January, 2019, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Bad Health Care Priorities in California and NYC

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.

Today's post is not so much the failures of Obama Care but the health care idiocy elsewhere in the political class across the country:

1) We have often talked about what bad shape California is in across any number of perspectives:

• It's unfunded state government liabilities is over $200 billion.
• Some of its larger cities have massive homelessness problems.
• In Los Angeles, over 40% of its residents make so little money that they qualify for Medicaid.
• The state’s infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) is falling apart, like every other state’s.
• It’s public schools severely under educate its kids.
• It has just suffered through massive wildfires that have killed, maimed, and made homeless many of its citizens.
• Like other states, many of its citizens do not have healthcare coverage.
• It’s high speed train dream project has been a massive and expensive failure.
• Out migration is a large problem has productive citizens flee the state because of its high taxes and shaky future.

Certainly a state in sad shape financially. But what does the new governor want to do in the face of these sever problems relative to its American citizens living in the state, at least those that are still there:

• Newly sworn in governor, Gavin Newsome, announced that he will expand the state’s Medicaid program to cover the health care needs of young adult illegal immigrants.
• Other illegal immigrants already are covered by the state’s Medicaid program so he has just added an extra expense to cover MORE illegal immigrants.
• Obviously, tax paying citizens at some point will have to pay for this additional coverage of illegal immigrants’ healthcare needs.
• According to Newsome: “People’s lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe — they all hang in the balance. The country is watching us, the world is watching us. The future depends on us, and we will seize this moment.”

Funny how another liberal politician seems to care more about illegal immigrants than his own constituents. Just once I would like to see people like Newsome have the same urgency, the same compassion, the same “seize the moment” energy about his own Americans. 

And the problems that affect real citizens that we listed above will have less resources to support and help real citizens’ needs in education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. and those limited resources will go to help illegal immigrants.

2) Oh, but wait! In case you thought that illegal immigrant health care was strictly a California problem, you would be wrong. According to the Money and Markets website:

• J.T. Crowe, writing for the website on January 8, 2019, reviewed how New York City is thinking about taking taxpayer money to fund health care for all of its citizens including illegal immigrants.
• Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed that $100 million of taxpayer wealth be diverted to provide affordable “health care for all” in the city.
• His plan would cover 600,000 people including illegal immigrants.
• According to the article: “The plan, called “NYC Care,” will offer public health insurance on a sliding scale based on income, and will begin later this year in the Bronx before being available to all New Yorkers by 2021. The plan will cost about $100 million once it reaches full enrollment, the mayor’s office said.”
• Apparently, if you are in this program, you would not have a choice of doctors, a doctor would be assigned to you whether you liked him or her or not.
• The theory is that this plan would eventually save the city money by reducing emergency room visits and by improving overall public health.

So many problems with this plan:

• Both Obama Care and its forerunner in Massachusetts promised that emergency room visits would go down once government intervened in the healthcare market.
• But those reductions never occurred and a case could be made that emergency room visits actually increased.
• De Blasio also said that, “We wanted one large solution for everyone. We are trying to avoid people getting health care the wrong way,’ which is another inane comment since “one large solution” will NEVER fit everyone’s needs (Obamacare prove that) and he pretends that he knows what is the “right” solution for everyone.
• But the really stupid aspect of this plan is the math.
• He wants to spend $100 million a year to cover the health care needs of 600,000 people.
• Do the math, Bill, $100 million means that every one of those 600,000 people will get….about $167 worth of healthcare a year, or a paltry $14 a month.

Either de Blasio is very bad at math and has no concept that $100 million will come nowhere close to covering the healthcare needs of 600,000 people or he is using the time tested political trick of low balling the cost estimate of a project, knowing that the cost will be much higher and by then the program will be embedded into the bureaucracy. If he is using the trick, then a lot more taxpayers are going to pay a lot more to cover the astronomical costs of 600,000 people, many of whom should not even be here from an illegal immigration perspective.

Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration along with other countries' single payer health insurance plans have proven that politicians, government bureaucracies, and massive government programs have no chance of being efficient, effective, and worthwhile. And yet people like Newsome and de Blasio somehow think that they can do what massive government efforts in the past have failed to do. Insanity.

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