May, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Dental Disaster

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) Healthcare does not just include diseases of the body, it should also include dental care. Good dental care is not only critical to having healthy teeth but healthy teeth are essential to keeping other parts of the body healthy. Thus, any health care reform effort that has the primary objective of reducing healthcare costs, like Obama Care, has to also be actively trying to improve dental care.

And not surprising, it is an objective that Obama Care also failed miserably at. Consider the highlights from an article that appeared in the June 2, 2017 issue of The Week magazine. The article, “Straight Talk About Teeth,” by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, followed the effort of Dee Matello to find the semblance of dental care:

• Matello and her husband own a small vending machine company and earn about $47,000 a year, about half of what they earned prior to the Great Recession.
• Although they are probably within 5% of the median U.S. household income level, they cannot afford health insurance that includes dental care.
• She cracked a molar three years ago but since the cost of repair would have likely been hundreds of dollars, she opted to use the family’s limited funds for more important expenses and go without dental care for the molar.
• She recently waited on line outside of the Wicomico Civic Center in Salisbury, Maryland when dentists from five states were meeting to provide free dental care for those like Matello.
• The event promised to provide free dental care for the first 1,000 people in line at the Center and Matello was lucky enough and arrived early enough to grab spot 503.
• She got on line a little before 5:00 am and did not get into the building until 9:44.
• A little after noon, she was called over to have some basic health checks done like temperature and blood pressure, she was getting close.
• However, shortly thereafter the announcement was made that only the first 500 in line would be serviced that day, she would have to come back tomorrow for the actual dental work despite waiting on line for over seven hours.
• Despite the hassle she was grateful to finally have been taken care of and not having to spend the $600 to $800 that the X-ray, exam, and treatment would have cost her out of pocket.

Unbelievable that a working American family has to go through such hoops and hassle to have a single tooth fixed. The article discusses some of the grim realities of dental health in America today, realities that Obama Care obviously did nothing to address or fix:

• During the event in Salisbury, the volunteer dentists pulled 795 bad and rotting teeth and provided over $1 million in free dental care so kudos to them.
• Some Americans spend over a billion dollars a year just to make their teeth whiter while one out of five Americans over the age of 65 do not have any teeth at all in their mouth and millions of people like the Matello family do not have access to quality dental care.
• The problem seems to be far worse in rural areas of this country since these areas tend to be in the lower economic strata and these areas are much more likely to rely on well water (25% of Americans use well water), water that has not been treated with fluoride, an additive to urban and suburban water systems that helps prevent tooth decay.
• Two million emergency room visits a year are related to dental health emergencies.
• Since emergency rooms generally are not equipped handle dental emergencies, the patient is usually sent home after being given either antibiotics or opioids to relieve the pain which sometimes leads to the bigger problem of drug addiction because of uncared for teeth problems.
• The growing opioid addiction in this country also contributes to worst dental health care since drug addiction dries out the mouth which contributes to more cavities.
• Fifty million Americans today live in government designated Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas where get dental help is often difficult or impossible to get.
• Of course, the area around Washington D.C. has one of the highest per capita concentration of dentists in the WORLD so the urgency for dental care is lost on the Washington political class.
• According to the ADA’s Health Policy Institute, more than a third of Americans have not dental health insurance since Medicare does not have dental health insurance, Medicaid in some states does not offer dental health insurance,  and many employer health insurance plans do not cover dental costs.
• Medicaid does provide dental health insurance in some states, assuming you can find a dentist that accepts Medicaid payments since nationwide only about 38% of dentists accept Medicaid dental patients.
• And this lack of coverage and related lack of dental care causes an increase in heart disease, eating problems, depression, and other non-dental health issues, further increasing the health care costs in this country.

Obviously, seven years after it was passed, Obama Care has failed to address and remedy this sad chapter in the American health system. Not when average Americans have to wait for days a a time to hopefully get dental treatment from volunteer dentists. Just another Obama Care unfolding disaster.

August, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Fake Poeple Get Insurance, Real Peopel Get Huge Premium Hikes, 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 health care 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 health care 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 health care 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.

Today and probably for the next few days, we will look at the latest disasters from Obama Care, including the gathering evidence that Obama Care policy holders are in for a big and ugly financial surprise in their 2016 costs along with some personal stories on how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families.

1) Obama Care information systems and data processing procedures have been a disaster from day one. Most of what was supposed to work at the beginning did not work, privacy of personal information was often non-existent and many called the security protocols an identity thief’s paradise.

Now, in addition to previous problems, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found a potentially additional data problem. According to the Associated Press, the GAO made up eleven fictitious people and attempted to put them through the Obama Care processes to see if these non-existent people could actually sign up for Obama Care policies and receive taxpayer funded subsidies. Here is what happened:

• All eleven of the fictitious people actually were able to sign up for Obama Care policies even though their personas, documentation, and personal information were completely fraudulent.
• In addition, all of them were automatically re-enrolled when the window for Obama Care policy sign ups came around last fall.
• While six of those fake people eventually were sent termination notices by the Obama Care process, the GAO was able to get all but one reinstated by calling the Obama Care consumer service center.
• But it gets better. The GAO was even able to get the monthly subsidies bumped higher during the call to get them reinstated.

Thus, the bottom line is that the Feds failed 91% of the time to identify fake people getting insurance via the Obama Care Federal exchange.That is almost as bad as the TSA failing to identify fake bombs and weapons 95% of the time when their procedures were recently tested.

Now, granted, a sample size of eleven is really small and is not statistically applicable to all Obama Care exchange enrollees. But given the problems Obama Care specifically and the Federal government in general has with building any kind of quality data processing system, I would lay odds that there are many, many other fake people enrolled in Obama Care policies and the American taxpayer is paying for the fraud in a very big way.

2) The Cato Institute has never been a big fan of Obama Care, namely because Cato is a big fan of minimal government and maximum freedom while Obama Care is the exact opposite. But Michael F. Cannon, writing for Cato in July, 2015, astutely pointed out that even Slate, a pro liberal, pro Obama, website is finally coming around to the realization that Obama Care might not be such a great financial situation that they might have hoped it would be.

He quoted the writer of the Slate article, Helaine Olen, with coming to the following realizations, realizations that we have been discussing in this blog for the past four years or so:

• "Last week Oregon’s insurance commissioner, Laura Cali, announced that the state had approved a 25 percent premium increase for the largest health insurer on the state’s exchanges. The second largest insurer did even better: It received permission to boost its monthly charge to consumers by 33 percent."
• "And that sounds like a relative bargain compared with Minnesota  and New Mexico, where the Blue Cross Blue Shield family is looking for increases of more than 50 percent. Even if the final numbers are lower than the asks, it seems quite likely these states will approve substantive premium increases."
• "The problem is simple. As Trudy Lieberman reported this month in Harper's , the ACA made a decent stab at solving the problem of Americans lacking insurance. Unfortunately, the bargain struck to get the bill to a point where lobbyists for the hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries to sign on, or at least not fight it, did not adequately address the issue of overall medical costs."
• "And that’s where the consumer comes in. Someone is “it,” the party paying the bill. And that “it” is increasingly you, whether you receive insurance on the exchanges or from an employer."

“Did not address the issue of overall medical costs.” I love that quote since we have been beating that horse since day one. If you never understand the root causes of a problem, in this case high medical costs, you will never resolve the issue you are facing. A good starting point of the root causes are listed above, all of which got no or minimal attention in the entire Obama Care development process. 

And now Ms. Olen and Slate finally realize what many of us have been yelling about for so many years. Obama Care is a health insurance solution trying to resolve a public health issue and that is why it will eventually implode onto itself, possibly crashing the economy with it as high medical costs and now high government costs associated with Obama Care run rampant and unresolved.

3) One last piece of Obama Care insanity today, more to follow tomorrow. The best way to lower costs, under simple economic theory, is to have a wide array of competitors vying for the business of customers. High levels of competition make competitors more efficient and cost effective driving out costs in order to compete better in the marketplace and to keep a decent level of profitability. Product offerings improve and grow, costs to end users go down, and quality improves.

But if anything, Obama Care did the exact opposite. We have already discussed any number of times that hospitals, doctor offices, and other health care providers have been consolidating, buying each other up, and generally reducing the amount of competition. This is the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do. It was supposed to drive more competition and thus reduce costs to the end user. Instead, we have fewer competitors, and as we see above, costs are going up substantially, a reality now recognized even by Slate.

And now the consolidation and reduced competition has hit the insurance company industry big time. According to an article in Bloomberg by Megan McArdle that was summarized in the August 7, 2015 issue of The Week magazine, giant health care insurer Anthem concluded a deal to purchase health care giant Cigna for $48 billion. Yes, $48 billion.

This merger comes on the heals of a $37 billion merger that combined Aetna and Humana. McArdle rightly lays the merger mania at the feet of Obama Care and its tonnage of paperwork and rules and regulations that are expensive to implement. This also allows the now giant health insurers to better compete with the now giant health providers relative to pricing and billables. According to The Week article:

• “For consumers, it means our health care will increasingly be delivered by only a few big players.”
• “As insurers and hospital networks supersize, patients will get the role of ‘tiny human standing on the ground between them.’”

Tiny human vs. supersized hospitals and insurers. Guess who does not make out well in that situation. Thus, as with most government programs, the so-called cure is often worse than the status quo, leaving the original situation worse off than before politicians got involved. Obama Care is no different: less choice, probably lower quality at a higher price.

More Obama Care news tomorrow and I can guarantee you it will not be any better than what we discussed today.

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

June, 2015,Part 9, Political Class Insanity: Obama's Failed Promises, The Failed Promises Of Home Ownership Rates, Silk Scarves Or Bribes, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity that the American political class has dropped on our heads in the past month or so. We do this review every month in order to continually prove our view that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of our country. Their inane quotes, their failed programs and laws, their wasteful spending, their ineptness, and continued focus on their own careers and self enrichment at the expense of taxpayers is constant and disgraceful.

This month could be one of the worst ever, given the backlog that needs to be discussed. The insanity will cover a full range of areas where today’s politicians continue to disappoint and fail us. As always, the new ways they find to screw up is never ending and always creative.

Today is the ninth update to the insanity for this month:

1) Starting with the Carter administration and accelerated during the Clinton administration, mostly Democratic politicians strived to make homeownership more affordable for Americans. This lead to the Federal government, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taking on more and more less creditworthy customers and their mortgages which led to the housing bubble which led to the Great Recession.

In turn, the Great Recession led to record high foreclosure rates, trillions of dollars of wealth lost in the housing market, high unemployment, major banks and financial institutions going out of business or requiring billions in taxpayer bailouts, and the American taxpayer getting stuck paying billions and billions of dollars to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Throughout all of this heartache, stress, and cost at least more American own their homes today, right? Wrong, consider the percentage of homeownership as reported by the U.S.Census over time:

Back in the Carter years and through most of Clinton’s years, the homeownership rate in America stayed pretty constant at around 65%. Six years after the Great Recession ended, after trillions of dollars of wealth was lost as a result of the housing induced recession, the homeownership in America is….about 65%. We have come full circle as a result of the political class’s actions in the housing market. And have nothing to show for it except a weakened economy and trillions more in national debt. A typical Washington program, no progress at great cost. Insane.

2) Followers of this blog know that the Washington political class has never been a beacon of integrity and honesty over the years. This reality was driven home again in a short article that appeared in the May 29, 2015 issue of The Week magazine:

• The House Ethics Committee is looking into a foreign trip that was made by ten members of Congress and 32 members of their staffs to Azerbaijan. 
• While the trip apparently did not cost the American taxpayer any direct money, those on the trip were allegedly showered with expensive gifts and tens of thousands of dollars in trip expenses. 
• The gifts included such items as silk scarves, expensive native rugs, and crystal tea sets with the travel expenses alone costing almost $113,000.
• The trip was secretly sponsored and paid for by the Azerbaijani oil company, SOCAR, who was looking to to have a gas pipeline project it wants to do with Iran exempted from the current economic sanctions the West has placed on Iran.

If Washington politicians had any sense of integrity they would have simply said “No” to the exemption request because that is why the sanctions are in place. Instead, they milked their positions and possibly compromised their integrity for a few scarves and rugs and an expensive trip. Pathetic.

3) We have covered the many failed promises, lies and deceptions of this President too many times to count over the years:

• If you like your current insurance policy, you can keep it under Obama Care. False.
• If you like your current doctor, you can keep him under Obama Care. False.
• Annual insurance costs will go down up to $2,500 for American households under Obama Care. False.
• We will go through every line of the Federal budget to root out wasteful spending. False.
• We will reduce the annual Federal deficit by half by the end of my first term in office. False.
• I will operate the most transparent administration in the history of the country. False.

We could go on and on but you get the idea, this administration has either failed to deliver on every promise or never had any intention of delivering on any promise, using lies and deceptions just for election purposes. And another one of those grandiose promises was broken according to a recent Businessweek article:

• In 2011, the President boldly stated that: “I’m directing our departments and our agencies to make sure 100% of the vehicles they buy are fuel-efficient or clean-energy cars and trucks by 2015. Not 50%, not 75% - 100% of our vehicles.”
• Fast forward to the Businessweek article: In the past six years, only  7% of the Federal government vehicle purchases have fulfilled Obama’s 2011 goal of 100% of vehicles purchased be fuel efficient or clean energy.

Close, missed this goal by just 93%. But I guess this is a better performance than the TSA which failed 96% of the time to find test bombs and weapons at its airport checking stations.

Really sad that whenever we hear Obama boldly state something, anything, we have to assume it is false, a lie, or will never happen, given his poor track record on everything from the budget to Obama Care to government vehicle purchases. Unfortunately, if he should ever tell us something important that is true, we are likely to never believe him, given his abysmal track record of false and empty statements over the years.

That will do it for today’s political class insanity and also this month's insanity. It is not as if we covered it all but after eight posts, and the depressing news that each post contained relative to the ineptness of America’s politicians, it is time to move on to other depressing topics.

Rest assured that the same time next month we are likely to have just about as many examples of wasteful spending, political greed, inept government programs, and who knows what new insanity awaits the American taxpayer.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

August, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 6: Graft In Virginia, Ignroance in Kentucky, Corruption in New York, and Economic Ignorance Everywhere

This is our sixth and hopefully last post on this month’s update on political class insanity. This monthly series covers the wasteful spending, the idiotic quotes, the effective government programs, the selfish greed and other sins of the current set of American politicians. It is through this series that we contend that we are currently being served by the most inept and greedy set of politicians America has ever had to endure.

1) Let’s start off today on the greedy angle. According to a recent Associated Press report, a Federal prosecutor has accused Virginia's former governor and his wife of illegally accepting gifts from a businessman who sought their influence to promote his company.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Aber opened the trial of the former governor and his wife, Bob and Maureen McDonnell, a trial that charges the couple with accepting more than $165,000 in gifts and loans from Jonnie Williams, the CEO of dietary supplements maker Star Scientific. They are accused of accepting the gifts in exchange for helping promote his products.

Which just goes to prove that politicians at the state government level may not be any different than corrupt and now jailed politicians at the Federal level. Innocent to proven guilty but disgraceful nonetheless that this former politician and his wife acted so greedily that the Federal government thinks it has enough to put them away for their actions.

2) The Iron Dome system is a missile defense system that shoots out missiles with the intent of destroying incoming missiles from an enemy. It has been in the news a lot lately because the Israeli deployment of its Iron Dome System, has probably saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli lives, by intercepting the thousands of rockets that Hamas has shot into Israel over the past months.

Pretty simple concept: anti-missile shot up in the air to intercept and destroy incoming missiles. Simple, but apparently not simple enough for a politician who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes says Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system prevents Hamas terrorists from tunneling into Israel.

Ms. Grimes was asked about the war going between the Israelis and Hamas during a recent interview with the Lexington Herald Leader: “The Iron Dome has been a big reason why Israel has been able to withstand the terrorists that have tried to tunnel their way in.”

Makes you wonder where she gets her information about life from. The Iron Dome is a MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM. It is not a giant iron cage or dome that is buried in the ground that prevent Hamas terrorists from tunneling into Israel. This is a quote and view of reality that is quickly moving up the charts as one of the dumbest quotes from a politician in recent times. 

According to an article in the Washington Beacon: the Iron Dome is a joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense system that is able to track terrorist rockets as they enter Israeli territory and destroy them in mid-air. The system has saved scores of Israeli lives and protected the Jewish state during Hamas’s latest terror campaign, in which some 9,000 rockets have been fired at Israel.

How out of touch can one be to not know this? How out of touch and inept is your campaign staff that they would allow you out in public so knowledge impaired? And you want to be a U.S. Senator? I don’t think so. Not if you are that naïve and out of touch with what is going on in the world.

3) A few days ago we reported on a New York Times article that reported on how New York governor Andrew Cuomo had shut down his own corruption investigation commission once the commission started investigating the potential wrong doings by one of companies he used for his election campaign.

Well, it seems that might not be the only shady dealings going on up in Albany. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the governor’s election campaign collected at least $650,000 in campaign contributions from companies or people whose companies were granted tax credits to redevelop industrial sites according to research done into state government data.

Related Cos. was the biggest donor, donating at least $262,700 to Cuomo’s campaign. Syracuse shopping-mall businessman Robert Congel, members of his family and executives at his Pyramid Cos. contributed $143,250.

According to Bloomberg, critics of the incentives, which have cost taxpayers more than $1 billion since 2006, claim they benefit wealthy developers and have done little to clean up contaminated industrial sites. Bloomberg cites a research study found that 94 percent of these tax credits have been used for redeveloping properties instead of fixing polluted and contaminated land.

Again, innocent until proven guilty. But as we have often said, the appearance of a conflict of interest is just as bad as a real conflict of interest. Deals and arrangements like this just smell bad, regardless of intentions, good or bad. 

That is why Step 7 from “Love My Country, Loathe my Government,” is needed in this country. Step 7 would allow only individual citizens to contribute to political election campaigns. Businesses, unions, PACs, Super Pacs, etc. would be prohibited form contributing and possibly buying influence and political favors. While it might not get rid of all the political hi-jinks and rip offs of taxpayers, a properly implemented and policed, Step 7 would go a long way to getting rid of even the appearance of conflicts of interest and might actually protect taxpayer interests in the long run.

4) According to a recent Bloomberg report that was summarized in the August 1, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made $12 million in speaking fees since leaving that position in February, 2013. That comes out to an amazing $750,000 a month. She is making in a MONTH, on average, fifteen times as much than what the average American household earns in a YEAR. I am sorry, nobody is worth that much money whose track record of accomplishment is next to nil.

5) More secrets about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) out of control spying on American citizens was made public recently. In an interview in the Guardian newspaper in England, former NSA analyst and whistleblower, Edward Snowden, made it known that NSA employees circulate ‘sexually compromising images” among co-workers that they came across when spying on innocent American citizens.

This type of behavior was “seen as sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions,” according to Snowden. We are getting oh so close to 1984 and Big Brother when the type of behavior is allowed to go on, secretly exploiting the lives of innocent American citizens using these same taxpayers’ wealth to do so.

6) According to a CNN.com report that was summarized in the August 1, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, a whopping 48% of the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation’s regulations and rules have not be formulated or written yet. This is four years after the legislation was passed. 

What good is passing legislation if four years later the Federal government is just about half way to getting the guidelines put together never mind having that legislation having an positive impact in the market? I cannot imagine the IRS letting any citizen get away with similar behavior, e.g. granting a four year extension to file income taxes. But somehow, politicians can get away with idiotic legislation that never really gets implemented. Insane.

7) We often make the case that the current set of American politicians have no economic background, no economic experience, no economic sense, and no economic training, resulting in economic programs and strategies that often to more harm than good in growing the economy. A recent article from Bloomberg, summarized in the July 18, 2014 issue of The Week, magazine reinforced this opinion.

Despite spending about $830 billion on a failed economic stimulus, trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve “quantitative easing," record low interest rates, and an energy boom, the political class has screwed up the economy so much that around 15% of all Americans, about 45 million people, still live below the poverty level in this country. The poverty level is defined as earning less than $23,600 a year. 

If we had taken that $830 billion from the failed economic stimulus and written a check to each of those 45 million Americans, a family of four living below the poverty line would have gotten a check for over $70,000 or at least three times their annual income. That would have been the far better economic decision rather than squandering the money like Washington did on stupid programs and crony infested programs, none of which stimulated any economic activity.

That will wrap up the political class insanity for this month. A depressing but necessary exercise that shows once and for all that we are living under the worst performing, most inept set of politicians in the history of this country. If you would like to help change this status, please visit the following term limits website and help us change out the current Washington insanity because, really, how much worst could it get:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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

January, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 6: Insurance "Orphans," Crushing The Middle Class, And Insurance Company Bailouts

This will be the next to last post this month covering the unfolding disaster that is Obama care. We are not stopping now because we have reviewed all of the bad news about this horrific legislation. We are stopping now because it is getting too depressing writing every day about how Obama Care is destroying Americans’ health, destroying our economy, destroying our freedoms, and how in the end, it will fail miserably to fix our ever escalating health care costs.

We have had to do multiple posts every month since last August to cover all of the chaos that Obama Care has unleashed. That first post in August can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/08/part-1-august-2013-obama-care-update.html

The post continued every month since then, starting up again this month at the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/01/january-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

I am assuming that the bad news about Obama Care will continue to hit the fan and that next month at around the same time, we will have to wade into this mess again to explain how this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by Washington, legislation that was enacted by the most inept set of Washington politicians...ever

1) We have already covered some heartbreaking cases of Americans who were turned away from medical treatment or scared away because of the out of pocket costs when they thought the had Obama Care insurance coverage but found out that they really did not. Recent news reports have described how health insurance companies are still trying to sort out cases of so-called health insurance “orphans.” 

Orphans are customers for whom the government has a record that they had enrolled in an Obama Care policy, but the insurer has no record of that enrollment and no payment and thus, is not providing insurance for that individual. The insurers are concerned the problem will grow more cumbersome as they begin to handle the flood of new customers who signed up in December as enrollment deadlines neared.

How bad is the problem? There are two conflicting views:

“It’s an ongoing concern,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. “Health plans can’t process enrollments they haven’t received from the exchange.”

Julie Bataille, communications director for the federal health care rollout, disputes the industry’s view: “We have fixed the issues that we knew were a problem, and we are now seeing nearly zero errors in the work moving forward.” 

So what is it? An ongoing concern or nearly zero errors. Given this administration’s track record of lying and deception, my money would be on the “it’s an ongoing concern” perspective. Consider the opinion of an industry expert, Bob Laszewski, who expects to hear more reports about orphaned files as ailing people seek health care or start worrying about insurance cards that have not arrived: “As we go through the month, you bet this is going to be a problem.” 

This is what happens when you have a faulty system that should have never gone live in the first place, given that we know now that the pre rollout testing of the system was a disaster. And for this stupid decision, rolling out with a broken data systems operation, this is eventually going to start causing people to die as they find out they cannot afford “affordable insurance” under Obama Care because the process made them orphans.

2) Consider a roundup of disasters that the Newsmax website reported on January 2, 2014:

- Middle-class families are finding out the exact cost of the Affordable Care Act to their weekly budget, and they are realizing they have to make cutbacks in their lifestyles to afford higher healthcare insurance premiums, The Week reports.

- An issue of The Week magazine looked at the bad side effects of Obama Care, concluding that the legislation was "another sucker punch to the middle class." 

- The Week’s analysis warned that "when the family budget gets hit in the solar plexus, guess what happens to consumer spending and the economy?”

- In California, the Wall Street Journal reported in December that 900,000 Californians are seeing their current health insurance policies terminated because they don't meet the Obama Care requirements. 

- Since about 600,000 of these people are not eligible for Obama Care subsidies, they will all end up paying larger premiums.

- In New York, thousands of small businesses are being hammered by the cost of premiums under Obama Care, according to the New York Post. The National Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents nearly 11,000 business owners in New York, reports that not one single member has reported that their healthcare insurance costs are going down. The federation's director Mike Durant said an "overwhelming majority" of small firms with fewer than 50 employees have reported, in fact, that their premiums have increased substantially. 

The article points out Michael Kennedy as an example, who owns two dog-grooming salons near Albany. He said his health insurance coverage had more than doubled under Obama Care, going from $132.99 to $325.92 a month per person. According to Mr. Kennedy: "It’s like another 100 dogs we need to groom." 

- In Alabama, WHNT News has revealed that middle-class residents have received letters "indicating their premiums will soon double." Alabama resident Courtney Long, a mother of four, was shocked when Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama notified her that her family's individual healthcare plan was going up from $352 per month to $796. "It's devastating. I started crying," said Long.

"I mean, we have worked so hard to get out of credit card debt, get ahead on the car loan, transfer our mortgage to a 15 from a 30 year mortgage…and for what?"

- In Washington state, Forbes estimates that Obama Care "will increase, the underlying cost of individually purchased health insurance by 34 to 80%, on average."

- In Tennessee, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander was stunned to learn from an Obama administration report/analysis that concluded many Tennesseans got hit with much higher health care premium on January 1. The analysis showed that a 27-year-old man in Memphis faces a likely jump in monthly premiums costs from $41 a month to $119. Additionally, 105 insurance policies in Nashville alone will no longer be available because of Obama Care requirements. 

- The Week correctly points out that the bigger health insurance premiums will likely have a trickle-down effect on the economy as middle- and upper-middle-income families start to spend less on what they usually spend on since they need to divert some of their earnings to pay for their expensive new health care premiums. Since consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the country's gross domestic product, the report: "The top 20 percent of earners account for about 40 percent of all spending in the U.S. When you increase the costs of health care and the new taxes associated with Obama Care, you can hear the wallets closing."

How is all of this suffering and chaos worthwhile if the legislation does not resolve any of the problems facing the country relative to health care?

3) The only way Obama Care financials work for Obama and the insurance companies is if a lot of younger, healthy people sign up for Obama Care policies and unnecessarily pay insurance premiums for policies that they are highly unlikely to use. Why? 

Well, since Obama wanted to give every American access to health insurance policies, even the sick and elderly who are much more likely to need health care, he needed to force younger, healthier Americans to buy health insurance to keep the insurance companies financials intact. See, if he forced the insurance companies to take on expensive customers, elderly and the sick, and did not give them an offsetting revenue stream, younger and healthy, the insurance companies would take a major, and perhaps, fatal financial hit. 

So not only does Obama need to get 7 million Americans to sign up for Obama Care policies in order for the whole Rube Goldberg system to work, he has to have the right MIX of customers. He needs enough younger, healthier Americans forced to buy health insurance and make regular payments to the insurance companies in order for the insurance companies to accept any Obama Care patient that develops.

Unfortunately, that does not appear how things are going according to two indicators. First, consider a recent news report from Reuters:

• Health insurer Humana Inc recently stated that its projected enrollment mix in private plans through the exchanges created by President Barack Obama’s healthcare law will be, “more adverse than previously expected.”
• Humana attributed the enrollment trend to regulatory changes allowing people to remain in previously existing plans not sold on the exchanges. Obama proposed allowing insurers to keep selling plans that did not comply with the Affordable Care Act after political fallout that he was not keeping his promise that people can keep insurance plans if they like them.

Thus, we see the first cracks in the major assumption that younger, healthier Americans would ignorantly fork over money to insurance companies when odds are they did not have to.

The second major indication that things are not going well relative to MIX is that while the Obama administration claims two million people have indicated they will sign up for an Obama Care policy, a vast majority of the indications are for the higher priced, lower deductible Gold and Silver plans, not the lower priced, higher deductible Bronze plans. 

This indicates that people who indicated they want an Obama Care policy are older and sicker than expected and needed by Obama Care financials since these potential customers realize that by paying more up front via higher premiums, they reap a larger, quicker benefit when they utilize the policy, i.e. they are more likely already ailing or expect to be ailing soon.

Thus, not only is the sign up rate for Obama Care way behind forecast, not only is the payment processing for Obama Care policies way behind schedule, it also appears that the mix needed to make this disaster work is also totally out of whack.

What happens if this scenario actually plays out? Believe it or not, within the legislation itself are contingencies for the American taxpayer to bailout any shortfall or financial damage that the insurance companies incur. 

That’s right: first the American taxpayer bailed out the auto companies, then they bailed out the banks, then they bailed out the large insurance companies and then they bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And now because of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care, we are going to bail out major insurance companies due to the ineptness of the Washington political class and their Obama Care abomination.

That’s it for this month. Again, it is not because we have covered every Obama Care fiasco. It is just too depressing to cover every Obama Care fiasco for too long without getting too bummed out. 

Tomorrow we will be doing a quick summary of every Obama Care disaster we can think off. It will summarize everything we have talked about over the past three years, focusing on the many blunders and every instance of incompetence is we have discussed over the past four months.

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

December, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Hope For The Future Down, Drone Civilian Deaths Up, Household Incomes Down, And More

This is our fourth post this month on the latest lunacy, idiocy and wasteful ways of the American political class. We do this series at the beginning of every month in order to keep track of how screwed up the current set of Americans politicians have become along with the many ways they destroy our wealth, our economy, our freedom, and in the case of Obama Care, our health and very lives. 

We currently leave the Obama Care insanity to a separate set of posts each month since the wreckage that piece of legislation is raining down on the country is too much to include in our regular insanity reviews. This week and last we have dealt with the normal set of ineptness of our politicians, in Washington and elsewhere throughout the land.

Today, will mostly be a quick hit type of post where we do a quick review of many pieces of insanity that speak for themselves, requiring no further explanation or discussion on our part.

1) According to an article from www.Qz.com, that was summarized in the September 17, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, the median income for U.S. households was $51,017 in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This is down a whopping 8.3% from 2007. From previous posts that this is a downward trend, it was not happening only during the Great Recession.

Thus, despite the claims of the Obama administration that the economy is improving, you cannot tell it from how much money an average household is bringing in, the only true measure of how healthy an economy is.

2) According to a recent article from Forbes magazine that was summarized in the November 22, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, between 1995 and 2012, 50 billionaires collected an estimated $11.3 million in Federal government farm subsidies, according to the Enviornmental Working Group. However, very few of them even live on a farm, never mind working on a farm.

This free money comes out to about $226,000 per billionaire, more than the median annual household income of more than four average U.S. households. Now ask yourself: is this the best way to spend over $11 million of taxpayer wealth, giving it to billionaires, or would it have better spent on feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, helping the addicted, or just plain giving it back to the American taxpayer?

3) According to a recent Gallup poll that was reported on by the November 8, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, 52% of Americans believe there is “plenty of opportunity” to get ahead in America. 15 years ago in 1998, that same question found that 81% of Americans believed there was “plenty of opportunity” to get ahead. What a difference in fifteen short years, an almost 36% drop off.

When a country loses hope for the future, than there is no hope for the future. We are getting dangerously close to that tipping point in the history of our country, no thanks to the ineptness of the leadership in the political class.

4) According to the New York Times, as reported in the November 8, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, over the past 10 years, 94% of the large Federal government information technology projects that were undertaken failed miserably, the Standish Group research firm reported. Standish found that more than half of the projects were either delayed, ran over budget, or fell short of user expectations or needs. A whopping 41% failed completely.

The real question is why any American still thinks that the whole Obama Care information systems and website effort will ever work, given this horrid track record of the political class in Washington to accomplish hardly any other substantial Federal government information technology effort. A 6% success rate, a 94% failure rate cannot be viewed in any profession, any human endeavor as something to be proud of.

5) Although Obama may be claiming that the economy is getting better, we already know that is a bogus claim, given how we just discussed the fact that household incomes continue to plummet. We also know that there are over 23 million Americans that are either unemployed or underemployed. Almost 50 million Americans require government food assistance.

Add to those dire numbers the reality, as documented in a recent Business Week article, that in August the U.S. ran a still embarrassingly large monthly total trade deficit of just under $39 billion in August, 2013. One month, we as a country imported about $39 billion more goods and services than we exported. You cannot say the economy is getting healthy when the trade deficits remain so high month over month.

6) The Washington political class has led the country into three military conflicts in the past ten years or so. What has that gotten us besides trillions of dollars in debt, thousands of our military personnel killed or wounded, and hundreds of thousands civilians killed or wounded, according to Steve Chapman writing in the Chicago tribune:

• A reinvigorated Al Qaida in Iraq is resulting in 20 Iraqis being killed EVERY DAY.
• In Afghanistan, we are still fighting a fruitless battle against jihadists, the government we support is riddled with corruption, and the Taliban are more than likely to take over again once the western powers withdrawal their military forces in 2014.
• Libya has become a “lawless haven for terrorists," e.g. Benghazi murders.

Senseless waste, useless waste, and inhuman waste.

7) Speaking of waste, consider the damage and wasting of innocent lives that our government’s drone warfare against terrorists has resulted in, according to a report in the May 20, 2013 article in The Week magazine:

• The London based Bureau of Investigative journalism claims its research estimates that U.S. drone attacks have killed more than 800 civilians and nearly 200 children in Pakistan since 2004.
• McClatchy News investigators found that the U.S. claim that it is attacking and killing only Al Qaida fighters and leaders is not true since it found that 482 people killed by U.S. drone attacks in a recent 12 month period were not Al Qaida fighters.
• People in many countries in the Middle East live in daily fear that some unknown, far off American military operator of a dangerous bomb laden drone will unexpectedly wipe out themselves or their friends and family, heightening the stress of just living a normal day and the hatred they have for America.
• They saddest part of this whole killing effort is that even if the Federal government takes out a high profile terror target, that dead target is quickly replaced with another terrorist nut case but the hatred of America has been increased.

Typical government effort: lots of expense, in both blood and money, random successes but systematic failures, and humanity and our homeland defense are worse off.

8) One last bit of insanity for today, an item that proves American politicians are not the only inept rulers in the world. According to a short article in the November, 2013 issue of Reason magazine, government officials in Gothenburg, Sweden have ordered a local nightclub to reduce the volume of music played in the club since the volume was not healthy for the fish kept in the aquarium in the club.

Makes you wonder what the job description read like for the government bureaucrat who actually researched the volume of the nightclub music in order to write the order. If that is what those local taxpayers are spending their taxpayer money on, I would ask for a refund.

That’s it for today. Unfortunately, we are going to need one more day to get all of this month’s insanity covered, it is that bad, thanks to the American political class.

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