November, 2018, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care:Why Medicare For All Stinks and Why Trump Has Made Healthcare Better

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 reviewed how horribly the Federal government’s track record has been when providing healthcare to the American public:

• Medicare is going bankrupt with tens of trillions of dollars in predicted unfunded liabilities.
• Medicare and Medicaid lose tens of billions of dollars every year to incompetence and criminal fraud.
• The Veterans Administration has been so inept that thousands of veterans have had to wait months just to get an appointment to see a doctor with untold numbers dying before they could actually get a doctor’s appointment.
• Obama Care never came close to attaining its stated goals along every financial, medical and health insurance perspective.

And yet, despite this horrid track record in the healthcare industry, many Washington politicians think it would be a good idea for the Federal government to control EVERY aspect of Americans’ health care needs. They even have a name for this travesty, “Medicare For All.” 

Jack Crowe, writing for the National Review website, described how idiotic this concept is,besides the track record of failure in this area in the past:

• A viable estimate of the cost of “Medicare for All” concludes that the concept would cost the Federal government, and American taxpayer, $32.6 TRILLION over just the first ten years.
• This is the estimate that as developed by a forecasting model developed by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
• This estimate is in line with another study that was done independently by the liberal Urban Institute.
• This average cost of $3.26 TRILLION a year is almost equal to the total amount of record setting Federal tax revenue collected in 2017, i.e. the country would have to double the amount of wealth going to the Federal government every year to pay for this program.
• This $3.26 TRILLION a year, if paid in taxes, is wealth that could not be used to support and grow the economy, depressing economic growth and the financial well being of the country with no guarantee the Federal government could even execute such a big effort in light of its failures listed above.
• In fact, the study found that “the government could double all corporate and individual income taxes and it would still lack requisite revenue to fund the program.”
• Specifically, “Enacting something like ‘Medicare for all’ would be a transformative change in the size of the federal government,” said Charles Blahous, the study’s author.
• Bernie Sanders, rather than read and criticize the study based on its merits, decided to attack the study’s credibility solely based on the reality that his political enemies, the Koch brothers, fund some of the activities of the Mercatus Center:“If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all, and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States cannot do the same.” 
• This is a totally self serving and incorrect statement since in our previous post we showed that single payer systems like “Medicare for All” has not delivered what Sanders claim they have.

As we have said before, any single payer health care system is a stupid idea that refuses to die, similar to just about every other idea or program that Washington politicians all too often come up with.

2) Trump has made some pretty substantial changes to Obama Care’s tenets and rules and, of course, liberals and Democrats have cried disaster all along the process, claiming that Trump is heartless and causing health care suffering among Americans. But according to reality as described by Warren Todd Huston in a November 6, 2018 article for the Godfather Politics website, Trump’s changes have actually made health care better for millions of Americans:

• Mr. Huston cites an article in the New York Post by Mary Vought that showed that Trump has made life easier for Americans who are chronically ill and others with pre-existing conditions.
• Trump has encouraged the Food and Drug Administration to speed up the approval of generic drugs which generally cost less than equivalent brand name drugs.
• In Trump’s first two years the FDA has approved over 1,900 generic drugs while only 1,143 were approved in the last two years of the Obama administration.
• An analysis by the Council of Economic Advisors found that drug price growth over the past two years probably saved consumers about $26 billion.
• Trump also signed the “Right To Try” legislation that allows terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs as a last ditch effort to save their lives.
• Also, according to the article: “The Trump administration has expanded access to more coverage options — not fewer as Obamacare did...To individuals who can’t afford pricey ObamaCare plans, changes to short-term, limited-duration insurance will give alternatives with more reasonable rates — and a guarantee that they can maintain their coverage should they develop a costly illness that requires treatment after their plans’ expiration date.”
• Trump also eased Medicaid rules to allow states to better their Medicaid rules to more efficiently handle the needy in their states since according to Ms. Vought, “Disability groups aligned with Democrats didn’t mention it at the time, but ObamaCare effectively created a two-tier Medicaid system — with individuals with disabilities and other vulnerable populations at the back of the line. Under the Affordable Care Act, states get 90 cents from Washington for every dollar they spend covering able-bodied adults, but only 50 to 75 cents for covering individuals with disabilities. That has led states that expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare to treat people with disabilities as lower priorities.”

So, Trump’s Obama Care’s changes made drugs less expensive, gave no hope to the really sick Americans in this country, made it easier to get insurance policies that fit a person’s needs, and made it easier for the truly needy to get Medicaid help for their health needs. Yeah, he really screwed things up [sarcasm.]

More unfolding disasters of Obama Care next month are highly likely since Obama Care is the law that keeps on giving...bad news.

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