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