February, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Medicaid Disasters and Obesity As A Root Cause

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.

Two disasters today to be discussed:

1) One of the disasters of Obama Care was the reality that it loaded up and overwhelmed the Medicaid system with far more people than was expected. We have previously made the analogy that Medicaid was like a thirty year old pickup truck that was designed to haul two tons and Obama Care forced it to haul four tons without doing any improvements to the pickup’s engines, tires, or shocks. As a result, it does not work like one was promised it would work.

We have also previously reported on these three realities:

1. At the state level, the annual cost of the Medicaid program is accelerating much faster than expected, stripping state government budgets of funding that is needed elsewhere for schools, infrastructure, law enforcement, etc. In fact, we have already reported that in at least four states, the annual state government Medicaid budget is now over 30% of the entire state budget with no end insight of how high that percentage could go. Furthermore, according to research from Pew Research, the number of states that were dedicating a higher proportion of their state budgets in 2013 vs. the year 2000 was 49 states, i.e. only one state was spending less on a percentage basis in 2013 vs. 2000.
2. At the Federal level, the national cost of Medicaid is also growing much faster than inflation and the economy putting a significant burden on the out of control national debt levels. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one out of every six dollars spent on healthcare in this country falls under the Medicaid program, a trend that is getting worse, not better.
3. Since only about two thirds of the doctors in this country accept Medicaid patients, quite often Medicaid patients have Medicaid coverage in theory but are nowhere close to or have access to a doctor, especially a specialist, that will accept them as a patient.

It is a bad program going fiscally bankrupt that delivers inferior care. Wow, cannot get much worse than that. But an aspect of Medicaid that is quite distressing is that much of its costs and resources are used by immigrants to this country, quite often in a much higher proportion that what is being by citizens. The following is not a discussion on national immigration policy but a rendering of the facts that underlie a lot of the financial strains that Medicaid is under, a program that Obama Care stressed even more:

• According to an article by Frank Vernuccio, writing for the Townhall website on January 31, 2018, a 2014 report by the Center For Immigration studies found that 42% of the growth in Medicaid enrollment from 2011 to 2013 was from immigrants and their children.
• The number of immigrants and their U.S. born kids on Medicaid grew twice as fast as the number of U.S. citizens and their kids on Medicaid from 2011 to 2013, 11% vs. 5%.
• The rise in Medicaid enrollment among immigrants and their kids now cost the American taxpayer $4.6 billion on an annual basis.
• By 2013, 25% of immigrants and their kids were on Medicaid while only 16% of native Americans and their kids were on Medicaid.
• A 2007 Congressional Budget Office research study found that: “State and local governments incur costs for providing services to unauthorized immigrants and have limited options for avoiding or minimizing those costs […] Rules governing many federal programs, as well as decisions handed down by various courts, limit the authority of state and local governments to avoid or constrain the costs of providing services to unauthorized immigrants […] The tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to those immigrants.” In other words, immigrants are a newt negative when it comes to tax revenue and the costs of their Medicaid treatment.

Again, this is not meant to be a debate on immigration policy. But Obama Care took a shaky program that delivered inferior care at a very high cost, partly because of the higher than proportional care and costs being spent on immigrants, both legal and illegal, and dumped millions of more Americans onto the Medicaid failing pickup truck. All of which resulted in just another unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

2) One of the main root causes of higher and higher healthcare costs in this country is listed above, namely that Americans are overweight and in many cases, obese. This extra weight being carried around by the majority of Americans directly causes a ton of health ailments including respiratory diseases, diabetes, failing joints, etc. 

These overweight/obesity related ailments require more and more healthcare resources to be used, i.e. it drives up demand, which in turn drives up the prices and costs of healthcare. It is a simple outcome of basic supply and demand economic theory. As we have always preached about Obama Care, it never attacked the root causes of our high healthcare costs in this country, a root cause like being overweight. And in any endeavor if you do not address and attack the root causes you will likely never resolve the problem you are facing.

But according to an article in the October 20, 2017 issue of The Week magazine, you can now add another costly ailment that being overweight causes: cancer:

• The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) analysed data from the U.S. Cancer Statistics database.
• They found that “cancers related to being overweight now account more than a third of diagnoses for this disease [cancer] in the U.S.”
• From 2005 to 2014, obesity related cancers increased 7% while cancers with no link to obesity decreased 13%.
• There are currently 13 types of cancers associated with “excess body fat” including cancers of the brain, breasts, ovaries, uterus, thyroid, and other organs.

Imagine how much healthcare costs, specifically expensive cancer healthcare costs would go down, if you could reduce the number of cancer patients by one third by eliminating the obesity problem in this country? Again, the law of supply and demand comes into play: reduce the demand for cancer healthcare and the cost for cancer health care, and overall health care, would go down. 

Obama Care never understood how better off the country would from a health, cancer, and cost perspective if they had attacked just this single root cause. Instead, they concocted a Rube Goldberg insurance solution to what is truly a public health problem, which of course, led to its failure.

So, two Obama Care failures today: the failure to fix a failing Medicaid system, especially its higher than proportionate costs going to immigrants vs. U.S. citizens and its failure to recognize the root causes of high healthcare costs in this country. More unfolding disasters to follow.

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