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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.
But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare 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.
For the past several days we have been reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington. Today's review will end this series of Obama Care updates until next month:
1) We have often made the claim, including in the preceding paragraphs, that Obama Care will never succeed in reducing the nation’s healthcare costs because the law never addressed the underlying root causes of those ever rising costs. The legislation and Obama tried to resolve a public health issue with a hokey insurance solution that is bound to fail and fail in an expensive manner.
As an example of why this is a public health issue, consider a recent Wall Street Journal article that was summarized in the May 8, 2015 issue of The Week magazine. According to the article, 28% of Americans were TOTALLY sedentary in 2014. TOTALLY means that they did not participate in a single physical activity such as lifting weights, running, yoga, bowling, or even stretching.
These results come from a survey by the Physical Activity Council which estimated that 83 million Americans age 6 or older did nothing to maintain their personal physical fitness throughout 2014, an increase of 18% since 2007. Is it any surprise then that obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other expensive to treat illnesses are driving up the cost of healthcare in this country?
These medical afflictions could all be addressed if America would start doing some exercising. Instead of launching a public health initiative to drive down the demand for healthcare services, and by driving down demand the price and costs of healthcare would also come down, we are stuck with a failing insurance system via Obama Care that leaves the public health driver of costs unaffected. Insane.
2) Let’s continue on the whole public health issue them for this next discussion. Based on recent analyses and data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, half of all U.S. adults are suffering from diabetes or are at risk of getting diabetes in the near future. Yes, one out of every two Americans are currently or getting close to being in a diabetic state, a condition that has driven up health care costs in this country and will likely continue to drive those costs in the future.
As we stated in the previous point and in other posts, this is an unaddressed public health issue that Obama Care did nothing to remedy. According to the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, most of these cases are Type 2 diabetes, which is caused by, surprise, surprise... poor diet and a lack of exercise. Sound familiar, public health issues, not an insurance issue.
The government study, recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also found that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians were more than twice as likely to suffer from diabetes as white people. Thus, not only have we identified an overall root cause of rising healthcare costs, we have also found where to focus a public health campaign to alleviate that problem.
Fix the root causes and the reduction in the demand for health care services will drive down the cost of providing healthcare services, it is simple logic and simple economics. But nothing with Obama Care is simple or logical and that is why it is a failure.
3) The large majority of Americans who got health care coverage as a result of Obama Care got it because they were now eligible for Medicaid coverage, the lowest form and probably lowest quality of health insurance available today. But coverage is coverage, right? Better than no coverage, Right?
Wrong. As Peter Suderman from Reason magazine points out back in mid-2013, those people with Medicaid coverage are not healthier or better off with similar people that do not have Medicaid coverage along several important health measurements. A test/control study in Oregon published by the New England Journal Of Medicine found that Medicaid has “no measurable effect on any of the objectively measured physical health outcomes the study examined.”
This study took advantage of a unique situation in Oregon relative to Medicaid patients. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment randomly picked over 6,000 state citizens to be covered by Medicaid and and a similar and large control group of state citizens that were not covered by any insurance including Medicaid. The study then went back after two years to compare the health profiles of the test/Medicaid covered group and the control, non-Medicaid covered group.
What they found is very interesting and unexpected:
- Those with Medicaid coverage did NOT have healthier blood pressure readings, did NOT have better cholesterol levels, and did not have better diabetic blood pressure control vs. the control group.
- Those with Medicaid coverage did not use the emergency room any less than those without Medicaid coverage.
- Those with Medicaid did see some reduction in their out of pocket healthcare costs vs. the control group.
- However, total spending on healthcare by those Medicaid patients, the majority of which is paid for by taxpayers, shot up significantly without any apparent improvement in overall health.
In other words, like most government programs, the Medicaid option via Obama Care resolves very little and accomplishes even that little bit at great expense to the American taxpayer.
4) We have probably done over a hundred posts on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have discussed the reality that it never addressed the underlying root causes of our rising healthcare costs, how people like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and many other politicians bold faced lied of what the benefits of the legislation would be, how we were promised that if we liked our current doctor, hospital, or insurance plan that we could keep them under Obama Care (we could not), how the middle class would not see any tax increases as a result of Obama Care (we did), how the program would only cost $900 billion over ten years (according to the Congressional Budget Office it will cost twice that much, at least), how it will not add a dime to the national debt (it will add over a trillion dollars), how insurance costs for a typical American family would go down by upwards of $2,500 a year (those costs rose significantly instead) etc., etc., etc.
To review those past posts, just type in “unfolding disaster” in the search box above. Or, go to the following link to get a 17 minute synopsis of everything that went wrong with Obama Care from the start:
http://www.youngcons.com/greatest-video-deconstruction-obamacare-you-will-ever-see/
While the presentation is a bit over dramatic, the essence of the message is clear and verifiable: this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington, it was the most deceptively presented piece of legislation ever presented by Washington, and the lies associated with it are despicable.
5) And if the previous set of video clips and the lies they contain is not enough to make you lose your lunch, consider the following set of video clips of the President making sure that we knew we would save up to $2,500 a year on health insurance premiums once Obama Care was passed. This promise almost became a mantra of this President, as you will see in the video, a mantra that turned out to be either the largest lie ever told to the American public or the words of a President who had not idea what he was talking about….or both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o65vMUk5so
6) We will end this month’s chapter of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care with just a few more real life examples of how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families, using the website, www.myhealthcarestory.com, as our source:
Wayne from Indiana on October 21, 2013
Just got my 2014 healthcare package details this week. It includes a 73% increase in premium contribution, $600 deductible increase, and $2,000 increase in out of pocket maximum. My current plan option was discontinued so I could not “keep my plan” even though I was completely satisfied with it. Now I am hoping my current doctor will accept the new plan.
David from Alabama on November 5, 2013
My premium increase is devastating to my budget and I am, for the first time in my life, worried about my health care. I was just getting by and thanks to The “Affordable” Care Act (Obamacare) I am no longer able to make ends meet. Is this what Obama means by redistributive policies? It is more like reverse Robin Hood if you ask me.
Pat from Minnesota on October 17, 2013
The company that I am a insurance agent representing- sent us a letter saying that due to the changes in the healthcare law- in 2014- that they no longer are offering the group plan that we have had since I started there over 25 years ago. We now all need to find our own individual policies.
I am sure we will be back the same time next month with more disasters from Obama Care, the disaster that keeps on giving.
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