The Obama Era, Part 2: Memories From The Worst Presidency Ever?

We are coming up on the end of another year so I thought it might be a good time to review everything that I remember about the Obama administration. He has been in office for seven years, seven long years that in my opinion have been horrific in so many ways. This was someone who entered office with approval ratings that were above 70% and who represented the so-called “hope and change” that many Americans were seeking.

Seven years later hope has become very scarce and change has almost always been for the worst. Now, before someone says that I am just a sour grapes Republican, conservative, or neo-con, understand that I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life (I started voting in the 1970s). Up until 2010, I had never voted for Republican for national office in my life. I fully support gay rights and respect a woman’s legal right to an abortion. Thus, none of what you are about to read over the next few days comes from a Republican sour grapes perspective.

But unless you have had completely had your head in the sand or elsewhere, this has been the worst Presidency that I have experienced in my lifetime. From horrid legislation (e.g. Obama Care) to a failed foreign policy (e.g. Syria) to daily lawlessness on the part of this administration (e.g. use of unsecured email accounts by high ranking administration members), the ineptness and ineffectiveness of this administration is mind boggling.

Thus, given this set up, in no particular order, this is what I will remember about the Obama Presidency:

- I will remember that this administration illegally ignotred the orders of a Federal judge relative to a ban on drilling in the Gulf Of Mexico.

- I will remember that whenever this President was called upon to pay a tribute to other Americans, e.g. Neil Armstrong, 9-11 victims, Daniel Inouye, Rosa Parks, etc., he always made the tribute about himself, not others.

- I will remember how this President illegally and unConstitutionally entered this country into the Libyan civil war without the consent of Congress, wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth, endangering the lives of American servicemen and women, and helped create another failed, terrorism infested state.

- I will remember how this President illegally and unConstitutionally refused to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, which although a repugnant piece of legislation signed by Democrat Bill Clinton, it was still the law of the land and required the consent of Congress to repeal it, not the unilateral action of the executive branch.

- I will remember how this President deliberately tried to bypass Congress and the Constitution by establishing a shadow government of “czars” that were not accountable to the people or voters.

- I will remember how this administration gave away tens of billions of dollars to failed alternative energy companies (e.g. Solyndra), mostly run by or financed by Democratic operatives, with no societal benefit in return.

- I will remember how this administration made sure that a major Democratic financial supporter of Solyndra, the Kaiser Foundation, was illegally given priority in bankruptcy proceedings over the American taxpayer when Solyndra failed.

- I will remember how this administration established and then tried to cover up a failed gun running program called Fast and Furious, a program that broke numerous domestic and international laws on gun running, directly resulted in the death of at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent and at least dozens of innocent Mexican civilians, and which accomplished nothing.

- I will remember how this administration implemented a series of failed, and mostly inane, economic stimulus programs including Cash For Clunkers, Cash For Appliances, Cash For Caukers, HARP, and more.

- I will remember how Americans' wages and household wealth have stagnated in the past seven years despite being many years beyond of the end of the recession.

- I will remeber how this administration used the IRS to harass political opponents and American citizens who dared to disagree with Obama's positons including Dr. Ben Carson and Sarah Palin's father.

- I will remember how this administration was caught totally unaware and unprepared when one of the biggest freedom movements of this era came to be, the Arab Spring, indicating a massive contingency planning failure of the Obama State Department.

- I will remember how Obama mistook a public health crisis (e.g. Americans smoke too much, Americans eat too much, Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans do not exercise enough), which is the primary driver and the root causes of our high health care costs, and tried to resolve the high cost issue with a Rube Goldberg insurance solution that has failed miserably and left the root causes intact.

- I will remember how the this administration failed to clean up the criminal fraud and wasteful spending of all Federal government entities such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, housing, etc., which in total easily wastes hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars every year.

- I will remember how this administration failed to fix the operations of Federal government agencies including the IRS that fails to collect hundreds of billions of tax evader taxes every year, the Pentagon whose accounting systems are so bad that they cannot even be audited, and the waste and redundancy of government programs, as witnesses by the reality that the Federal government has 15 different agencies overseeing food safety laws, more than 20 independent programs helping the homeless, 80 different programs to help economic development, 82 different government agencies working on improving teacher quality, 47 different government agencies working on job training, and 18 different programs working on food and nutrition assistance.

- I will remember how this President always blamed others for his failings, it was never his fault things failed, at various times it was the fault of It was the fault of the Bush administration, it was the fault of the Tea Party, it was the fault of the Republicans, it was the fault of Congress, it was the fault of the Japanese tsunami, it was the fault of the Euro crisis, it was the fault of wealthy Americans who do not pay enough in taxes, it was the fault of ATM machines that help cause high unemployment, it was the fault of ordinary Americans who have grown “a little soft” and who “have lost their ambition” over the years, and it was the fault of the Chinese.

- I will remember how this President often claimed ignorance when an unexpected domestic and international crisis caught him off guard and unprepared and how he found out about it from cable news stories.

- I will remember how this President often claimed that the medical needs of our veterans were a top priority for him but who never fixed the problems of the Veterans Administration, likely resulting in the premature deaths of hundreds of veterans.

- I will remember how Obama tried to bypass the Constitution and Congress by making government appointments during Congressional recesses even though in 2005 then Senator Obama said Bush’s recess appointments were “the wrong thing to do,” to appoint people who “couldn’t get through a Senate nomination,” promising that would never happen if he was President. 

- I will remember how Obama promised to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever and then promptly undercut that promise by abusing executive privilege, stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests, secretly investigating and harassing journalists, and impeding Congressional investigations.

- I will remember how Obama promised to shut down the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, implying that those there would get their day in court, but instead the center is still open and and Obama is bypassing judicial processes to unilaterally release terrorists back out into the world.

- I will remember how Obama promised that the nation’s unemployment rate would go as high as 8% unless his $800 billion economic stimulus program was passed and how the the program was enacted and the unemployment rate still soared well beyond 8% for a very long time.

I will remember a lot about this Presidency, almost all of it very forgettable, regrettable and often disgusting, as we have discussed over the past two days. And unfortunately, I will still have more bad memories to review 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.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Obama Era, Part 1 - Memories From The Worst Presidency Ever?

We are coming up on the end of another year so I thought it might be a good time to review everything that I remember about the Obama administration. He has been in office for seven years, seven long years that in my opinion have been horrific in so many ways. This was someone who entered office with approval ratings that were above 70% and who represented the so-called “hope and change” that many Americans were seeking.

Seven years later hope has become very scarce and change has almost always been for the worst. Now, before someone says that I am just a sour grapes Republican, conservative, or neo-con, understand that I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life (I started voting in the 1970s). Up until 2010, I had never voted for Republican for national office in my life. I fully support gay rights and respect a woman’s legal right to an abortion. Thus, none of what you are about to read over the next few days comes from a Republican sour grapes perspective.

But unless you have had completely had your head in the sand or elsewhere, this has been the worst Presidency that I have experienced in my lifetime. From horrid legislation (e.g. Obama Care) to a failed foreign policy (e.g. Syria) to daily lawlessness on the part of this administration (e.g. use of unsecured email accounts by high ranking administration members), the ineptness and ineffectiveness of this administration is mind boggling.

Thus, given this set up, in no particular order, this is what I will remember about the Obama Presidency:

- I will remember that the major issues facing the country when he was sworn in as President are no better and perhaps have gotten worst seven years later:

• Our public schools still fail to properly education our kids despite the trillions of dollars we have spent on their poor education.
• Our borders still leak.
• Our “war on drugs” is still failing with no alternative proposed or deployed.
• Our nation still lacks a comprehensive energy strategy and plan to deliver clean, inexpensive energy to the American economy.

- I will remember that this administration severely violated the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans by using the IRS to hinder their political organizing and fundraising activities.

- I will remember that this administration severely violated the Fourth Amendment rights of all Americans by collecting just about any form or communications of Americans without warrants or just cause.

- I will remember that this President attended hundreds of fund raising events, setting Presidential records, and played over 250 rounds of golf after promising that he would devote every waking moment of his life, if elected, to serving the people of the country and addressing their needs.

- I will remember that this President had no idea on how to cope with the Gulf oil spill and how he took two vacations, golfed, and attended a number of fund raising events while people in the Gulf coast states were fighting for their lands and livelihoods.

- I will remember that this President refused to attend a memorial service in France for the vicitms of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist assassinations even though every other major world leader attended. Instead, a week later he lamely sent Secretary of State John Kerry to France along with James Taylor to sing a song.

- I will remember how this President told so many lies about Obama Care:

• If you like your current health insurance policy, you can keep it.
• If you like your current doctors and hospitals you can keep them.
• You could save up to $2,500 a year in your family’s health insurance costs.
• Using the Obama Care online website exchanges will be easy and simple.
• Obama Care will not add a single dime to the national debt.
• Over 20 million uninsured Americans will have health insurance by 2016.

- I will remember how this President illegally and unConstitutionally made upwards of twenty changes to the Obama Care legislation without the consent of Congress.

- I will remember how this President lied when he promised to go through the Federal budget “line-by-line” to eliminate wasteful and redundant Federal government spending.

- I will remember how this President lied when he promised to unify the country and heal its racial and political divisions but instead helped widen existing divisions and create new ones.

- I will remember how this President illegally swapped out five high ranking captured terrorists for a sole Army deserter.

- I will remember how this President honored this deserter by inviting his parents to the White House for a meeting and press event but ignored the families of the soldiers who died searching for the the deserter in the wilds of Afghanistan.

- I will remember how this President allowed many high ranking members of his administration to blatantly violate Federal law when they used deceptive, secret, unsecured, likely hacked and criminal private email accounts to conduct government business.

- I will remember how this administration abandoned upwards of two dozen Americans to die in Benghazi by denying them the necessary military help that was ready and willing to go and rescue them.

- I will remember how this administration lied about the root cause of the Benghazi attack in order to preserve their precious political speaking points about curtailing terrorism and how it is not a factor in our lives anymore.

- I will remember how this President failed to live up to the Iraq troop withdrawal timetable that he promised while campaigning.

- I will remember how this President focused on the theory of man made climate change, that may or may not be a reality, vs. focusing on Islamic terrorism that is a real and fatal issue today.

- I will remember how this administration racked up four straight fiscal years of trillion dollar deficits, endangering the future economic health and viability of the country.

- I will remember how this administration violated the law four years in a row by not providing a detailed Federal government budget on time.

- I will remember how this administration has incurred MONTHLY budget deficits that often exceeded the ANNUAL budget deficits of the Bush administration.

- I will remember how this administration will likely incur a national debt level equal to the debt level incurred by all previous Presidential administrations COMBINED.

- I will remember how this President stood by silently, given his tacit approval, when his political allies called Americans a**h***s, Nazis, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, terrorists, racists, whores, sluts, and other vulgar names.

- I will remember how this President failed to come up with any plans to fix Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, three major government programs that are hurtling towards financial insolvency.

- I will remember how George W.Bush always left for Washington for his Christmas holiday the day after Christmas so that people associated with Presidential travel could spend Christmas with their families while Obama always left for his Christmas vacation, always to Hawaii, prior to Christmas day, denying those people associated with Presidential travel the opportunity to spend Christmas with their families.

- I will remember that despite free lodging, a massive staff, free food, free Presidential perks, free healthcare, and free Secret Service security protection, President Obama griped that his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, should be treated special and be paid just for being the First Lady even though every preivous First Lady did not get paid.

I will remember a lot about this Presidency, almost all of it very forgettable, regrettable and often disgusting. And unfortunately, I will still have more bad memories to review 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.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

December, 2015, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Personal Horror 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 are going to focus the entire post on the hardships that Obama Care has rained down on Americans across the country and point out which shortcomings of ObamaCare caused their problems. The source of these stories is the website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

1) JOE - NEW JERSEY: Joe Porzio, a 57-year-old construction worker in Wayne, has bought his own insurance through Aetna for years. When he received a letter saying his plan was being canceled by Dec. 31, he began looking at the federal marketplace for new options soon after it went live Oct. 1. He was eventually able to fill out an application, but the website locked him out and he has not been able to access it.

He finally completed a new application last week by phone but, as of Wednesday, was unable to access that one also. “The deadline is approaching, and I’m still in limbo,” Porzio said. “I also found out that my doctors, who I have been seeing for years, will now only accept the highest offered plans. So, it’s true, you have to pay to keep your doctors.” 

Obama Care Disasters: Lost access to preferred doctors, current policy cancelled, and difficulty accessing the Obama Care website.

2) DONNA - GEORGIA: Donna Hill in Duluth, Ga., just outside Atlanta, said premiums are 80- to 100-percent higher than those under current policies that offered wider networks

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premium costs and narrow, restricted healthcare networks.

3) LARRY - MICHIGAN: “I sold my business because of Obamacare. I opened my restaurant, Schu’s Grill & Bar, in 1990. There’s no question that the new health law has impacted not only my current business but future projects, too, to the point where I sold my restaurant in January and I’m in the final stages of moving on. I won’t be working in a brick-and-mortar business and putting people to work. I’ve chosen to go into consulting for myself and the ACA was one of the reasons, though not the only reason. 

During our busy season, we are well over the 50 full-time employee threshold, which meant we had to offer private health insurance under the new law. As a small-business owner, I don’t have a chief financial officer and the paperwork required would have added probably another 20 hours per month to my accounting staff. We didn’t have the dollars to put into those additional labor hours. 

It would have actually cost me all the profit I generated from the restaurant. Profit is not a dirty word. It’s important to survive. Before the ACA, we already offered private insurance to our employees and we paid 50% of their policies, which would have cost us $150 a month per worker. But we hired a lot of young professionals who were 27 or 28 years old and they would opt out of medical insurance because they said they didn’t need it. That’s the irony.

Yes, they extended the deadline for small-business owners to comply with the ACA until 2016. They bought more time, but unless there’s an evolution in the policy, it’s still unacceptable. I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed in the Obama leadership but I’m more disappointed in the real problem, which is that Americans don’t really take the time to study and understand what’s really happening in politics. We’re the ones that voted him into office. 

Obama Care Disasters: Business crushing government bureaucracy.

4) LEE - OHIO: I recently had to utilize my local ER. Obamacare was supposed to eliminate the use of ER's as substitute Doctor's Offices; however,my experience disproved that. I was there for post surgery complications, but had to wait behind people who complained of a sore throat, a cold, a pain in their shoulder, pain in their shin, an upset stomach, and three headaches. I waited 90 minutes in distress before being attended to. By the way, I was the only patient close to an emergency there...no broken bones, severe lacerations, or head injuries in sight.

Obama Care Disasters: Failure to reduce emergency room visits as promised.

5) DOMINIC - NEW YORK: As a retired information technology specialist, Dominic Saglibene is amazed. First, at the botched rollout of Obamacare website.

Second and, personally more important to Saglibene, at the dollar hit for healthcare he's going to face next year because his company reimbursement contribution will decrease.

It's such a hit, said Saglibene, who knew surgery was in his future, that he "rushed to do the operation now, before the end of the year, so I could get the maximum deductible."

Which leaves Saglibene, of Westerleigh, where?

At home recuperating and pondering what he calls "the not-affordable healthcare act."

After 36 years on the job as an IT specialist, Saglibene retired last year.

He said under the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act, his "retirement medical premium will go up $103 a month beginning in 2014."

Also, said Saglibene, his "maximum out-of-pocket has risen from $6,000 to $9,200 for my family in network, and the Health Reimbursement Account from my company will decrease from $2,000 to only $800."

Added Saglibene: "I have a fixed pension. I would expect our medical needs would go up as we get older."

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premium costs, higher deductible costs, and difficulty accessing the Obama Care website.

6) CHIP - OREGON: I would like to relay a real story about the Obamacare nightmare! My family and I had great Insurance. We got the 3 months extension so we have it up to March 31. I had to have emergency open heart surgery and our deductible is $5,000. Now I had the operation but have A fib, and our insurance will be gone. Our new insurance that is comparable is $306.00 more a month and has a $12,500 deductible! Our out of pocket health bill will be close to $20,000 this year! [ . . .]If you want to use us for an example of how bad this law is please let me know

We need to end this nightmare that they have thrown at us!

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premiums and higher deductibles.

7) DAVID - NEVADA: I was really looking forward to my $2,500 savings I was promised. My total yearly cost instead went up by $2,620 with a higher deductible. President Obama could not have been this far off in his prediction which means he knew he was lying and said it anyway.

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premiums and failure of Obama to deliver his promised $2,500 reduction in premiums.

8) 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.

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premiums and higher deductibles.

9) JOHN - NORTH CAROLINA: My story has more to do with how many individuals and companies have decided that since they don't like the ACA, they'll use it as an opportunity to justify scalping. My family paid a reasonably affordable plan with BCBS through my wife's employer. When the ACA was enacted, our insurance rate when up almost $130 PER MONTH. This is insane! Also, due to my wife and I just getting married right before all of this happened, somehow the company 'forgot' to add me to the plan even though we'd filed the paperwork two times. When I went to healthcare.gov, I was shocked at some of the prices, and thought I wouldn't be able to afford any insurance and have to pay a fine (to add insult to injury).

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premiums.

10) KENT - NEBRASKA: We had our long time blue cross policy cancelled because it was not good enough for Obama care. The policy we got offered cost us 25% more premium and increased our deductible from 5000.00 year put of pocket to 12,500.00 out of pocket. It had to include crap like birth control and maternity which 50 year old people do not need. To apply for a subsidy we had to give out all of our personal financial data to lord we do not even know who.

Obama Care Disasters: Increase in premiums, current policy cancelled, and forced to pay for health care services that are not needed.

11) ED - OHIO: Even after the administration made hundreds of improvements to the troubled Obamacare website, many people are still encountering difficulty.

Ed Anderson, a graphic designer from Columbus, Ohio, who was recently bumped from his wife’s insurance policy for reasons relating to the new law, discovered that his family’s monthly premiums will double even if he chooses the most inexpensive plan available to him through the new federal insurance exchange in his state.

Anderson said he and his wife currently pay a monthly premium of $460 through Blue Cross Blue Shield. But now that he can no longer stay on his wife’s plan, he will have to get his own coverage. The most inexpensive option would cost him a $428 monthly premium. And he and his wife can’t qualify for a federal subsidy because their joint income exceeds the cutoff. The new insurance policy will cost the Andersons an extra $5,000 a year in premiums alone.

“When you’re trying to keep your house, pay car insurance and put your kid through college, it’s tough,” Anderson said. Everything we do is going to be affected by this. Getting groceries, eating out. Going anywhere. It’s just crazy.”

Obama Care Disasters: Current policy cancelled and increase in premiums.

12) JOE - MICHIGAN: Lost my employer plan and now pay 21.6K per year for a Gold plan with no tax credit or subsidy. The coverage is not as good as the old plan and the premium is 32% of my retirement income after taxes. Obamacare has put our retirement plans in the tank.

Obama Care Disasters: Current plan cancelled, increase in premiums, and restricted healthcare networks.

13) LORI - CALIFORNIA: The Anthem Blue Cross representative who answered my call told me that there was a silver lining in the cancellation of my individual P.P.O. policy and the $5,400 annual increase that I would have to pay for the Affordable Care Act-compliant option: now if I have Stage 4 cancer or need a sex-change operation, I’d be covered regardless of pre-existing conditions. Never mind that the new provider network would eliminate coverage for my and my son’s long-term doctors and hospitals.

The Anthem rep cheerily explained that despite the company’s — I paraphrase — draconian rates and limited network, my benefits, which also include maternity coverage (handy for a 46-year-old), would “be actually much richer.”

I, of course, would be actually much poorer. And it was this aspect of the bum deal that, to my surprise, turned out to be a very unpopular thing to gripe about.

“Obamacare or Kafkacare?” I posted on Facebook as soon as I hung up with Anthem.

Obama Care Disasters: Current plan cancelled, increase in premiums and forced to pay for health care services that are not needed. 

So, the next time that someone like Hillary Clinton says Obama Care “is working,” tell them about Lori, Joe, Ed, the rest of the Americans above who are suffering through higher premiums, higher deductibles, lost coverage, coverage that they will never need, lost access to preferred doctors, and the myriad of other burdens Obama Care has forced on the nation. Maybe say a little prayer for them this holiday season as they struggle to cope with Obama Care’s fallout, Lord knows that the Obama family, frolicking on the beach on Hawaii is not going to do so.

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.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

December, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: America Is Still Obese, Killing Small Businesses, and More

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 this month’s update of Obama Care that we began earlier this week, the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed.

1) Yesterday, we discussed the reality that restaurants are being hit especially hard by Obama Care’s rules, fines, taxes, and regulations because the industry’s margins are so tiny and narrow. Any incremental expense of any magnitude places them in jeopardy of going out of business very quickly.

Such a situation was recently documented in a Heritage Foundation article on December 11, 2015 by Melissa Quinn. The details of that Obama Care disaster include the following:

• Quinn discusses the reality that a Nashville deli, Noshville Authentic New York Delicatessen, is soon to go out of business in part because of the cost of complying with Obama Care regulations.
• The motto of the deli had always been, “anyone is welcome here from ages 0 to 99, because you’ll find something on the menu.”
• The deli has been around and profitable for almost twenty years with more than half of the employees having been working there for at least 10 years and on quarter of the employees having worked there for almost 15 years.
• Thus, this had been a successful business, serving both customers and employees well for a very long time, in some cases serving food to three generations of the same family.
• But the owner, will be closing the deli on December 27 because of Obama Care: “Having more than 50 full-time employees means you have to comply with the Affordable Care Act, and it was an unknown risk of how much it was going to cost. But it was going to be significant, and take a lot of time and labor to take care of the transition and the reporting and the forms.”
• He estimated that the incremental cost of Obama Care would be between $70,000 and $100,000 a year, an expense that his deli's financials could not withstand.
• For three years he tried to find ways to stay in business and comply with the regulations and bureaucracy of Obama Care but could not find a way to make it work.
• Congresswoman Diane Black who serves the deli’s Congressional district, spoke about the plight of this deli and other small businesses on the House floor recently: “I hear from especially the small business owners about how difficult the health care coverage is for them. They’re trying their best, but they’re also having insurance companies come into the office saying they’re going to have to increase their employees’ premiums by 35 percent which means they have a decision to make...Do they [business owners] pass that [added cost] onto the employee? Do they take that up themselves? And many of them are saying, ‘Look, we’ve done that for the last couple of years where we absorb these increases, but we can’t afford to keep on doing that.’ And so they’re having to pass them on to the employees."
• This deli is just one example of why the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that Obama Care would cost the economy two million jobs over time.
• Some businesses will try to stay in business by turning their full time workers into part time workers in order to avoid the Obama Care mandates, which will then create a situation where many Americans not only do not have healthcare but have lower wages to boot.
• The Congresswoman struck a blow for liberty, freedom and personal choice when she recently went on to say: “The government shouldn’t be telling people that this is what we’re going to require you to have when they know best what they need. One size does not fit all, and you shouldn’t be pushing everybody into this pipeline. Different needs, different costs, all of that should be considered by the individual, not the federal government.”

A real life example of real life people, business owners, employees, and customers being screwed by this horrid piece of legislation.

2) One way to bring down healthcare costs and make health insurance more affordable, as mentioned in the above list, is to make people healthier. One way to do that is to encourage them to eat better, exercise more, and lose weight. Reducing obesity reduces a full range of healthcare and medical costs including diabetes, heart disease, joint distress, and probably to some degree, cancer.

But five years into the Obama Care era, years into Michelle Obama’s disastrous attempt to get kids to eat healthier, the results of addressing this root cause of high healthcare costs is another miserable failure. According to a Daily Beast article that was summarized in the November 27, 2015 issue of The Week magazine, “Despite efforts to improve the American diet and lifestyle - like the First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign - the percentage of obese Americans has actually increased. About 38% of U.S. adults were obese in 2013 and 2014, compared to 35% in 2011 and 2012.”

Another Obama Care failure. A root cause is getting worse instead of better under the legislation, which means this root cause will continue to contribute to the ever rising healthcare costs in this country. It is a root cause that Obama Care obviously has not come close to remedying.

3) A recent article by Guy Benson on the Townhall website on December 11, 2015 described how Obama Care was hurting real people in need of medical treatment in the state of Texas:

"Last summer, the state's largest insurance carrier dropped all preferred provider organization plans from both the Affordable Care Act's federal exchange in Houston and the private individual market. Now, with only weeks to go before existing plans expire, patients, doctors and hospitals are scrambling to find what care is available under the insurer's replacement health maintenance organization plans. "Jody would be dead if she didn't have her oncologist," said Steve Schoger of his wife, his voice catching. The Woodlands couple had their plans canceled. Both have cancer; both are in experimental clinical trials at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center they fear cannot be replicated elsewhere. They are at turns furious and terrified...Dr. Robert Morrow, president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas' Houston and Southeast Texas Region, said in a recent interview that the decision to drop 367,000 PPO plans across Texas, even though customers were paying more for them, was driven by economics. 

He called the plans "unsustainable" after his company lost $400 million by paying out more in claims than it collected in premiums...Dan Fontaine, executive vice president of administration at M.D. Anderson, has similar concerns about the disappearance of exchange coverage for Houston's prestige medical institutions: "The management of risk used to be handled through denials of pre-existing conditions," he said of pre-ACA days. "It is now being handled through the narrowing of the marketplace.""

So, Obama Care supporters claim that 10 million Americans got health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care. But that was before hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their healthcare coverage when Obama Care co-ops went out of business almost overnight. It does not include the 367,000 Texans who have now lost their Obama Care policies that they signed up for and now have to scramble to find other, likely less optimal policies for their coverage. Seems the more Obama Care policies that get written today, the more Obama Care policies disappear tomorrow, causing stress and health issues for untold thousands of Americans.

4) We have often talked about how more than half of the Obama Care co-ops have already gone out of business or are going out of business due to financial hardships. The financial future of the remaining co-ops grew more dim with the recent signing of a large budget bill by the President last week. 

That budget legislation included an explicit condition that taxpayer money never be used to bailout any Obama Care insurer via the legislation’s risk corridor program which includes the co-ops. Given the shaky financial of the co-ops, this restriction on the risk corridor potential makes them an even riskier bet to be around for the long term. 

Which makes this a good time to review how many co-ops have already failed, how much taxpayer money they took down the drain with the, and how many hundreds of thousands Americans lost their insurance coverage as a result, graphic courtesy of the Heritage Foundation (click on the graphic for a better view):




5) Let’s finish off today’s unfolding disaster that is Obama Care review with a few more heartbreaking stories of Americans who have suffered as a result of this putrid legislation:DAVID - NEVADA: I was really looking forward to my $2,500 savings I was promised. My total yearly cost instead went up by $2,620 with a higher deductible. President Obama could not have been this far off in his prediction which means he knew he was lying and said it anyway.DR. DANIEL CRAVIOTTO - CALIFORNIA: Daniel is a physician who wrote an op-ed in WSJ expressing his frustration with ObamaCare: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dictates that we must use an electronic health record (EHR) or be penalized with lower reimbursements in the future. There are "meaningful use" criteria whereby the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells us as physicians what we need to include in the electronic health record or we will not be subsidized the cost of converting to the electronic system and we will be penalized by lower reimbursements. Across the country, doctors waste precious time filling in unnecessary electronic-record fields just to satisfy a regulatory measure. I personally spend two hours a day dictating and documenting electronic health records just so I can be paid and not face a government audit. Is that the best use of time for a highly trained surgical specialist?[. . .] Meanwhile, our Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements have significantly declined, let alone kept up with inflation. In orthopedic surgery, for example, Medicare reimbursement for a total knee replacement decreased by about 68% between 1992 and 2010, based on the value of 1992 dollars. How can this be? Don't doctors have control over what they charge for their services? For the most part, no. Our medical documentation is pored over and insurers and government then determine the appropriate level of reimbursement.I don't know about other physicians but I am tired—tired of the mandates, tired of outside interference, tired of anything that unnecessarily interferes with the way I practice medicine. No other profession would put up with this kind of scrutiny and coercion from outside forces. The legal profession would not. The labor unions would not. We as physicians continue to plod along and take care of our patients while those on the outside continue to intrude and interfere with the practice of medicine.MARIA - CALIFORNIA: Maria Berumen, a tax preparer in Downey, was uninsured for years because of preexisting conditions. The 53-year-old was thrilled to find coverage for herself and her husband for $148 a month after qualifying for a big government subsidy.
She jumped at the chance in early January to visit a primary-care doctor for long-running numbness in her arm and shoulder as a result of bone spurs on her spine. The doctor referred her to a specialist, and problems ensued. At least four doctors wouldn't accept her health plan — even though the state exchange website and her insurer, Health Net Inc., list them as part of her HMO network."It's a phantom network," Berumen said.It was no surprise to her family doctor, Ragaa Iskarous. She has run into this problem repeatedly with other patients in the last month, the doctor said. "This is really driving us crazy."One last update tomorrow, a post that will focus on the personal pain and suffering of real Americans whose real lives were upended by Obama Care, the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington.