October, 2017, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Real Stories Of Real Sufferings of Real Americans Under a Really Bad Law

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.

As we often do each month in the last post on the unfolding disasters of Obama Care is we highlight the real hassles, problems, and health threatening events that the law has caused real Americans. From higher premiums and deductibles to lost coverage to lost access to preferred doctors, the Obama Care legislation has caused real agony across America, agony that does not appear to be registering with the Washington political class, given their inability or non-desire to fit what they have broken. As always, our source of these heartbreaking stories is:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

MARK, IDAHO - Mark A. York, a 60-year-old freelance writer in Hailey, Idaho, said he began shopping after he received a letter saying that his current insurance policy would be canceled because it did not meet the requirements of the health care law. In the exchange, he said, he found policies with premiums similar to what he is now paying, $440 a month, but “the deductibles were so high — $4,000 to $6,000 a year — that it defeats the purpose of having insurance."

SALLY - MICHIGAN: I live in Michigan and today I took my car in for routine service. My family dealership has recently been sold to a multi-brand company with over well over 50 employees. When I was checking out and talking to the cashier, she told me that she and all the other office and service workers were given at least 40 hour work weeks and the family dealership paid for their health insurance. Now, she told me, most of the employees had their hours cut to 34 per week so the new company did NOT have to pay for the health insurance under the new Obamacare rules. The costs to the new company, with all the minimum requirements, was just too great. This was costing her, a hard working office person in a car dealership, pay for 6 hours per week and an additional $300/month to foot the bill for her own health care. These rules are negatively affecting the working class people which was NOT the way it was sold to the American public. This is a real life example of just that.

KATHLEEN- MICHIGAN: Kathleen Forster, 64, a retired interior designer in Grosse Point, Mich., who received a cancellation notice in the mail several weeks ago, said she holds no hope that her provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, will rescind the cancellation notice it sent her and her husband several weeks ago.

"Why would they?" Forster said. "They jumped through all these hoops to come up with something new. Now they are going to rescind that? To make President Obama look good?"

The Forsters ended up buying a new policy from Blue Cross that meets the ACA requirements. Their premium ticked up from $762 per month to $820; their deductible shot up from $1,000 to $12,000.

LARRY - NEVADA: The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich’s mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn’t.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state’s Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He’s been paying monthly premiums since November.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man’s-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he’s covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich’s insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich’s problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

Xerox, meanwhile, said it’s working every day to fix Basich’s problem, and its legal counsel is routine.

In the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and its insurance exchanges, you can find a success story for every failure. But Basich’s case is extreme.

LINDA - CONNECTICUT: I am self employed and my insurance premium increased by $307.00 a month. Guess I'll stop eating! Not only that but at the age of 58, I'm required to carry maternity coverage! To further add insult to injury, my prescription which was costing me $26.00 a month is now costing me $87.00 per month.

MAXINE - NORTH CAROLINA: My husband and I had United Health Care's Medicare Advantage Plan for the past couple of years. It was very cost effective, and my husband and I were quite satisfied with it. However, last October we received a letter from UHC stating that due to the Affordable Care Act our plan was cancelled, no other information given at that time. We were quite upset about this and decided that we had to find another alternative; having only Medicare was not an option. After doing quite a bit of research, my husband finally came up with the best solution. We both enrolled in BCBS of North Carolina, called a supplement, but is basically an advantage plan that includes drug coverage. I got one of the best plans, and my husband chose a lesser plan (as he has VA benefits). Now we will be paying about $2,300 yearly for health coverage, which fortunately we can manage financially despite having Social Security as our primary source of income. (I feel sorry for those who can only afford Medicare.)

P.S. We finally got another letter from UHC offering us a supplement plan that was even more expensive than BCBS. However, we had already decided that we wanted nothing more to do with United Health Care!

Forced to pay higher costs, forced to buy coverage they will never need, forced to find new doctors, forced to cut workers’ hours, you could not have come up with a more destructive law if you tried. And each month the disasters keep on unfolding. More suffering next month for sure.

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