May, 2015, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Cowardness In Congress,Beating the Obama Care System and More

Every month for the past few years we have had to dedicate multiple posts every month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It is without a doubt the worse piece of legislation ever passed passed by Washington, as one can see from our dozens of posts and the hundreds of mini-disasters we have discussed in each of those posts.

The legislation has increased insurance costs, stifled the economy, caused millions of people to lose access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies, increased the national debt, and exposed the many lies and intentional deceptions of this President and his political allies. It is a piece of legislation that has no chance of accomplishing its supposed goal of reducing healthcare costs in this country since it never understood nor addressed the underlying root causes of our high healthcare costs. These root causes include,m but are not limited to:

• Americans eat too much overall and too much of the wrong types of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• Washington laws and regulation encourage additives such as high fructose corn syrup to infest our food supply.
• The medical industry is in urgent need of tort reform.
• Current laws and regulations discourage cross state border insurance company competition.
• Federal healthcare programs today are infested with criminal activity that wastes upwards of a $100 billion a year.
• The Obama administration never “followed the money” to find out where the waste and over charging was in the entire medical industry.

Without understanding and alleviating these root causes, it makes no difference how many people get Obama Care insurance policies, the costs will keep going up and care will keep going down.

So with this quick background, let’s take a look at what Obama Care disasters have popped up in the past month or so, something we started with yesterday’s post:

1) In order for the Obama Care financials to pan out, about 40% of its customers were expected to be in the younger age brackets, aged 18 to 34 years of age, (i.e. the “young invincibles”). The reason is that younger people tend to be healthier and need less health care. Thus, the plan was for these younger policyholders to help pay for the expected higher medical costs of older policy holders. If that percentage is too low then the Obama Care population would skew older and less healthy, making the financials blow up and the costs to the insurance companies be higher than expected or wanted.

And so far, after the second open enrollment period, the financial expectation relative to the average age of Obama Care enrollees is not looking good. The age profile for the second round of enrollment shows that the young invincibles make up about 28% of Obama policy holders, about the same percentage as the first year.

This low percentage of younger customers could eventually lead to a death spiral of cost increases for Obama Care policies: the insurance companies holding these policies realize that they are paying out more in insurance costs than expected which requires them to raise policy prices which turns off even more younger people which causes the Obama Care poll to be comprised of even older, sicker people which increases healthcare costs… 

And if you combine the reality that in 2017 the Federal subsidy programs being paid to insurance companies to keep Obama Care policy costs low go away, then the costs of this badly planned legislation will sky rocket and cause the entire operation to implode. All because the root causes were never addressed and remedied which led to a fatally flawed economic model.

2) Simple economic theory says that the more you have of a product or service the lower the prices will be due to increased competition. Unfortunately, when it comes to small, rural hospitals, Obama Care is causing there to be less medical services available which is likely to drive up costs. According to a recent Associated Press report, small, rural hospitals across the country are closing down due to financial stress:

• For example, after 45 years of providing health care in rural western Missouri, Sac-Osage Hospital is being sold piece by piece.
• Ceiling tiles are going for 25 cents, the room doors for an average of less than $4 each, the patient beds for $250 apiece. Soon, the remnants of the hospital that long symbolized the lifeblood of Osceola, population 923, will be torn to the ground.
• A total of 50 similar rural hospitals have closed since 2010 with the trend accelerating with more closures in the past two years than the past ten years combined. Wasn’t it Obama Care that came into existence a little over two years ago?
• The AP report found that upwards of another 283 rural hospitals could be shut down in the near future and that 35% of all rural hospitals are now operating at a financial loss.
• Many of these hospitals rely on Federal government payments to cover Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus, according to the AP report, “Hospitals that rely heavily on those government programs have been particularly hard hit by Federal budget cuts and provisions in the 2010 federal health care law that reduced charity care reimbursements and changed other payment criteria.”

Did Obama Care cause all of the problems forcing the closing of rural hospitals? No, but 1) it did contribute to the financial distress and 2) it did not help the situation either, leaving millions of Americans without good medical options within their geographic and financial price range. In other words, even if you have health insurance via Obama Care, does you no good if you cannot get health care.

3) If you did not have health insurance coverage in 2014, when you filed your Federal income taxes you were supposed to pay a penalty for not having coverage. The strategy for having the penalty was to force people to get Obama Care health insurance if they did not have any coverage to begin with and imposing a financial burden by the writers of the legislation seemed like a nice, vindictive way to force people to do something they might not want to do, i.e. make them criminals.

But the website, www.townhall.com, found a way and strategy to avoid paying for high priced, poor quality Obama Care policies, still protect yourself from a devastating illness, and how to game the Obama Care system to satisfy your needs with minimal costs. Their approach is really quite ingenious and totally legal and it leverages the Obama Care tenet that no one can be denied Obama Care insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

Rather than having me try to explain the process, go to the following link to find out how to outsmart Obama Care, stay legal, and save a lot of money in the process, an approach that seems particularly attractive to younger people

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2013/12/23/how-to-get-real-and-affordable-health-insurance-without-obamacare-n1767438/page/full

4) Stephen Moore, recently writing for the Heritage Foundation did a nice job of reviewing the history of cancer treatment and the current status of cancer treatment in this country. His writings can be accessed at:

http://dailysignal.com/author/stephen-moore/

He makes a convincing case that of all the factors hindering the search for cancer cures, Obama Care might be the biggest factor inhibiting advances in cancer treatment:

“Finally, the greatest setback for cancer research and wonder treatments in modern times is Obamacare. That dismal law puts new taxes on the next generation of life-saving drugs, vaccines and medical devices. It may be the dumbest tax in history. Mr. President, if you want more of something, you don’t raise taxes on it, you cut them. Repealing these taxes is one small step Washington could take to accelerate the race for the cure and save millions of lives each year. What are we waiting for?”

Causing companies and researchers to divert capital away from research and development to cover Obama Care taxes is a viable line of reasoning, especially since the law itself has such low potential for doing any good and the potential for developing anti-cancer treatments is so much higher with so much large positive societal impact.

5) One last disaster for this month. Today, a Senate committee voted against getting rid of one ofthe largest injustices of Obama Care. As the law is written, Federal employees, from sitting Congressional people to lowly Congressional staffers were supposed to get their health insurance via Obama Care individual policies, much like millions of other Americans and suffer the same consequences of such a move as millions of other Americans.

But Congress, cowards as they are, convinced the Obama administration to exempt them and all Federal workers from such high cost nonsense and illegally allowed them to get lower cost, taxpayer subsidized health insurance through, of all things, the Washington D.C. small business Obama Care exchange. A petition to right this wrong reads as follows and provides more details:

No Washington Exemption from Obamacare!
Send Letters to Congress : 60,177 Letters Sent So Far

When the Democrats were rushing the health care law through Congress before most of them even knew what was in it, Republicans insisted on language requiring members of Congress and their staff to go into the new health care exchanges, to experience the same thing millions of Americans would experience and create a strong incentive, therefore, for them to make sure the system works.

Like many Americans being dumped into Obamacare exchanges, members of Congress and their staff stood to lose their employer contributions - in this case, the generous financing of their health benefits by taxpayers that they had before the law passed and took it away.

But unlike all of the other Americans in that situation, Congress had access to President Obama to personally intervene on their behalf. And he did, with an OPM rule allowing them to avoid the costs of being dumped into Obamacare exchanges. That's wrong.

And because there is no mechanism for employer contributions in the regular exchange, Congress also filed false documents claiming the House and Senate each have less than 50 employees to sign up as "small businesses," even though over 13,700 employees have in fact signed up. That's fraud.

Tell Congress: "Support Chairman Vitter’s effort to end Washington’s Exemption from Obamacare!"

If you believe that the law should be followed by those that actually wrote it and that this special financial favor be disposed off, please go to the following link to take action:

http://action.americancommitment.org/11464/no-washington-exemption-from-obamacare/

So, let’s review today’s disasters:

• The Obama Care policy holder mixed is badly skewed to older and sicker patients, likely leading to an eventual death spiral of rising costs.
• Healthcare coverage is decreasing in rural America, something not anticipated by Obama Care and probably made worse by Obama Care, as rural hospitals are closing rapidly.
• There is a low cost, legal way to beat Obama Care and still have healthcare coverage.
• The biggest obstacle to new treatments for cancer could be Obama Care itself.
• Congress took the cowardly way out and continues to disobey the law it wrote relative to health insurance for Federal workers.

Obama Care, the law that keeps on failing, month after month after month.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w