April, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Using a Lousy Insurance Plan To Attack a Public Health Problem 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, sugar, 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) A few days ago in this series we devoted an entire article to the reality that Obama Care never addressed a primary driver of ever rising health care costs in this country: the obesity epidemic sweeping the country. With so many overweight Americans running around, with so many addicted to bad eating and lifestyle habits, the costs to treat their overweight related diseases is a significant burden on the health care cost curve.

But addiction to obesity is not the only addiction driver relative to increasing healthcare costs. Let’s follow up on that theme based on an article from the National Review from March 24, 2017, written by David French, “Health-Care Reform Won't Fix What Really Hurts American Health:”

• Consider that in 2010, almost 50 million Americans did not have health insurance but by 2016, the number had dropped to 27.3 million, hitting a record low of 8.6% of Americans without health insurance coverage, indicating that maybe Obama Care was a tremendous success. 
• However, also consider the reality that despite Americans have more access to insured health care, the nation’s death rate actually increased in 2015.
• Recent research by Princeton economists, Annie Case and Angus deaton, verified that this is indeed the case, more people insured but more people dying, and that this trend is true across many segments of Americans.
• Two factors are driving these higher deaths rates including the reality that, “The obesity epidemic is carrying with it increases in chronic health conditions, including diabetes and heart disease, and make no mistake — obesity is exploding in the United States.”
• Thus, as we said in the earlier post referred to above, Obama Care did nothing to address this root cause of higher and higher healthcare costs. 
• In addition, there are more and more “deaths of despair,” deaths caused by the abuse of drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and that these deaths of despair are increasing across all age groups, another root cause not addressed by Obama Care. 
• It does not matter if you have health insurance if your mindset is self destructive.
• The article quotes a doctor that said, “If it weren’t for addicts, I wouldn’t have a job,” that intensive-care units are overrun across the country with people addicted to drugs, to alcohol, to tobacco, and yes, to food.

More and more Americans are killing themselves and it does not matter that they have insurance. And their attempts to kill themselves, either by drug abuse, food abuse, or too much smoking, was not addressed by Obama Care. If a doctor goes out of business without addicts, shouldn’t that be the objective to reduce healthcare costs rather than trying to figure out who wants a bronze, silver or gold Obama Care insurance policy?

Mr. French so elegantly sums up the problem: “Unless our citizens can find a way to soothe the despair, the great health-insurance debate from 2009 to 2016 may end up a mere footnote in public-health history. At the end of the day, neither the best nor the worst insurance can cause a man to put down his pills, throw out his whiskey bottles, or walk more and eat less. When the human heart aches, an insurance card won’t ease the pain.” 

The problem of ever increasing healthcare costs is a public health care problem requiring a public healthcare remedy, not a half baked Obama Care insurance remedy.

2) There can be no doubt that Obama Care has been a total failure along so many dimensions. It needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Whether the Republicans can come up with something better is still open to debate. 

But leave it to the opposing political party, the Democrats, who were the architects of the Obama Care failure, and who were quick to get hysterical and into liar mode when the Republicans dared to try to fix what the Democrats broke. Consider the following lies and fact checking that proved them lies from leading Democrats, as reported by Andrew Kugle and the Washington Free Beacon on March 17, 2017:

• The lies were debunked by the Washington Post, usually a reliable defender of Democrats and their lies.
• Their debunking was related to the false claims by Democrats relative to the first Republican proposal to replace Obama Care.
• Batty Nancy Pelosi kicked off the lie parade: "Is it an act of mercy to throw 24 million people off of health insurance, so Republicans can hand billionaires a massive new tax giveaway?"
• Just as batty Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz followed up: "But what this bill does is it takes away healthcare from 14 million people in the next year, 24 million over ten years." 
• But the Washington Post called these statements misleading since while the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did say that 14 million fewer people would have insurance under the Republican plan in 2018 it does not mean 14 million people would lose their insurance, just that 14 million might not buy it since it would no longer be against the law not to have health insurance.
• In fact, the CBO actually stated this reality in their report but as always, Democrats ran with a number they did not understand: “"Most of the reductions in coverage in 2018 and 2019 would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate.” Seems that fact and reality got left behind by Wasserman Schultz and Pelosi.
• In addition, the CBO just scored the part of the Republican plan that would eliminate Obama Care, it did not take into consideration any replacement insurance options that would occur and absorb any Obama Care insurance customers that might opt for less oppressive and less expensive new insurance options.
• But the insanity continued with Senator Bernie Sanders stating: "If this legislation is passed and millions of people are thrown off of health insurance, not able to get to a doctor when they must, thousands of Americans will die." 
• The usually liberal friendly Washington Post could not even swallow this statement, giving Sanders’ statement the highest degree of lying possible, four Pinocchios, saying that Sanders was basing his statement off of a faulty Think Progress report that assumed, again, that there would be no replacement installed when Obama Care was killed.
• Senator Tammy Baldwin jumped into the lie fest when she said: “#ReadtheBill & you’ll see #TrumpCare would allow insurance execs to personally make millions off your health care.”
• The proposed Republican plan repeals the Obama Care $500,000 cap on how much insurance companies can deduct on their taxes, it has NOTHING to do with insurance companies’ executives personal tax impacts as Politifact Wisconsin accurately pointed out.
• Tough to tell whether she is lying or is that stupid to understand what applies to an insurance company’s tax bill vs. insurance company’s executive individual tax liability.

Given that Democrats were solely responsible for Obama Care I can see how they might be a little sensitive about its many failures. But lying about the reality and proposed changes does nothing to enhance their credibility and perception that they actually care about what is right for Americans vs. what is right for their bruised egos. Lying and omitting critical information displays a complete lack of integrity.

3) Rather than try to summarize the following analysis of Obama Care, I will just give you a link to the original article. It is an in-depth economic analysis by an economist from Hillsdale College, Casey Mulligan, published back in 2014. Mr. Mulligan does an excellent, easy to understand economic analysis of the damage that Obama Care has done to the country and its economic growth potential by covering such things as companies not hiring and expanding due to the onerous Obama Care regulations and taxes, companies turning full time employees into part time employees since the companies could not endure the Obama Care fees, fines, and taxes, etc. 

His analysis fuels the argument that one of the reasons that economic growth was historically anemic under Obama was because of the simple economic principles and tenets that Obama and Obama Care ignored or spit on.

The link for the entire analysis can be accessed at:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/effects-of-the-affordable-care-act-on-economic-productivity/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=stripes&utm_medium=social&utm_content=03122017

That will do it for today’s unfolding Obama Care disasters: economic principles abused, lies, lies and more lies from Democrats, and using a shoddy insurance solution to resolve a massive public health problem.

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