We will need at least today’s discussion to cover the idiocy and futility of the Obama Care fiascos from the past month or so. Previous month’s fiascos can be seen by typing “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.
1) In what may be one of Obama Care’s scummiest tenets is recent news that has been uncovered relative to non-profit hospitals. Recall that under the Obama Care law, every American is required to purchase health insurance or face fines via IRS procedures for not purchasing.
However, many of America’s hospitals have treated sick kids for a long time whose families do not have health insurance policies in effect. If that behavior was to continue into the future, the Federal government, under Obama Care, could fine those hospitals thousands of dollars for each instance of serving a sick uninsured kid or eventually revoke that hospital’s non-profit status, if it was non-profit, causing the hospital to now pay taxes to the Federal government.
Under Obama Care’s newly created IRS Section 501, financial penalties will be incurred by hospitals that provide care for uninsured, poor Americans. The underlying, and underhanded reason, for this approach is that by providing needed medical care to sick kids the kids families might not be anxious to sign up for Obama Care insurance policies. By threatening hospitals for serving the needy, it can force the needy to buy insurance as required by Obama Care.
The situation is better described by John Kartch of Americans For Tax Reform:
“Failure to comply, or to prove this continuing need, could result in the loss of the hospital’s tax-exempt status. The hospital would then become a for-profit venture, paying income tax— hence the positive revenue score. Obama Care advocates turned over every rock to find as much tax money as possible.”
Pretty sad when a Washington law goes after more tax revenue at the expense of sick kids.
2) Almost as despicable as using sick kids to attain your political goals is to accuse anyone who disagrees with your view of being a racists. Critics of Obama Care have been called racists for years under the assumption that if you disagree with what an African-American President says, it must be because you are a racist.
Has nothing to do with expressing an opinion or holding an honest and legitimate contrary view, a view that has been proven right over the years. Disagree with Obama, you must be a racist. Senator Jay Rockefeller repeated this tired cliché recently relative to critics of Obama Care:
“I’ll be able to dig up some emails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good — especially from people who made up their mind that they don’t want it to work because they don’t like the president. Maybe he’s of the wrong color, something of that sort. I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true. It’s not something you’re meant to talk about in public but it’s something I’m talking about in public because that is very true.”
Hey Senator, maybe we do not want Obama Care to work because, as we have reviewed many times in this blog:
- The legislation makes the cost of insurance premiums and deductible go up in cost.
- Millions of Americans have lost their health care coverage as a result of Obama Care.
- The legislation never understood or attacked the underlying root causes of our high health care costs so it has little chance of being successful.
- It only signed up a net two million people to health insurance policies despite spending untold billions of dollars.
- It is causing millions of Americans to lose work hours, lose their jobs, or not get access to jobs that would have been created without Obama Care.
- The cost of the program is now well north of two trillion dollars.
- Americans are losing access to their preferred doctors and hospitals and the top hospitals in the country.
3) A recent poll of potential voters in so-called competitive Congressional districts by Politico showed how unpopular Obama Care is with a majority of Americans:
- 89% of respondents said it will affect their votes.
- 60% of respondents said the debate and finality of Obama Care is not over while only 39% said it should be.
- 48% said Obama Care should be repealed, 35% said they would “keep the law, but with modifications,” and only 16% would keep it as is.
- Thus, more than five times as many voters want some changes or the total repeal of the law vs. those that want to do nothing and keep the law as is.
4) We have often talked about and provided examples of government actions and laws that do the exact opposite of what they were intended to. And according to a new study out of the University of Minnesota, Obama Care might actually INCREASE the number of uninsured Americans, the exact opposite of what is was supposed to do.
According to a recent Washington Post article, Professor Stephen Parente and Adjunct Professor Michael Ramlet did an economic analysis of Obama Care and its projected effect on the number of uninsured Americans over the next ten years. They concluded that the number of uninsured will go up starting in 2017, due to the declining purchasing power of the government subsidies.
In other words, the legislation will not curtail the growth of health care enough to continue to make the Federal subsidies for low income Obama Care policy holders attractive. When the costs go up too fast and the subsidy levels do not keep up, policy holders will drop the Obama Care policies because of the higher out of pocket expense.
They also found that health insurance costs will increase by nearly $1400 for those individuals with “silver” Obama Care plans and $4200 for families with “silver” Obama Care, as they explained in the article from the Post:
Nationally, we estimate an initial decrease in the uninsured with greater use of the private health insurance subsidies, but over time health plan prices are likely to increase faster than the value of the insurance subsidy. As a result of the declining purchasing power of the insurance subsidy, the implementation of the qualified health plan requirements and the end of the reinsurance and risk corridor programs we estimate a significant reduction in the private insurance market in 2017 with steady declines continuing for the rest of the decade.
Great do something and get the exact opposite of what you planned for, only in Washington and only with our politicians.
5) We have often talked about how the web based Obama Care health insurance exchanges that were developed by some of the states have often been a disaster. The state of Oregon wasted tens of millions of dollars on a site that signed up one customer online. Nevada had to opt out of its site as has a number of other states (e.g. Maryland, Massachusetts, etc.).
The reason that these states are getting out of operating their own websites for Obama Care signups is that they could not manage to put together a website system that worked. But other states are having other problems even though their websites for Obama Care signups worked adequately.
It turns out that even if your website works okay, the cost of operating it is getting way out of line of expectations. Apparently, Rhode Island is considering getting out of their website process and letting their citizens default to the Federal website since the estimated annual cost of maintaining and operating their own site is about $23 million, much more than they expected or budgeted for. Illinois is even in worse shape with the annual operating expenses of their Obama Care exchange website likely to be about $100 million. Since the entire state of Illinois is a financial basket case, a large unexpected expense like this can be devastating.
Thus, either because of operational ineptness or overwhelming operating expense, the majority of states that built their own website, at a total costs of probably billions of dollars, will likely dump them anyway and default to the Federal Obama Care website. And given how poorly that website process has worked, adding millions of additional users from these states is sure to make the entire operation collapse under its own weight and incompetence.
Another bad day for Obama Care. Forcing hospitals to not serve uninsured sick kids, opponents are still racists despite the ungodly bad realities of this law, the vast majority of Americans still do not like the law, the law might be doing just the opposite of what it is intended to do, and the political class still cannot build an efficient and cost effective website process. Insane and pathetic and more tomorrow.
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