November,2016, Part 7,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Democrats Bash Obama Care, Competiton Down, Costs Up

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 its 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 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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: 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 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 insurance premiums, 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) We have often pointed out that Obama promised that Obama Care would “bend the cost curve" of health care spending in this country, i.e. it would start to reverse the trend of ever increasing healthcare spending in this country. We have often pointed out how poorly this prediction worked out with premium and deductible levels on insurance policies, especially Obama Care policies, going higher and higher. 

But it is not just Obama Care policy costs that are increasing at alarmingly high rates. Consider a recent post by Sharyl Attkisson on the Twitchy website. She had been sent a letter from an American living in Georgia who had just been notified that their current, non-Obama Care health insurance policy would not be offered and available after December 31, 2016. The insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia, offered to put the person on a new plan that would be available to him in 2016, a so-called bronze plan.

Here’s the problem though. The customer’s old plan cost him $711.83 a month to keep in effect. The replacement plan, one that is assumed to be comparable, will cost him a whopping $1,872.18 a month, an over $1,100 increase per MONTH in 2017. Thus, not only is Obama Care causing Obama Care insurance policy premiums to skyrocket, it has done nothing, at least in this one case, to prevent non-Obama Care policy costs from going through the roof. 

So much for Obama Care reducing Americans’ annual healthcare insurance costs by up to $2,500 a year. This poor person’s insurance costs are going up by $1,100 a month rather than going down up to $2,500 a year. Missed it by that much. Another Obama Care promise by Obama bites the dust.

A photo of the actual letter is below:

2) Robert Moffit, writing for the Heritage Foundation on November 4, 2016, outlined a bunch of other facts about the implosion of Obama Care in his article, "Obama Care Revealed as Masterpiece of Government’s Failed Central Planning:”

• Mr. Moffit correctly sums up how we got to where we are today with Obama Care: “Liberals in Congress meticulously designed the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges as powerful regulatory bodies. They defined the kinds of insurance plans, benefits, and medical treatments and procedures the plans must offer; set all of the insurance rules; determined the permissible premium and deductible levels; and organized the most complex and confusing premium subsidy program imaginable. So, federal government control was, and is, comprehensive. They planned it all.”
• And what did this overreaching government intrusion into our lives get us: “Americans have less consumer choice, less market competition, exploding insurance premiums, ridiculous deductibles, fewer doctors, a narrowing of provider networks—no, you can’t necessarily “keep” your doctor—and the looming prospect of ever bigger burdens on taxpayers.”
• In 2016, the Congressional Budget Office projected that 21 million Americans would get coverage via an Obama Care insurance policy: only 11 million signed up.
• The Obama administration is estimating that 13.8 million will sign up in 2017 but that would still more than 30% short of what was supposed to happen in 2016 and given the unpopularity of the whole process, that 13.8 million is likely very and overly optimistic.
• As we have pointed out many times before, it is not only the ever increasing premiums costs of Obama Care that are a burden but also the ever increasing deductible costs that mean while many more Americans have health insurance, they cannot afford to make use of it because of high deductibles: the average deductible for an Obama Care silver policy is $3,572 for a single person and $7,474 for a family while a bronze Obama Care customer faces a whopping $6,000 deductible for a single person and a $12,393 deductible for a family on average.
• And although about third quarters of Obama Care policy holders get a taxpayer subsidy to pay for their insurance, 40% of them are dissatisfied with the size of their premiums and 46% are dissatisfied with the size of their deductibles according to research done by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
• In 2017, 15 new insurance companies will start offering Obama Care policies but 83 insurers will be stopping their offerings of Obama Care policies.
• In 2017, it looks like about one in three counties (32.8%) across the country will have only one Obama Care insurer to choose from while another third or so (35.9%) will have only two insurers to choose from, totally killing the Obama promise that Obama Care would lead to more competition.

Fewer plans, less competition, higher deductibles, higher premiums, higher dissatisfaction, oh yeah, this is working out just fine. 

3) One last review for today. The Heritage Foundation put together a short video of the seven times that Democrats correctly categorized Obama Care as a failure. Remember, not a single Republican voted for the Obama Care legislation since 1) they disagreed with it and 2) Obama and Pelosi in the House and Reid in the Senate made sure that the Republicans had no input to the legislation. This legislation is purely a Democratic Party creation so it is actually quite refreshing to hear their own bash it. That video can be accessed at:

http://dailysignal.com/2016/11/02/7-times-democrats-admitted-the-truth-about-obamacare/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRjeU1UVTBNRGN5WkRSbCIsInQiOiJOYmZGRjZyNERzZEdqbFFkM1IrNzVZbnpPRVNhc0NZaDNhXC8xWDM1TWJpR0JVK2Q2ekFnanlNZ3JDU3pcL2pPTVdMTFFKdHlSZjdUcHpxUVkrKzZvU0Q4REo4S3pNaDlCMFRtY1lwQ3RKV3JNPSJ9

You will hear Democrat Bill Clinton call Obama Care “the craziest thing in the world.” You will hear former Democratic U.S. Senator Max Baucus call it a “train wreck.” Diehard Democrat filmmaker Michael Moore called it “awful.” Democratic Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton who said that “the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable." Oh, FYI, there will be 29 fewer Obama Care insurers in Minnesota next year.

But none of this should not be surprise to anyone if we venture back to another Democratic quote in the video, this one courtesy of then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” A more stupid statement has never been uttered by any politician anywhere, at anytime. 

Which is why we are where we are today: the people that actually put this thing together had no clue what was in it. A clear dereliction of their Congressional duty, a dereliction that has resulted in the disaster nightmare we are living through today.

Unfortunately, there will be more Obama Care disasters tomorrow.

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