August, 2018, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care:Short Term and Long Term Ways to Fix What Washington and Obama Care Have Broken

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) Our last two posts about Obama Care have discussed, as always, the unfolding disaster that is indeed Obama Care. From narrow doctor and hospital networks, to higher and higher premiums, co-pays, and deductibles to the failures of single payer healthcare systems around the world to lower life expectancies in this country, it is not a pretty sight. 

So today, we will deviate a little bit from this misery and talk about some good things that are happening regarding health care. There are solutions out there, both small and short term and large and long term, so let’s be a little more optimistic in today’s discussion.

Let’s start with a recent article from the League Of Power website which summarized some of the short term positive efforts Trump has taken to relieve the failure of Obama Care:

• Trump has loosened and enhanced the health insurance options known as short term policies or STLDs.
• These policies are designed to bridge the gap between times when someone is not able to get a regular, permanent health insurance policy.
• Under Obama Care, any use of an STLD policy could last only three months since Obama Care wanted to and forced Americans to purchase Obama Care policies which were usually more expensive and forced Americans to get coverage for health situations that would never happen to them.
• But STLDs usually have lower premiums (often one third the cost of an Obama Care policy), lower deductibles, and more and different options than the standard, one size fits all Obama Care policies.
• Given the positive aspect of STLDs, Trump extended the time that they could be used to a full year and allowed them to be renewed up to 36 months. 
• This extension allows Americans to have less expensive health insurance that better fits their needs while giving them an adequate time to shop around for a real policy, time that Obama Care never allowed.
• Trump made Health Savings Account (HSAs) much more attractive financially to help Americans pay for their health insurance and general health needs.
• As with short term policies, Obama and Obama Care tried to take this important tool out of the hands of Americans in the fight against high health care costs.
• Trump increased the number and types of people who can use an HSA, how much money can be used to fund an HSA, and the ability of kids to inherit HSA funds from their parents.
• The best part is that HSA funds can be used for any sort of medical ailment since it is basically a cash savings plan whereas the number of Obama Care policies on the market gets smaller and smaller.
• Trump has loosened the tight controls and regulations on the states so that the states have much more flexibility to tailor medical plans like Medicaid to fit the needs of their particular citizens rather than being forced to live under the Federal one size fits all of Obama Care.
• This has resulted in more efficient, cheaper and better health care plans for Americans in need of medical help and insurance.
• This is also a first step to allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines, forbidden under Obama Care, which attacks one of the root causes listed above.
• Trump is also now allowing people with related small business characteristics to band together and form business insurance pools for their employees health insurance needs.
• The heavier bargaining power of these pools results in lower costs for the businesses’ employees with higher quality care than with Obama Care policies.

Thus, finally some good news when it comes to Obama Care, the dismantling of Obama Care’s tenets is the best possible news for Americans in need of affordable, quality health insurance. 

2) But Trump is not the only one trying to find ways to unravel the disaster of Obama Care and improve the cost, efficiency, and effectiveness of our country’s health care. A new book by Charles Silver and David Hyman, “Overcharged - Why Americans Pay Too Much For HealthCare” is an in-depth look at what is going on in America’s healthcare industry today but more importantly, how to fix what ails it with a bottoms-up, consumer driven, free market approach. 

I fill not go into detail on how they would fix what is broken, they needed a whole book to do so. Let me just do two things. First, let me cite two examples they cited of the craziness of what we deal with now and what Obama Care did not fix:

• Example #1 - “After a brief overnight stay in a local hospital for snake bite treatment, Eric Ferguson was hit with a bill for $89,227. How could this possibly happen?”
• Example # 2 - “A year after Dr. Paul Davis’s daughter was given a urine test, she received a bill for the test (but never received the results). The cost? Over $17,000. For a urine test? How can a lab charge so much?”

Insanity. Their book tries to find ways that would fix such insanity. 

Second, it has received very favorable reviews from some very important people:

• ”The biggest threat to America’s prosperity and even its solvency is the mismatch between the amazingly and increasingly competent science of medicine and the amazingly and increasingly incompetent pricing and allocation of it. Now come Silver and Hyman to frighten us with the facts and to point to ways the biggest player in the healthcare game - the government - can stop making matters worse.” George Will, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and author.
• “This blood-boiling book will have you ready to root for serious change in our medical system where the patient - not third parties - is in charge.” Steve Forbes, chairman and editor in chief, Forbes Media 
• “Overcharged shows the outrageous prices and anti-competitive practices in U.S. healthcare are not the consequence of free markets but of big government.” Eamonn Butler, director, Adam Smith Institute.
• “Apologists dismiss each heartrending failure of the National Health Service [single payer government healthcare system in England] as what you get from trying to do socialized medicine on the cheap. “Overcharged” reminds us that profligate socialism is no better.” Damile Hannan, member of the European Parliament.

Soundly researched, original thought on how to fix what Obama Care could not.

3) One last piece of good news for hope. The Medium.com website recently put out their way to fix the American healthcare system. Before giving you that link, consider some stats they provided:

• Average premiums for individual insurance rose a whopping 105% in the first four years of Obama Care, breaking Obama’s promise that Obama Care would “bend the cost curve.” At the time of the promise we assumed he meant it would be bent down, not up.
• The average monthly premium went from $232 to $476.
• As the price went up, the number of people carrying Obama Care policies went down due to the increasingly unaffordable costs of such policies.
• Fewer people overall had individual policies in December, 2017 than when Obama Care took effect in December, 2014.
• The number of small businesses offering health insurance plans to their employees dropped 24% between 2012 and 2016.

Dreadful, dreadful numbers that we have reviewed dozens and dozens of times. But Medium thinks it has a cure for what ails our healthcare system which can be accessed at:

https://medium.com/@consensusgroup2018/the-health-care-choices-proposal-policy-recommendations-to-congress-a4660182d830?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRReE4yTmlPV1V4WkRNeiIsInQiOiJaXC9IdWwyY1ZvVVVNUFBsMVlKTFh0bXcyOHlsbFRxVFdsMG9kRUtNUVRBQUlKM21KSHY5bEVuQW1CcDhhem9UeEhQdmpSeVZHbGJrb2pJOVo3Ujc1QTUzUGl2YmJYbFFDTEhpdTF3WG56R2pnbExXWWxtdmNtU2lKOVMwRTkxRksifQ%3D%3D

That will do it for this month’s review of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. But hopefully we left you with some hope until next time. There are ways to fix the system, that Trump is already doing and which other, smart, non-politician people have analyzed that do it without relying on inept and greedy politicians and the lobbyists and drug companies that feed on them. 

It will not be easy but the alternative of doing nothing, or going with a single payer plan where crazy, incompetent people like Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Walters and the 500 other Washington dingbat politicians control your healthcare and life, is not pretty.

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