May,2018, Part, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Broken Mediciad System, Higher Costs and Lower Quality, and Trump's Simple Yet Elegant Solution

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) In our last Obama Care disaster post, we discussed the reality of ow Obama Care has led to the destruction and heartbreak of the Medicaid program. By overwhelming the Medicaid program with able bodied Obama Care patients, perhaps upwards of 21,000 American Medicaid patients died as they waited on Medicaid waiting lists to get the health care they desperately needed. Thus, a program (Obama Care) that was supposed t5o make Americans healthier actually hastened the death of at least some folks.

But a National Review article recently listed out the ways that Medicaid could be fixed to actually serve those it was originally designed for (the disabled, the blind, the elderly poor, etc.) and not be a dumping ground for Obama Care abled-bodied adults:

• States that expanded Medicaid under Obama Care should stop wasting limited resources on able bodied adults coming into the program under Obama Care.
• Current enrollees would be able to stay on Medicaid but would be rolled off once their incomes rise enough to exceed Medicaid’s income thresholds, freeing up more resources for the truly needy.
• One way of stopping new states from expanding Medicaid to able bodied adults would be to eliminate the funding that these additionally able bodied adults would get from the Federal taxpayer, i.e. if a state wanted to expand Medicaid then that state and its taxpayers would pick up the entire tab.
• Medicaid rules should be changed to force able bodied adults currently on Medicaid to get a job to reduce the government’s cost of Medicaid for these able bodied adults.
• Anti-fraud efforts should be stepped up to recover and prevent the billions of Medicaid dollars lost every year to fraud and criminal activity within the program.
• For example, a recent inspector general report found that Federal taxpayers spent definitely more than $628 million on about 366,000 ineligible Medicaid recipients just in California alone and just in California’s Obama Care expansion alone. 
• Imagine how much more waste goes on across the country if $628 million exists solely in a fraction of California’s Medicaid population.
• But the California situation is likely worse since that same report found that another 70.055 California Obama Care expansion Medicaid patients were “potentially ineligible” which could cost taxpayers upwards of another $402 million, meaning that a billion dollars in waste in just a subset of California Medicaid patients.
• Maybe some of that wasted billion dollars could have saved the 384 California Medicaid patients that died while on the waiting list for medical care in that state.

What a mess that can be fixed but which Obama and Obama Care never cared about fixing. It is like they took a broken down, 50 year old pick up truck that was designed to two two tons and decided it could tow 4 tons without any new enhancements to it. As a result, the program wastes more taxpayer money than ever, it provides a low level of medical care, and it has helped kill upwards of 21,000 Americans. Truly an unfolding disaster.

2) David Thornton, writing for the Maven website recently explained how as we get closer and closer to the 2019 Obama Care sign up season, costs for Obama Care policies, as they do every year, are going to jump up again in cost:

• The state of Maryland is one of the first states that has proposed new insurance rates for 2019 available and those rates for Obama Care like individual insurance policies are seeing an average rate increase request from insurance companies of a whopping 32%.
• The proposed increases for the state range from 18% to 91%.
• And as always, insurance policy customers, both Obama Care policies,and employer policies, will show higher deductibles and co-pays going forward into 2019 despite the many promises Obama made about Obama Care “bending the cost curve” or a typical American family saving upwards of $2,500 a year on their insurance costs.
• This last point was highlighted by a real life example of the writer: “There are also hidden limitations that you only find out about when you have a claim. As an example, my wife had to go to the hospital in an ambulance last year. Six months after her hospital stay, we received a bill from the ambulance service asking us to pay more than $4,000 for a 30-minute ride. When I followed up with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, our insurance company, I was told that the ambulance service was out-of-network. When I pressed further, I found that Blue Cross did not have any ambulance providers in their network in the entire state of Texas. As a result, Blue Cross paid less than $1,000 on a total claim of more than $5,000.”

Higher costs, lower quality, the hallmarks of Obama Care.

3) Let’s finish up with a good news/bad news Obama Care situation:

• According to a recent Breitbart article by Rhona White, a recent study from Avalere Health estimated that 3.2 million Americans will drop their Obama Care policies in the coming years.
• This is good news because of an executive order Donald Trump signed that made it easier for people to get better and less expensive health insurance coverage from so-called Association Health Plans (AHP).
• An AHP is a health insurance plan that is sponsored and populated by people in an industry, trade, or professional association that pools their buying power to negotiate and get better health insurance costs from insurance companies.
• According to Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, “Consumers are always looking for a new low-cost health insurance option but migration of healthy people to a new product will ultimately take a toll on what is presently being sold in the market.”
• The Avalere study estimates that those that drop Obama Care policies and join an AHP insurance poll will save about $9,700 a year on average vs. a policy they could get in the private insurance market.\
• So the good news is that millions of Americans will save thousands and thousands of dollars a year in insurance costs. The bad news, according to Chris Sloan, senior manager at Avalere, “The proposed rule would lead to millions of individuals and small businesses shifting into a new form of coverage, likely reducing their premiums, but leading to higher premiums in the markets they leave behind.” 

That means that there will be fewer and fewer Obama Care policy holders which will put pressure on the insurance companies to raise rates over as smaller and likely less healthy base which will drive more people out of Obama Care policies which will cause the insurance companies to raise rates….and the Obama Care death spiral continues.

All of which raises a good point: why didn’t Obama just do this eight years ago, allowing people to more easily join an AHP? It may have allowed millions and millions of Americans to get lower cost health insurance many years ago without all of the hassles, bureaucracy, and failures of Obama Care? Another example where government and politicians’ “solutions” made a bad situation worse.

That will do it for the unfolding disasters of Obama Care for this month: a Medicaid system in much need of reform, higher healthcare costs and lower quality, and a simple solution that Obama Care completely missed. More next month as the disasters keep on coming.

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