September, 2017, Part 2,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Idiocy Of A Single Payer System, Drug Costs Still Going Up, 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 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)Even though  greatly enhanced government and political class interference in the healthcare market via Obama Care turned out to be an enormous failure, some liberals and Democrats are doubling down and saying the reason Obama Care failed was because there was not enough government and political class interference in the healthcare market.

These harping for more interference are calling for a so-called “single payer” health insurance process where the government controls every single aspect of your health care. But Brian Riedl, writing for the National Review website on August 15, 2017, showed how stupid this idea is:

• Every time someone proposes a single payer system in this country the reality of the cost of such a system shows how stupid the idea is.
• Bernie Sanders’ single payer proposal would cost $32 TRILLION in the first ten years.
• This would be about $3.2 TRILLION a year, equal about 80% of the entire Federal government budget today.
• This $32 TRILLION would require an annual average tax increase of $24,000 for every American household.
• The state of Vermont looked at a single payer system for their state in 2014 and gave up when the estimated costs would require a state tax increase of 160%, about $27,500 per Vermont household per year.
• New York also took a run at a single payer system and gave up when the costs got too high.
• In California, the estimated cost of their entry into a single payer system was a whopping $440 billion a year, a sum greater than the entire state government budget.
• The $440 billion came out to a per household annual cost of $26,500.
• In Canada, a country that has had a single payer system for a long time, three quarters of Canadians also see fit to purchase supplemental health insurance to cover prescription drugs, ambulance costs, dentistry, and other services not fully covered by the single payer system, which kind of defeats the whole concept of a single payer system which is supposed to cover “all” medical costs.
• And these cost estimates to not include the inevitable increase of tests and procedures being done if everything is “free” in a single payer system.
• And even if a liberal thinks these astronomical costs are manageable, keep in mind that no government program has ever come in under budget so the $32 TRILLION estimate is probably too low by orders of magnitude.

Unbelievable costs for a process that has never worked anywhere else in the world. And consider the pathetic history of Washington in managing health care processes besides the Obama Care failure:

• Medicare loses about $60 billion a year to wasteful spending, criminal fraud, and inefficiencies.
• Medicare is hurtling towards bankruptcy with a projected $33 TRILLION shortfall over the next 75 years.
• We have reviewed the reality that Medicaid also wastes tens of billions of dollars every year and is so ineffective as a health care process that numerous studies have shown that Medicaid customers are not any healthier than people with no health insurance.
• The Veterans Administration was so inept as a government run health care process that people died while waiting to get an appointment with a doctor within the VA system.

So let’s review: Obama Care failed, Medicare and Medicaid are rushing towards fiscal insolvency, the Veterans Administration killed people with its inefficiency, and no country in the world has operated a single payer system that delivered quality and comprehensive health care at a reasonable cost. And yet, some American politicians still want to go forward with such a system  in this country. To use a medical analogy: there is still no cure for stupid when it comes to a single payer system.

2) According to a Wall Street Journal article that was summarized in the June 9, 2017 issue of The Week magazine, the median out of pocket cost of a prescription drug through Medicare Part D was $117 in 2015. This was higher by nearly half of the level it was in 2011, $79. But wasn’t Obama Care supposed to reduce healthcare costs when it was passed back in 2010? Obviously, it did not do the job on prescription drugs if the cost went up almost 50% in just four years.

In addition, there are now 220 Part D drugs with annual out-of-pocket costs greater than $1,000 while in 2011 there were only 118 such drugs. Out of control cost rises with no sign that Obama Care had any impact in restricting such increases.

3) We have always said that Obama Care failed because it tried to resolve the problem of ever rising healthcare costs in this country by applying a very poor insurance solution when what is really needed is a well constructed public health solution. We have listed the root causes of our high health care costs above, one of which is the reality that America is generally overweight, a major cause of high healthcare costs, from hip replacement to diabetes.

This reality was recently highlighted in a Newsmax article by Cathy Burke on September 1, 2017:

• The 14th annual State of Obesity report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation determined that “obesity is a national security issue.”
• This reality has resulted in that almost 25% of all military recruits are rejected because they are too overweight.
• Furthermore, a majority of today’s kids in this country are not fit to serve in the military because they are overweight, have criminal records, are drug users, or have educational deficits.
• And obesity is a major problem  even for those recruits that get into the military since “obese service members and their families are costly, the report found, costing the military about $1 billion every year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.”
• Overall, in the entire U.S. population adult obesity rates are greater than 25% in 46 states.

As we have said many times before, obesity is a root cause of high healthcare costs in this country. It causes diabetes, it causes hip and knee replacements, it causes heart disease and other diseases, all of which result in higher and higher healthcare costs.

The root cause is obesity, a root cause that cannot be eliminated via insurance solutions, the base cause remains unresolved regardless of who pays for the damage caused by obesity. Obama Care never understood this basic issue.

Single payer idiocy, higher and higher drug costs, and obesity as a root cause, more to follow.

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:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w