October, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Five Obama Care Policies In Five Years and Doctors Not Being Doctors

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) We have often discussed the reality that America does not have enough doctors to adequately satisfy the needs of sick Americans. That shortage was made more dramatic once Obama Care was implemented since its' hassles and idiocy led to many doctors retiring earlier, deciding that they did not want to deal with the hassles of dealing with government red tape and bureaucracy associated with Obama Care’s intrusion into the healthcare market.

Well, according to an article in the September 11, 2017 issue of Businessweek, now it appears that the front of the pipeline for doctors in this country is also getting smaller, which will make the number of doctors in this country even tighter in years to come:

• A 2016 survey of 17,000 medical school graduates by the Physicians Foundation found that 13.5% of them stated they planned to be in non-doctor/patient or non-clinical jobs within three years, with many of them going into business or research.
• This is up from 9.9% in 2012.
• Another study of doctors from Merritt Hawkins asked doctors if they were to begin their educations again, would they enter the medical profession and 25% said they would enter another field.
• This 25% is up threefold from the 8% that answered the same question in 2006.
• The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that by 2030, the country will be short 100,000 doctors or about 2,000 per state on average, with rural areas being hit especially bad.
• These medically trained but non-practicing doctors are being hired by consulting companies, going back to get their MBA degrees, or starting their own businesses but are not seeing sick patients, often because of the hassles of actually treating patients or the desire for bigger dollars not treating patients.

Thus, Obama Care’s impact and the administrative headaches and rules/regulations it brought with it at best is not helping resolve the current doctor shortage and at worse (more likely) has made and is making the doctors shortage worse with no solution in sight.

2) Michelle Malkin is a well known political commentator, blogger, and writer. One of her latest pieces shows a real life example of how one American family, her own, has been raked over the coals by Obama Care. In her case, she has had four different insurance carriers since Obama Care went into effect:

• She and her husband just got the fourth cancellation notice of their health insurance policy since 2013.
• Their first cancellation came from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in 2013 since Obama Care tenets made their preferred and then current policy from Anthem invalid.
• It did not matter that they liked their then current high deductible policy since it fit their family needs and included a wide ranging network of doctors that their family needed and liked.
• Their second plan from Rocky Mountain Health Plans died in August, 2015 which in a way was a good thing since they did not like it since it did not cover their kids’ health needs and was not accepted at their local urgent care clinic.
• This second plan died since the insurer pulled out of their market area because they could not make money.
• Their third plan was cancelled in August, 2016 since the insurer claimed that it was pulling out of their Colorado market because it would “no longer offer your current health plan in the State of Colorado,” i.e. it could not make a profit in Colorado. 
• The Malkin family then enrolled in the Bronze HSA EPO plan offered by the Minneapolis startup, Bright Health.
• Less than a year later, Bright Health told them that their plan would be discontinued on January 1, 2018.
• When they went looking for a new policy for the fifth time since 2013, they found that the cheapest plan they could get would raise their monthly premium cost from $944.86 to over $1,300, and this is a high deductible plan which means that they will have to satisfy an annual deductible that is likely to be over $13,000 a year.
• Malkin goes on to point out that her home state of Colorado is not the only state experiencing the disaster that is Obama Care: “Premiums for individual health plans in Virginia are set to skyrocket nearly 60 percent in 2018. In New Hampshire, those rates will rise 52 percent. In South Carolina, individual market consumers will face an average 31.3 percent hike. In Tennessee, they’ll see rates jump between 20-40 percent.”

So it is not only the unknown average Americans family that is getting slammed every day by Obama Care, it is famous, higher earning Americans like Malkin that also are getting whipsawed by a terrible piece of legislation. And yet, Washington politicians have no clue or energy or will to fix what is a horrible situation. 

Malkin concludes her piece by summing up the frustration that her and millions of other Americans have experienced as a result of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care: “There are an estimated 450,000 consumers like us in Colorado and 17 million of us nationwide — small-business owners, independent contractors and others who don’t get their plans through group coverage, big companies or government employers. The costs, headaches and disruption in our lives caused by Obamacare’s meddling meddlers are real and massive.

But we’re puzzles to corporate media journalists who’ve never had to meet a payroll and don’t even know what is the individual market.

We’re invisible to late-night TV clowns who get their Obamacare-at-all-costs talking points from Chuck Schumer.

We’re pariahs to social justice health care activists and Democrats who want us to just shut up and subsidize everyone else’s insurance.

And we’re expendables to establishment Republicans who hoovered up campaign donations on the empty promise to repeal Obamacare — and now consider amnesty for immigrants here illegally and gun control higher legislative priorities than keeping their damned word.

We’re the canaries in the Obamacare coal mine. Ignore us at your peril, America. You’re next.”

And idiots like Senator Bernie Sanders and others want Washington to control everyone’s healthcare needs via a single payer system, not just those in the individual insurance market. One look at what Washington did to the individual health insurance market, and families like Malkin’s via Obama Care, should be enough proof that Washington and a single payer system are both insanity and the height of idiocy. More disasters 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:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w