August, 2017, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: $ MIllion Say NO Thanks To Obama Care, Aetna Says Good Bye to Obama Care, and The Failure Of Health Care In Canada

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) By this time in the Obama Care life cycle, we were promised that well over 21 million Americans would be enjoying affordable health care coverage from a plethora of insurance companies all eager for our business and insurance dollars and that we would be getting medical support from our current doctors or any doctor we wanted. Instead we have about half the promised number of people with Obama Care policies, the annual cost of those policies has been going up by double digits since the beginning, the number of companies offering Obama Care policies continues to dwindle quickly, and the network of healthcare professionals in Obama Care policy networks has gotten more and more narrow.

The quality of the insurance and health care provided has gotten so bad that a whopping 8.1 million Americans paid over $1.6 billion in fines since they did not purchase health insurance back in 2014, as required by Obama Care. According to the IRS: “Beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act required that individuals must have had health care coverage, qualified for a health coverage exemption, or made a shared responsibility payment with a tax return. A health care individual responsibility payment was made on 8.1 million returns for $1.7 billion, an average of $210 per tax return paying this penalty.”

While that number got lower as the penalty for not having health insurance got higher, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that this year 4 million Americans will still ignore the mandate to buy insurance and pay the fine which in total will come to about $5 billion. Let’s play with some numbers:

• That is $5 billion that will not be used to grow the economy, $5 billion less than cannot be used for movie tickets, nights out for dinner, kids’ camps, etc., $5 billion that will disappear into the Federal bureaucracy and never be seen again.
• With about 10 million Americans currently having Obama Care insurance policy coverage, a whopping 40% equivalent to those covered have said no to Obama Care.
• If Obama Care was really that good, you would not have the equivalent of 40% of the current enrollees saying no thanks.

Another sad Obama Care prediction failure. Or as Senator Tom Cotton summed it up: “It’s not surprising that the Obamacare mandate numbers are worse than the administration first claimed. Obamacare penalizes taxpayers who can no longer afford insurance that Obamacare made unaffordable. As Obamacare continues to unravel, things will only get worse. The legacy of Obamacare is skyrocketing premiums, unaffordable deductibles, the destruction of the individual insurance market, and tax penalties on Obamacare’s victims.”

2) So not only are millions of Americans savvy enough to realize that paying a lot of money for very poor insurance coverage is not a sound financial decision, even those that would like to get an Obama Care policy are having problems:

• According to Martin Knoll, writing for the Conservative Tribune website on August 4, 2017, another major health insurance company has pulled out of ALL of the Obama Care markets that it currently serves.
• Aetna, one of the largest health insurance companies in the country, announced they are completely withdrawing from Obama Care exchanges in 2018, leaving many Americans again without health insurance coverage.
• While the company had considered staying in the Nevada Obama Care market, in the end it pulled out of that state also.
• The reasons they are pulling out of all of the Obama Care markets was evident in their recent earnings report where they had a record 52% growth in profits with a lot of that growth being attributed to pulling out of other Obama Care markets previously.
• Aetna had lost about $700 million on Obama Care policies between 2014 and 2016 and was expected to lose another $200 million in 2017 despite a shrunken presence.

So much for “bending the cost” curve of healthcare in this country. The costs due to Obama Care are higher than expected or promised everywhere, from people voting with their wallets to not buy Obama Care expensive, poor quality insurance policies to large health insurers saying they have had enough, the costs of Obama Care policies are still too high.

3) The last refuge of Obama Care supporters is coming down to the universal healthcare/single payer system, where the government handles every single aspect of your health care needs. These people are now saying that Obama Care did not go far enough, did not allow the government enough control over our health care decisions, that is why it failed. They say this despite their promises seven years ago of lower costs, more competition, better medical care. They were entirely wrong back then in their predictions about Obama Care, why should we believe them and their predictions about universal single payer health care?

In fact, we do not have to believe them. We have previously reviewed the single payer government controls everything healthcare market previously in this blog and how it has failed miserably in other countries:

Canada: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/02/february-2015-part-4-unfolding-disaster_23.html

England: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/february-2017-part-5-unfolding-disaster.html

Let’s stay with this theme, i.e. failed single payer around the world, with a revisit to Canada:

• A new research report from the Fraser Institute shows that Canadians pay a lot of money for their single payer healthcare system and get very poor service in return.
• The research also found that that Canadians really have no clue how expensive their healthcare really system is since it is indirectly paid for via a myriad of taxes and fees: “Canadians often misunderstand the true cost of our public healthcare system. This occurs partly because Canadians do not incur direct expenses for their use of health care, and partly because Canadians cannot readily determine the value of their contribution to public health care insurance.”
• The research found that a typical Canadian family of four will pay $12,057 a year for health care in 2017, an increase of 70% over the past 20 years.
• Thus, the typical family is paying over $1,000 a month and still are not getting anywhere close to good medical care.
• Fraser also found that about 63,000 Canadians leave the country every year to get medical treatment, an average of about 120 a week.
• Thus, if the Canadian system is so good while do tens of thousands of Canadians abandon that system for medical care elsewhere, usually in the U.S. every year? Could it be the long waiting lists for both simple and complex surgery that exists in Canadian hospitals?
• According to the report from Fraser: “Services are being rationed. In our last report on wait times in Canada, we discovered that the average wait time from referral to treatment was 20 weeks. That was the longest wait time in the history of our survey.”
• While the U.S. healthcare model has its problems, can you imagine waiting for five months on average just to get a referral? That does not mean treatment, that means getting a referral to get an opinion on what treatment should be.
• A five month wait for a referral could be a death sentence for someone with a cancer or other life threatening disease, hardly good health care practices.

Rationed health care at high prices with long waiting lists? Does not sound so great when you understand the reality of failure of a single payer, government controlled healthcare system. 

And besides the point of the failure of single payer in England, Canada and elsewhere: do you really want the likes of Nancy Pelosi (the Speaker ofthe House who actually said that they had to pass legislation before they could see what was in it), Maxine Walters, Hank Johnson (the Congressman who actually thought the island of Guam could topple over and go upside down in the Pacific Ocean), Sheila Jackson Lee (the Congresswoman who wanted to know if the Mars Rover would be driving anywhere close to where Neil Armstrong landed on the moon), etc., etc., I think not!

More Obama Care unfolding failures to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Small Businesses Want It Repealed, Competition Continues To Disappear, and Gruber Insanely Blames Trump

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 discussed the reality that many small businesses have been crushed by Obama Care’s requirements and regulations. It has caused their costs to increase, they have had to reduce staff or change staff from permanent to temporary ino order to survive, their taxes have gone up, or they just went out of business because of the regulations. 

Thus, it is not a surprise that in a recent poll, 60% of small business owners said they want Obama Care repealed:

• According to Philip Hodges, writing for the Eagle Rising website, a February survey of 700 small business owners found that 60% of them wanted Obama Care repealed.
• The primary reason given for their position is skyrocketing insurance premiums that was caused by a lack of competition in the Obama Care insurance market as large and smaller insurers fled the Obama Care market, unable to make a profit in that market.
• Quoting a CNBC article: “It is a trend affecting business owners in all states. Ross Coulter, 49, and his wife, who run a two-person public relations firm in Dallas, have been hunting for a new health insurance plan after Humana notified them it was discontinuing their current one. They had no immediate plans to slow their search after the House vote. They are looking for an affordable replacement by July 1 for the high-deductible plan, for which premiums are $900 a month for the couple and their three children. The only plans that are comparable would be a $400- or $500-a-month increase,” says Coulter, who is now considering options like a Medi-Share plan, run by Christian Care Ministry, in conjunction with a cancer-coverage policy.
• CNBC went on to report on a situation that we have covered many times before, namely that Obama Care policies are so expensive that customers buy the high deductible plans to reduce their monthly premium payments but then cannot afford the deductible payments when they need the insurance because the deductibles are so high: “When Paula Muto, a vascular and general surgeon in Lawrence and North Hanover, Massachusetts, looked into unpaid bills in her solo private practice recently, she found that many were for patients who had high-deductible plans. It was the people with insurance, that couldn’t pay the deductibles, that weren’t paying us,” she says.”

The unfolding disaster that is Obama Care continues to unfold disasters.

2) One of the people most associated with the disaster known as Obama Care is one of the so-called architects of the plan, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. Obviously, as an architect of such a disaster, it is not unexpected that he would name others of the failures of this wretched piece of legislation.

But at some point, you can stretch that blame game too far in who you blame for the failures as Gruber recently did when he blamed, of all people, Donald Trump for the failures of the law. Let’s keep in mind that Gruber’s work and the passage of Obama Care was over seven YEARS ago, much before Trump became President less than five MONTHS ago.

Come on Professor Gruber, insurance companies were fleeing the Obama Care policy market long before Trump became President. Enrollment numbers were falling 50% short of your promises long before Trump became President. Premiums and deductibles of Obama Care policies were skyrocketing long before Trump became President. Obama Care state co-ops were failing long before Trump became President. The law was already in place long before Trump became President and he has made no changes to that law since becoming President.

Wow, you know you are desperate to place blame and deflect attacks on your reputation when you are blaming someone retroactively seven years. Pathetic. Not not unexpected when you consider that Gruber considered Americans too stupid to understand the law he helped create: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass,” Gruber stated during one health care conference.

Another time, Gruber self-admitted that the Obama administration pushed through the so-called Cadillac tax, a tax on certain premium health care plans, “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance plans.”

Surprised that he did not blame Trump for the American voter being stupid.

3) According to a recent Associated Press article, the carnage of health insurers leaving the Obama Care market is continuing:

• After pulling out of several states previously, after losing $450 million on Obama Care policies, giant insurer Aetna announced that it will also pull out of Nebraska and Delaware next year after expecting to lose $200 million on Obama Care policies this year.
• This will further increase the number of counties across the country that have only one Obama Care insurer operating in that county in 2018.
• With access to only one Obama Care insurance company available, insurance industry experts expect the costs of those Obama Care policies to increase due to lack of competition.
• Things continue to get bad in Iowa with Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross leaving the state and another Iowa insurer, Medica saying that its "ability to stay in the Iowa insurance market in any capacity is in question at this point."
• When Humana pulled out of Tennessee, it left 16 Tennessee counties with NO Obama Care insurance options, a void that has since been filled by only one other company.
• Blue Cross-Blue Shield is now the only Obama Care insurer in one third of the country’s 3,100 counties.

So much for the Gruber and Obama promise that Obama Care would result in a robust competitive environment that would drive down the cost of insurance for all Americans.

The disasters continue to unfold: lack of competition, disasters for small businesses, and the blaming of Donald Trump for something he had absolutely nothing to do with. More disasters to follow shortly.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Fevruary, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Less Competition, Less Choice, Higher Costs, and Nancy Pelosi Latest Delusion

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, 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 co-pays 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 we will focus on some of these root causes to show how they are the main drivers of our high healthcare costs, causes that Obama Care never addressed and which still stay unresolved:

1) The Fix This Nation website recently had an article where a major insurer’s CEO explained that Obama Care was indeed in a death spiral:

• Aetna’s CEO, Mark Bertolini, in an interview at a Wall Street Journal event, stated that Obama Care was in a death spiral from which it could not recover.
• He predicted that more insurance companies would pull out of the Obama Care policy market in the coming weeks which could leave parts of the country without access to Obama Care policies.
• Specifically, he stated: “It’s not going to get any better. It’s getting worse.”
• His prediction comes in the wake of another major insurer, Humana, announcing that it would also no longer provide insurance policies through the Obama exchanges, stating that it could not make a profit based on the existing customer base it was serving via Obama Care.

Another day, another day closer to spiraling into oblivion.

2) One of the cruelest lies that Obama and his like dumped on the country was that Obama Care would allow people to keep their existing insurance policies, access to their favored current doctors, and access to their preferred hospitals if they wanted to. We now know that was one of the grossest, most deceitful lies that Obama ever told since millions of Americans lost access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and policies. The lie was so outrageous that the usual Obama-loving Washington Post gave him the Lie Of The Year award several years ago.

Which brings us to the latest Nancy Pelosi rant and example of how out of touch with reality she is. Pelosi was one of Obama Care’s biggest cheerleaders. Of course, she made another infamous Obama Care quote with the inane quote that Congress had to pass the Obama Care legislation “so that we can see what is in it.” Yes, why read legislation BEFORE voting to enact it!

Well, Pelosi was at it again. House Speaker Paul Ryan is putting together plans to try and save Medicaid which is rapidly heading towards fiscal insolvency and collapse. I do not know if Ryan's plan is workable and fair, he is still working on it. 

But that did not stop Pelosi from getting into her delusional act again, stating boldly and indignantly: “They won’t be able to go to their own doctor if you take this away.” Really, millions of Americans lose access to their preferred doctors as a result of Obama Care and Pelosi is silent. A potential, non-final plan is under consideration and all of a sudden she is worried about Americans losing access to their preferred doctors. Pathetic and delusional, as always with this over the hill politician.

3) Jean Morrow, writing for the Heritage Foundation on February 15, 2017, reminded everyone of the major broken promises of Obama and the Obama Care effort and legislation:

- Although Obama promised that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by up to $2,500 the exact opposite happened:

• According to an eHealth analysis, from 2013 to 2017, the average individual market insurance premium increases were 99% for individuals and 140% for families, hardly a $2,500 decrease.
• According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, premium costs for employer sponsored insurance from 2010 to 2016 for employer family programs increased almost 32%.
• HealthPocket found that the lowest Obama Care bronze plans in 2017 had an average deductible of $6,092 for individual plans and $12,383 for family plans, leading to the Obama Care reality that the good news is that many people now have insurance, the bad news is that it is too expensive to use.

So much for that $2,500 decrease Obama promised.

- Obama promised that his legislation would increase competition, resulting in more choices and cheaper costs for insurance policies. But that was also a lie:

• Humana recently announced that they were leaving the Obama Care market because of unprofitability.
• This follows the lead of other major health insurance companies who have also left the market including UnitedHealthcare, BlueCross, and Aetna.
• As more insurers leave Obama Care it leaves about 70% of American counties with only one or two Obama Care insurer options, up from just 36% in just one year.
• And the infamous Obama Care co-ops did not help fill the competition void since 18 of the original 23 have already gone out of business, taking $1.9 billion of taxpayer wealth with them, and most, if not all, of the remaining co-ops will also go out of business. 

So much for Obama Care increasing competition.

- Obama claimed you could keep your existing plan and access to your preferred doctors if you wanted once Obama Care was enacted. This was by far the most persistent lie that Obama and his administration leaders said, stating this vow at least three dozen times.

But in 2014, the first year that Obama Care was in effect, the Associated Press reported on an analysis they did that found that 4.7 million families and individuals saw their existing, preferred health insurance policies cancelled as a result of the tenets within Obama Care. And this analysis covered just 30 states, indicating that possibly millions more Americans in those other 20 states also lost access to their preferred policies.

- Not only can you not keep your preferred policy, you cannot keep your preferred doctors lie. The legislation and the provisions included in it caused insurance costs to rise dramatically which caused Obama Care insurers to severely narrow their doctor and hospital networks. Many times this required people to change doctors in the middle of treatments they were undergoing for life threatening diseases. And typically, these more narrow networks did not include the best doctors, specialists, and hospitals.

That will do it for today’s unfolding disasters that come from Obama Care: higher costs, less choice, loss of preferred policies, doctors, and hospitals, lies and deceptions from the President and his cohorts, and of course, more delusions from Nancy Pelosi. More failures tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

January, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Eight Reasons To Kill Obama Care Now

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, 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 co-pays 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

We have been talking of the many reasons why ObamaCare has been a disaster from the start which turned it into the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington. Alyene Senger, writing for the Heritage Foundation recently did a nice job of summarizing the eight primary reasons why Obama Care needs to go away:

- Costs - Obama claimed multiple times that his namesake legislation could reduce a family’s annual health insurance costs by up to $2,500 a year. Instead, Obama Care insurance policy holders have seen double digit increases almost ever year in their premiums and higher and higher costs for their deductibles and co-pays. According to an eHealth analysis and report, between 2013 and 2017, the “average nationwide premium increase has been 99 percent for individuals and 140 percent for families.”

And do not forget deductibles. According to analysis done by HealthPocket, the average 2017 deducible for an Obama Care bronze plan is almost $6,100 for an individual policy and a whopping $12,383 for a family policy. This reality points out that less affluent people who can only afford a bronze plan may never get to utilize their policy, or a doctor, since they cannot afford these high deductible levels. The more expensive silver plans will average, in 2017, more reasonable deductibles of $3,572 for an individual and still high $7,474 for a family but the tradeoff is higher monthly premium payments which have been going up by double digits every year.

Not often mentioned in the context of Obama Care is the reality that insurance policy costs for those getting health insurance via their employers have also not been curtailed by Obama Care. According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, family policy premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance plans have gone up by 32% from 2010 through 2016, probably about twice the rate of inflation.

- Choice and Competition: We know that major insurance companies have already gotten out of the Obama Care market or curtailed their presence including UnitedHealthcare and Aetna. 2017 will be the worst year yet for Obama Care insurance company competition as many more companies have dropped than joined and those that remain tend to be bare bones companies that trade off cost for quality of care and access to the better medical options. Things are so bad that more than half the counties in the country now have access to only one or two Obama Care insurance companies, quite the opposite of the Obama boast that the legislation would boost competition and competitive options.

- Failed Exchange Enrollment: The Obama administration claims that 10.4 million people were covered by Obama Care insurance policies in 2016, more than 50% short of the promised enrollment goals, a disaster in itself. But according to the IRS in 2015, that year 12.7 million taxpayers claimed one or more exemptions from Obama Care’s mandate to purchase insurance coverage and another 6.5 million taxpayers paid the penalty rather than sign up for insurance coverage.

Thus, 19.2 taxpayers tried to get out of paying the Obama Care the required fine for not having insurance or just openly decided not to buy insurance, meaning that almost twice as many people tried to get out of buying mandatory insurance than actually bought the Obama care insurance policy.

- Obama Care Exchange Websites: The exchanges were supposed to the easy, efficient way for Americans to buy an Obama Care policy. They were unreliable and difficult to use in addition to not generating near enough customers that were promised. The American taxpayer sent almost $5 billion to the states to set up these state level exchanges but only 11 states and the District Of Columbia set up their own exchanges, the remaining states relied on the Federal government’s exchange. And that Federal exchange cost at least $800 million to build and on its first full day of operation signed up...six people.

- If You Like Your Plan, but the Government Doesn’t, You Can’t Keep It: This title is a play on words of one of Obama's biggest lies when he said over and over that if you like your current insurance policy, Obama Care would not force you to give it up. But that was far from the truth.

Early in the Obama Care era, there were estimates that 6-7 million people lost their existing health insurance policy because of Obama Care. Which means if we look at the true “net” gain in insured Americans, it is not 10 million as Obama claims but only between 3 and 4 million once you realize that the legislation caused 6 -7 million to lose insurance. That number was recently verified to some degree based on analysis by the Associated Press which found that 4.7 million insurance plans across 30 states were cancelled because of Obama Care. Extrapolating that 30 states results to 50 states easily gets back to the 6 - 7 million who lost insurance coverage.

- Co-Op Program: Obama gave 23 states an additional $2.4 billion in taxpayer wealth to create state level “insurance co-ops” to provide insurance policy competition in the 23 states. Within just a few years, 18 out of the 23 co-ops have gone belly up, with the remaining five in danger of following them, so far wasting $1.9 billion and causing hundreds of thousands of co-op customers to frantically seek out other insurance options when the co-ops usually went out of business very quickly.

-Medicaid - The other side of Obama Care disaster, Medicaid, has also been a disaster. Before Obama Care, Medicaid was a creaky, expensive, and low performing government health program. Rather than fix it first, Obama Care dumped about 12 million new customers on this wretched program, making it even more creaky, expensive, and low performing.

These Obama Care Medicaid customers are expected to add almost $1 TRILLION in incremental Medicaid spending in the next ten years for a whopping total Medicaid cost of about $4.8 trillion during the next decade. This comes out to an ANNUAL cost for EVERY American household of about $3,800 just to pay for Medicaid. This is not a good use of taxpayer wealth.

- Limited Access to Providers: Not only have costs gone up because of Obama Care, but access to quality doctor and hospital networks has become more limited over time. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation quantified network sizes for Obama Care plans in 2014, finding that: “Forty-one percent of networks are small or x-small: 11 percent of networks are x-small, meaning they include less than 10 percent of office-based practicing physicians in the area and another 30 percent are small, including between 10 percent and 25 percent of physicians. At the other end of the spectrum, 11 percent are x-large, which we define as networks including more than 60 percent of physicians.

What a mess. Costs up, quality down, Medicaid costs out of control, enrollment targets grossly missed, co-ops  collapsing, it is like you could not screw up more even if you tried. One more review of the unfolding disaster tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Making Up Excuses For Failure, IRS Harassment of Citizens, and More

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, 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 co-pays 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) The October 14, 2016 issue of The Week magazine did an article on the downfall of Obama Care called, “Why Obama Care Is Struggling.” It covers much of the failures we have already discussed this week and adds in a few others along with the very few, and very weak, Obama Care success stories:

• Some of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, and Blue Cross Blue Shield are rapidly pulling out of the Obama Care market because they are losing billions of dollars by being in those markets.
• Only 12.7 million people enrolled in the Obama Care exchanges this year, far short of the forecasted and promised 21 million who should have already enrolled. [Note: not included in the article is the reality that over 1.6 million original enrollees out of the 12.7 million have already been kicked out of their policies because they never paid the first installment of their premiums so the miss relative to the 21 million is even worse.]
• As many as 19% of those customers will have access to only one Obama Care insurer in 2017, very short of Obama's promise that Obama Care would increase competition, not reduce competition to only one provider.
• The main reason cited for the failure is that not enough young people have signed up for Obama Care policies, preferring to pay the penalty for not having insurance.
• While the business case and financials of the Obama Care effort required at least 35% of the enrollees to be aged between 18 and 34, in reality that percentage is only a meager 28%.
• Another problem with the shortfall is that small businesses did not kick employees off of their business insurance plans and onto the Obama Care policies as often as the Obama Care planners and forecasters expected, leaving the Obama Care insurers with older, sicker, and more expensive customers than expected.
• As a result, Obama Care insurance companies either have to hike up premium costs which drives away customers or strip down the benefits of their insurance policies, forcing customers to pay higher prices for less robust insurance coverage which drives away customers so much that many insurance companies decide that from a financial perspective, it is better to be out of the Obama Care world than be in it and take a financial beating.

What a mess, missed customer forecasts, higher premiums, less competition. Now, to be truthful, the article does point out that 20 million more people have health care insurance vs. the times previous to the Obama Care legislation. Also, the percentage of Americans without insurance coverage has dropped from 16% to 9% since Obama Care was passed. But there is a problem with considering the increased quantity of people having healthcare insurance vs. the quality of their healthcare insurance:

• Many of those with Obama Care policy customers are paying more and getting less than what they had with their previous insurance policies, policies that Obama Care outlawed and doomed to termination.
• Which gets us to another point, the 12.7 million who enrolled in Obama Care policies in 2016, were not all people who had not had health insurance before the law was enacted; likely more than half of the 12.7 million just traded their existing policies for Obama Care policies, often under duress, so that the incremental number of Americans insured under Obama Care insurance policies is likely closer to 4 or 5 million.
• Half of those Americans that are now insured as a result of the law, have gotten insurance via Medicaid, a reality that places upwards of 10 million people on a government program that will add tremendous costs to our national debt, provide health care via very narrow networks of less than the best doctors and hospitals, it is a government program that is hurtling towards financial insolvency, is corrupted with inefficiencies and criminal fraud, and if a Harvard study is to be believed, being a Medicaid patient does not make you any healthier vs. not having Medicaid coverage at all.

So yes, Obama Care did increase the number of Americans with health care insurance coverage. But Obama never promised that it would be lousy coverage that costs a lot, has high deductibles, had narrow networks of doctors and hospitals that were not of the highest quality, the reality that we see today. Quality also matters, it is not just quantity that matters.

[Note: the article tries to make the point that “overall government spending on healthcare was $2.6 trillion less last year than what it was expected to be before Obama Care…” This is obviously a ridiculously wrong number. The entire Federal government budget is just under $4 trillion a year so to claim that it is spending $2.6 trillion LESS, not in total, $2.6 trillion LESS, a year on healthcare is obviously either a falsehood meant to make Obama Care look better than it is or a gross typo.]

2) Zachary Tracer, Katherine Doherty, and Tatiana Darie, writing for Bloomberg on October 14, 2016, continued the bad news train coming out of the Obama Care disaster:

• According to an analysis by Bloomberg, 1.4 million Obama Care policy holders in 32 states will lose access to their policies in 2017, forcing them to find other insurance options. 
• Most of the damage is being caused by major insurance companies pulling out of the Obama Care world.
• The search for replacement policies will like lead to fewer insurance policy choices that are more expensive.
• S&P Global Ratings predict that 2017 enrollment in Obama Care insurance policies will be down by 8%.
• Just in Washington DC 7,800 Obama Care customers will lose access to their current policies.
• Kaiser Family Foundation has predicted that at least 19% of people in the Obama Care individual market will have the ability to choose from exactly one provider in 2017.
• In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield will be the only Obama Care option in 95 out of the state’s 100 counties since Aetna and UnitedHealthcare have withdrawn from the state, leaving 284,000 state residents without Obama Care health insurance policies.
• 117,000 residents in Tennessee will lose access to their Obama Care policies.

Another article, another set of implosions.

3) Obama Care from the beginning always had a little bit of the “Big Brother” syndrome ala George Orwell’s 1984. The government was forcing you to buy a product/service that you may or may not want to buy and making you a criminal if you did not heed their warnings and tracking your behavior to make sure you obeyed.

That Big Brother feeling came about again with a current IRS program that was put in place to ensure your compliance. The IRS, the enforcement arm, the “muscle” behind Obama Care is sending out official IRS letters to uninsured Americans (“reaching out” in their words) to remind them (“attracting” in their words) they need to get insured or be fined. The emphasis of the IRS has been to “remind”younger Americans to get insured because in order for Obama Care to work, younger Americans have to subsidize older, less healthy Americans, kind of a cross generational subsidy program from Americans with generally less wealth paying the bills of Americans with generally more wealth to their name.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise and Ways & Means Chairman Kevin Brady recently sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. It stated, “We strongly object to any action by the Administration to improperly use sensitive taxpayer information to identify and harass individuals who have rejected the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by choosing to pay a tax rather than be forced into a health care plan they don’t need and don’t want.” 

Their other concern is that the IRS was using “protected taxpayer information” to conduct the outreach program and that “We do not believe it to be an appropriate tax administration activity, or a good use of scarce taxpayer resources, to use protected return data to direct taxpayers on their personal coverage decisions.”

So yes, Big Brother IRS is watching and like Santa Claus, knows if you have been naughty or nice when it comes to your personal decision on health care insurance, the First Amendment be damned.

4) This next story is great because it shows how out of touch many of the Obama Care architects are relative to the current meltdown of the program and how deep they are into denial. According to David Ruiz, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on August 16, 2016, Zeke Emanuel, one of the more primary and certainly one of the more obnoxious architects of Obama Care, implied that Aetna’s decision to withdrawal from 70% of the Obama Care exchanges markets is not because they were losing money on Obama Care policies but it was to spite the government for not allowing its merger with Humana.

Is he that much out of touch with reality or just pissed off that his work is turning out to be a disaster? Let’s consider some facts:

• Blue Cross and BlueShield have also pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• UnitedHealthcare has pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• Humana and other insurance companies have pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• 17 out of the 23 Obama Care co-ops have gone out of business already because of heavy financial losses.
• We know for a fact that younger, healthier Americans did not sign up for Obama Care in the volume expected which increased insurance company costs more than expected.
• The primary objective of any business executive is to maximize shareholder wealth so no executive would stop operating in a profitable market category if they were maximizing shareholder wealth in that category, i.e. being profitable serving that category.

And despite all of these realities, this sore loser blames Aetna for doing something the whole market has done or is considering doing. By the way, Emanuel provides not proof, no income statements, no Aetna financial disclosures, no Aetna SEC documents, he just accuses them of doing what everyone else is doing. Pathetic.

One last set of unfolding Obama Care disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w