a Federal program that is infested with criminal elements, fraud, and inefficiencies, apparently does not make people any healthier or reduce their reliance on expensive emergency room services vs. doing nothing even though more was spent via Medicaid on those Medicaid customers according to a peer reviewed, published study. 

In other words, like most government programs, the Medicaid option via Obama Care resolves very little and accomplishes even that little bit at great expense to the American taxpayer. 

4) We have probably done over a hundred posts on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have discussed the reality that it never addressed the underlying root causes of our rising healthcare costs, how people like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and many other politicians bold faced lied of what the benefits of the legislation would be, how we were promised that if we liked our current doctor, hospital, or insurance plan that we could keep them under Obama Care (we could not), how the middle class would not see any tax increases as a result of Obama Care (we did), how the program would only cost $900 billion over ten years (according to the Congressional Budget Office it will cost twice that much, at least), how it will not add a dime to the national debt (it will add over a trillion dollars), how insurance costs for a typical American family would go down by upwards of $2,500 a year (those costs rose significantly instead) etc., etc., etc.

To review those past posts, just type in “unfolding disaster” in the search box above. Or, go to the following link to get a 17 minute synopsis of everything that went wrong with Obama Care from the start:

http://www.youngcons.com/greatest-video-deconstruction-obamacare-you-will-ever-see/

While the presentation is a bit over dramatic, the essence of the message is clear and verifiable: this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington, it was the most deceptively presented piece of legislation ever presented by Washington, and the lies associated with it are despicable.

5) And if the previous set of video clips and the lies they contain is not enough to make you lose your lunch, consider the following set of video clips of the President making sure that we knew we would save up to $2,500 a year on health insurance premiums once Obama Care was passed. This promise almost became a mantra of this President, as you will see in the video, a mantra that turned out to be either the largest lie ever told to the American public or the words of a President who had not idea what he was talking about….or both:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o65vMUk5so

6) We will end this month’s chapter of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care with just a few more real life examples of how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families, using the website, www.myhealthcarestory.com, as our source:

Wayne from Indiana on October 21, 2013

Just got my 2014 healthcare package details this week. It includes a 73% increase in premium contribution, $600 deductible increase, and $2,000 increase in out of pocket maximum. My current plan option was discontinued so I could not “keep my plan” even though I was completely satisfied with it. Now I am hoping my current doctor will accept the new plan.

David from Alabama on November 5, 2013

My premium increase is devastating to my budget and I am, for the first time in my life, worried about my health care. I was just getting by and thanks to The “Affordable” Care Act (Obamacare) I am no longer able to make ends meet. Is this what Obama means by redistributive policies? It is more like reverse Robin Hood if you ask me.

Pat from Minnesota on October 17, 2013

The company that I am a insurance agent representing- sent us a letter saying that due to the changes in the healthcare law- in 2014- that they no longer are offering the group plan that we have had since I started there over 25 years ago. We now all need to find our own individual policies.

I am sure we will be back the same time next month with more disasters from Obama Care, the disaster that keeps on giving.

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:

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The Disgrace and Waste That is Medicare Fraud

Many times we have talked about how the American political class allows hundreds of billions of dollars to be lost to waste, fraud, and other criminal activity every year from major and minor U.S. government programs. One of the biggest Federal programs that wastes taxpayer wealth is the Medicare program. Our research has found that most unbiased estimates of waste usually put the annual figure for Medicare waste between $60 billion and $90 billion.

If you take the lower number and assume that crooks are trying to defraud the Medicare program 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, then you find that the political class losses almost $7 million an HOUR to fraud, waste, and criminal activity just in this one Federal program. That is $7 million an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Unbelievable.

The details on how this happens were recently laid out in an excellent, well researched article by Peter Suderman writing in the October, 2011 issue of Reason magazine. The article starts with a compilation of expert estimates of how much Medicare wastes and loses from various means every year:

• The Government Accounting Office issued a report this year which estimated the Medicare process makes an estimated $48 billion in "improper payments" (i.e., wasted taxpayer wealth) every year. However, this is a low ball estimate since it does not include "improper payments" made through Medicare's prescription drug program.
• An executive Director from the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association told Congressional members last March that the nation's total health care fraud losses likely range from $75 billion to $250 billion each year.
• Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Senator, has estimated that the Medicare fraud in the $80 billion a year range.

Certainly a wide range of estimates but they all have one thing in common: the amount of mismanagement in the Medicare program wastes tens of billions (at least) of dollars every single year.

Some more Medicare statistics:

• Unfunded, future liabilities of the Medicare program are estimated to be $36 TRILLION so any reduction in fraud and waste today would make future funding requirements of this huge unfunded liability requirement less onerous.
• At the current rate, Medicare's financials will be insolvent around 2024, a mere thirteen years from now, given the current growth rate in the program and the current fraud rate in the program.
• Medicare is currently, and will continue to be the largest driver of our out sized national debt, which is currently over $15 TRILLION.
• In 2010, American taxpayers shelled out over $500 billion in Medicare expenses and reimbursements, or over $4,000 for every American household, money that could not be spent on expanding the economy and creating jobs.
• If we use the conservative estimate of fraud listed above of $60 billion, then the program wastes 12% of its budget every year on fraud, waste, and criminal activity. Any business in the private sector that wasted 12% of its budget every year would not be in existence very long.
• Between 2007 and early 2011, the Federal government claims to have won convictions against 990 individuals in fraud-related operations that ripped off $2.3 billion from the Medicare processes.

These numbers are certainly mind boggling. But it gets worse. The article reports on a typical crime effort, this one run by a Fred Dweck, a surgeon in two Broward County, Florida hospitals who also ran his own health care business in Miami. Mr. Dweck pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud but for four years before he was arrested, he ran the following operation:

• He cheated Medicare out of at least $24 million or about $6 million a year or an amazing $500,000 a month, on average.
• He put in claims for prescription drugs, insulin injections, in-home visits by nurses, and many other treatments for 1,279 patients, none of whom actually needed any of these treatments that the good doctor was reimbursed for.
• He had five nurses conspire with him to create fake patient records and payment forms.

One would have hoped that someone in the Medicare organization would have grown suspicious of this one doctor generating so much work over the years or the $500,000 a month he was billing. Unfortunately, it took many years to figure out this one scam, too many years.

And according to the article, this  is not an unusual case, especially in Florida where the fraud is most rampant and most outlandish. Again, one would have hoped that decades ago, the political class and the Federal government would have focused a little more intently on fraud in general and fraud in Florida especially since Florida Medicare fraud seems so obvious. But alas, hope is all that existed vs. criminal investigations.

The Federal government actually manages a website dedicated only to Medicare care fraud examples that occur only in the state of Florida. The site has reported on fraud cases that involved $200 million in claims for unnecessary mental health services, $24 million for a fraud scheme based on AIDS injections, $61 million in taxpayer dollars paid to a man running a network of false health clinics, and the fact that the criminals perpetrating the fraud own fine homes, expensive cars, and a report that one of the criminals had purchased half a million dollars worth of jewelry with Medicare fraud money.

The practice has gotten so lucrative in Florida that the article reports that Medicare fraud is now the preferred form of crime, overtaking illegal drugs. And the scam operators run the gamut from small time hoods to large organized crime syndicates.

These numbers are certainly unbelievable and a disgrace but even worse than the magnitude of the numbers, is the ease in which the fraud is executed. According to a a convicted fraudster, one who illegally defrauded Medicare out of almost $10 million in just four years, all you need is basic computer date entry skills, someone to recruit fake patients for you, and someone who can falsify patient and prescription records.

Once you can perform these simple tasks, then Medicare's incompetent, antiquated, and bureaucratic data systems take over and start spitting out fraudulent checks. It is so bad that several years ago, the General Accountability Office set up a Medicare sting operation with fake names, fake offices, fake bank accounts, etc., actually using an official government telephone number in the General Accountability Offices as the contact number.

Shortly after applying to Medicare, the sting operation was granted  Medicare billing privileges and billing numbers. This approval was granted even though no one in the sting operation was required to prove they were in the medical field or that they actually could provide the medical services they listed on their application.

What a mess, surely part of the government waste sewage example we discussed in yesterday's post. The article concludes with some ideas on how to fix the problem including better data systems, better coordination between health care providers and law enforcement, and certainly more realistic payout schedules for Medicare disbursement. The article contains examples where Medicare sometimes pays out more than ten times more for a piece of equipment or a medicine then the private sector, making these outlandish payment practices ripe for criminal activity.

However, the biggest thing needed to curtail this waste of taxpayer wealth is courage. The article correctly points out that cracking down on Medicare fraud may impose some impositions on honest doctors who submit legitimate bills for reimbursement. These honest
doctors are likely to complain to their political representatives and get their honest patients involved and complaining to their elected representatives.

And we all know what is likely to happen once our uncourageous politicians start hearing complaints. They will stop the necessary anti-fraud efforts lest they tick off a voter or two who are slightly inconvenienced by stronger anti-fraud activities.

Thus, as always, we again see the need for two of our favorite steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

1. Step 34 would remove all politicians from their Congressional committees that do not adequately fulfill the duties of their committee posts. Wasting $7,00,000 an hour of taxpayer money certainly would fall into that category of duty dereliction. Thus, if Step 34 was in effect today, all members of Congressional committees with Medicare oversight would be replaced for incompetence and their inability to contain the fraud and waste.
2. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, they would all be "one and done." The hope is that with no chance of ever getting reelected, sitting politicians would finally grow some backbone and take the courageous and necessary steps to rein in the rampant Medicare fraud and waste. There would be no need to pander to doctors and patients who face some inconveniences due to the crackdown on criminal activity in the program. Better to have some inconveniences with Medicare today rather than have no Medicare program at all in the future due to its insolvency.

The waste that exists in Medicare, and other government programs, today, is a disgrace. Politicians that have ignored this problem and have allowed it to grow to insane levels of waste, both today and in the past, or no less disgraceful.








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:



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http://www.repealamendment/

Out Of Control Government, Out Of Touch Politicians And Other Madness

I recently received my monthly edition of Reason magazine. Reason is a great source of articles from writers and journalists dedicated to preserving and expanding freedom in America. Their articles are detailed but easy to understand and serve no political party, just the pursuit of freedom. Each issue has its share of instances where our government, at all levels, is out of control and the politicians that run it are out of touch with reality, often making for some humorous but tragic wastes of taxpayer money and resources.

Below I have picked out some of these examples for you to laugh at and cry about:

• Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote about the bagel situation in the state of New York. Apparently, in New York state if you go to a bagel shop and buy a bagel, it will cost you $.08 more if the bagel shop slices the bagel in half for you. The $.08, of course, goes to the state government in a form of a tax for your convenience of having a sliced bagel. More confusing, if you eat an unsliced bagel at home it is untaxed but if you eat that same unsliced bagel while still in the bagel shop you are subject to tax. Thus, to avoid bagel taxation in New York state you should never ask the bagel shop to slice it for you or dare to eat a whole bagel while still in the shop.
• The same article goes on to point out that in several states, if you purchase a Hershey chocolate bar you have to pay tax on the purchase. However, if you purchase a Kit Kat bar, another type of candy which is covered in chocolate you do not have to pay tax because the Kit Kat bar has flour in it. Both of these situations are examples of out of control government. These stupid rules take up valuable time and energy from business owners who have to understand and implement these requirements, time and energy that could be better spent serving their customers, expanding their businesses and maybe actually hiring more workers, reducing the high unemployment rate in this country. And who is responsible for these out of control government regulations? It is the out of touch politicians who concoct these stupid rules and laws with no sensitivity or experience on how the waste ripples through the economic system, hurting everyone in the process. Madness.
• The Milwaukee school system had to lay off hundreds of its teachers due to a budget shortfall. At about the same time, the teachers union had taken the school board to court. The reason for the suit? To force the school system's health insurance plan to cover Viagra and other ED drugs for teachers. The school board estimates that the benefit would cost about $786,000 a year. How many more teachers would have to be laid off, and how many kids would suffer as a result, if the school board actually loses this case? More madness.
• We have done this type of economic stimulus math before but a short article by Peter Suderman updates the numbers and confirms our previous math exercise. According to the Department of Energy's reports, it spent $1.9 billion of the stimulus money it received to create 10,018 jobs, resulting in a cost per job created of $194,213 per job. Since the wages of most of these jobs were probably far less than $194,213, we see yet another example of what a dismal and insane failure Obama's economic stimulus plan was. However, this is probably a best case scenario. Mr. Suderman goes on to explain that "jobs created" is probably a misnomer. As the economic stimulus money was spent and jobs were not "created," the administration solved the problem by just changing the definition of jobs created. That category was expanded to include new full time jobs created, new temporary jobs created, jobs saved, and the most ludicrous of all, "lives touched." Thus, many of the 10,018 jobs created in the Energy Department could have included people who worked on an Energy project for two hours. That situation was given the same weight as if an unemployed American was given a 40 hour a week job. Seems the politicians were spending more time on concocting job definitions than actually creating jobs. Even our usually out of control government recognized the insanity with the Federal General Accounting Office  calling the Energy Department's job estimates unclear, problematic, confusing, and potentially misleading. No kidding. When government calls the bluff on itself you know it is madness you are dealing with.
• The United States government has maintained a ridiculous trade embargo with the island nation of Cuba for about 50 years in an attempt to force Fidel Castro from power. However, 50 years later, Castro is still in power, many of the Presidents who continued the embargo are themselves dead, the United States deprives itself of a good sized economic market right off its shores, and the Cuban people have lived in poverty for 50 years, especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain when the support from Russia dropped dramatically. Typical U.S. government program: never ending, never accomplishing its goals, and the people of both countries worse off for the experience. Stopping the embargo is one of the 50 steps to freedom outlined in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Why is this an important step? First, the United States should never condemn a group of people to a live of poverty because of who is ruling them. Second, as pointed out in this edition of Reason magazine by Ms. Mangu-Ward, opening the Cuban market to American goods and services could lead to American farmers annually exporting over $360 million a year of American food crops to the island, in the process feeding a hungry nation. It is madness that this has not happened.
• Talk about true madness, consider another article by Peter Suderman. This one concerns the health care reform package that Obama forced through the back door of reconciliation in the spring and the fact that a new Congressional Research Services (CRS) report stated that it is impossible to count or estimate the number of new government entities, boards, commissions, and organizations that will be created as a result of the legislation. Talk about out of control. Even the government cannot now estimate how big it will become as a result of politicians being out of touch with the root causes of rising health care costs. Specifically, the CRS reported that "the precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA (i.e. Obama care) is currently unknowable." The report went on to say that it is unclear how the General Accounting Office will be able to audit the new creations, it is impossible to determine how much power many of the new entities will have, and it is currently impossible to know how much influence the new organizations will have. Again, this is Congress talking about itself. We have created an out of control government  monster with this legislation that is self reproducing, eating up taxpayer resources without solving any problems. The worst part of this monster is that many in the government bureaucracy and the political class will be part of the problem but no one will be accountable for the tragic results.
• If the latest CSR report shows an out of control government, then Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the perfect example of an out of touch politician. If experts in the Congressional Research Service cannot explain what is going on in the health care reform legislation after an extensive study, what chance does a single bureaucrat like Sebelius have of explaining everything going on as a result of the legislation?  If Nancy Pelosi, who helped ram the bill's approval through, has publicly stated that we will not know everything in the bill until it was passed, a truly ignorant statement for a politician to say for a piece of legislation he or she is advocating for, how will anyone else know? Apparently, however, Ms. Sebelius has got it all figured out since she was recently quoted as stating: "We have a lot of re-education to do" as it pertains to the legislation. If she has an education plan ready to go, maybe she should start over at the CSR since they have not figured it out yet, despite their best efforts. Madness.
• One last example of out of touch politicians, people who never understand the ramifications of their actions. The health care reform legislation is one example, an attempt to fix a problem spawns out of control government control and bureaucracy, among other catastrophes. A Reason magazine report by Brian Doherty discussed  the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Mr. Doherty, the out of pocket costs for these two conflicts has so far reached about $800 billion. Thus, each American family, on average, has paid about $7,000 each to support both war efforts, $7,000 that could have been spent within the economy, contributing to economic growth and employment growth. However, the $800 billion is just the current operating cost. According to the article, two economic and financial experts from Harvard and Columbia universities have estimated the true cost over time to the American public of both wars closer to three TRILLION dollars. Their analysis shows that the country was still paying for the effects of the first world up until about 1965 and for the second world war up until about 1980 as veterans and disabled soldiers needed to be cared for and interest payments on borrowed money spent to execute the wars was paid off. Just another example of out of touch politicians rushing off to do something without understanding the root cause and the true cost to the Treasury and the country's taxpayers.

Silly and sad at the same time. Just these few examples illustrate how, in a wide set of fields, we have allowed our political class, which has no grounding in reality, to create madness and an out of control government that results in lost freedom, wasted money, and non-solved problems. Besides stopping the Cuban embargo, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" also proposes steps such as term limits that remove out of touch politicians before they can do real damage and a step that would implement procedure to punish existing politicians for the out of control and non-effective government programs they create.

However, it is up to us to stop this madness by electing leaders, not politicians, regardless of what party they are from, that can understand all of the implications of complex problems and their proposed solutions, that can look at stupidity (e.g. Kit Kat is not taxable, a Hershey bar is taxable, a sliced bagel is treated one way, and unsliced another way) and say enough with the madness, and who have the fortitude an courage to focus on real issues affecting real American families. Until then, Reason magazine will continue to have endless material to talk about, material that unfortunately reduces our freedom every day.



Our recent 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.


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