September, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Single Payer Still Sucks and Americans Still Suffering

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) In our previous post we reviewed all of the analysis and studies that have been done to put a single payer health care system into effect in this country and what the cost would be. We found that even the most liberal states that have looked into a single payer system have shied away from it since it would cost so much money and deliver less than stellar healthcare. In most cases, the states found that every household in that state on average would have to see their tax burden rise by over $25,000 a year. That post can be read at:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/09/september-2017-part-2the-unfolding.html

Bernie Sanders has proposed a single payer healthcare system in this country that he has dubbed “Medicare For All.” As with any single payer system, Bernie’s system would put the Federal government in charge of every aspect of one’s health care using Medicare as the basis is for the single payer system. Never mind the reality that Medicare is rushing towards fiscal insolvency and loses about $60 billion a year to fraud and wasteful spending. Bernie wants to double down on this disaster.

How much of a disaster is this plan? Well, a recent analysis from the iPatriot website went to the Medicare website and figured out how much a young American just entering the workplace would have to pay to be part of Bernie’s “Medicare For All” system. As you will see, the Bernie claim that everyone would get “free healthcare”: is not quite accurate:

• Using the Medicare website, www.medicare.gov, let’s start off with Medicare Part A.
• A young person who has been the workforce for less than seven a half years would be paying $413 a month for Part A.
• But they would not be able to access Part A benefits until the fulfilled a $1,316 deductible each year.
• Part B would cost that young American at least $134 a month but they could only access that benefit after fulfilling an annual deductible of $183 and even after passing the deductible they would still have to pay 20% of any medical bills incurred under Part B.
• So, already this young American is paying $547 a month before paying for deductibles but there are more Parts to pay for. Part C, which would cover vision, dental and hearing needs can range from $30 to $200 a month.
• If we assume the midpoint or so for Part C, about $100, then the monthly “Medicare For All” cost is now $647 a month.
• Part D, which covers prescription medicines, costs $10 to $100 a month so taking the midpoint of so, say $53, the monthly cost for the first four parts of Medicare is now about $700 a month.
• But don’t forget you cannot partake of the Part D benefit until you fulfill the $400 annual deductible.
• If you go for Parts G and H, which would help pay for the excess charges under Part B, that will cost you another $50 a month but only after you fulfill an annual $2,100 deductible.

Thus, using current government data, the annual Medicare cost for a single young American is about $750 a month, $8,500 a year which cannot be fully accessed until that person pays upwards of $2,700 in deductibles. This brings the possible annual cost to about $11,200 year. Does not sound like “free” healthcare to me.

And as always when dealing with government cost estimates, these are the current estimates. You know it is highly unlikely these costs will stay flat or go down over time so the $11,200 is likely a low ball estimate for one person.

The other factor that no one bothers to discuss with the single payer system is how many and what quality people will be enticed to enter medicine if the government controls everything including what the future doctors get paid and how they can practice. What quality student is willing to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a certified doctor only to be ruled and controlled by inane and idiotic politicians and government bureaucrats? 

Thus, not only would costs go up, but health care quality would likely go down as the number of quality, smart doctors decreases over time. Higher costs, lower quality, not exactly a winning formula.

2) As we have discussed many times, people like Bernie Sanders keep trying to apply an insurance solution to a public health problem. If you can fix some of the root causes of our high health care costs, e.g. Americans eat too much, Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans do not exercise enough, etc., than overall health goes up and health care costs, and thus insurance costs, go down.

Consider some simple and stark realities about poor eating habits that were discussed in a Fortune magazine article from the March 1, 2017 issue:

• On average, every American eats about 76 pounds of sugar every year.
• The sugar amount a consumer eats every year on average is up 8% since 1970, i.e. Americans from a sugar perspective are eating less healthy than they did almost 50 years ago.
• A study by The Lancet found that a whopping 74% of packaged goods on supermarket shelves across the country contain some sort of sweetener, either sugar or artificial sweeteners.

America does not have a health insurance problem, America has a dietary problem that results in obesity which results in diabetes, heart disease, hip and knee replacements, and a whole slew of other maladies. Fix the dietary problem and our infested food chain, and you go a long way to fixing the health insurance problem.

3) Every month when we address the unfolding disasters of Obama Care, we usually finish up the discussion with real life stories of Americans whose lives and health have been severely disrupted by Obama Care. The source of most of our stories comes from the website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

Let’s continue that habit below:

KEN - COLORADO: My wife and I have been on the same health insurance plan for 12 years. The cost of that plan has gone up 110% in the last three years and we had to go with different plan due to the cost. The new plan covers less with higher deductibles. It is due to the Obamacare act. We called BCBS to ask why the cost has gone up each year (that's three calls, one a year) we were told the same each time, to get ready for the new health care act. So much for cheaper insurance. IT IS A SAD, RECKLESS LAW! All those who voted for it should be ashamed for what they did!

P.S. We are now slaves to our government, we now have to buy something from a private company or pay a fine, to live in this country.

DAVID - MICHIGAN: I received a letter from my insurance company that I was going to lose my insurance coverage due to obamacare. In order to keep my plan the way I had it but to make aca compliant my premium would raise from $430 a month to $699 a month.which is not affordable at all or my out of pocket deductible would go from $5000 to $15000. Which is also not affordable[. . .]It would be cheaper for me to pay [the] fine/tax then it would be to go with obamacare.

RENAY - WASHINGTON: Our insurance has DOUBLED! My husband is self employed and we have ALWAYS had insurance we bought on the open market, meaning we don't get it subsidized by an employer or government. We had a plan with a high deductible and low monthly cost because it worked perfectly for us. Of course, we didn't get to keep our insurance if we liked it (we were lied to by Obama) and our insurance didn't go down $2500. (we were lied to by Obama). Our insurance went from $500/month to $988/month. Our deductible went from $10,000. to $12,000. and with less coverage than we had before.

When Obama realized that he was caught in his lie and started handing out waivers to 'allow' us to keep our old insurance, I called our state insurance commissioner and said Obama said we could keep it. His office said they were not going to and just keep on as they were. I had looked at the exchanges and noticed that every insurance plan sold was almost EXACTLY the same in price. I also mentioned this to the insurance commissioner office that it didn't look like competition but more like price fixing and racketeering.

I asked what would happen to my complaints and I was told that they weren't even put into a complaint system and that nothing would be done about it! Yes, this is the government we have here in Washington state. We have an insurance commissioner that the only thing I can see that he does is when insurance companies ask for rate hikes (and we had double digit ones every year prior to Obamacare) he wrings his hands and allows ALMOST as much as they asked for and thinks he did a good job for the 'people.'

CHARLOTTE - NEW HAMPSHIRE: When my husband and I lost our long time insurance coverage due to the company's withdrawal from NH after ACA, we went shopping and discovered that we had only 2 options available: we could go through an exchange and lose all our doctors (because Concord Hospital was not an ACA networked provider) or we could pay $5000 more than we were paying before to get an outside-the-exchange plan that would require us to meet a $7000 deductible, covered none of our preventative care (nutrition / chiropractic / dental), but allowed us to keep our doctors. We chose the second option because losing all our doctors after working 9 years to find good ones was too much to bear. 

My family is now actively avoiding health care. We are just scraping by. Ever since the recession it's been one thing after another and now we're being nickeled and dimed to death. My husband was having chest pains / shortness of breath the other day and after speaking with a nurse he chose not to go into the ER because he said having to find a way to pay off another $3500 would have killed him for sure as he struggles to provide for our family (something that was much easier for him 6 years ago). This on top of all the infringements on conscience rights through the HHS mandate, the complete lack of private health records, and the rationing of Medicare through IPAB. 

I'm all for helping people with pre-existing conditions to get the care they need...but there were other ways of doing it without government takeover of health care.

CAROLYN - KANSAS: CBS News has confirmed millions nationwide will be losing their current insurance coverage. That's because it doesn't meet the new minimum requirements under the Affordable Care Act. There could be thousands of Kansans in that total.

The letters started going out last month, telling Kansans their insurance policies will be discontinued at the end of the year.

"I'm self-employed," said Carolyn Perry. She runs a day care out of her home. "So I need the coverage cause anything can happen at any given time."

She's among those the Affordable Care Act was meant to help.

"But the premium that I'm paying now is twice as much as what it was when I first started paying it," she said. Perry buys her own health insurance. So far, she's keeping it.

Another month, another set of stories of higher insurance premiums, higher deductibles, and politicians who still do not understand that no matter how much you apply an insurance solution to a public health problem you will still never fix the issue of high healthcare costs in this country. More unfolding disasters of Obama Care next 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:


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

The Obama Epic Fail Series - Obama Care

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:

• Transparency and integrity
• Economic policy
• Foreign policy
• Healthcare policy
• Government management policy

Healthcare policy, a.k.a. Obama Care

This is the fourth topic in this series which examines whether and where the Obama administration was an epic fail. The first post in that series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-obama-epic-fail-seriespart-1.html

Today we will take a summary look at Obama's legacy piece of legislation, Obama Care. Of all the areas to determine if this administration has been an epic fail, Obama Care is probably the easiest one to conclude...epic fail. We have been documenting and discussing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care for a number of years now.

In fact, every month there have so many unfolding disasters from this law that we usually have to devote multiple posts to cover all of the bad things that have been spawned by Obama Care. To review the dozens of disasters from the legislation, just enter the phrase, "the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care" in the search box above.

As we have pointed out many times, Obama Care is doomed to failure since it never addressed the underlying root causes of high and growing healthcare costs in this country. The main reason for high health care costs is not the fact that people do not have health care insurance, there are many other reasons that drive the cost increases. 

Even if every American had health care insurance, the overall costs to the nation would not change and would continue increasing. These root causes of ever higher costs include the following realities:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans smoke too much and drink alcohol too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• Current Federal government programs encourage the production and use of inexpensive high fructose corn syrup and plain old sugar, two ingredients that infest and infect the nation's food chain.
• The legislation does nothing to encourage break through research to attack and conquer the major cancers and diseases of our time.
• Americans are getting older on average, increasing the likelihood aging diseases (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.) will become more prevalent and costly.
• Medical tort reform of the entire industry is required.
• Insurance company competition across state lines is discouraged.
• Current government healthcare programs already waste tens of billions of dollars every year, money that could be used to improve health care in the country.

As we said above, even if every citizen got health care insurance as a result of Obama Care, these root causes and underlying problems would still exist. They would still be driving health care costs ever higher. 

Basic economic theory and reality teaches that if you reduce demand for a product or service and not change supply, the price has to go down. If we consider health care to be the service and we reduce the demand for cancer treatments, alcohol treatments, heart disease, obesity, dementia, etc., then price and and costs would go down as would the cost of health care insurance.

Consider some information from a previous post we did that illustrates what we are talking about and what is possible:

Dr. Delose Cosgrove, the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic is one of the best and well known hospitals in the world. Despite being the best and serving some of the richest people in the world, they also have one of the lowest costs structures. How did they accomplish this double play of outstanding care at low costs? According to the article and Dr. Cosgrove's experiences:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well.
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs.
• Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to  40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and account for 75% of the nation's total health care.
• At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated fro Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons.
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Get people to eat right and reduce national health care costs by up to 10%.  Get people to stop smoking, exercise, and eat better and reduce health care costs by up to 75%. Imagine how much less expensive health insurance would be if health care costs were reduced by 75%? Get the government to stop subsidizing the production of corn fructose syrup and sugar and see how fast the food chain might get healthier.

Obama blew it it two big ways. First, he mistook a public health problem for a health insurance problem. Much like the long term seat belt usage public health initiative, we need a long term healthy living public health initiative in this country. Get people to understand the benefits of healthy living, much like most now understand the value of seat belts, and the cost of health insurance will take care of itself.

Second, he could have been epic in the realm of John F. Kennedy's epic declaration in the 1960s that the country would put a man on the moon within the next decade. Obama should have put forth a set of national challenges that would have focused the country on curing major cancers, eliminating Alzheimer's, etc. within the next ten years. That focus and success on any of these bold ideas would have significantly reduced health care costs while making life much healthier, longer, and better for millions of Americans. 

Alas, Obama did nothing like that. Rather than being bold and out front leading the nation, he and his minions went behind closed doors to craft a secret health care bill that:

• Never addressed the root causes of high healthcare costs.
• Will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt in the next ten years.
• Will leave tens of millions of Americans without health care insurance ten years from now.
• Has resulted in almost as many Americans losing their current health care insurance coverage than those that attained it under Obama Care.
• Has exposed millions of Americans to easy identify theft fraud via its inadequate data systems processes.
• Has resulted in health care insurance premiums and deductibles being higher for individual health insurance policies in most states after Obama Care took effect than before it took effect.
• It made criminals out of ordinary Americans who decide they know what is best for themselves and their families and who refuse to purchase health care insurance as mandated by Obama Care.
• It has resulted in a higher rate of doctors leaving the profession or retiring earlier than expected in order to avoid the hassles of dealing with Obama Care requirements, making a national doctor shortage even more severe.
• In many cases it has lessened made the quality of health care since many Obama Care policies do not allow policy holders to have access to the best treatment options available in order to reduce insurance company costs.
• For Obama Care Medicaid customers, many are finding out that although they have health insurance, they may not be able to get health care as fewer and fewer doctors are taking on Medicaid patients due to the reduced doctor fees that Obama Care pays Medicaid doctors.
• Has stymied economic growth and wage growth since it has forced many companies to reduce the work hours of current employees, forced some companies to move jobs overseas due to the increased business costs of the law, and curtailed the hiring of new employees.
• Has set up programs that subsidize insurance company losses with taxpayer backed financial guarantees.
• Has substantially increased the cost of certain medicines for those Americans in need of medicinal help, pricing many of those medicines out of the reach of people even though they have Obama Care insurance policies.
• Caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred, insurance policies, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals even though the President lied and said those preferences would remain intact if Obama Care was enacted.

We could go on but you get the idea. Rather than being an epically good thing to do, reduce suffering, reduce costs, and improve the quality of life of Americans relative to health care, this administration misdiagnosed the root causes and put together a Rube Goldberg-like bureaucracy that is ineffective, dangerous, and expensive.

Rather than being half way there to curing cancer and other major diseases, rather than being half way there to better public health, we are in many ways much worse than where we were as a nation five years ago. Obama could have been Kennedy-esque by setting the nation on a path to healthier, and less expensive living, much like Kennedy set us on the path to the moon. Instead, Obama Care has been an epic fail that will cost the country trillions of dollars over the next generation while doing nothing to improve the overall health of the nation.

When you are closer to be Rube Goldberg than being JFK, epic fail is the only conclusion.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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