December, 2015, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama's Media Allies Turn Against HIm, Unhealthier Eating, and Persona lObama Care Heartbreak Stories

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

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

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

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

But it is not just missing the root causes of our health care 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 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. Today we continue with this month’s update of Obama Care that we began yesterday, the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed.

1) The Daily Beast will never be mistaken for Fox News. It is a left leaning, Obama loving entity that really gets your attention when it criticizes anything related to the Obama administration. But that is exactly what it did in a December 2, 2015 article related to the problems with Obama Care. We have previously pointed out many of these problems and disasters but it is worth noting when someone like the Daily Beast finally acknowledges the obvious:

• According to the Daily Beast article: “The President’s signature domestic policy, his namesake health care law, is doing very poorly.”
• It mentions that the largest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealth, has publicly stated that it might stop participating in Obama Care do to financial losses.
• If companies like UnitedHealth start to leave the program the remaining insurers are likely to raise rates for their policies even quicker.
• This possibility is made more likely since the insurers are worried they may not get Federal taxpayer bailout money to ease their financial pains.
• According to the Daily Beast: “At root, the problem stems from the fact that it has turned out to be far more difficult to get young, healthy people to sign up for plans in the exchanges, and the population is therefore older and sicker than insurers had expected and the Obama administration had predicted.”
• Wellmark of Iowa, the largest insurer in the state of Iowa, has reported that Obama Care policy holders use significantly more health and medical services for more chronic and critical diseases and illnesses than the company expected.
• Not surprisingly, many Obama Care customers are “playing the system,” a strategy that Obama Care critics accurately predicted years ago. According to Wellmark: “There were 135 members [Wellmark Obama Care customers] who signed up for coverage, received several million dollars in health care services, and then terminated their coverage. Wellmark received only approximately 10 percent in premiums to cover those members’ health care claims.”
• The Obama administration admitted in October that rather than attaining 20 million Obama Care customers by 2016 it will attain only about half that many, a massive 50% miss.

Again, we have covered many of these disasters previously. This review is important because it is from a corner of the media world that is almost always pro-Obama on everything.

2) An article by J.K. Wall from December 1, 2015 on the Affluent Advisor website pointed out how healthcare regulations and bureaucracies were out of control and driving up health industry costs. The premise of the article is that as the government imposes more and more regulations on the industry. more resources from the industry have to be devoted to fulfilling the requirements of the regulations:

• From 1990 to 2012, while overall healthcare industry jobs grew by 75% only one out of every 20 of those new jobs was filled by a real doctor.
• This left the country with a ratio of one real doctor for every 16 employees in the healthcare industry.
• And even worse, only six of those 16 non-doctors are involved in providing actual health care, the rest are administrators and bureaucrats.
• These numbers are made worse if you add in the lawyers, accountants, and industry consultants to the non-doctor totals.

And Obama Care with its thousands of pages of law and regulations and dozens of new taxes certainly added to this craziness where healthcare dollars are used to fulfill regulations rather than being used to heal Americans.

3) A recent article on the Political Outcast website by Joe Scudder on December 5, 2015 had an interesting take on how Obama Care might actually be causing Americans to eat more poorly, an exact opposite behavior that the law would want to create. Restaurants operate on very thin margins, the difference between being profitable and staying in business and unprofitable and going out of business is very narrow.

Thus, when a stupid law like Obama Care comes along and forces businesses to pay their employees more in the form of mandatory health care benefits or fine those businesses for not doing so, it places incredible hardships on restaurant businesses and their thin profit margins. Restaurants are trying to cope with this added financial burden in a number of ways including putting an Obama Care surcharge on on their menus and pricing, eliminating tipping while jacking up their prices, or just raising their prices in an attempt to cover the government mandated healthcare costs.

In whatever approach a particular restaurant takes, the bottom line to the customers of that restaurant is that they will be paying more to dine out at that establishment as a result of Obama Care. Combine this reality with the reality that many Americans have less disposable income because their Obama Care premiums and deductibles keep going up. Thus, we are likely to find that when American dine out in the future, they will likely be forced to choose less expensive and less healthy, i.e. fast food, options to fulfill their dining out experience. 

And fast food is never a substitute for healthy food. Thus, it is highly likely that Obama Care has already had and will continue to have a detrimental effect on America’s eating habits, the exact opposite of what should be happening if we want Americans to be healthier, which would reduce healthcare costs.

4) As we often do in this series, let’s end today’s discussion with real life horror stories on how Obama Care has disrupted Americans' lives from across the country. The source of today’s heartbreak's comes from the website, www.ourhealthcarestories.com:

SUSAN, FLORIDA: Our policy last year went from 600.00 a month to 700.00 a month, then we just received a new letter a week ago saying that our policy is going from 700.00 a month to 1050.00 a month, plus raising our deductable from 10,000 to 12,000.00 a year. This start in Jan. We must repeal Obamacare.

LARRY, OHIO: I just retired, a few days ago received the letter from our insurance provider that Obamacare requirements have kicked in.

Current cost $ 636.00 month New cost $ 1057.00 month

Current deductible $ 7,000 New deductible $12,000

Current out of pocket $ 7,000 New out of pocket $ 12,350

Effective 8/1/14

This is my retirement gift from Obama & the democrats, an extra cost of $ 5050.00 per year for insurance coverage I don't want or need. I am very happy with my current coverage. There is no way this is Constitutional.

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

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

Higher premium costs, higher deductible costs, higher out of pocket costs, loss of access to current insurance plans, unhealthier eating habits, unhealthy insurer financials, etc. The disasters just keep on unfolding from the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington. More disasters 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:

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June, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Still Obese In America, Whopping Policy Cost Increases, and MOre Family Heartache Stoires

Every month for the past three years or so we have had to take time out and review the latest insanity and disasters from the Obama Care legislation. Long ago it only took a day or so to cover it all. But then the law starting taking effect and the “unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” made it impossible to contain the bad news, the heartache, the rising costs, and the stress put on American families to just a day or two.

To review the past discussions on this horrid piece of legislation, enter the term "unfolding disaster" in the search box above or just page through previous month's posts on the right side of this page and click on the various references to Obama Care. Very quickly, as your read the past posts, you will see that this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington.

Not only has it disrupted lives, stymied the economy, and increased healthcare costs in this country, it never addressed the various root causes of high healthcare costs. Thus, by never addressing some of the root causes listed below, the legislation has virtually no chance of actually reducing healthcare costs in this country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The healthcare industry in this country needs serious tort reform.
• Federal government crop subsidies lead to our food chain being infested with unhealthy sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
• Current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, lose upwards of $100 billion a year to waste and criminal fraud, billions of dollars that could be used to reduce other healthcare costs in this country.
• Cross state line insurance competition needs to be made easier to do.
• The Obama effort never “followed the money” to actually map out where the high costs paid by Americans for healthcare actually end up.

Since Obama Care never addressed these root causes, we are still going to have those root causes resulting in higher and higher healthcare costs regardless of how well Obama Care is implemented. And since the prime objective of Obama Care was to reduce costs, the legislation will end up being a failure.

So with that gloomy set up, let’s see what Obama Care disasters unfolded in the past month or so.

1) According to a recent Gallup poll, the national obesity rate went up to 27.7% of all Americans in 2014, an increase from 27.1% in 2013. And more discouraging, this obesity rate is up from 25.5% in 2008. 

Why is this important and relative to Obama Care? It is quite well known and researched that obesity causes a whole host of health issues and related healthcare costs: diabetes, heart disease, joint problems, etc. If we eliminated the obesity problem in this country, the related healthcare costs would go away or at least be greatly reduced. If you reduce the demand for a product or service, in this case health care services to treat obesity impacts, you would reduce the costs. 

But as we see from Gallup’s results, the obesity problem is getting worse, not better, since Obama Care was enacted. So a primary root cause of our high healthcare costs has not been addressed by Obama Care, in fact, it is getting worse. And as obesity gets worse, the chances of reducing health care costs as they relate to heart disease, joint issues, and diabetes gets more and more expensive, regardless of how many people end up getting Medicaid or Obama Care insurance policies under the legislation.

As an FYI, Mississippi is the most obese state in the United States for the second year in a row, a whopping 35.2% rate, with Hawaii being the skinniest, according to the new Gallup poll.

As you can see, despite passage of the Obama Care law, the trend of this root cause is definitely going in the wrong direction.

2) A May 21, 2015 Washington Examiner article by Philip Klein reviewed the reality that Obama Care insurance policy rate hikes are likely to be in store for many policyholders: 

• Some of the larger insurance companies that provide health insurance policies under Obama Care recently filed their proposed rates for 2016 and many of them contain large rate hikes for their policy holders.
• Some of the increases actually exceed 40%.
• And these rate increases are coming down the road in 2016 despite the reality that the Federal government will still be subsidizing Obama Care policies through bailouts of the insurance companies through 2016. This raises the question of how much higher those policies will go in 2017 when those bailout support programs end.
• According to the article, after two years of Obama Care insurance experiences, insurance companies are finding that, “the pool of customers is older and sicker than originally projected, driving up medical costs. Meanwhile, federal help isn't what they anticipated.”
• CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the largest health insurer in Maryland, proposed an average increase of 30.4% for 2016.
• BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee asked for an average increase of 36.3%. 
• In South Dakota, Wellmark proposed a 42.9% average increase.
• In Oregon, Moda Health, which serves roughly half of the state's individual insurance market, is proposing to raise its rates by an average of 25.6%. Apparently, Moda's Obama Care policy costs for 2014, the first year of Obamacare's exchanges,exceeded its premiums by 61.5%, certainly not a formula for success and profitability.
• Industry experts quoted in the article agree that Obama Care policyholders tend to be older and sicker than expected, resulting in much higher costs than the administration or the insurance companies anticipated. The higher payout costs by the insurance companies end up driving higher premium costs for the Obama Care policy holders.
• According to the Obama administration, as of the second open-enrollment period ending this past February, just 28% of those who signed up for insurance came from the critical and healthier age 18 to 34 age group. 
• The administration had stated that at least 40% of the Obama Care enrollees had to come from that younger and healthier market segment for the Obama Care policies to be financially viable.
• The other critical number for viability is that the Congressional Budget Office forecasted that Obama Care needed to sign up 21 million customers by 2016. However, less than 11 million paying customers have signed up in the first two years, making the 21 million signups by the 2016 probably impossible to reach, further depressing financial viability. 
• CareFirst CEO Chet Burrell warned a Congressional hearing that "if this transitional protection [taxpayer bailouts] is not there, carriers will have to increase rates substantially (i.e. 20 percent or more beyond what they might otherwise file) to make sure that premiums adequately reflect expected costs – because there would be little protection if they do not."

3) All along, the Obama administration has promised that costs across all facets of the healthcare industry in this country would go down. For example, the President boldly claimed that American families would see their annual health insurance costs go down upwards of $2,500. A we see above and from other posts, that is not happening, costs are going up and going up quickly, not down.

But what about other costs in other parts of the industry, are those costs going down as promised? Probably not, at least according to an article written by Sarah Ferris on May 27, 2015 for The Hill. According to her research, the overhead costs for the entire domestic healthcare industry will be $270 billion higher over the next decade compared to what would have happened if Obama Care had not been passed. 

The $270 billion is in new, incremental overhead costs for both private and government insurance programs. These whopping increases in overhead costs are likely to happen despite some provisions in Obama Care what was supposed to DECREASE overhead costs. 

So under Obama Care, premium costs are going UP for policyholders, deductible costs are going UP for policyholders, payout costs are going UP for insurance companies, and overhead costs are going UP for insurance companies and government healthcare programs. All because of a new law, Obama Care, that was supposed to LOWER costs. Typical Washington effort, getting the exact opposite results than what were intended and promised.

4) We usually finish up each of our Obama Care unfolding disaster posts with real life examples of how this legislation has damaged the health care situations of typical Americans. Our source for these true life stories is the website:

www.ourhealthcarestoires.com

ANDREA - NEBRASKA

Reporter: Insurance companies cancelled millions on peoples' polices because those policies did not meet the new Obamacare requirements. We did find an Omaha family who did not lose theirs, but will pay a lot more.

Reporter: She currently pays about $440 a month, but starting January 1st her rates will increase to $726. In the letter, Blue Cross and Blue Shield stated that her current plan didn't meet the Affordable Care Act standards.

Andrea: Now we have inpatient substance abuse care.. Now we have maternity. I already made the choice that I'm done, I have two children, and I'm done with my family.

MICHAEL - GEORGIA

From Dawson News:

[Michael] Boyette, 28, is married, has one child and another on the way.

The Boyettes have insurance through the state through his wife's job. Under the new law, his family's insurance premium has gone up $190 a month, from $350 to $540.

"We have less coverage than before at a higher out-of-pocket expense," Boyette said. "One company, three choices, that was it. This was not what [President Barack Obama] assured me and many others."

ROSE- PENNSYLVANIA

I cannot believe what has happened to my health insurance at work. Last year it cost me about 85.00 a month with 80% coverage. This year it doubled! I now pay 171.00 and for less coverage, as with a very high deductible! When I went to the Doctors just recently, they paid only 0.896 cents. Last year they covered the cost at 80%, so I do not know how they calculate or what my deductible is! I have to get blood work done, sure it will cost a lot more this year! When I called my benefits office they claim it's because of the new laws. Tried to cancel my insurance due to the fact I can not afford to pay them, and they claim company policy I can not unless I have a different insurance or leave the job. Why shouldn't I be able to get rid of something I can not afford?

That will do it for today. A root cause of high healthcare costs, obesity, getting worse, despite the passage of Obama Care, premium costs going up substantially for 2016, incremental overhead costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and more heartache at the household level. Worst peice of Washington legislation ever passed, hands down.

More unfolding disasters tomorrow and beyond.


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