March, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Vox Asks The Wrong Question, Obama Care Trolls 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 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.

1) The liberal, leftist news site, Vox, recently asked its readers to submit success stories related to Obama Care. Vox, along with its head honcho Ezra klein, has been a big fan of Obama Care in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington and the disasters it has caused or made worse: ever rising premium and deductible costs, depressed economic growth, higher taxes, doctor shortages, millions of Americans losing access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and current insurance policies, increasing identity theft via Obama Care data systems, increases to the national debt, etc.

But undeterred, Vox tried to find positive testimonials on how great Obama Care was. And that idea fell flat on its face when it was overwhelmed with negative stories of how Obama Care ruined or negatively changed their lives, with some of their stories and comments listed below:

• Cost of my insurance skyrocketed, so I registered Republican and voted for Trump.
• lost my doctor & plan. My Aunt's plan is up 48% and she needs the insurance because of her kidney prob. Family can't afford it!
• the hospital I work for is freezing raises because insufficient reimbursement for services rendered. The ACA needs to go.
• My son's business/employment closed and he was unable to find a full time job because NO business would allow over 30 hrs/ week.
• my insurance policy went from $998/yr to over $1240/yr or over $14K/yr. I could buy a new car every year for that much $$
• Due to unaffordable #Obamacare premiums I'm selling my house next month & moving in with family. It's destroyed my dreams.

Keep in mind that people reading the Vox website, and who likely responded to the Vox Obama Care story request, are likely liberals and Democrats who probably had high opinions of Obama. 

Thus, if Democrats and liberals are so down on Obama Care you can imagine how down the rest of the country is on it. Which brings up that old adage: never ask a question that you may not want the answer to. Vox, the place that loves Obama and loves Obama Care, found out this truth the hard way.

2) Sam Dorman, writing for the Associated Press, in an article that appeared on the Political Insider website on February 27, 2017, reported that: “Obamacare may have received a massive amount of support on social media because many of its online defenders were paid professionals, according to digital expert Matthew Brown:”

• In an interview with journalist, Sharyl Attkisson (one of the few journalists that I believe has any integrity based on her prior history of standing up for the truth in the face of Obama administration opposition), Brown reviewed the leaked government emails that discussed “"creating an army of fake social media profiles" and using "tricks to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas."
• Brown did a statistical sampling of over 200,000 Facebook postings, all of which defended Obama Care.He found that 60% of those 200,000 Facebook posts, 120,000, came from just 100 profiles, leading him to believe that those Facebook “users” were being paid to post supporting comments for Obama Care.
• Brown called these fake posters, "Digital activists are paid employees; their purpose is to attack anyone who's posting something contrary to the view of the page owner wants expressed." 

So it looks like Obama Care supporters and/or the Obama administration were using “fake news” tactics via fake social media posts and attacks before the term “fake news” came into being. Which is sad since if you cannot pass legislation that can stand on its own merits and you need to construct an elaborate spying machine online to combat the realities and disasters of that legislation, then maybe that legislation really does stink.

3) We have often pointed out that while the Obama Care legislation was a couple of thousands pages long, the resulting government regulations that came out of it were many, many times more, adding to a government regulation overload that is overwhelming many industries including medicine and health care. The Charles Hughes Smith blog recently published a chart from the Physicians For A National Health program that showed how those usually unnecessary and burdensome regulations were negatively affecting the health care industry:

The blog draws the following common sense conclusion: “Add layer after layer after layer of new complex regulations to the practice of medicine, and soon enough you need millions of paper-pushing employees to monitor compliance, enforce compliance, pursue administrative and criminal charges of non-compliance, file claims and counterclaims, defend the innocent from false accusations, write hundreds of pages of new regulations, and so on….But the system is now so onerous and out of control that the practice of medicine now requires far more attorneys and compliance-regulatory-paper-pushers than it does doctors and nurses.”

And the more time, money and resources spent on government regulations compliance and paperwork means less resources spent on actual health care which creates doctor and nurse shortages (supply) which in the world of economic drives up prices and costs to handle the demand for healthcare services. And Obama Care was the king when it comes to regulations overload.

4) Terresa Monroe-Hamilton, writing for the I Have The Truth website on February 15, 2017, did report on some good news as it relates to Obama Care, something that we very rarely have the honor or stating. Under the Obama administration, the IRS would refuse to accept your Federal income tax return unless you reported on it which health insurance coverage you had the previous year, if any. This is important since the Obama Care legislation required to you carry and pay for health insurance or pay an ever escalating Federal government fine.

Under the previous rules, the IRS would not even accept your return if that information was not on the return, causing you to deal with the IRS prior to fulfilling your legal obligation to file your tax return. This delay, besides being stressful, opened you up to additional IRS sanctions and fines since it could cause you to miss the legal filing deadline.

According to Ms. Monroe-Hamilton: “The Obamacare mandate required that Americans either be covered by health insurance or they had to pay a tax penalty. Well, the IRS quietly altered their rules this month for the submission of tax forms, making reporting of health insurance coverage “optional.” They still say they may follow up if you don’t check that little box, but they don’t say what would trigger that. I sincerely doubt they will ever bother tracking down people over it. Which means the Obamacare mandate is pretty much dead at least at the IRS. Glory freaking hallelujah! The IRS will no longer reject your tax forms if you don’t fill out that portion that indicates whether or not you have health insurance...Now the mandatory disclosure is voluntary and that will be a relief to millions of Americans. Returns that no longer state whether you have coverage or not, will not be automatically rejected by the IRS now.”

The IRS confirms the reporting: “Processing silent returns means that taxpayer returns are not systematically rejected, allowing them to be processed and minimizing burden on taxpayers, including those expecting a refund.” 

This is great news on two fronts. It obviously makes filing taxes less stressful, less dangerous from a legal perspective, and easier. But in the bigger picture, it is another hole in the wall of Obama Care whose mandatory insurance tenet and the resulting fine if you did not get health insurance was critical to the hoped for success of the entire legislation. Removing that requirement to some degree is welcome news for freedom and for those that want the Obama Care death spiral to continue.

Tomorrow we will wrap up this month's review of Obama Care’s unfolding disasters by reviewing actual Americans’ horrible experiences with this bad, bad piece of legislation, experiences that humanize what havoc Obama Care has wrought on everyday Americans.

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