April, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: MIssed Enrollment Projecttions, Increasing Taxpayer costs, And Higher Premiums

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

• It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Yesterday and today, and possibly longer, we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Remember that President Obama promised numerous times that the average American family could see annual reductions in their family health insurance costs of up to $2,500. This lie and/or deception has been proven wrong so many times in the real world and in this blog since the legislation was enacted. For the most part, health insurance costs have gone up steeply and rarely, if ever, decreased. 

Drew Gonshorowski, writing for the Heritage Foundation on March 21, 2016, provided an update on how badly these costs have been going up across the country:

• The insurance premiums for Obama Care policies purchased through the exchanges increased by 25.1% in Kentucky over the past year.
• The cost rise was also significant in Ohio, 14%, and in Michigan, 11%.
• The largest Obama Care insurer in Idaho, Blue Cross of Idaho, raised its premium rates by 23%.
• In New Mexico, some plans were pulled out of the Obama Care options since the premium costs had gotten too high.
• Overall, the Heritage Foundation estimates that overall the Obama Care premium increase in 2016 will be about 15%, a far cry from Obama’s $2,500 reduction.
• Their analysis is congruent with others’ analysis of the data.
• The Heritage analysis also came to the same conclusion as others in that sicker and older people signed up for Obama Care policies than expected.
• In Tennessee, monthly health insurance premiums in 2014 for a 27 year old cost 70% more than what the same policy would have cost prior to Obama Care taking effect, possibly explaining why younger and healthier Americans are not signing up for Obama Care as expected.
• In 2015, that same average 27 year old from Tennessee would have seen another 18% increase in Their Obama Care premium costs.
• A 50 year old person in Tennessee would have seen his premiums increase 31.6% in 2014 and another 9.8% in 2015.

Significantly rising costs for more narrow networks of doctors, such a mess and disaster.

2) Again, remember that Obama Care, as promised by this President, was going to REDUCE the health care costs for all Americans by up to $2,500 a year per family. Thus, for example, a family paying $10,000 a year for health insurance should have seen their annual $10,000 bill be reduced down to possibly $7,500, especially several years after the legislation was passed.

But as we saw in the first point above, in yesterday’s post, and many previous posts in this blog, this Obama promise could not have been farther from the truth. And according to a recent analysis that was published on the Eagle Rising website, not only are Obama Care policies not getting cheaper as promised, but the costs of employer based insurance plans is also skyrocketing, in direct contrast to that the President promised:

• According to the non-profit organization Freedom Partners, the cost of employer provided health insurance has continued to rise unabated despite Obama Care.
• Between 2005 and 2010, prior to the enactment of Obama Care, the annualized employer provided health insurance premium increase was 4.8%.
• Following the enactment of the law, those annualized employer provided health insurance premium increases were 5%, unaffected by the law and Obama’s promise to reduce premium costs.
• In the first year after Obama Care was enacted, the annualized employer provided health insurance premium increase was a whopping 9.4% from 2010 to 2011.
• That upward trend in premium cost increases for employer provided health insurance continued with the increase in 2015 vs. 2014 being 4.2%.
• Health insurance premiums for employer provided policies have gone up up much faster than wages with premiums increasing by an average of 27.9% while wages increased by just 7.8% between 2009 and 2014.

Thus, no matter how you cut the data and reality, absolute dollars, percentage increase, percentage increase vs. wage increase, health insurance today is less affordable than it was prior to Obama Care was passed. This is the definition of failure.

No matter where you look, nobody can seem to find the $2,500 reduction that Obama promised, be it in Obama Care health insurance or employer provided health insurance. As a result of Obama Care, we are all still paying more and more for health insurance coverage, quite possibly, as we described above, because the architects of Obama Care never understood the root causes of our escalating healthcare costs. And when dealing with any problem, if you do not understand the root causes of that problem, the potential of resolving that problem become very, very small.

3) Last bit of disaster for today. The Washington Free Beacon, in an article by Ali Mayer on March 29, 2016, recently reported on the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyses relative to Obama Care enrollment:

• The estimated number of Americans covered by Obama Care insurance policies has been reduced by one million enrollees relative previous CBO estimates.
• In January, the CBO said that 13 million Americans had Obama Care policy coverage but has since downgraded that estimate to 12 million.
• Recall from previous posts that Obama and his Obama Care advocates told us, falsely, that over 20 million Americans would have Obama Care health insurance coverage by now, a 40% shortfall.
• The latest CBO estimates say that by 2026, 28 million Americans will have Obama Care health insurance coverage, tens of millions of people short of providing affordable health insurance to all uninsured Americans, as promised by Obama.
• This 28 million estimate is 2 million higher than previously estimated.
• But this seemingly bit of good news is really not good news since that additional 2 million covered by Obama Care policies is because the number of people covered by employer provided health insurance is estimated to go down by 3 million, i.e. the additional 2 million expected to be covered by 2027 is churn from existing insurance coverage options, not newly insured people that were previously uninsured, the whole purpose of Obama Care.
• More bad news from the latest CBO analysis is that the annual cost increase to the Federal government is expected to be 5.4%, hardly the reduction in national health care costs that Obama promised, not even a “bending of the cost curve” that Obama promised.

That will do it for today’s unfolding disasters from Obama Care. Missed enrollment projections, mounting costs to the Federal government and American taxpayer, and higher and higher premium costs for both Obama Care policies and employer provided health insurance coverage. Seems you could not have devised a worst, less effective way to control escalating healthcare costs if you tried.

And we are not close to finishing up this month’s update on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care, our sad stories to continue at least through 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care Update, Part 3: Obama Care Increases Costs and the Number of Uninsured, Fining The Poor Becuase They Are Too Poor, and Rube Goldberg Would Be Proud

This is our third post in our regular monthly series on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been documenting this disaster for the past several years but over the past year or so we have had to go to multiple posts every month just to keep up with the waste, the lunacy, and failures of Obama Care.

The first post in this month’s updates can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/june-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_6417.html

Past posts can be found by just entering “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

1) One of the big promises of Obama Care and its supporters is that lower income people would see most of the benefits and little, if any, of the financial pain of the legislation’s tenets. However, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis and report, that is nothing more than another broken promise of this administration:

• According to the analysis, about one million low-income Americans will pay a fine under Obama Care.
• These one million Americans are among the estimated four million Americans who will need to pay the individual mandate penalty for not having health insurance by 2016 as a result of Obama Care: “All told, CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] JCT estimate that about four million people will pay a penalty because they are uninsured in 2016 (a figure that includes uninsured dependents who have the penalty paid on their behalf). An estimated $4 billion will be collected from those who are uninsured in 2016, and, on average, an estimated $5 billion will be collected per year over the 2017–2024 period.”
• A chart included in the report revealed that 200,000 of those estimated to be paying the Obama Care penalty will be earning less than 100 percent of the poverty line. 
• An additional 800,000 Americans are considered low-income, earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, will also be paying Obama Care penalties

What makes this situation doubly ironic is 1) the President claimed that health care costs would go down $2,500 on average for American families, and now we are seeing poorer American families being financially penalized for not making enough money to afford health care insurance and 2) at one point Obama actually campaigned against this mandatory insurance coverage option back in 2008. This happened during a debate with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, because he realized the insanity of a mandate for imposing fines on people who could not afford health insurance to begin with.

Apparently, that view was just for the campaign since his signature piece of legislation, Obama Care, did exactly that, mandated poor Americans to pay a fine for not buying something they could not afford. Insanity.

2) In another illegal move by the Obama administration, it is again going against the schedule and requirements of passed legislation by allowing 18 states to continue delaying a key part of Obama Care’s health insurance exchange for small businesses, “employee choice.” This latest delay puts off this component of the legislation until 2016, if then.

Which raises the same question that has been raised any number of times after this administration unilaterally and arbitrarily delayed numerous pieces of this legislation: if the President thinks he can change approved legislation according to any whim that strikes him, then why are we still paying the 500 members of Congress? We apparently do not need them if their only function is to pass legislation that turns into mere suggestions, rather than law, and Obama does what he wants? Obama Care is not only the worst piece of legislation ever passed it is turning into the most lawless piece of legislation ever passed.

3) We have previously discussed the top line results of a recent University Of Minnesota study that concluded that health care costs will accelerate because of Obama Care and that there will actually be more uninsured Americans five or so years down the road then there are today as a result of Obama Care. 

I recently came across a more in depth discussion of that work by one of the analysis’s authors, Mr. Parente, who is an associate dean of the Carlson School of Management and director of the Medical Industry Leadership at the University of Minnesota. Highlights of his analysis and what drives his conclusions include the following:

• Health-insurance companies who deal with Obama Care policies are expected to soon begin releasing insurance policy rate estimates for next year's plans, with most industry experts expecting consumers to experience far significantly higher premiums. 
• It is not expected by that Federal subsidies will increase by the same amount to keep current Obama Care policy holders financially whole, meaning that those policy holders will experience higher out of pocket costs in 2015.
• If this happens, both in 2015 and in the follwing years as expected, lower-income and some middle-income consumers will be forced out of the private insurance market, viewing the expense as more and more unaffordable.
• Using the 2014 health-insurance exchange enrollment data and a micro-simulation model funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Parente estimated the national and state impact of Obama Care on insurance prices and enrollment from 2015-24 to illustrate this phenomenon.
• The average premium for an individual exchange health plan (Silver) will increase by $1,375 by 2019 while the average family premium for the same plan will increase by $4,198. 
• The steepest price increases will not occur until 2017 and after, when three things happen.
• First, Obama Care‘s "essential benefits" requirements will kick in. All Obama Care insurance plans, including those currently exempted for hardship and old plans extended for various reasons, must provide all of the law's mandated benefits from January 1, 2017. On average, roughly 15% of plans offered in 2013 do not qualify for sale on the insurance exchanges once all of the time extensions run out. Depending on the state, as many as 60% of the plans sold in 2013 would not be permitted for sale going forward since they do not cover all of the essential and mandated benefits, forcing people to buy more expensive plans or drop health insurance altogether..
• Second, Obama Care’s program to subsidize those insurance companies that provide Obama Care policies will also expire in 2017, i.e. the bailouts end in 2017. 
• Other insurance companies subsidies also end in 2017. For example, health insurers will no longer be able to bill the government for 80% of a patient's health-care costs when they make more than $45,000 in annual claims. As all of these subsidies end, the insurance companies are highly likely to pass the now unsubsidized costs unto their policy holders, further increasing the cost of Obama Care policies, leaving consumers to pick up the tab through premium payments. Federal subsidies will be unable to keep up with such dramatic rate spikes. 
• Faced with all of these upward cost pressures, consumers will react the only way they know how: by looking for cheaper options such as the remaining high-deductible health plans offered by private companies and the exchanges as well as plans with very limited physician and hospital networks established to maximize efficiency but not quality care for the average patient. These plans are likely to provide no or limited access to specialized facilities and physicians. 
• And finally, rising premiums will create a death spiral exodus from insurance plans, with increasing departures forcing insurance companies to raise premiums even more on the remaining customers to make up for the shortfall which will drive out more customers from Obama Care plans, etc. 
• And these disasters and death spirals exclude what might happen with employer provided health insurance plans. It is expected that many businesses will find it less expensive to drop their company insurance plans and pay the Obama Care fines, forcing millions (the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the ACA will lead to a seven-million person decline in insurance provided by employers by 2020) of Americans to find health insurance coverage on the individual market at the same time that individual market insurance policy costs are spiraling upwards.

This leaves the newly uninsured with two options: If they qualify by their income, sign up for Medicaid or stay uninsured and face a penalty. Many will choose the first option but that will cover a relatively minor set of uninsured Americans since those people exceed the income limits of Medicaid. 

Whatever these millions of Americans do, there will be a significant number of uninsured Americans unwilling or unable to pay for the constantly increasing cost for health insurance available on the exchanges and forced to pay penalties. By 2024, the authors of this analysis and research estimate that there will be more than 40 million uninsured, roughly 10% more than today.

Thus, here we have another well researched and thought out piece of analysis that shows again that Obama Care will do the exact opposite of what it set out to do: rather than decreasing the cost of health insurance and making health insurance affordable for millions of Americans, it will make health insurance more and more unaffordable for every American and eventually result in a net gain of uninsured Americans when it was supposed to reduce the number of uninsured Americans.

4) One last piece of bad news today to chew on about Obama Care. The original legislation is supposed to be about 2,500 pages long. The number of pages of regulations that were created to implement the law is reported to be well over 10,000 pages. As we have said many times before, there is nothing elegant about this legislation. It is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that is so complicated it will eventually collapse and implode into itself from its own complexity and idiocy.

Someone actually tried to flowchart the actual information and process flows of Obama Care. This is legitimately what they came up with:






No way something this complicated has any chance of ever succeeding, especially if the Washington political class and Federal government bureaucracy are operating the levers.

Based on this flowchart, one of my favorite sayings comes to mind: “Try to pare things down, Very few moves to a lot.” It looks like Obama Care got this wisdom backwards, like it got everything else backwards: “Never pare things down. A lot of moves, spread over 2,500, pages accomplishes very little." 

We will finish up our latest Obama Care analyses tomorrow. As you read through these posts it becomes very clear that we have been right all along. We have always maintained that the legislation never went after the root causes of our escalating health care problems, a view we will explore tomorrow using some very interesting data and research. 

Because at the end of the day, regardless of what Obama Care does, Americans will still be overweight, they will still eat too much of the wrong kind of foods, they will not exercise enough, and they will still smoke too much. Those and a few other factors are the drivers behind our escalating health care costs, not whether or not someone has a bronze insurance plan from Obama Care. Obama Care will never succeed since it never understood the root causes of the problem, mistaking a public health crisis for a health insurance coverage crisis.

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 6: The Overall Disaster In Pictures

This is our sixth post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. And we still may not be done covering all of the trauma, idiocy, and wasteful spending of this horrid piece of legislation that has popped up in just the last month or so. 

We have been running half a dozen Oabma Care failure posts or so every month since last August, that is how bad this law is turning out to be. The first post in this series did a thorough overview of all the problems along with an in-depth look at why it was doomed to failure from Day One. That post can be accessed at:

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

Today's discussion is centered on a fantastic piece of journalism that recently was done by the Heritage Foundation. They took many of the disasters we have discussed extensively in this blog and put the reality and information into graphs and pictures to make the situation easier to visualize and understand. Below are a dozen or so graphs and pictures from the Heritage Foundation along with some of their commentary and some of ours mixed in

I am pretty sure that after reviewing and understanding these graphs and pictures on what Obama Care is doing to the country and how it is already a failure, you will understand why it has to be repealed and replaced with something that actually attacks the root causes of our high health care costs. The Obama Care approach has nothing to do with solutions to that problem and everything to do with creating another needless Federal bureaucracy that has little chance of being efficient or effecitve.

The orignal Internet post where Hertiage published its findings can be accessed at:

http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2014/obamacare-in-pictures-spring-2014/obamacare-in-pictures-slide-14

Note: double click on any of the graphs below for a larger view.

1) According to analysis done by the Heritage Foundation, which reached conclusions similar to other analyses by other organizations, 27 year old Americans are much more likely to be paying more for health insurance premiums as a result of Obama Care vs. how the world was prior to Obama Care. 

If you are a 27 year old American looking for health insurance coverage, in about 90% of the states you will pay more now for insurance premiums than you would have if Obama Care did not exist. This runs counter to the whole promise of Obama Care which was to reduce the cost of health insurance and insurance premiums in this country.

But this should not be a surprise since the financial structure of Obama Care tries to force an intergenerational transfer of wealth from younger, healthier Americans to older, sicker Americans. That was the strategy from Day One so it is not a surprise that some young Americans could end paying more than double for insurance premiums what they would have paid in a non-Obama Care world.


















2) While not as bad as for 27 year olds,  50 year old Americans in the individual health insurance market will also end up paying more for health insurance premiums in an Obama Care world than prior to the legislation, with the exception of five or six states. Many 50 year old Americans could see their insurance premiums go up by over 50%.



3) Not only will the insurance policy premiums be generally much higher for Obama Care policy holders, as the previous two points show, but the cost of the average annual deductible cost will also be much higher relative to employer sponsored insurance deductibles. In many cases, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher. Thus, after all of the hype, all of the angst, and all of the billions and billions of dollars spent on Obama Care, it cannot not even come close to matching what is already present in employer insurance market. Pathetic performance.






4) History shows that the best way for prices to optimized to the advantage of consumers in any marketplace is for there to be robust competition in those marketplaces. That history lesson must have been lost on Obama Care's developers since in more than half of the counties in the country, there is either only one Obama Care insurance carrier available (35%) or only two carriers available (17%). No way prices will be driven down with such meager competition serving the Obama Care exchanges.




5) In March, 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ten year net cost of the Obama Care legislation would be $898 billion. Less than four years later, as the disasters unfolded, the same organization estimating the current ten year window of Obama Care net costs found that their intital cost estimate was less than half of what their current cost estimate was. I dread to see how high the cost estimates will be in another four years at this rate.




6) Supporters of Obama Care like to think that their legislation at least got more people covered via Mediciad. That might be true to some extent but at what price?  Using Congressional Budget office information, Heritage calculated how much more Obama Care would cost the citizens of each state relative to increased Medicaid costs. 

Overall, the country will pay almost $42 billion more for Obama Care induced Medicaid costs or about $364 for every U.S. household. Some states such as California, Illinois, New York, and Arizona will see per household Medicaid charges that are orders of magnitude higher than the natinal average. All for a piece of legislation that was supposed to reduce health care costs, not increase them by billions of dollars. 



7) Despite the increased Mediciad costs and the doubling of the costs forecasted to implement Obama Care to $2 TRILLION by the Congressional Budget Office, in ten years there will still be a whopping 31 million Americans that do not have health insurance coverage. Only 26 million Americans are forecasted to have picked up coverage, so in ten years the legislation would not even be half way to its stated, overarching goal, getting health insurance coverage for everyone.

Even worse, simple math shows that if this forecast is accurate, it would have cost the country at least $2 TRILLION to get healh care insurance coverage for 25 million people. This computes out to a whopping $80,000 cost to get those 25 million covered! $80,000 for each person. You cannot run a business or a government when you pay so much and get so little for each customer.

Additionally, if I read the above graph correctly on the $2 TRILLION, that number does not apparently include all of the billions of dollars that have been spent up front to set up this monstrosity nor does it include the ongoing costs of operating it. The $2 TRILLION estimate appears to only encompass the increased Medicaid costs and the Federal subsidies. Thus, the $80,000 per person cost we just calculated is probably way too low, given that these other expenses are not figured into the calculation.



8) Remember when the President stated that during his Presidency no American earning less than $250,000 would pay more in taxes while he was in office? Well, another promise (or another Presidential lie) broken since according to the Congressional Budget Office, almost 70% of those that are likley to pay the Obama Care individual mandate tax earn less than about $46,000 a year and 10% of that almost 70% actually live below the poverty line. So much for the $250,000 threshold.



9) Many times we have pointed out, and no one who supports the Obama Care has denied this reality, that the legislation intentionally reduced future Medicare expenses (by over $700 billion) and switched those expenses to the Obama Care business case and financial views to make it more appealing. However, if these reductions actually happen, an analysis from the Medicare Trustees shows that by not inititating true reductions in health care costs, Obama Care's Medicare budget reduction plans will cause upwards of 40% of hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies to operate at a financial loss in the coming decades.

This financial squeeze in the absence of real and effective health care industry reform will either cause these facilities to shut down or stop taking on Medicare patients. In either case, this Obama Care strategy will cause there to eventually be a new health care crisis, this one centered on the fact there are not enough health care professionals available to service the Medicare population.






10) So far, Obama Care has caused between 5 and 6 million Americans, who had gotten their health insurance coverage via the individual, non-employer market, to lose access to their preferred insurance plans, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals. However, the real tsunami of disruption will come when the delayed provisions of Obama Care hit employers' health insurance plans. 

A recent survey of employers found that a whopping 92% of them expected changes to be done to their companies' health insurance plans, with almost half of them expecting substantial changes. Thus, in a year from now, that 5 to 6 million Americans who lost their insruance coverage might look like a rounding error when the employer operated insruance plans get the once over from Obama Care.




11) Supporters of Obama Care like to assume that when Medicare and Social Security were launched, there were operational problems with them also and that somehow, miraculously Obama Care will work itself out over time just like Social Security and Medicare. There are a few fallacies with this reasoning:

• Over time, the original cost projections for both Social Security and Medicare exploded  far beyond the original estimates, so much so that just these two Federal government programs threaten the financial integirty and viability of the entire country. Thus, comparing Obama Care to these two bloated and inefficient programs is probably not a good idea, especially since the expected Obama Care costs have more than doubled in just four years.
• Social Security and Medicare were launched with bipartisan Congressional support and support among the country's citizen's.  Obama Care was launched with only Demcoratic support, no Republicans signed on to this lousy piece of legislation and as the following chart shows, the majority of citizens never supported Obama Care in the first place, contrary to the other two massive programs, programs that are failing anyway despite bipartisan Congressional support and popular citizen support.

12) And finally back to the lie of the year, the President stating over and over through the years that if you liked your current health care policy you could keep it. The following chart from the Associated Press gives a state by state breakdown of the number of Americans that indeed did lose access to their current and preferred insurance plans, despite the President's assertion. 

The Associated Press analysis and map show that 4.7 million Americans lost access to their insurance policy. However, that estimate does not include every state because informaiton was not available for every state. Thus, you can rest assured that the 4.7 million is off by quite a bit, especially since that figure did not include high population states like Texas and Ohio. 

If we ratio the number of people living in Texas to the number of people living in California and then use that ratio to get a very rough estimate of how many people lost access ot the policies in Texas based on the 1.1 million who lost access in California, we can easily support a Texas estimate of over 700,000 people who lost their insurance coverage in Texas. Thus, it is not to hard to see that upwards of 6 million Americans across the country have already lost access to insurance policies that they were happy to pay for and carry.

        

That will do it for today. The unfolding disasters of Obama Care in pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these Obama Care "pictures" are worth $2 TRILLION and millions of newly uninsured Americans as a result of a piece of legislation that is doomed to failure today and ten years from today.

More disaster reviews for 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

May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: Spending Trillions To Insure Millions, Identity Theft Problems, The Oregon Implosion, and More

Okay, I have been putting this off as long as possible but it is that time of month where we need to go through the latest unfolding disasters of the Obama Care legislation. Earlier this week we reviewed the totality of the disasters from this horrid law along with a list of root causes behind our high health care costs that the legislation never addressed. That post can be read at:

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

Over the past two days we have been reviewing the many ways that health care costs and health insurance costs could be reduced dramatically without 2,500 pages of useless regulations from Washington. Those posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_29.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_30.html

The next series of posts will go through the disasters that have arisen just over the past month or so. We will hit them pretty fast, given how many of them there are. For a more detailed view of what went wrong and what should have been done to address the high costs problem, please refer back to the three posts listed above.

1) The first discussion point today is a parody that was created by some creative people somewhere that fully captures the disaster that is Obama Care. The basis of the parody is a pretty famous clip from a German movie about World War II and takes place in Hitler’s bunker towards the end of the war. 

The clip keeps the original German soundtrack and dialog but overdubs different words onto the screen to completely change the meaning of the clip. This clip has been used many times in many different areas including explaining how the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots in two Super Bowls for those of you looking for other parodies using the same scene.

This version adjusts the dubbed dialog to reflect the many disasters of Obama Care including Hitler losing his preferred doctor, his current insurance plan, paying higher premiums, etc. Enjoy the parody at:

http://safeshare.tv/w/jyeqLxShwx

2) The Democrats in Oregon were one of the earliest and most avid supporters of Obama Care. They went all out to push for a state based Obama Care health insurance exchange website and process and spent millions of dollars advertising the availability of Obama Care policies through their state exchange.

But as we previously reported, the website supporting the health exchange has been a nightmare, with some news reports saying that no one or virtually no one in the state of Oregon was able to sign up for Obama Care via the Oregon website. Virtually no one despite spending at least tens of millions of dollars in constructing the website.

How bad was the experience? On April 24, 2014, the newspaper The Oregonian, reported that Oregon’s top information technologies official was recommending Cover Oregon, the Obama Care effort in Oregon, scrap the state’s online health insurance exchange that failed to sign up a single resident. Alex Pettit, Oregon’s Chief Information Officer, recommended to a 16-member technical advisory committee that Cover Oregon should drop its glitch-filled website and join the Federal government’s online insurance exchange, which also has been pretty much a disaster from day one

Unfortunately for taxpayers, Oregon has received more than $305 million in Federal grants for the state’s health exchange and, since January 16, has spent nearly $200 million through Cover Oregon and the Oregon Health Authority. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars, the website has never worked properly and Oregon applicants were forced to use a “costly, time-consuming, hybrid paper-online process,” according to The Associated Press.

Pettit told the technical committee that it was a more expensive to partially fix the state’s website, $78 million, with no guarantee the problems would be fixed, than what the original cost estimate for the whole development of the website was, $40 million. To add insult to injury, Cover Oregon is one of several Obama Care state exchanges under investigation by the General Accountability Office which will audit the process and effort to see if there was criminal or negligent use of taxpayer wealth.

Unbelievable, you cannot make up such incompetence. These folks at both the Federal and state level cannot build a relatively simple website and they want to run the nation’s health care industry. Heaven help us.

3) While the website was a huge factor in lower than expect signups for Obama Care in Oregon, the associated advertising campaign could not have been very helpful either. One of their TV commercials can be viewed at the following link:

http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/cover-oregon-buyers-remorse-friday-funnies/#.U1qqPsd4T6F

After viewing the ad, ask yourself: what compelling reason did the ad provide to make you rush out and sign up for an Obama Care policy? Answer: absolutely none. No call to action, no cost vs. benefits sell, just a poorly done cartoon of fluff. And apparently this commercial and others cost taxpayers over $3 million to develop and air. 

If you were just looking at the graphics and music I contend that this could have been an ad for anything from laundry detergent to shampoo to a Saturday morning kids show, that is how innocuous and ineffective it is. Insane. I wonder what the “bad” advertising concepts looked like, the ones that were rejected in favor of this piece of nothing.

4) The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) continually churns out new numbers on Obama Care as the disasters unfold. The latest numbers are not good, as the operational costs continue to go up while the number of Americans who attain insurance continue to see their estimated premium costs go up:

• The CBO now predicts that the net impact on the national debt over the next ten years as a result of the Obama Care legislation will be $1.383 TRILLION. Remember that the original promise from this administration is that the deficit would not go up at all.
• This increase in the national debt of almost $1.4 TRILLION will only get 26 million more Americans covered by an insurance policy.
• This comes out to a whopping per person coverage cost of over $53,000 per person ($1.383 TRILLION divided by 26 million newly insured.) 
• The really sad part from this new analysis is that the original purpose of Obama Care was to get health insurance coverage for EVERY American. The CBO’s latest analysis shows that ten years from now, 31 million Americans will still not have insurance coverage, five million more than the 26 million Americans that do attain coverage. Thus, Obama Care will not cover even half of those it was supposed to help. Pathetic.

The detailed CBO findings can be read at:

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43900-2014-04-ACAtables2.pdf

5) Although the Obama administration spent well over $700 million building and rebuilding its flawed Federal Obama Care exchange website, an Associated Press article from April 19, 2014 pointed out that this effort is possibly infected with the so-called Heartbleed Internet security flaw. As a result, users of the Obama Care Federal exchange website are being told to change their passwords as a precaution.

Obama administration officials said there is no indication that the HealthCare.gov site has been affected and the action is being taken out of an abundance of caution. The government review is ongoing, the officials said, noting that users of other websites may also be told to change their passwords in the coming days, including those with accounts on the popular WhiteHouse.gov petitions page.

Hundreds of millions of dollars and yet another example of the government’s systems actually being an “identity thief’s paradise.”

That will do it for today’s disasters. Hitler loses under Obama Care, Oregonians lose under Obama Care, trillions spent to insure millions, and more identity theft troubles. Just a typical day in Obama Care land. More to follow 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

March, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Bonus Post 2: Real Americans Facing Real Obama Care Crises, Oregon Obama Care Implodes, and More

This will definitely, positively, absolutely be our last post this month on Obama Care. Not because we covered everything but because it is getting too depressing spending so much time on such a fiasco. We will pick up the disaster train again next month since I am sure that the unfolding disasters from this horrid piece of legislation will continue to destroy the economy, families’ health, and liberties in this nation.

The first post in this month’s series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/03/march-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

The previous month’s posts on the Obama Care disaster can be accessed via the menu on the right side of this page.

1) If any state was going to be a success relative to Obama Care it was going to be Oregon. They were going to have a state of the art website for their health exchange, courtesy of the American taxpayer. They had an enthusiastic supporter of Obama Care in their current governor, John Kitzhaber, a doctor who left the emergency room for politics, and who made health care his main issue. The state legislature was controlled by Democrats. They are a liberal leaning state who supported Obama’s election bids. Yes, Oregon was going to show the country how to do Obama Care right. 

Oops, maybe not. According to a recent New York Times article, things are not going that well in Oregon relative to Obama Care:

• Only about 50,000 Oregon residents have signed up for an Obama Care insurance plan through the state health exchange, well below the state’s goal.
• Almost all of those people enrolled using paper applications or with help from an insurance professional because the website has been so unreliable despite spending millions and millions of dollars to build it.
• The governor recently released a new report, commissioned by the state with a private company, that found fault not only with the website developers at Oracle, the software company which built the site, but also with the state executives who overlooked or minimized repeated warnings that the system they had asked Oracle to build was too complex. 
• Things are so bad that the governor is pleading with the Federal government to reduce Obama Care penalties for Oregon residents who did not sign up for insurance, citing the horrid job his state government did in preparing for the legislation.
• He is also looking into junking the state’s exchange website and processes and forcing Oregon residents on to the national Obama Care Federal exchange website or latching on to use another state’s website. abandoning Oregon’s system entirely and using the Federal website, or another state’s Obama Care website. 
• The governor also recently accepted the resignation of the acting executive director of the Oregon health exchange and said that legal action was being considered to recover some of the tens of millions of dollars already paid to Oracle. This resignation is in addition to two other executives who left late last year.
• The state has one of the nation’s lowest rates of enrollment under the health care law among young people, tied for last place West Virginia, with only 18% of eligible 18- to 34-year-olds.
• And the troubles are not confined to within the state since the General Accountability Office of the Federal government has plans for an investigation of how Federal money was spent and possibly abused, in building the exchange in. 
• Within the state, a former state employee, who oversaw the state’s health care exchange construction, has filed a notice with the state of her intent to sue for wrongful discharge, defamation and other damages in what her lawyer said was a “cover-up” of the insurance exchange’s troubles.

If the political class cannot make Obama Care work in Oregon where it had everything going for it, what chance does it have elsewhere? Answer: it is not working elsewhere AND it is not working in Oregon.

2) If Obama Care is so great and such a good deal, why is it not hitting its numbers and why does the Federal government need to spend about $17 million a MONTH advertising for it? Yes, $17 million a month, as reported by the New York Times. 

The Times reports that from January until the end of March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers the Affordable Care Act, will have spent $52 million on paid media advertising. The Times article reporting the expenses opens with a paragraph that actually has a streak of sarcasm running through it, a first for a paper that has constantly downplayed Obama administration failures:

Russian troops were rolling through Crimea when Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff and a foreign policy expert, was deployed on a mission to do media outreach. But the focus of Mr. McDonough’s calls to local talk radio stations was not geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe, it was health care. 

Mr. McDonough chatted with Andy Baskin and Jeff Phelps, hosts of a popular sports talk radio program on WKRK-FM (92.3) in Cleveland, about the coming N.F.L. draft, basketball at the White House and his days playing college football in Minnesota. Mr. McDonough then pitched a new website featuring games, videos and superstar athletes explaining the benefits of health insurance.

Yes, a highly paid administration executive whose expertise is in foreign policy is doing local sports talk shows to talk about health care insurance, strictly a domestic issue...in Cleveland. Again, how bad is Obama Care if we have stooped to having foreign affairs experts worrying more about Obama Care the potential reigniting of the Cold War? 

Pretty pathetic when you consider that the administration has had four years to get the nation on board but now has to rely on a Cleveland sports talk show less than two weeks before the sign up deadline.

3) As a statistician by training, I prefer to look at the total picture of facts and numbers to understand reality. For instance, we know that:

• Probably over five million Americans have already lost their current and preferred health care insurance, and access to their preferred doctors and hospitals, because of Obama Care.
• While the administration claims that over four million people have signed up for Obama Care, it has no clue how many have actually paid for it.
• Surveys from reputable polling firms indicate that likely less than have of those that have chose an Obama Care plan have actually paid for it.
• The mix of young, healthier people singing up for Obama Care is far below the percentage need to subsidize older, sicker people signing up for Obama Care, destroying ther Obama Care financial model integrity.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that tens years don the road, millions, possibly tens of millions of Americans, will still not have health insurance coverage, despite Obama Care.
• Most industry experts expect the cost of Obama Care premiums to skyrocket within the next year for a variety of reasons including lower than expected enrollments and a bad mix of healthy vs. sick customers.
• The cost of Obama Care is now expected to be at least double or tripe what was initially touted, ending up in the $2 TRILLION to $3 TRILLION cost range.

These are the big numbers, the realities of Obama Care. TRILLIONS of dollars, millions of people. All very sad and certainly a disaster for the country as a whole.

But what about the personal stories, the individual stories of how Obama Care is causing havoc on Americans’ lives? Obama likes to roll out individual Americans as props whenever he makes a public relations pitch so I have few no qualms about using individuals to support the overall statistics and realities. If he can do it, I can do it, in addition to looking at the global, total impacts of the legislation.

Consider the Facebook post of Angela Portillo below. She is the negative face of the legislation. Whenever Obama parades out an individual and how Obama Care helped them, remember Angela’s story, the opposite of whoever Obama points to as a success. Remember how Obama Care did not help her reduce health care costs, the purported objective of the legislation, it actually substantially in creased the costs.

You have to look at the total positives AND the negatives to grade Obama Care. And even if the positives equal the negatives, we still have not made a progress.

She nails the disaster right on the head. Why did her family’s life, and millions of American lives like hers, get so upset for something that is not working and was unnecessary? 

Consider a small sample of other reactions to Obama Care, actually pulled form the Facebook page supporting Obama Care. These reactions are a sub-sample of Facebook comments pulled by the Independent Journal. 

This is the reality at the individual American family level, a reality totally foreign to out of touch Washington politicians who insist that Obama Care is still a success despite all of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

As promised, that will do it for this month regarding the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. However, I can guarantee you that next month we will go thorugh another grueling series of posts since Obama Care is the fiasco that keep on giving.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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