Aporil, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Retro Post from 2013, I Told You So!

Every month for the past few years we have had to dedicate a number of posts each month to try and keep up with the unfolding disaster that is the Obama Care legislation. Higher taxes, higher national debt, individual stress, loss of access to favored doctors, hospitals, and medications, mass confusion, stunted economic growth, loss of jobs, increased deductibles, increased co-pays, identity theft threats, lies and deceptions, etc, it seems the disasters never end. That is why we have so much to talk about each month, the surprises and heart aches never end.

To see and review past posts and discussions and the many aspect of this failed legislation, just type in "unfolding disaster" in the search box above or go through the past month's post listing on the right side of this page to pick out past posts. Starting tomorrow, we will have a likely multi-day discussion of what disasters have popped up in just the past month or so.

However, today we are going to reach back in our past discussions of the topic and pull out a post we did in 2013 that for some reasons has seen tremendous readership in the past week or so. This has made it the most popular disucssion on the disasters of Obama Care of the dozens and dozens we have done over the years.

What makes this retro post interesting is that it was written before any aspect of the legislation was rolled out. However, it accurately predicted the many disasters that would occur when the legislation was put into operation. Which begs the question: if a non-expert int he ehalth field like myself could accurately predict what a fisaco Obama Care would be when it was rolled out, how come none of the experts who were working on it were so clueless? A question for the ages.

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MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2013

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, Part 1: Pending Health Exchange Disasters, Senators Say "Just Kidding" And More

As we move through this new year, we are about to face the reality of Obama Care as its many taxes, regulations, and insanity cascade down on us and our struggling economy. We have not talked about Obama Care’s implications for a while, having been preoccupied with regular political class insanity, the fiscal cliff, the fallacy of gun conrol, and the eight part series on how stupid it is to raise taxes on any American, given how wasteful and inefficient our Federal government is today.

But before reviewing the latest approaching Obama Care fiascos, let's review the basic problems we have discussed way too many times in this blog:

1) Obama Care never identified or addressed the primary root causes of our nation's escalating health care costs:

Americans eat too much and Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food - These two interrelated causes have many underlying drivers, not the least of which is Federal government farm subsidies. These subsidies have incented American farmers to grow way too much corn, corn that ends up as cheap but unhealthy corn fructose which ends up in just about everything Americans eat.

Americans smoke too much - This problem is exacerbated by the Federal government, with the American taxpayer paying and incenting tobacco farmers over $190 million a year in Federal subsidies to grow more tobacco which ends up killing more Americans.

Americans do not get enough exercise - Americans exercise so little that a recent article in the August 17, 2012 issue of The Week magazine discussed a global study which found that Americans "ranked among the most physically lazy countries in the world," with 40% of American adults rarely engaging in any physical activity or exercise.

Americans are getting older - Rather than mobilizing resources to aggressively go after new cures and treatments for aging diseases, e.g. cancer, dementia, etc., Obama Care instead just introduces a massive new Federal bureaucracy and taxation system without a focus on disease eradication.

Tort Reform - The legislation contains none of the previously successful medical tort reform that some states have already shown to reduce health care costs, an omission due to the fabulous lobbying efforts of the ABA.

Health Insurance Competition - The legislation does nothing to break down the state line barriers that inhibit insurance company competition across state lines.

The legislation never "followed the money."- In other words, when we go into for a simple medical test that takes only a handful of minutes to perform, e.g. a blood test, but end up paying hundreds of dollars for the simple test, Obama Care never took the time to understand where these outrageous amounts of money flow, who benefits from the outrageous fees, understand how much of these fees are reasonable and unreasonable, and how to control the flow.

2) The legislation does little to curtail current wasteful spending of existing massive Federal government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which easily lose well over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

3) The legislation will not contain health care costs, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that the gross cost of the legislation is almost double what was estimated just a few years ago, the head actuary of Medicare and Medicaid recently estimating that Obama Care will add more than $300 billion to the national debt in the first ten years, and the one sub-program that was supposed to be a positive contributor to the legislation's financials, the CLASS program, has already been shut down for being ineffective.

4) The legislation is written so poorly that companies have already set plans in motion to curtail hiring, change full time employees to part time employees, and cancel existing company health care plans in order to dodge the taxes, regulations, and burdens imposed on them by the legislation. This legislation and the ensuing actions by companies are likely a primary driver to our continuing high unemployment rate.

A whole series of previous Obama Care problems can be viewed beginning with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/08/obama-care-still-constitutional-and.html

But we will have to spent more than the next week catching up with the disaster that is Obama Care. It is coming at us quickly and it will likely increase medical costs, decrease medical care availability, and crush our struggling economy. Don’t believe this? Consider the following revelations that have come to light over the past few months from reputable, nonpartisan sources as the wave of Obama Care begins crashing upon us.

The following facts and reality, both today and the following posts, are in no particular order. All of the news is bad so we are just going to plow through all of it until we cannot take it anymore.

1) Reuters and CNBC reported on December 13, 2012 that only fifteen states have decided to set up their own, so-called health care exchanges as created under Obama Care. These exchanges are theoretically supposed to provide low cost, readily available health care insurance for those Americans who need it. Under the legislation, the states can establish and operate these exchanges or pass on the option, in which case the Federal government would step in and run a Federal health care exchange within the state.

Thus, by October 1, 2013, the Federal government will have to step up and put in place a functioning health care provisioning service in about two thirds of the country, far more than they thought it would have to do. That’s just ten months from now.

According to the article, administration officials say that is possible: "I am confident that states and the Federal government will be ready in 10 months, when consumers in all states can begin to apply," Gary Cohen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, testified to a House panel.

Remember, that:

• The data systems to do this are not in place or possibly not even being developed.
• The methods and procedures are not close to being in place.
• The customer service functionality and service representative training is not close to being in place.
• The payment process functionality is not close to being in place.
• Adjusting and customizing all of these factors to make sense and hang together at the individual state level will be a monster undertaking.

Given that this is the same government that after decades/centuries still cannot operate a fiscally sound postal system, cannot seal our leaky borders, loses over two hundred billion dollars a year to waste and criminal fraud in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs, fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders, and cannot protect its foreign embassies, I find it highly doubtful that it will be able to handle this massive effort to provide any kind of decent service via health care exchanges within ten months.

No matter what you think of Obama Care, administratively it is going to be a disaster come October 1, 2013. It will be a failure from a procedure perspective and probably a financial perspective at the Federal level since I am pretty sure the original business case and plans for the exchanges did not have the majority of states saying “thanks but no thanks.

An expert in the field, Dennis Smith, who heads health services in Wisconsin, a state that has decided not to pursue its own exchange, summed up the challenge quite politely: "I don't envy them for the job that they have. At the end of the day, you're trying to connect a buyer to a seller. And the fundamental things required to do that are not yet in place."

And that is why most states opted out, it will be a disaster since nothing exists at the Federal level to do this.

2) One of the greatest ironies of the entire Obama Care fiasco is the recent news that eighteen Senate Democrats, the very people that voted to pass the legislation, recently sent a letter to Obama asking that a key revenue provision of the law be stripped out. This revenue/tax provision assessed a 2.3% tax on the gross revenue of medical device manufacturers.

It seems that many of these medical device manufacturers are in the home states of these eighteen Senators. They have been exerting pressure on their elected representatives since this tax will likely do one of four things:

• Put them out of business.
• Curtail their hiring and employing of American citizens in order to pay the additional tax.
• Curtail their research and development efforts.
• Force them to move manufacturing jobs overseas in order to stay financially viable, further hurting a bad unemployment picture.

None of these options will make for happy constituents and voters back home and thus, these politicians are scrambling to protect their jobs in the next election by asking that Obama cave on this tax, a tax they voted for in 2009.

Their position means one of two things, neither of which is very flattering:

1. These eighteen Senators never actually read the legislation they voted to approve, (ala Nancy Pelosi’s infamous quote, “we have to pass the legislation to see what is in it), making them derelict in their duties. What else does a politician do except read, understand, and vote on pending legislation?
2. Or, even more scary, they actually did read the legislation and were too ignorant to understand how badly this will impact their citizens back home, i.e. they never understood the basic reality, businesses have to make a profit and will adjust their business operations (hire fewer people, curtail expansion, go offshore) when an expense like taxes gets higher. Basic economic ignorance.

Whatever the cause, they are now scurrying like rats leaving a sinking ship, trying to get their ill thought out votes reversed. Given that Obama Care’s CLASS provision and 1099 provision have already been overturned, two provisions that were supposed to be cash flow positive to the entire legislation, if this medical device tax is actually delayed or terminated, the net cost of Obama Care would go even larger since its three main revenue producing provisions would have been ended.

Thus, our national debt would skyrocket even more and we still would not have solved the root causes of our escalating health care costs. All because eighteen politicians were derelict in their duties or just plain ignorant of what their vote would do.

3) In light of the message that has finally gotten through to these eighteen Senators, consider what is actually happening on the front lines of the medical device industry, according to recent news reports:

• In northern New Jersey, Andre DiMino operates his family’s medical device company ADM Tronics, which his father founded decades ago. The company has never had to lay anyone off but will do so by lying off three employees (out of twenty) in 2013 as a result of the Obama Care medical device tax.
• The Uresil, LLC company in Skokie, Ill. has already laid off six employees, “primarily related” of the tax. It had previously never laid off any employee: "We had never laid off anybody. We bought the company in 2004, never had a layoff. In fact, even during the recession, we added jobs. ... It wasn't until this tax hit us that we had to do it," stated President Lev Melinyshyn. He also stated that he has had to deeply cut back on research and development in order to protect the jobs of his remaining employees.
• But it is not just the small device companies that are cutting back. Michigan-based Stryker Corporation, a company with 20,000 employees, laid off 1,000 workers in anticipation of the tax in 2012 since it will see a $100 tax million bill dumped on them in the first year of Obama Care: "We would rather put this money towards jobs, innovation, clinical research and priorities that will create value-added medical technology for patients while helping us partner with hospitals to deliver cost effective solutions," CEO Kevin A. Lobo said in a statement.
• The industry’s trade association, The Advanced Medical Technology Association, estimates that the tax ultimately could cost the U.S. economy up to 43,000 jobs.

All for a piece of legislation that has virtually no chance of ever succeeding on any level for any problem for any reason.

That’s enough bad news for today. A massive Federal bureaucracy that does not exist today but needs to be up and running within ten months, eighteen gutless Senators looking to cover their ill thought out votes and protect their political careers, and small and large companies getting hammered and possibly destroyed by an Obama Care tax, resulting in less domestic manufacturing and higher unemployment.

Unfortunately, as we go through this week and next, this is not the only bad news that is about to crash down on all of us as a result of this disastrous piece of legislation.

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As predicted, lost jobs, still massive fraud in other government health care programs, more national debt, a debacle of a data systems experience trying to get insurance via the Federal exchange, Senators scurrying about to protect their careers, all for a piece of legislation that never addressed the root causes of our high healthcare costs in the first place. 

More current disasters tomorrow and for a few more days afterwards. 

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/
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http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2014 the Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 3: What Should Have Been Done Vs. What Obama Did Continued

Two posts ago we laid out all of the Obama Care operations, strategies, and tenets that have already gone wrong and which are highly likely to go wrong in the coming months and years. Identity theft, higher deficits, higher national debt, higher insurance premiums, higher deductibles, loss of privacy, IRS harassment, failing government websites, millions of Americans losing access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans, millions of Obama Care policy holders being denied access to the top medical facilities and doctors in the country, etc. The list seems endless.

We also explained how the legislation never had a chance of successfully reducing our ever escalating health care costs in this country since those that wrote it never understood the true root causes of our increasing health care costs: Americans smoke too much, Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans do not exercise enough, the government restricts insurance company cost reducing competition across state lines, much needed medical tort reform never happened, etc.

Since Obama, Pelosi, Reid and other Obama Care architects never understood the root causes, we ended up with 2,500 pages of legal mumbo jumbo that created a Rube Goldberg-like subsidized government insurance program that will ultimately fail. The problem is that we have a public health crisis that is causing our higher and higher health care costs, we do not have a lack of insurance problem. High insurance costs are a symptom of the root causes, they are not the cause themselves.

Starting tomorrow, we will again start reviewing the unfolding disasters still coming out of the Obama Care legislation, much like we have done on a monthly basis since last August. Today and yesterday, however, we have gone back through our blog posts over the past few years and gathered up all of the suggestions that subject matter experts and informed, logical people have put forth to identify the true root causes of our high health care costs. That information leads one to the needed public health initiatives which should be put forth to resolve those root causes. We have also added some additional information and reports that we have not previously covered which also make our point.

I maintain that if we were successful in attacking the true root causes, as proposed below, the cost of health care would drop dramatically as would the cost of health care insurance, making it affordable for all who wanted it. The Obama Care approach, raising taxes to cover everyone with health care insurance without eliminating the underlying root causes is a fallacy solution.

The following observations, government and independent reports and analysis, success stories, and realities are in no particular sequence. However, at the end of the two posts I think you will agree that the Obama Care approach to the problem has missed the mark completely by focusing on health care insurance rather than health care solutions.

8) An article on smoking that appeared in the February 7, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, reinforced the high toll in lives, health, and costs due to smoking, as researched by the Surgeon General:

• Thirteen different types of cancer have been linked to smoking tobacco.
• Other ailments associated with smoking include vision loss, tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, impairment of the immune system, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, and ectopic pregnancy.
• The report calculated that smoking is the nation’s leading cause of premature death, killing 480,000 people a year.
• It also costs the nation up to $333 billion a year in medical care costs and lost productivity.

And the Washington political class annually insists on giving the tobacco industry hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies. Insane.

9) The May, 2014 issue of AARP’s Magazine discussed the widespread malady of diabetes. According to the article, almost 26 million Americans have diabetes, about 8% of the country’s citizens have it. 26 million is bad enough news but the trend is even worse, with that diabetes number having grown by 8 million people in just the past six years. 

The American Diabetes Association recommends losing weight, exercising, and a low fat diet are great ways to reduce the odds of getting diabetes. However, the article put forth some simple public health steps that everyone can take in their daily lives to reduce the spread of diabetes and thus, reduce the increasing costs of treating diabetes:

• Stop drinking soda since according to a recent Harvard School of Public Health review, drinking just one or two sugar sweetened sodas a day increase your risk of getting diabetes by 26%. This is a result of the wide spread use of high fructose corn syrup in non-diet sodas that is encouraged by the Federal government’s misguided subsidies of corn growers.
• Take a 15 minute walk a half hour after you eat and you will lower your post meal blood sugar levels for at least three hours, according to a recent study from George Washington University.
• Adopt the so-called Mediterranean diet which is rich in fish and heart healthy olive oil and you can reduce your chance of getting diabetes by a whopping 83%.
• People who sit around six to eight hours a day on their job are 19% more likely to get diabetes. Getting up and moving around for just two minutes every hour ups one’s metabolism enough to lower glucose levels and reduce the chance of diabetes.
• Include a weight lifting component to your exercise regime beyond just aerobic exercise and you will do a better job of managing the glucose level in your body.
• Eat your meals more slowly and you will usually end up eating less and reducing weight and the chance of getting diabetes.

Simple personal and public health initiatives that would go much further in reducing health care costs than whether of not you signed up for an Obama Care Bronze, Gold, or Silver insurance plan.

10) That same issue from AARP discussed research which found that one out of every three cancers can be prevented by exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, and eating right. The article points to six types of food to accomplish this reduction in your chances of getting cancer:

• Garlic and onions
• Milk
• Broccoli
• Dark, leafy green vegetables,
• Red Grapes
• Whole grains

It is that simple and you do not have to wrestle with a dysfunctional Obama Care website to get results.

11) A recent New York Times article that was summarized in the December 20, 2013 issue of The Week magazine reported that about 440,000 Americans dies each years as a result of preventable errors in U.S. hospitals. This means that one out of every size deaths in the country can be attributed to mistakes in hospitals. This makes these preventable deaths the third leading cause of death in the nation.

It does not matter whether you have a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Obama Care insurance policy since the legislation never really addresses this national problem and the associated costs caused by it. The good news is you have health insurance, the bad news is the hospital killed you anyway.

12) A mini-scandal and uproar occurred a few weeks ago when it was revealed that some doctors were receiving millions of dollars from Medicare every year for services rendered to Medicare patients. To make this number more understandable, and disgusting, a doctor getting $2 million a year from Medicare, and the American taxpayer, on average was getting about a $7,700 check EVERY business day of the year. I find it hard to believe that any doctor was providing that amount of quality and efficient medical service every day.

The situation became much clearer on why these doctors were making so much money as explained in Business Week article that appeared last week. Using the drug Lucentis as an example, you can see why doctors make millions off of the American taxpayer with very little effort.

Lucentis is used to treat is used by ophthalmologists/eye doctors to treat macular degeneration. Medicare pays doctors 106% of the average cost of a drug when a doctors administers it to a patient. Lucentis costs $2,000 for one shot making it a lucrative drug for doctors to administer since they will, on average, get 6% of $2,000 for their efforts.

However, another drug, Avastin, works just as well as Lucentis but costs only $50 a shot. Thus, a doctor would make 40 times less in Medicare payments, 6% of $2,000 vs. 6% of $50, if he or she used Avastin vs. Lucentis. 

Given that almost half of the 50 doctors being paid the most by Medicare in 2012 were ophthalmologists, what drug do we think these doctors are using the most, Lucentis or Avastin with Medicare not caring one way or the other from a treatment and payment perspective? Given that Medicare pays out about $1 billion a year just for Lucentis, it is pretty clear that at least some of these doctors are milking a stupid Medicare payment system.

I do not believe anywhere in the Obama Care legislation does it require Medicare to stop being so stupid and wasteful. Just forcing the switch from Lucentis to Avastin would save upwards of $1 billion a t year and contribute substantially to reducing health care costs.

13) An article in the march, 2014 issue of AARP’s Bulletin reported on how the nation is addicted to unnecessary medical tests, unnecessary tests that also needlessly increase the country; overall health care costs. For example, an estimated $3 billion is spent every year on PSA screening of prostate cancer which many experts now say does more harm than good. Nearly a quarter of $1,000 colonoscopies performed in older people every year are most likely inappropriate.

Nearly two thirds of women who have had hysterectomies and half of all U.S. women over 65 with not cervical cancer history report having recent Pap tests even though the American College Of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends against this test for these women. Excessive use of MRIs for lower back pain likely results tens of billions of dollars worth of treatments that end up not working.

How many hundreds of billions of wasted costs could be saved each year if we got the unnecessary testing syndrome under control, a syndrome not addressed by Obama Care?

14) Okay, last example of how we could dramatically reduce health care costs in this country without needing a useless 2,500 page piece of legislation from Washington:

• In 1975, California passed the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) which, among other things, capped the amount of medical malpractice awards. Since then, the California cost for medical malpractice insurance has gone up 168% on average while nationally the cost has gone up 420%. 
• In the 1990s and again in 2003, Texas passed major medical malpractice tort reform. Since then, the number of malpractice awards have gone down 25% and the cost for malpractice insurance from the state's largest insurers is down over 50%. 
• In 2005, Georgia also capped malpractice awards and has seen the number of malpractice lawsuits go down 39% and medical insurance rates go down 18%. 
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that medical malpractice tort reform would reduce the cost of medical insurance anywhere from 10-30%. And if you reduce the costs of malpractice insurance, you eventually would see those savings translate into lower overall health care costs.

Want to bet that the reason that national and rational medical industry tort reform was NOT included in Obama Care, despite the success at the state level, is that the American Bar Association and the legal cartel did not want to see their lucrative practices in suing doctors to dry up? Just a hunch.

There you have it. Fourteen easy ways to reduce health care costs in this country that truly address the root causes of that problem. No fancy Washington legislation, no corrupt and inoperable new Federal bureaucracy, no loss of freedom, no wasting of taxpayer wealth, no increased taxes, no disruption in millions of Americans lives. 

Just a straightforward approach to resolving a public health crises with public health strategies as oppose to using a massive and inefficient government insurance operation to resolve a public health crises. Eat healthier, exercise, stop smoking, clean up the existing inefficiencies and criminal fraud that exists to day and the country would easily save hundreds of billons of dollars every year. That is what root causes analysis does for you, something that Obama and the rest of the Obama Care advocates never did.

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

Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works: Part 2

Over the past two weeks we have been reviewing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The first seven posts were the result of our research into real life realities of people getting their work hours cut, their jobs terminated, seeing their insurance polices being cancelled, enduring their insurance premiums going up substantially along with their deductibles,  losing access to their doctors and hospitals, and the pitiful rollout of the Obama Care website.

The next four posts were detailed analyses and research by experts in the health care industry that verified what we had already proven: Obama Care is the worst piece of legislation ever created by the Washington political class. It fails on so many levels: data systems, logic, root cause problem analysis, cronyism, financials, etc,

Yesterday, we started to discuss how to fix what Obama Care has broken. Using the root cause analysis philosophy proposed in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” we started to list out a series of simpler, easier to implement and more effective steps to combat high health care costs in this country. Obama Care provides an aspirin to make the pain of high health care more palatable but with very serous side effects. Our approach attacks the root causes of our high health care costs with no side effects.

Yesterday, we discussed how to terminate two of the leading cause of high health care costs:

1. Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
2. Americans smoke too much.

While resolving those two issues would be a gigantic step forward to a healthier America and lower overall health care costs, several additional common sense steps are required:

Root Cause #3 - Americans do not exercise enough. Yesterday, we discussed a recent piece of research from the Centers For Disease Control that found about one third of American adults are obese. It is very difficult to be healthy and free of medical costs over the long term if you are obese. The strain on the heart and kidneys from obesity leads to heart disease and diabetes.

Thus, a public health effort is needed to get Americans up and moving. Having insurance under an Obama Care scheme does not reduce obesity, get Americans exercising, or reduce health care costs. I am not a public health care expert but here or a few things that could be done to get America moving:

• Make Americans pay more for insurance if they are overweight since they incur a higher level of medical needs than non-obese people, i.e. led the cost causer also be the cost payer, as a little motivation to get in shape.
• Leverage contacts with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB to get those high profile athletes involved in community health and exercise programs. If the leagues do not get involved then do not invite their championship teams to the White House for a photo op as has been the custom for decades. Help us get America in shape and get to visit the White House. 
• Subsidize YMCA and other gym memberships to get people moving, spending a little money now to avoid a lot more money down the road. Set up the program so that if people do not go to the gym, they pay more than if they do go to the gym.
• Make getting in shape a  national priority of the White House with high visibility events with celebrities to get America moving.
• Other efforts that true public health officials can come up with beyond my layman’s ideas.

It took America decades to get into the most obese situation in the history of mankind. Only a concentrated, long term public health effort can reverse that trend and start reducing the cost of obesity related health care costs. Obama Care does nothing of the sort.

Root Cause #4 - The age of America is getting older. With an aging population comes a lot of aging diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimier’s, higher incidences of cancer, etc. Without curing or mitigating these ravaging age-related diseases, it makes no difference if Obama care works or not, the overwhelming costs of these aging diseases will crush the health care industry and our economy.

What is needed is something akin to the bold challenge that JFK threw out to the country in the early 1960s when he dared the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That challenge gave the nation a focus and a drive that eventually was realized.

The same challenge should be laid down in this area: 

• Within ten years, reduce the incidence of breast and lung cancer by X%.
• Within ten years, find cures of dementia and Alzheimer’s diseases.
• Within ten years, find cures for Parkinson’s disease.

I am obviously not the right person to lay out the eventual goals and success criteria for such worthy goals. But somewhere in this country someone is capable of doing so and by putting together a plan, with regular benchmarks, maybe we can duplicate the success of the Kennedy moon dare with a handful of focused health care dares today.

Obama Care does nothing of the sort, making Americans healthier. All it does is provide overpriced, generalized health care insurance without regard to improving health.

Root Cause # 5 - Tort Reform. One of the important drivers of escalating health care costs is the threat of malpractice litigation by an over energetic legal class. This threat of malpractice legal action results in two bad drivers of high health care costs:

1. Doctors over prescribe tests and analyses in order to make absolutely sure that their actions could withstand a review in court even though defensive actions, loads of extra tests,  are usually not necessary or warranted.
2. Outlandish malpractice decisions and settlements increase doctors’ malpractice insurance costs which are  then passed on to consumers of those doctors’ services.

It does not have to be that way. Many states have taken tort reform action, resulting in substantial sanity brought into the litigation arena and the reduction in costs. We examined these success stories in the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2009/11/please-do-not-bother-me-with-facts.html

Highlights of that post include the following realities (source: American Tort Reform Association website):

• The state of Texas implemented significant tort reform in the medical field in 2003.
• Soon after the legislation, the AMA dropped Texas from its list of states in medical liability crisis.
• Malpractice claims went down and doctor recruitment and retention are up.
• The five largest Texas insurers actually CUT their insurance rates which saved doctors tens of millions of dollars.
• The Texas Medical Liability Trust, the state's largest liability carrier, reduced its premiums by 17%.
• Fifteen new insurance companies entered the Texas market.
• Health Care Indemnity, the state's largest carrier for hospitals, reduced its insurance rates by 15%.
• The American Physicians Insurance Exchange and the Doctor's Company also reduced their premiums.

Tort reform in Mississippi caused the following to occur:

• The Medical Assurance Company Of Mississippi, which provides malpractice insurance to 70% of the doctors in Mississippi, reduced premiums 5% in 2006.
• This comes on the heels of not raising premiums in 2004 and 2005 after raising them up to 20% a year in earlier years.
• Four other insurance companies returned to Mississippi to do business, likely resulting in more competition and further malpractice cost reductions.

Tort reform in West Virginia caused the following to occur:

• An increase in the number of doctors practicing in the state.
• West Virginia Physicians' Mutual sought permission to reduce malpractice insurance 5% in 2005 while insuring more doctors.
• Woodbrook Casualty Insurance also applied for a rate reduction.

Given these results, why wasn’t tort reform a major portion of Obama Care? Reduced insurance costs leading to reduced health care costs leading to more doctors and more competition, all good things. Want to bet the ABA lobbyists had a lot to do with that?

In our root cause analysis and solutions, tort reform is a major resolver of our high health care costs problem.

Root Cause #6 - Limited insurance company competition across state lines. More competition in any aspect of human events results in better products and lower costs. Unfortunately, in this country, there are a lot barriers to insurance companies competing across state lines. Simple solution: terminate those state line barriers and allow any insurance company to compete anywhere in the country for health insurance customers. There is very little, if any, downside to cross state competition.

Root Cause #7 - Atrocious Federal government inefficiencies in existing health care programs. Many times in this blog we have pointed out how inefficient and disgusting the waste and fraud is in the Federal government’s administration of Medicaid and Medicare:

• Medicaid wastes or loses to fraud and criminal activity between $30 to $40 billion a year.
• Medicare wastes or loses to fraud and criminal activity between $70 to $90 billion a year.

Thus, if Obama and the Washington political class were actually running an efficient government operation, they would have had anywhere between $100 billion and $130 billion a year to either get Americans healthier, leaner, and off of the smoking habit or would have been able to provide health insurance payment support without disrupting every American’s life and destroying the economy.

Consider the math. The latest, reasonable estimate of uninsured Americans I remember seeing is about 40 million. If we take the midrange of the waste listed above, $115 billion a year, we could give every uninsured American almost $2,900 a year to cover their health insurance costs. A family of four would get about $11,500 a year to cover health insurance, more than enough for a good family insurance policy. 

Instead, given the incompetence of Washington, that $115 billion or so is wasted every year and now the same people that cannot manage Medicare and Medicaid want to manage a whole new government program without fixing what is wrong today. Insane. 

There is enough wealth in this country to get everyone covered without new taxes, without cutting worker’s work hours down to under 30 hours a week, without killing job growth, without taking away freedom or choice, and without another massive government bureaucracy. Too bad the President and Congress have no idea how to operate efficiently.

That’s it, resolving the high cost of health care in this country without the idiocy and waste of Obama Care, is simple if you know how to solve a problem and define the underlying root causes:

1. Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
2. Americans smoke too much.
3. Americans do not exercise enough.
4. Americans are getting older on average resulting in a substantial increase in aging-related diseases.
5. There is an urgent need for tort reform to reduce doctors’ operating costs.
6. There is an urgent need to allow more insurance company competition across state lines.
7. There is an embarrassingly high need to force the Washington political class to stop wasting taxpayer wealth today on existing health care program, shifting that saved wealth into helping uninsured Americans survive health crisis without destorying the country and the economy in the process.

Seven root causes, all resolved with simple solutions that we have proposed over the past two days. However, simple solutions is usually a foreign concept to those in the White House and Congress, leaving us with a Rube Goldberg contraption called Obama Care with way too many moving parts, way too many unnecessary parts, and no chance of success. 

Remember, try to pare things down, few moves accomplish a lot. Public health drives, tort and insurance reform and fixing existing health care programs. Those are the only few moves that are needed to resolve a big societal issue. 

Tomorrow we will look at a few alternative solutions, based on work done by Republican politicians, work that the mainstream media has deemed to never show in the light of day.

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

Part 4, August, 2013 Obama Care Update: Identity Theft Paradise, Younger Americans Getting Screwed, and Costs Go Up Despite Promises Not To

This is the fourth and final post in this series that is looking at the current facts, figures, impacts, and disasters that are occurring as a result of Obama Care. The results so far have not been pretty. Untrained implementers, processes open to severe abuse by identity thieves, Americans losing their jobs or work hours, more and more people finally learning that this is indeed the worst piece of legislation ever written, and a whole slew of other problems.

It is really sad that every month we find enough data, experiences, and realities to write about this unfolding disaster for days at a time.  And as we get closer and closer to more major rollout dates of Obama Care processes and regulation, I am sure that the information will continue to get worse and worse. 

Wouldn’t it have been much better if the Washington political class had taken the time up front to understand what the root causes are of our escalating health care costs are and THEN developed plans to address those root causes? Instead, the failed to do that preliminary analysis work and in its place constructed a complex Rube Goldberg-like insurance monstrosity that will do nothing to address these root causes and will likely make a bad situation worse.

Consider the root causes of our high health care costs and how no one has been able to convince America that there are serious components of Obama care that will address these underlying drivers of high health care costs:

• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans eat too much.
• American eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• The Federal government spends taxpayer wealth to support tobacco farmers who grow smoking products and farmers who grow unneeded corn that ends up as obesity inducing corn fructose in our food chain.
• Americans do not get enough exercise.
• The health care industry needs substantial tort reform, reform that has worked well at the state level in reducing health care costs.
• The health care insurance industry needs to be able to more readily compete across state lines, increasing competition for health care insurance and reducing prices.
• Americans are getting older but there is no national effort to remedy the effects of aging diseases such as dementia and certain cancers.
• The Federal government loses tens of billions of dollars every year via its Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs to criminal activity, tens of billions of dollars that could have been used to provide low cost insurance to the uninsured in America without Obama Care’s costly bureaucracy.

Instead of this coherent, problem solving-oriented approach, we get stuck with inane and expensive processes via Obama Care like the following examples illustrate:

1) Investor's Business Daily examined a recent Government Accountability Office report and its detailed information on insurance plans today in all 50 states, from the least expensive health insurance plans offered to a 30-year-old nonsmoker to the most expensive plans 55-year-old couples can buy. It then looked at the Obama Care insurance plans that were compiled by the state of Maryland for eight states that are putting together their state based health insurance exchanges and compared the cost of insurance today and the likely cost of insurance under Obama Care.

The results were not pretty relative to the claim that Obama care will reduce health insurance costs for Americans:

• In Ohio, the least expensive Obama Care "bronze" plan for a 25-year-old will cost $1,956 a year, a price that's almost three times higher than the cheapest plan in Ohio today.
• In Virginia, the lowest priced Obama Care "bronze" premium is $1,608, 252% higher than the cheapest policy available today.
• Maryland's least expensive Obama Care plan will be 83% higher than the lowest-cost plan sold in that state this year.
• Critics of these types of analysis, and thus, supporters of Obama Care, correctly point out that some of these plans will actually cost less because some people will get Federal subsidies to purchase Obama Care plans.
• However, not everyone will be entitled to Obama Care subsidies, based on their income level,  and will be stuck with these higher costs.
• Other people who live in the 34 states that are not implementing Obama Care health insurance exchanges and by the law’s explicit language, they will not be eligible for any Federal subsidies.
• Other counter points to the supporters’ point is that even with the subsidies, the cost could also be higher. For example, Investor's Business Daily found that a young worker making $20,000 in Maryland, for example, would pay about $1,000 for the cheapest Obama Care plan, after the subsidy. That's still $278 more than the least expensive plan offered in the state today.
• It is difficult to believe that any subsidy will be enough to offset cost increases of  like the 252% increase in Virginia or the 825 increase in Maryland.

So much for Obama Care resulting in significant cost savings for Americans when the buy health care insurance. Best, best case is that costs do not go up too much. Seems like a lot of energy and effort to get us no better and likely much worse than where we were prior to Obama Care’s attack on logic and sanity.

2) The biggest losers in the Obama Care legislation is likely to be younger Americans. Obama Care needs them to buy insurance plans so that the Federal government can take the wealth from these younger, healthier Americans and use it to subsidize health care insurance for generally older and less healthy Americans. It will be the biggest inter-generational transfer of wealth from younger Americans to older Americans in the history of the country.

As an example of what is actually underway as a result of this lousy legislation, consider an analysis and resulting graphic from the same Investor’s Business Daily article we discussed above (double click on the graph for a larger view):











The red bars in this graph are the least expensive Obama Care “bronze” insurance plans across eight states. The blue bars are the least expensive plan available to a young person on the market today. Not a pretty picture, with today’s plans substantially less expensive than anything Obama Care is spitting out. There is no way that cost health insurance goes down under Obama Care in at least these eight states even with subsidies. 

The conclusion is obvious. If you are a young American, Obama Care is after your wealth in order to leverage your probable good health to fund health care for other, general older Americans.

3) Yesterday, we talked a little about how the infrastructure of Obama Care is really under the gun and behind schedule. The discussion focus of that problem was that the so-called Obama Care “navigators” are likely to be put in place without criminal background checks being completed (enhancing the hence of identity theft) and without adequate training.

Today’s infrastructure horror story comes from a recent article from Reuters:

• The government is months behind in testing data security for the main component of Obama Care: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1
• The missed data systems deadlines have pushed the government’s decision on whether information technology security is ready and secure to exactly ONE DAY BEFORE that crucial October 1st date, according to the the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general.
• Thus, data systems experts say the Obama Care exchanges might open with serious security holes or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.
• “They’ve removed their margin for error,” said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. “There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.”
• The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance because the government’s Obama Care systems have serious security holes.
• The Inspector General‘s report found that “Several critical tasks remain to be completed in a short period of time.” 
• Any additional delays beyond one day would mean the government entity operating the Obama Care exchanges would not have the security testing information it needs to authorize  know if they were entitled to subsidy support.
• One day leeway to have this thing working by October 1. No way the Federal government gets this right within the next 60 days. Take that to the bank.
• Since a 2002 law requires that government systems obtain a “security authorization package,” essentially the roadmap for keeping out hackers and preventing security breaches, implementing Obama Care without this common sense authorization would mean the government is in violation of its own law.

If the systems are not online and deemed secure by October 1, people could still apply for Obama Care exchanges but they would not know if the qualified for subsidies and how much they might get, probably delaying them for choosing and signing up for an exchange health care program, leaving them in health insurance limbo.

But enough bad news. We will do another update next month, a time that will be a mere weeks from the onset of a major component of Obama Care. How scary do we think that update will be?

That will do it for our own analysis and roundup of the unfolding disaster from Obama Care. Tomorrow we will step aside and present an analysis of Obama Care presented by the Cato Institute.

Cato's analysis and commentary is about how Congress and the President are breaking the law and allowing Congressional members and their staffs to side step the law’s financial burdens. It is a despicable act that 1) is clearly illegal under the law’s tenets, 2) is a slap in the face of the rest of America who will not get the same financial relief from Obama Care, and 3) reinforces the feeling that we are truly living in a “Hunger Games” world where the rulers in Washington get the best of everything and the rest of us are stuck with the remnants and the dregs of their decisions.

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 1: Pending Health Exchange Disasters, Senators Say "Just Kidding" And More

As we move through this new year, we are about to face the reality of Obama Care as its many taxes, regulations, and insanity cascade down on us and our struggling economy. We have not talked about Obama Care’s implications for a while, having been preoccupied with regular political class insanity, the fiscal cliff, the fallacy of gun conrol, and the eight part series on how stupid it is to raise taxes on any American, given how wasteful and inefficient our Federal government is today.

But before reviewing the latest approaching Obama Care fiascos, let's review the basic problems we have discussed way too many times in this blog:

1) Obama Care never identified or addressed the primary root causes of our nation's escalating health care costs:

Americans eat too much and Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food - These two interrelated causes have many underlying drivers, not the least of which is Federal government farm subsidies. These subsidies have incented American farmers to grow way too much corn, corn that ends up as cheap but unhealthy corn fructose which ends up in just about everything Americans eat.

Americans smoke too much - This problem is exacerbated by the Federal government, with the American taxpayer paying and incenting tobacco farmers over $190 million a year in Federal subsidies to grow more tobacco which ends up killing more Americans.

Americans do not get enough exercise - Americans exercise so little that a recent article in the August 17, 2012 issue of The Week magazine discussed a global study which found that Americans "ranked among the most physically lazy countries in the world," with 40% of American adults rarely engaging in any physical activity or exercise.

Americans are getting older - Rather than mobilizing resources to aggressively go after new cures and treatments for aging diseases, e.g. cancer, dementia, etc., Obama Care instead just introduces a massive new Federal bureaucracy and taxation system without a focus on disease eradication.

Tort Reform - The legislation contains none of the previously successful medical tort reform that some states have already shown to reduce health care costs, an omission due to the fabulous lobbying efforts of the ABA.

Health Insurance Competition - The legislation does nothing to break down the state line barriers that inhibit insurance company competition across state lines.

The legislation never "followed the money." - In other words, when we go into for a simple medical test that takes only a handful of minutes to perform, e.g. a blood test, but end up paying hundreds of dollars for the simple test, Obama Care never took the time to understand where these outrageous amounts of money flow, who benefits from the outrageous fees, understand how much of these fees are reasonable and unreasonable, and how to control the flow.

2) The legislation does little to curtail current wasteful spending of existing massive Federal government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which easily lose well over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

3) The legislation will not contain health care costs, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that the gross cost of the legislation is almost double what was estimated just a few years ago, the head actuary of Medicare and Medicaid recently estimating that Obama Care will add more than $300 billion to the national debt in the first ten years, and the one sub-program that was supposed to be a positive contributor to the legislation's financials, the CLASS program, has already been shut down for being ineffective.

4) The legislation is written so poorly that companies have already set plans in motion to curtail hiring, change full time employees to part time employees, and cancel existing company health care plans in order to dodge the taxes, regulations, and burdens imposed on them by the legislation. This legislation and the ensuing actions by companies are likely a primary driver to our continuing high unemployment rate.

A whole series of previous Obama Care problems can be viewed beginning with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/08/obama-care-still-constitutional-and.html

But we will have to spent more than the next week catching up with the disaster that is Obama Care. It is coming at us quickly and it will likely increase medical costs, decrease medical care availability, and crush our struggling economy. Don’t believe this? Consider the following revelations that have come to light over the past few months from reputable, nonpartisan sources as the wave of Obama Care begins crashing upon us.

The following facts and reality, both today and the following posts, are in no particular order. All of the news is bad so we are just going to plow through all of it until we cannot take it anymore.

1) Reuters and CNBC reported on December 13, 2012 that only fifteen states have decided to set up their own, so-called health care exchanges as created under Obama Care. These exchanges are theoretically supposed to provide low cost, readily available health care insurance for those Americans who need it. Under the legislation, the states can establish and operate these exchanges or pass on the option, in which case the Federal government would step in and run a Federal health care exchange within the state.

Thus, by October 1, 2013, the Federal government will have to step up and put in place a functioning health care provisioning service in about two thirds of the country, far more than they thought it would have to do. That’s just ten months from now.

According to the article, administration officials say that is possible: "I am confident that states and the Federal government will be ready in 10 months, when consumers in all states can begin to apply," Gary Cohen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, testified to a House panel.

Remember, that:

• The data systems to do this are not in place or possibly not even being developed.
• The methods and procedures are not close to being in place.
• The customer service functionality and service representative training is not close to being in place.
• The payment process functionality is not close to being in place.
• Adjusting and customizing all of these factors to make sense and hang together at the individual state level will be a monster undertaking.

Given that this is the same government that after decades/centuries still cannot operate a fiscally sound postal system, cannot seal our leaky borders, loses over two hundred billion dollars a year to waste and criminal fraud in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs, fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders, and cannot protect its foreign embassies, I find it highly doubtful that it will be able to handle this massive effort to provide any kind of decent service via health care exchanges within ten months.

No matter what you think of Obama Care, administratively it is going to be a disaster come October 1, 2013. It will be a failure from a procedure perspective and probably a financial perspective at the Federal level since I am pretty sure the original business case and plans for the exchanges did not have the majority of states saying “thanks but no thanks.

An expert in the field, Dennis Smith, who heads health services in Wisconsin, a state that has decided not to pursue its own exchange, summed up the challenge quite politely: "I don't envy them for the job that they have. At the end of the day, you're trying to connect a buyer to a seller. And the fundamental things required to do that are not yet in place."

And that is why most states opted out, it will be a disaster since nothing exists at the Federal level to do this.

2) One of the greatest ironies of the entire Obama Care fiasco is the recent news that eighteen Senate Democrats, the very people that voted to pass the legislation, recently sent a letter to Obama asking that a key revenue provision of the law be stripped out. This revenue/tax provision assessed a 2.3% tax on the gross revenue of medical device manufacturers.

It seems that many of these medical device manufacturers are in the home states of these eighteen Senators. They have been exerting pressure on their elected representatives since this tax will likely do one of four things:

• Put them out of business.
• Curtail their hiring and employing of American citizens in order to pay the additional tax.
• Curtail their research and development efforts.
• Force them to move manufacturing jobs overseas in order to stay financially viable, further hurting a bad unemployment picture.

None of these options will make for happy constituents and voters back home and thus, these politicians are scrambling to protect their jobs in the next election by asking that Obama cave on this tax, a tax they voted for in 2009.

Their position means one of two things, neither of which is very flattering:

1. These eighteen Senators never actually read the legislation they voted to approve, (ala Nancy Pelosi’s infamous quote, “we have to pass the legislation to see what is in it), making them derelict in their duties. What else does a politician do except read, understand, and vote on pending legislation?
2. Or, even more scary, they actually did read the legislation and were too ignorant to understand how badly this will impact their citizens back home, i.e. they never understood the basic reality, businesses have to make a profit and will adjust their business operations (hire fewer people, curtail expansion, go offshore) when an expense like taxes gets higher. Basic economic ignorance.

Whatever the cause, they are now scurrying like rats leaving a sinking ship, trying to get their ill thought out votes reversed. Given that Obama Care’s CLASS provision and 1099 provision have already been overturned, two provisions that were supposed to be cash flow positive to the entire legislation, if this medical device tax is actually delayed or terminated, the net cost of Obama Care would go even larger since its three main revenue producing provisions would have been ended.

Thus, our national debt would skyrocket even more and we still would not have solved the root causes of our escalating health care costs. All because eighteen politicians were derelict in their duties or just plain ignorant of what their vote would do.

3) In light of the message that has finally gotten through to these eighteen Senators, consider what is actually happening on the front lines of the medical device industry, according to recent news reports:

• In northern New Jersey, Andre DiMino operates his family’s medical device company ADM Tronics, which his father founded decades ago. The company has never had to lay anyone off but will do so by lying off three employees (out of twenty) in 2013 as a result of the Obama Care medical device tax.
• The Uresil, LLC company in Skokie, Ill. has already laid off six employees, “primarily related” of the tax. It had previously never laid off any employee: "We had never laid off anybody. We bought the company in 2004, never had a layoff. In fact, even during the recession, we added jobs. ... It wasn't until this tax hit us that we had to do it," stated President Lev Melinyshyn. He also stated that he has had to deeply cut back on research and development in order to protect the jobs of his remaining employees.
• But it is not just the small device companies that are cutting back. Michigan-based Stryker Corporation, a company with 20,000 employees, laid off 1,000 workers in anticipation of the tax in 2012 since it will see a $100 tax million bill dumped on them in the first year of Obama Care: "We would rather put this money towards jobs, innovation, clinical research and priorities that will create value-added medical technology for patients while helping us partner with hospitals to deliver cost effective solutions," CEO Kevin A. Lobo said in a statement.
• The industry’s trade association, The Advanced Medical Technology Association, estimates that the tax ultimately could cost the U.S. economy up to 43,000 jobs.

All for a piece of legislation that has virtually no chance of ever succeeding on any level for any problem for any reason.

That’s enough bad news for today. A massive Federal bureaucracy that does not exist today but needs to be up and running within ten months, eighteen gutless Senators looking to cover their ill thought out votes and protect their political careers, and small and large companies getting hammered and possibly destroyed by an Obama Care tax, resulting in less domestic manufacturing and higher unemployment.

Unfortunately, as we go through this week and next, this is not the only bad news that is about to crash down on all of us as a result of this disastrous piece of legislation.

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