May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 8: Bogus Sign Up Numbers, Aetna Looks To Jack Up Prices, and A Marine Proves Harry Reid A Liar

This is our eighth and final post this month covering the latest insanity from the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It becomes more and more difficult to keep up with the disasters as we continually find out why this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the Washington political class. The first post in this series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

1) Harry Reid recently and falsely claimed that no one in the country was paying more in health care insurance costs as a result of Obama Care. This is just one in a series of lies that the good Senator from Nevada has perpetrated on the country over the past few years. We know there are millions of people that have either lost their insurance and are stuck paying more for replacement insurance policies or who kept their policies but have been told by their insurance companies that their rates are going up as a result of Obama Care.

Just to prove again the Reid was either grossly wrong or grossly lying, consider the plight of a regular American, a Marine veteran, who saw his insurance costs more than double as a result of Obama Care:

http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/barbara-boland/veteran-says-he-thinks-president-lied-him-about-obamacare?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Marketing&utm_term=Facebook&utm_content=socialflow&utm_campaign=b-megyn-soldier

It is interesting that one of his state’s Senators also came out and more or less implied that this former Marine was lying. It is pretty sad when so-called leaders of this country have to resort to lies and deceptions and the slandering of American citizens to cover-up their ineptness on this legislation.

2) One of the huge and disgraceful bets within the Obama Care legislation was whether or not the President and his allies could convince younger, healthier Americans to sign up for health insurance plans that most would never need in order to take their money to support the needs of older, less healthy insurance customers. The business case financials depended on the intergenerational transfer of wealth from younger/healthier to older/sick citizens.

Early surveys and analyses of those that actually did sign up for health care insurance have indicated, as we have reported, that this bet was lost. Rather than getting almost a 40% level of younger and healthier, the signup profile shows that less than 30% were younger and healthier Obama Care customers. If that is indeed the case, than those insurance companies that participated in the Obama Care exchanges will have to raise their premiums and deductibles in 2015 to make up the difference.

We have already reported on the fact that Humana is leaning towards a substantial increase in premiums in 2015 to make up for the shortfall in younger and healthier that they are starting to see. And last week, Aetna, America’s third-largest health insurer said that its customers should expect to see 2015 premium spikes that in some states will be “over double digits” as a result of the Obama administration’s endless “on the fly” Obama Care changes.

The company’s CEO, Mark Bertolini, told reporters that while his company prefers to stay at its current level of Obama Care participation in just 17 states, customers can expect health insurance premiums to climb in 2014 despite Obama Care. Specifically, Bertolini said that, depending on a customer’s state and the mix of sick versus healthy patients, customers will see insurance hikes ranging from “the very low single digits” to “some that will be over double digits.” So much for the President’s promise that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by $2,500. Going down $2,500 is not consistent with the reality of going up  “over double digits.”

3) One of the problems the President has relative to his signature legislation is that no one except his die hard fans believe anything he says anymore. Remember, even the Obama-friendly Washington Post awarded him the biggest lie of the year for 2013 and included three of his promises in the top ten lies for 2013, a very dubious achievement for the leader of the country.

A quick review of his lies and deceptions include, but are not limited to the following:

• If you like your current insurance policy you can keep it under Obama Care. No, respected estimates show that anywhere from 5 to 6 million Americans lost their insurance coverage because of Obama Care.
• If you like your current doctor and hospital, you can keep your access to your current doctor and hospital. No, we now know that Obama Care policies are showing much tighter and narrower access to doctors, and hospitals, meaning that millions of Americans have lost access to their preferred doctors and hospitals.
• The average annual insurance policy costs for the average American family will go down by $2,500 a year. No, in 45 states, the average costs of health insurance premiums are going up and generally going up a lot, according to a study and analysis done by the Society of Actuaries.

Other lies in other areas include:

• He was going to cut the annual deficit in half by the middle of his first term. Instead, he has recorded record deficits for every year of his Presidency.
• He would immediately shut down the prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. More than five years into his Presidency and the camp is still open.
• He was going to run the most transparent Presidency in the history of the country. Instead, we have the most opaque administration ever.
• He was going to unite the country and get everyone to work together. Instead, he has stood by as his political allies have attacked and slandered his political opponents, ordinary Americans, and media people who dare to question his policies.
• He was going to support the Constitution and execute the laws of the land. Instead, he has operated the most lawless Presidency in the history of the country, from the illegal gun running of Fast and Furious to using the IRS to harass his political opponents and critics to spying on every American, Congress, foreign leaders, and the media, etc.

Quite a track record of lying. Thus, when this administration claims, without any backup proof that Obama Care has signed up 8 million Americans, it is difficult to believe that is a valid and integrity based number.

Nevertheless, lets assume that 8 million is reality, although we doubt it based on the trck record of lies, and do some simple math:

• Given that reputable sources estimate the 5 to 6 million Americans lost access to their preferred insurance policies as a result of Obama Care, the net gain in insured Americans is not 8 million, it is only 2 to 3 million. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and go with 3 million NET new Americans enrolled on insurance policies.
• But that 8 million is not the number of people that actually have new, valid, paid for  insurance policies, it is the number of Americans who indicated that they were going to sign up, not the number who actually paid their first premium payment. Estimates of non-payers range from 10% to 50%. Again, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that 90% of those interested actually paid for their policies, reducing the number of actual, newly insured Americans from 3 million to 2.7 million Americans.
• What is not known is how many of those 2.7 million Americans would have signed up for health care insurance anyway in the absence of Obama Care. If we assume/guess that 10% would have purchased insurance anyway, that 2.7 million becomes 2.4 million, best case, most optimistic case.

Thus, if there truly are about 50 million Americans who do not have health care insurance coverage, after four years of hype, news reports, hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, political debate, neighborhood outreach programs, celebrity endorsements, etc., Obama Care has managed to sign up just under 5% of the uninsured Americans for health insurance (2.4 million divided by 50 million.) This is truly a pathetic performance.

But not an expected performance. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that less than half of uninsured Americans will have health insurance coverage in ten years, severely missing the President’s intent to have every uninsured American covered.

What also is not covered by the above numbers is what happens when Aetna, Humana, and other Obama Care insurance partners come into 2015 with insurance policy costs that are double digit and triple digit percent higher than in 2014? How many of those 2.4 million Obama Care enrollees will opt out of their Obama Care policy because it got too expensive to keep? A further reduction in the 2.4 net newly insured.

For a detailed look at other factors that will further reduce the phantom 8 million enrolled number, go to an interesting analysis at:

http://thefederalist.com/2014/04/18/why-obamacares-enrollment-triumph-will-prove-fleeting/

This author uncovers more lies relative to Obama Care including some that are properly designated as “whoppers.”

4) And remember, the number is really not that all important. Whether it is 8 million or 2.4 million, at the end of the day, Americans will still be eating too much of the wrong kinds of unhealthy foods, Americans will still not be exercising enough and will still be the most overweight and obese country on the planet, Americans will still smoke too much, the government will still be subsidizing tobacco growers and corn growers whose product ends up as high fructose corn syrup throughout the food chain, there will be no concentrated effort to tame the growing problem of aging diseases, etc. The true root causes will still be driving up health care costs regardless of ‘the number.” Obama Care creates the number but does not create the right solutions.

That will do it for today and for this series. Likely bogus numbers from the administration on signups, costs of Obama Care policies likely to skyrocket in 2015, and Washington Senators call Americans liars. Just another day in the bizarre world of Obama Care. More disasters have been piling up over the past eight days or so but they will have to wait for next month. There are many other facets of polticial class insanity to cover and they cannot wait any longer, starting tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are those root causes? They include the following:

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

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

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

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

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

September, 2013 Obama Care Update Part 3: Unions Bailing Deadlines Missing, and The Top Ten Screw Ups

This is the third in our latest series of updates on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Given that the rollout of a major component of Obama Care is supposed to be happening in three weeks, it is appropriate to review what has happened in the past month or so since our long series on Obama Care’s many disasters done back in August. Unfortunately, since we ran that series last month starting with 

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

the fiascoes have just kept on coming, fiascoes that we are reviewing in a quick hit fashion this week.

1) The first review of disaster comes from the latest analysis by the Heritage Foundation where they documented the top ten disasters of Obama Care. Since they do a better job of describing them than I could, I have lifted their words and placed them below:

1. WAIVERS: The Administration established a legally questionable program of temporary waivers when firms announced they were considering dropping coverage rather than comply with the law’s costly requirements. Even though more than half of the recipients of these waivers were members of union plans, many union leaders are still not satisfied—they want another waiver, to receive taxpayer-funded subsidies for their employer-provided coverage.

2. ILLEGAL TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES FOR CONGRESS: Last month, following heavy lobbying from leaders in both parties—and an intervention from President Obama himself—the Administration issued a rule regarding coverage for Members of Congress and their staffs, who will retain their taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies in the exchanges. Unfortunately, as previous research has documented, the Administration had no legal basis on which to make this ruling.

3. EMPLOYER MANDATE: In July, the Administration announced it would not enforce Obamacare’s employer mandate until 2015, effectively granting big business a one-year delay. This action came despite language in Section 1514(d) of the law requiring employers to act “beginning after December 31, 2013,” and despite the fact that hard-working Americans are not getting a delay from the other harmful effects of Obamacare.

4. PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: Immediately after Obamacare was signed, Democratic staffers admitted that under the law as written, insurers “still would be able to refuse new coverage to children because of a pre-existing medical problem.” The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) took it upon itself to issue regulations prohibiting plans from turning down such applicants three years earlier than the law required. As a result, insurers stopped offering child-only plans in 17 states, fearing that only parents of sick children would apply for insurance coverage.

5. OUT-OF-POCKET CAPS: Section 1302(c)(1) of the law includes caps on out-of-pocket expenses and explicitly states they are to take effect “beginning in 2014.” But earlier this year, the Administration delayed these new caps from taking effect as scheduled. What’s more, as The New York Times reported, the Administration made this unilateral change not by issuing rules subject to public comment, but by posting a series of questions and answers on an obscure website.

6. BASIC HEALTH PLAN: This government-run health plan for people above the Medicaid income level was created in Section 1331 of Obamacare as a way to promote “state flexibility,” but the Administration unilaterally delayed it for one year. One Democratic Senator criticized the Administration for this move, saying it does not “live up” to the law as written.

7. TAX DISCLOSURES: Section 9002 of Obamacare requires employers to report the value of workers’ health insurance on W-2 filings, effective for all “taxable years after December 31, 2010.” But the Administration unilaterally delayed this requirement, and employers did not have to report these data until after the 2012 presidential election.

8. HONOR SYSTEM: In July, the Administration announced it was placing most Americans on the “honor system” when it came to verifying their income and access to employer-provided health coverage. As prior research has documented, this move, coupled with loopholes written into the law, gives many Americans a strong incentive to “game the system” and obtain more in taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies than they should actually receive.

9. PRIVACY: Former HHS General Counsel Michael Astrue, when serving as Commissioner of Social Security earlier this year, complained strongly within the Administration about the security risks posed by Obamacare’s new data hub. However, the Administration overrode his objections, using what Astrue called “an absurdly broad interpretation of the Privacy Act’s ‘routine use’ exemption.”

10. TOBACCO PENALTIES: Section 1201 of the law allows insurance companies to charge smokers up to 50 percent more in premiums. But due to a “computer glitch,” those penalties will be limited for “at least a year”—meaning non-smokers may have to pay more as a result.

It’s sad when your top ten is really a bottom ten of failures.

2) How screwed up and behind schedule is this piece of legislation? Consider a recent article from Forbes that had an actual scorecard of Obama Care’s rollout history:

• As of the end of May, 2013, the Obama Care implementation schedule had failed to meet 9 of 12 deadlines that should have been done in the first year after the legislation was signed.
• It failed to meet 22 of 53 deadlines in the second year.
• Another 9 of those implementation deadlines became moot after Congress did not appropriate funds to complete the assigned tasks. 
• In year three, the implementation effort had  missed 10 out of 17 deadlines. 
• This comes to a total of 41 out of 82 deadlines missed, just a measly 50%.
• If you exclude the 9 deadlines that became moot because Congress never appropriated the funds to meet them, the Obama administration missed 41 out of 73 deadlines, or 56%, still very pathetic. 

A pitiful performance by this administration. But not unexpected. We have previously reported that only a very small part of the regulations needed to implement Obama’s Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation was completed several years after the law was enacted. One could not expect this type of lousy implementation performance for Obama Care given the history of incompetence by this administration.

3) In the middle of August, 2013, the clothing chain Forever 21 announced that it was capping some full-time workers at 29.5 hours a week as of August 18, resulting in a loss of the health coverage and other benefits offered to full-time workers. 29.5 hours per week is an important because….Obama Care forces employers to provide health care insurance for employees that work more than 30 hours a week. Thus, add the employees from this company that now have fewer hours, lower wage levels, and no insurance as a result of Obama Care.

4) Unions, early avid supporters of Obama Care have certainly done a major reversal in support if you consider a recent press release from the Teamsters union: “ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour workweek that is the backbone of the American middle class.” 

When your major supporters are abandoning ship, maybe it is a time to reconsider whether or not this is a good thing to do.

5) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was interviewed in his home state of Nevada back on August 8, 2013 on a local radio station. He was taking questions from listeners when a union member called in and said he was worried that his health insurance coverage would take a hit under Obama Care. Reid’s response was pure political double talk when he first said: "He's [the union member calling in] exaggerating. ... I would recommend that he calm down and stop frightening people." 

However, according to a Washington Examiner article documenting the exchange between Reid and the union member, Reid did appear to acknowledge that union members could lose access to some of their more generous health care policies, referred to as "Cadillac" plans. Bottom line according to Reid: don’t be afraid, don’t exaggerate, don’t frighten people. Oh, by the way, be very afraid, be very afraid when it comes to your union provided health insurance plan.

Enough for today. Unions bailing out, deadlines being missed left and right, and at least ten major screw ups as a result of the legislation. Makes you wonder how those in Washington can be so ignorant or blind to see that the monster that is Obama care is so bad, so crippling to every American’s life.

Worse of all, we are still not done, more quick hit disasters and idiocy from Obama Care tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, February Update, Part 2: Killing Marriages, Killing Work Hours, and More

Just when you thought we could stay away from the devastating effects of Obama Care, another set of bad surprises pop up. We thought we had contained the damage in a series of posts from earlier this year that began with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-devastation-that-is-obama-care-part.html

Yesterday's post was Part 1 of a February update to that original series of Obama Care posts. Today is the second half of that update.

Unfortunately, more bad news has arisen:

1) One of the biggest reasons why Obama Care is falling apart is that the creators never understood the root causes of our high and escalating health care costs. Until you understand the root causes, you cannot develop the right solutions to address those root causes and anything you try to do without that basis is probably doomed to failure:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kinds of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• The Washington political class subsidizes these bad habits by paying American farmers to grow unhealthy food and making tobacco farming more lucrative via Federal subsidies.
• Government regulations inhibit health care insurance competition across state lines.
• Obama Care never included any major tort reform to remove unnecessary legal expenses out of the system.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to quantify who and what entities were making obscene profits off of obscene health care costs.

Without understanding the root causes of high health care costs, Obama Care turned into nothing more than a poorly structured, poorly run and poorly financed health care insurance program, not a comprehensive health care industry reform program. That is why some components of Obama Care, e.g. the CLASS program, which was supposed to provide long term care for Americans, have already been shut down because of their failure to address the true causes of our problems.

Which brings us to the next component of Obama Care which is about to be shut down even before the whole piece of legislation is implemented. According to a February article from the Washington Post:

• Tens of thousands of Americans who cannot get health insurance because of a preexisting medical condition will be no longer be able to get coverage from an Obama Care program because funding for that program is running out.
• These so-called “high-risk pools” will be closed to new applicants no later than March 2, depending on the state.
• According to an HHS spokesperson, the closing of the program to new applicants is being taken in order to protect the interests of those who had already signed up for the program, about 135,000 people.
• The program launched in 2010 and was supposed to last until 2014 but now will be shut down in the coming weeks because of a lack of funds.
• In another back handed slap at bad government forecasting, the original business case assumed that about 375,000 people would sign up for the program. However, only 135,000 enrolled, about a third of the expected enrollment, but the cost of servicing this one third is far higher than what was expected, causing the shutdown of the system to new enrollees
• In a moment of rare candid honestly from a Washington bureaucrat, that same HHS spokesperson is quoted in the article: “What we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.” Could not agree more.

Another Obama Care program blows its forecasts, exceeds its budget, and does not deliver what it promised to deliver. Par for the course.

And let’s do some simple math to see why this is another epic failure. The article states that between nine million and 25 million Americans are uninsured and have a preexisting health problem. If the current program has 135,000 enrollees and they have blown through $5 billion in three years or so, then the cost of insurance coverage for these enrollees comes out to about $37,000 per person or about $12,000 a year per person. If we take the mid point of the uninsured estimates, we end up with 17 million Americans (9 plus 25 divided by 2) who are uninsured because of preexisting health conditions.

Thus, using the results of this program, the average cost ($12,000) times the number needing insurance (17 million) comes out to an annual cost of over $200 billion a year. There is no way the country and the Federal government could afford this cost. This one program alone would eat up about 8% of the entire 2012 revenue stream of the Federal government:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

Which gets us back to our original point, you have to reduce the root causes of the high health care costs in this country, the root causes that cause these preexisting conditions. You cannot paper over them with complicated and expensive Obama Care insurance programs that just do not work since “what we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.”

2) Another perverse incentive of Obama Care is to make marriage less palatable for Americans and American families in the lower income ranges. Consider the opinions of two experts on the matter:

• Former Obama Treasury Department executive David Gamage was quoted The Wall Street Journal last year: “Consider a couple with children in which one of the parents earns most of the family’s income. If the couple marries, the family would lose thousands of dollars of subsidies that could otherwise be used to pay for health insurance for the children and the lower-income spouse. If the couple is already married, divorce may be their only option for obtaining affordable insurance for their children and the lower-income parent.”
• Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute testified in front of a Congressional hearing:“Health insurance premium credits in the new law are linked not directly to income, but to the poverty line, resulting in a particularly steep marriage penalty for low-income Americans. With $10,890 as the poverty line for one person and an additional $3,820 for a spouse, marriage means less government help with health insurance.

Thus, despite the President’s claim in his recent state of the union message that he wanted to strengthen families (“We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples,”) because that is best for Americans and American families, his health care reform disaster does just the opposite, financially incenting people not to get married or to get divorced.

3) We have reported on the many instances where private businesses and companies are cutting the hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week due to the asinine Obama administration ruling that anyone working 30 hours or more a week is considered a full time employee relative to Obama Care, forcing them to provide full health insurance coverage to these employees. Since many of these businesses’ business model, particularly those in the restaurant industry, cannot support these extra, onerous costs, they have cut their employees hours. Now these Americans still do not have health care insurance AND they have fewer hours to work and lower take home pay.

But this situation is not restricted just to private businesses and restaurant businesses:

• The Virgina Pilot newspaper reported on February 8, 2013 that thousands of part-time state workers will see their weekly working schedules reduced to no more than 29 hours a week going forward. The reason given for the drop in hours is that under Obama Care employees working 30 hours a week or more receive health care benefits, which would cost Virginia tens of millions of dollars a year. The new policy will mean a pay cut for many part-timers, including adjunct college professors.
• The Huffington Post reported back in November, 2012 that Youngstown State University will reduce the hours of part-time employees to ensure that the university is not required to provide them with health insurance coverage under Obama Care. Adjunct professors and lecturers would see their payable hours reduced to that magic number, 29 hours a week or less. Reason given for the decrease: onerous costs of Obama Care.
• We have already reported on how the Community College Of Allegheny County will cut the hours for some instructors to avoid paying for their health insurance coverage under Obama Care’s 30 hour rule, cuts that are affecting about 400 employees.

Again, insanity. These people will still not be able to afford health care insurance and will see a cut in take home pay nonetheless.

4) The Portland Press ran an article on February 18, 2013 that questioned the assertion made when Obama Care was passed that health care costs would go down. Many organizations, states, and politicians who supported the passage of the bill are now backpedaling on the potential devastating affects it may have on their constituents:

• State insurance regulators in California, recently sent a letter to the Obama administration in a recent letter to express their fears and concerns about "rate and market disruption."
• Oregon's insurance commissioner predicts that the new Obama Care regulations could push up premiums for younger Americans by as much as 30% and urged administration officials to slow the rollout of the new regulations.
• Insurance regulators in California, Oregon, Rhode Island and several other states have asked the administration to phase in the new requirement over several years in order to not jolt the insurance market or America.
• An advocate for consumers in their 20s, Young Invincibles, is also worried, sending a letter to administration officials suggesting that additional steps may be needed to protect young people from rising premiums. Remember, one of the insane aspects of Obama Care is that insurance costs for older Americans is reduced at the expense of raising insurance costs for younger Americans, those that are far more likely to have lower personal wealth than older Americans.
• Following up on that point, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that insurance costs for those who buy insurance coverage on their own probably will be 10-13% higher in 2016.

The article lays out a scenario that is very likely to occur in 2014 for many Americans, especially younger Americans:

• As health insurance rates come down for older people, the insurance rates will likely increase for consumers in their 20s.
• If that happens, young, healthy people could elect not to get health insurance and pay the small penalty if AND when they actually get caught by the IRS.
• This is the logical personal financial path for them to take since the cost of their insurance will be going much higher than the relatively minor fine they MIGHT eventually face.
• That, in turn, would leave an older, sicker population in the insurance pool on average, which typically inflates premiums and will leave millions of Americans without health care insurance.

In other words, the entire Rube Goldberg structure of this idiotic legislation will come tumbling down in bad financials, sick Americans, and much higher national debt.

Unfortunately, the bad news keeps oncoming from this massive, ill-conceived, complex, doomed to failure piece of legislation. But we should not be surprised, experts and news outlets have been correctly predicting this coming doom for years. For a nice synopsis of this history, consider going to the following link for a detailed, but easy to read, trek through the past few years to see what was predicted to fail is now actually failing:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/obama-concedes-obamacare-didnt-do-anything-for-rising-health-care-costs/

I am sure this is not the last set of disasters we will cover relative to Obama Care. Unfortunately.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, Part 5: Taxing Your Health Care, A Secret $63 Tax, $900 Back Braces, And More

This is a fifth in a series of posts that review and dissect the horrible consequences that Obama Care will dump on lives, our health, and our economy in the next year or so. All of this disruption will not result in any improvement in our health care costs, our health care deliverance, or our health care insurance processes since Obama Care never investigated, understood, and addressed the root causes of our health care crisis:

1. Americans eat too much.
2. Americans eat too much of the wrong types of food.
3. Americans smoke too much.
4. Americans do not exercise enough.
5. Americans are getting older on average.
6. Health industry tort reform is desperately needed but not included in Obama Care.
7. Cross state lines health insurance competition is severely restricted, competition that would reduce health care costs.
8. The Federal government subsidizes the over production of corn that results in dirt cheap corn fructose as a by product that infests most of our good supply.
9. The Federal government subsidizes the tobacco industry that produces high quality, lost cost, deadly tobacco products that Americans use to their health detriment.
10. The Federal government loses well over $100 billion a year to Medicare and Medicaid wasteful spending and criminal fraud, wealth that could be used to extend health insurance and health care to Americans who need it without raising taxes.
11. The U.S. health care system wastes well over $700 billion a year in total, waste that could easily fix the health care needs of the country without raising taxes and without instituting a mammoth and dysfunctional Federal bureaucracy.
12. The Obama administration never "followed the money" to understand where and how the U.S. healthcare system drains wealth out of the economy.

Since the Obama Care writers never understood that these were the root causes of our health care issues, their legislation has no chance of ever being cost efficient, health effective, or successful. The past four days went into excruciating detail of their failure, based on reality, statistics, and expert opinions, including the opinions of those that initially supported the legislation (e.g. the eighteen Senators who want to repeal some of the funding attributes of the law.)

The failures continue today:

1) A December 25, 2012 Associated Press article discussed the new possibility that the Federal government might start treating the health care benefits that many Americans receive and depend on today for their health care insurance coverage as regular income, subject to income tax. This new tax would affect about half of all Americans.

A few observations:

• Obama has always stated that his tax increases only affect the very rich in this country, a claim that oft repeated has been proven false any number of times. By raising the taxes on half of America, he could not longer make this boast.
• He has also boasted that if we liked the health care coverage insurance we have today, we could keep it since Obama Care would not affect what we have today. Subjecting this coverage to a new tax would certainly destroy this false boast also.

The article quotes Congressional sources which estimate such a tax on half of America would raise about $150 billion a year. We have reported many times that Medicaid and Medicare lose anywhere from $110 billion to $150 billion a year to waste, mismanagement, and outright criminal fraud. In other words, if Obama and the rest of the political class were actually doing their jobs in D.C. and running an efficient and effective government, there would be no need to hit the American taxpayer for more tax revenue.

Disgraceful.

2) Speaking of increased taxes, the Associated Press reported on December 10, 2012 that Obama Care includes another hidden “tax”, this on people with current health care insurance from their employer, that very few people know about. These medical plans are facing an unexpected Obama Care expense in the form of a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

The original supporters of Obama Care liked to brag that Americans with existing conditions could now get “free” health care as a result of the legislation. But most realists know that nothing is free in this reality and the cost is now known: a $63 fee for about 190 Americans. Most experts expect businesses to pass this annual $63 dollar fee along to their employees and retirees, a subsidy to cover Americans with preexisting conditions.

Now, I am not saying that any human should be denied health care because of pre-existing health conditions. What I object to is the implication from Obama and his supporters that somehow there would be no cost involved with implementing this condition requirement. This cost should have been presented in an honest and upfront manner so that the true cost on millions of Americans was made clear up front.

This Obama Care fee comes out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers. The article quotes employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks who calls this a "sleeper issue" with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers: "Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, (companies will) be hit with a multi-million dollar assessment without getting anything back for it," said Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary.

Higher fees without getting anything back in return. Seems like this is a recurring theme for Obama Care.

3) Did you ever wonder how Medicare and Medicaid could be so wasteful and inefficient with your tax dollars? Consider a report from the Health and Human Services Inspector General that was reported on by the Associated Press on December 19, 2012:

• Internet sale price for a standard back brace: $99.99.
• The average cost from retail suppliers of standard back braces: $191
• What Medicare pays for the standard back braces: $900-plus.

Just one example of why the government wastes anywhere from $110 billion to $150 billion a year on these Federal programs: "The program and its beneficiaries could have paid millions of dollars less if the Medicare reimbursement amount ... more closely resembled the cost to suppliers," according to the report from the inspector general’s report.

In light of the report, Medicare's administrator, Marilyn Tavenner issued a written statement stating Medicare will consider including back braces in a competitive bidding plan for medical equipment. The bidding experiment, expanding across the country, has been shown to save taxpayers money. Well, duh! Why hasn’t this then been part of the process all along, given that Medicare has probably been paying for back braces for decades. And why isn’t it standard operating procedure for all Medicare programs?

Other distressing findings form the inspector general’s report include the following:

• Medicare spends more than $10 billion a year providing beneficiaries with medical equipment, from power wheelchairs to blood sugar monitors, areas that have been rife with fraud.
• Dishonest and criminal suppliers sell Medicare customers items they may not need and bill the cost to Medicare.
• Although the $96 million that Medicare spent on back braces in 2011 was a small part of its overall spending, that amount had more than doubled in just three years, up from $36 million in 2008, the inspector general’s report said.
• Investigators decided to take a closer look, before the line item for back braces could reach the $200 million or $300 million mark.
• The article showed how unscrupulous dealers and medical professionals could use the back brace category to generate revenue without necessarily helping customers: “A reporter's quick Internet search suggested there's a thriving business in back braces. One medical supplier in the Midwest aimed its pitch directly at doctors: "Your peers are using back braces to help generate additional revenue for their office," the promotional material said. It explained how doctors can make an added $350 to $650 for each Medicare patient who qualifies for a brace.”

Disgraceful. Decades after the Medicare program was launched, the Federal government still does not know how to control runaway, wasteful pending and fraud in the program. And now Obama Care will be coming along that will make the program orders of magnitude worse and the criminal fraud component that much more lucrative for criminals and dishonest health care provider.

A new tax on hundreds of Americans that currently have health care insurance. A new fee on hundreds of Americans that currently have health care insurance. All for nothing in return and because the Federal government has proven over the decades that the only thing it can do well in the health care industry is to be criminally infested and cost cutting deficient.

But we are still not done with the insanity of Obama Care. More during the next two days on how the legislation still has not addressed the root causes of our escalating health care costs and how it will even reach out and make caring for our pets and vet care more expensive.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Abra Kadabra - The Right Hand Of The Federal Government Still Does Not Know What The Left Hand Is Doing

Several times we have discussed the fact that our Federal government has grown so large and unwieldy, becoming more like Jabba The Hutt of Star Wars (a parasitic blob that wastes resources) than an efficient and effective organization, that we often come across ludicrous situations where one part of the Federal government is doing something that is in direct conflict with what another tentacle of the government is doing:

• A little while ago we saw how the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department were doing the exact opposite of each other. One entity was busy trying to reduce the volume of long term Treasury bills in the market and increase the amount of short term Treasury bills while the other entity was trying to expand the volume of long term notes and reduce the volume of short term notes.See the following link for more details: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/10/clueless-in-washington.html
• Another time we saw how the Department of Agriculture was increasing the amount of cheap corn in the market with its farm subsidies, making obesity provoking foods less expensive and more widely used due to the proliferation of cheap corn fructose while other parts of the government were trying to reduce the use of corn fructose infested foods to fight obesity. See the following link for more detail: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/06/your-local-and-state-government-in.html

I am sure I could pull up some other examples from past blog posts but you get the idea. This thing called the Federal government has gotten so large and cumbersome that it cannot help but get in the way of itself every day. If the loss of taxpayer wealth and loss of freedom was not so tragic, some of these antics and working at cross purposes would be kind of funny in a Keystone Kop kind of way.

Unfortunately, these actions do waste incredible amounts of taxpayer money and do rob us of our freedom as the government intrudes to our personal lives more and more with its bureaucratic bumbling.

Today let's talk about the latest crashing together of different government priorities and how this crashing negates the use of taxpayer wealth in the process. Specifically, the latest cross purpose example comes out of the recently passed Senate farm bill. Most of the following information comes from an article in the July 8, 2012 issue of Money News:

• The Federal government and every state government adds a multitude of taxes onto each pack of cigarettes that consumers buy in order to 1) collect taxes on each pack sold and 2) to discourage the purchase and use of cigarettes (not included in the Money News article).
• The Federal government recently announced a new $54 million, 12-week TV ad campaign it will be airing to encourage smokers to give up the smoking habit.
• State level and Federal spending on anti-smoking efforts have topped $800 million in some years.
• Which raises the question that if government entities want to discourage smoking, why does the latest Senate approved farm bill contain continued taxpayer financial support for the industry responsible for the product targeted by those anti-smoking ads, namely the tobacco farming industry?
• From 1995 through 2011, the Federal government has paid out $1.329 billion in subsidies for the tobacco industry. In 2011 alone, Federal taxpayers paid out over $190 million in tobacco subsidies to 58,350 recipients, according to analyses done by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
• North Carolina receives the largest share of the subsidies — 39.7% of the total or $528 million from 1995 through 2011 — followed by Kentucky at 28.7%. The taxpayer waste is not even spread out across a lot of states if only two states sop up almost 70% of the total subsidy.

So let me get this straight. Smoking is a leading cause of disease and death in this country and a prime driver in our problem with escalating health care costs. As a result, the Federal and state governments in this country spend taxpayer money, sometimes to the tune of $800 million a year, to discourage Americans from smoking. This is so important in one part of the Federal government that it is launching a $54 million television ad campaign to encourage people to stop smoking.

However, in the past seven years, the same people running these same government entities have also given away over $1.3 billion of taxpayer wealth to tobacco farmers to help them grow tobacco that leads to disease and death and contributes to our escalating health care costs.

Wouldn't this money have been better spent by either returning it to the American taxpayer, using it to fund lung cancer research, or to help treat victims of lung cancer, a cancer that is most often caused by tobacco smoking? These seems like better uses for over a billion dollars than giving it to tobacco farmers who grow a product that governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to discourage people from using. Makes no sense.

But making no sense by our political class should not come as any surprise. They do it every day. How else to you explain the fact that these same politicians have overspent and incurred a national debt of almost $16 TRILLION without resolving a single major issue facing American families today: our public schools still fail to educate, we are still losing a war on drugs, our borders still leak, we still do not have a national energy policy, our health care costs continue to rise, our infrastructure continues to decay, etc.

That is why Step 1 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years. Not only would this result in a tremendous relief to our national debt problem and spur our economy, it would force these politicians to focus on a much smaller set of priorities since they would have far less taxpayer money to spend and waste and divert their attention. With a smaller set of priorities, maybe, just maybe, they might resolve an issue or two.

Lord knows paying tobacco farmers to grow tobacco to be consumed by consumers that the Federal government wants to discourage consumers from consuming is not the right priority.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/