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.

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November, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 5: Making Divorce More Economical, Twisting Twitter's Arm?,

This is the fifth in our series this month that covers the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Over the years, and especially the past few months, it has been increasingly more difficult to keep up with the idiocy, insanity, and wastefulness of this legislation. In just the past three months we have had to dedicate almost thirty daily posts just to get through all of the nonsense. I do not know how many posts it will take this month to get through it all since more insanity pops as quickly as we review it.

As we promised earlier this week, we are not going into to tremendous details, analyses, and background on the latest bad news. We have done that in-depth work in the past few months. This week and probably next, we are just trying to document and stay ahead of the bad news from the worst piece of legislation ever written.

1) We have often pointed out how the writers of Obama Care never stopped to examine their logic train to make sure that stupid stuff did not happen as a result of the law. But, unfortunately, stupid stuff keeps popping up as a result of the law. 

Consider a November 6, 2013 report from CBS News in New York. Nona Willis Aronowitz and Aaron Cassara’s love affair began at a party in 2008 and within a year they found themselves getting married at the NYC  City Hall in Manhattan. However, four years later they realized they could save thousands of dollars annually if they got divorced and signed up for health insurance via Obama Care. 

The math calculation  for Aronowitz and Cassara is that together as a family of only two, they make more than the $62,000 level to qualify for Obama Care. However, if they got divorced and lived together unmarried, they would qualify for the law’s subsidies and could literally save hundreds of dollars a month on their health care.

Why? A single person can qualify for Obama Care subsidies if their income is less than $46,000 a year. Thus, by living together, unmarried, the stupidity of the Obama Care math makes it very profitable to get divorced for these two New Yorkers and probably many other Americans across the country. 

You cannot say any law is a good piece of legislation when it reaches so deeply down into a family and forces the family to make the life impacting decision to get a divorce. Pathetic.

2) This Presidential administration promised to be the most transparent ever. We have proven that promise to be a joke any number of times but the latest proof of this false claim recently came about relative to Obama Care. 

A website that tracks the health care policy cancellations and the skyrocketing  premiums and deductibles being caused by Obama Care, mycancellation.com, has had a rough start, with Twitter freezing its Twitter account at least three times since the site launched last week. Twitter provided no advance notice or warning of the disruption to their service and the people operating the website and related Twitter account suspect there is some political motivation or arm twisting behind the scenes to silence the bad news that their effort is uncovering. Definitely not a transparency friendly atmosphere if that arm twisting is coming from the Obama administration.

But the other half of the story beyond the news suppression, is the incredible number of stories that Americans are sending into this collection effort along with copies of their policy cancellation letters and the notices of how much their current health care costs will be going up if they are fortunate enough not to have their policies cancelled. Their stories and the proof of their agony and pain from Obama Care’s tentacles can be seen at the following link:

http://www.teaparty.org/twitter-fire-removing-photos-people-whove-lost-health-insurance-30337/

3) Any reasonable person would probably conclude that media empire NBC has been a fervent and biased supporter of Obama from day one of his administration. We could go off on why and how they are so biased but it is funny what happened in late October. CNBC’s morning anchors discussed the recent news that their own insurance plans will become more expensive because of  Obama Care.

On Oct. 30’s “Squawk Box,” CNBC correspondent Scott Cohn revealed details of NBC’s open enrollment, showing an official fact book outlining the process. He quoted the document, revealing that Obama Care would increase NBC employee health insurance premiums. Cohn observed “Some of these costs, when you look at this, are way up -- double digits.” Well duh?

4) When CNN reports something bad about the Obama administration, you know that the administration really screwed up. CNN reported in early November: 

Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.

In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it.

Rather than listen to the Republicans, EVERY Senate Democrat voted to support the provision that is causing havoc for American families with millions of people losing their access to their preferred insurance plans. Thus, they are complicit in the President’s lies or deceptions that if you liked your current policy you could keep your current policy. That options was snuffed out three years ago by every Senate Democrat and not a single one of them had enough integrity to warn America about the impending doom, a doom predicted by Senate Republicans.

5) Again, when NBC comes down hard on this administration you know they really laid an egg. The following link puts to video clips side by side. The first clip is the President emphatically declaring that if you like your current insurance policy, you can keep it under Obama care. 

The second clip is about a small business owner who saw his health insurance costs go up 400% since he now must buy an Obama Care policy that provides maternity health care for his 59 year old wife. Just another  bit of stupidity and no one thinking through what was actually in Obama Care:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/small-business-owners-premiums-increase-400/

6) It is so pathetic when politicians realize they screwed up and could lose their access to the best and most cushy job in the world, that of being a U.S. Senator. Politico reported on October 30, 2013  that Louisiana Senator Landrieu would introduce a measure that would allow Americans to keep their health insurance coverage amid a flurry of reports documenting that hundreds of thousands of people have been told that they will lose their plans because of Obama Care. 

“The promise was made, and it should be kept,” said the good Senator. “And it was our understanding when we voted for that bill that people when they have insurance could keep with what they had. So I’m going to be working on that fix.”

Two problems her, Senator. As we discussed above, three years ago you voted against a Republican provision that would have avoided this mess altogether. You blew that chance and now about 3.5 million Americans have already lost access to their preferred plans. 

Second, just this past August, at an event sponsored by the Southwest Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, you publicly stated: “If I had to vote for the bill again, I would vote for it tomorrow.” So what happened between August and now? What changed such a dramatic turnaround? Oh, that’s right, your 2014 reelection hopes have taken a gigantic hit because of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Talk about a hypocrite.

7) In closing today, I directly lifted some talking points from an October 31, 2013 analysis by the Heritage Foundation. Their article pointed out hat there are at least four other brewing Obma Care disaster besides the currently exploding disasters of Americans losing access to their preferred doctors, their preferred health insurance plans, and the fact that many are seeing their deductibles and premiums going up substantially in cost.

As Heritage points out, these four other disasters were predicted years ago but no one in this administration took them seriously but they have now arrived on the doorsteps of tens of millions of Americans:

1. Back-Door Public Option: You might have thought it was killed off, but an ugly embodiment of the public option is alive and well in Obamacare. Health expert Robert Moffit pointed out in 2011 that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) next year will administer at least two nationwide health plans that will compete against private insurance. OPM is responsible for these plans’ pricing, profits, and operations.

These government-sponsored plans are the only health plans that can compete nationwide under a new set of rules, giving them an unfair advantage in an already disrupted health insurance market. “Instead of fair competition with private health plans, Congress is sponsoring the equivalent of a national monopoly,” Moffit wrote.

2. Illegal Subsidies to Congressional Members and Their Staffs: Keep in mind, OPM is the same agency that recently ruled members of Congress and their staffs can buy health insurance in the Obamacare exchanges and use a large, tax-free subsidy that exists for federal workers who get their coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). Sure, the federal government doesn’t have actual legal authority to pay for federal workers in a health plan outside of plans contracted by OPM. But when has that stopped this Administration from creating special rules that flout the law’s language?

3. Cancellations in Employer-Sponsored Insurance: Much of the recent media focus is on cancellations for customers with individual insurance plans, but Heritage, the Congressional Budget Office, Deloitte, McKinsey & Co., and other organizations have warned for years that businesses will drop health coverage for their employees and dump them onto the federal health exchanges. With higher health costs, it will be cheaper for many companies to pay Obamacare’s employer mandate fine rather than pay for expensive, government-mandated health plans.

The scenarios vary, but anywhere from 5 million to 35 million hard-working Americans could lose their current health plans—and face the same plight of many customers forced to deal with a glitch-ridden website to buy plans on the Obamacare exchanges. A big reason why this hasn’t materialized yet is the Administration’s recent decision to delay the employer mandate until 2015.

4. Perverse Incentives That Hurt Low-Income Workers: The employer mandate delay hits the pause button on another expected setback for lower-income workers—mainly pricing them out of full-time employment. Labor expert James Sherk warned in 2011 that after paying for new health premiums, the minimum wage, payroll taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes, hiring a full-time worker would cost at least $10.03 an hour. With full-time family health plans easily costing $13.75 an hour, companies would lose money by having full-time workers with low productivity rates. Therefore, less-skilled workers would be at more risk for having their full-time jobs replaced with part-time ones.

Enough for today, but more disasters 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.

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