September, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Higher Costs, Fewer Competitors

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 copays 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) One of the supposed selling points of Obama Care, as constantly promised by Obama, was that the legislation would greatly reduce health insurance costs and bend downward the cost curve of medical costs in this country. We have written constantly in this blog how the legislation failed miserably on both of these counts. Rather than going down upwards of $2,500 a year as Obama promised, health insurance costs have grown by significant double digits every year since enacted. Regular medical costs have continued to increase far greater than the overall rate of inflation.

A recent Bloomberg article that appeared on the Newsmax website presented another example of how horribly Obama Care failed to control any kind of medical and healthcare costs:

• Fidelity Investments now estimates that a 65 year old American retiring in 2017 will need to spend $275,000 to cover his or her health care expenses for the remainder of their lifetime.
• This is 6% increase in ONE year vs. 2015 despite Obama Care being in effect for years and years.
• And this number does NOT include dental care, long term care, or nursing home care.
• This Fidelity estimate is close to the annual 5.5% increase for medical care that Health View Services research predicts for the next decade.
• The big drivers of higher and higher medical costs according to the Health View Services research are an annual increase of 7.2% for Medigap insurance premiums and an annual increase of 8% for Medicare Part D.
• All other components of medical and health care, according to their research will all grow faster than the current rate of inflation.

If Obama Care was going to bend the cost curve downwards as a primary objective, then these sobering research results from Fidelity and Health View Services are pretty damning in showing what a failure Obama Care has been.

2) Let’s take a quick trip to Iowa and see what is going on there with Obama Care policy premiums. According to a recent article on the Convention of States website, the only insurance company selling Obama Care policies in that state is looking for a whopping 57% increase in insurance premiums in 2018.

If that is not bad enough, the 57% is 13% higher than the rate hike they asked for just two months ago. This indicates that the Obama Care insurance market in Iowa is deteriorating faster and faster. So not only is there only one Obama Care insurer in the state, despite Obama’s promise that Obama Care would spur competition, the lone remaining competitor is looking for a huge increase, hardly bending the cost curve that Obama promised.

3) But Iowa is not alone in this jam. According to a recent Washington Free Beacon report, as listed on the Right Alerts website:

• The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that a majority of U.S. cities that it tracks, 71%, will see Obama Care premiums rise by double digits in 2018.
• A lot of this increase is driven by competitors leaving the Obama Care market.
• According to Kaiser: “The foundation analyzed data in the 20 states and in Washington, D.C. that had submitted rate filings to examine how much premiums were rising and how many insurers were participating on the exchanges.The study evaluated the cost of Obamacare’s second-lowest silver plan. Roughly 71 percent of enrollees have this type of coverage. The second-lowest silver plan is one of the most popular plan choices on the marketplace and is also the benchmark that is used to determine the amount of financial assistance individuals and families receive,” the report states. Of the 21 major cities that were evaluated by Kaiser, 16 will see a double-digit increase in the silver-plan premiums next year. Across these 21 major cities, based on preliminary 2018 rate filings, the second-lowest silver premium for a 40-year-old nonsmoker will range from $244 in Detroit, MI, to $631 in Wilmington, DE, before accounting for the tax credit that most enrollees in the market receive. Only one city will see their premiums decline, while in some cities premiums will increase as high as 49 percent in 2018."
• Kaiser also found that the number of insurance companies participating in Obama Care policies is also declining with 120 insurers in 2014 in the areas Kaiser studied but that has dropped down only 97 insurers today.
• Besides losing money on Obama Care policies, companies dropping out and those asking for huge premium rate increases cite the uncertainty of future subsidies and taxes on premium revenue.

What a mess, higher costs and fewer competitors. The exact opposite of what Obama promised. More unfolding disasters to follow.

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