November, 2015 Part 4,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Death Spiral Analogy 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 it 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 but with a big exception: 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 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.

For the next several days we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Edward Woodson, writing for the The Blaze on November 5, 2015, laid out the sordid relationship between the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Obama administration over the years as it relates not only to Obama Care but to the entire Medicare/Medicaid/AHA government cronyism scam:

• Back in in May, 2009, as the Obama Care legislation was being put together, the AHA publicly announced its support for healthcare reform in general, reform that eventually turned into Obama Care.
• When early drafts of the legislation were not as favorable to the AHA and its members as it would like, Obama’s so-called health reform czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle emailed an AHA operative, Linda Fishman, that, “I know you understand that you are much more likely to end up where you want to be if you don’t box us in.” In other words, relax, we got your back.
• After Obama Care was passed, the AHA was so delighted with the results that it funded a million dollars worth of ad campaigns for 16 Democratic members of Congress to thank them for their support in getting the legislation passed.
• That support paid off when the Department of Health and Human Services decided to further curtail a government audit program of hospitals that has already recovered billions of dollars in Medicare fraud and wasteful spending incurred by, surprise, AHA members.
• In 2013, this audit program recovered $3.7 million of taxpayer wealth from crooked hospitals but the recovery rate dropped more than a third to $2.4 billion in 2014 as a result of the Obama administration putting stringent restrictions on the government auditors trying to recapture wasted dollars.
• For example, current rules allow the auditors to only look at 2% of a hospital’s claims for government reimbursement and even worse, the Obama administration recently announced that it was dropping that restriction even further down to .5% of claims, less than 1%.
• Now there is no more than a one in two hundred chance that an auditor will come across a bogus claim by a member of the AHA, and thus, the ability to cheat the American taxpayer and get away with it is greater today and greater than it has ever been.

Now, it could be that the more lax enforcement of criminal investigation of AHA members has nothing to do with the campaign money and support the AHA provided to the passage of Obama Care. More likely though, given the current atmosphere of cronyism that pervades the Obama administration, these events are all connected and the American taxpayer gets screwed again in the process. 

Given that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified in front of Congress this past October that the Federal government annually pays out $125 billion in improper payments from its programs such as Medicare, up from $105 billion in previous years, it is not as if everybody is being honest and forthright when it comes to accepting government payouts for services rendered. 

Of the $125 billion, the GAO estimated that $75 billion of that waste comes from just Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that are integral to Obama Care and AHA's hospitals' financials. By recovering only $2.4 billion a year, criminals and others such as the AHA may be getting caught a meager 3% of the time.

2) Richard Pollock, writing for the Daily Caller on October 22, 2015, dove more deeply into the GAO testimony and findings that we just discussed:

• The GAO ran an undercover operation to see how easily they could cheat the government’s health care operations.
• Ten out ten fake Obama Care applications were approved for government subsidies even though the ten people did not exist, they were just GAO fake identities.
• The fake identities used fake Social Security numbers and fictitious employers.
• The ten fake people were scattered across the country in different states.
• The GAO also submitted eight fake people into the Medicaid system of which seven out of the eight got approved for Medicaid coverage even though they also were totally non-existent.

Totally inept and corrupt government programs and the processes that support them. 

3) Betsy McCaughley, writing for the New York Post on October 19, 2015, described how Obama Care is entering into a “death spiral:”

• In general, the death spiral is being caused because, “The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up."
• In late October, the Obama administration announced that enrollment in Obama Care policies in 2016 will be less than half of what the original expectations were.
• Despite a large increase in the penalty for not having health insurance in 2016, only one in seven uninsured Americans will have signed up for insurance for next year.
• Without enough healthy people signing up for Obama Care policies, the existing pool of policies becomes very expensive and unprofitable for the insurance carriers offering them, which is causing the companies to raise the premiums of current policy holders to make up the difference.
• David Wichmann, UnitedHealth Group’s president, recently stated that higher premiums are required going forward since current Obama Care enrollees will “require more medical services than original expectations.”
• The Robert Wood Johnson/Urban Institute analysis predicts that many states will see Obama Care policy costs go up 30% or more in 2016.
• The Heritage Foundation estimates that Obama Care insurers lost 12% selling Obama Care plans so far.
• Most of the Obama Care co-ops have already gone out of business, are going out of business, or are in dire financial straits which will result in hundreds of thousands of Americans seeking out other insurance coverage which is likely to be more expensive than the insurance they got through their now defunct co-op.

But none of this should surprise anyone who reads this blog or who has more than a passing interest in healthcare. The Obama administration never addressed the underlying causes of high healthcare costs in this country. They misunderstood a public health crisis with an insurance crisis and thus, applied the wrong solution to the wrong problem. And even worse, the insurance solution they tried to apply was a Rube Goldberg like contraption that was so onerous, confusing, and idiotic that it also has failed to reach even its ill founded goals and objectives.

More unfolding disasters tomorrow, disasters that never stop coming from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted.

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:

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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.

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July, 2014 Update, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 2: An Incompetent Enrollment Process, Likely Cost Increases In Florida, and More

Yes, the world has been a mess lately. Fighting in the Gaza Strip, downed airliners, Russians fighting Ukrainians, the economy still stagnant, Iraq begin torn apart, Syrian civil war still killing thousands, veterans still not getting the proper medical treatment, a border that is a humanitarian crisis, etc. In the background though, has been the continuing and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

We have had to devote many posts every month to this fiasco since last August. The fallout from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by Washington just keeps on giving and messing up Americans’ lives. This month is no exception. We will probably need most of this week to cover it all, that is how bad the law is many, many months after it was rolled out in such a disastrous manner last fall. 

As with previous months, we will likely stop talking about it this month not because we ran out of material but because it can get so depressing going over the damage the legislation is doing to lives, health, freedom and the economy.

1) Besides the big problem Obama Care is facing that we discussed yesterday, namely that a court ruling may have gutted the main thrust of the legislation which was to give out subsidies to low income Americans to purchase overpriced and under featured Obama Care insurance policies, the logistics and operations of the entire effort continues to be a disaster.

The General Accountability Office of the Federal government recently announced that it had completed a sting operation on the sign up process of the Obama Care process. What they found was very discouraging, but not surprising, given how poorly every other aspect of failed to meet even minimal standards of quality:

• Despite using totally fake ids, undercover GAO investigators were able to obtain taxpayer-subsidized health care coverage in 11 of 12 attempts, according to Associated Press reporting.
• This latest disgrace and dysfunction appears focused on Obama Care call centers that handle applications from those people who were unable able to enroll in the system via online the online exchanges.
• Members of Congress had some correct if cynical, remarks about non-existent people being able to get enrolled in Obama Care policies. Congressman Dave Camp said the GAO finding is just more proof that Obama Care is rife with “incompetence, waste and the potential for fraud.” Senator Orrin Hatch said: “Obama Care is working really well — for those who don’t exist.”

It seems ironic and pitiful that many of our real, living, breathing veterans cannot get basic medical care from the Federal government but fictitious people have no trouble getting health insurance coverage from the same Federal government. Talk about incompetence.

2) Not surprisingly, more states are finding out that the premiums likely to be paid next year on Obama Care policies will be much higher than today’s premiums. Kaiser Health News recently did a story on what is going on in Florida relative to the latest cost increase news. Highlights of their report include the following:

• The top executive of Florida Blue, the state’s largest health insurance carrier, recently went public with the announcement that his Obama Care customers will see an increase in their policy costs in 2015.
• Apparently, the company, which picked up the most Obama Care enrollees in the state, were stuck with a larger percentage of older and sicker patients than they expected.
• In addition to not getting enough younger and healthy enrollees, the company ended up paying more than expected for people seeking more expensive health services: “We will be under tremendous financial pressure initially given the age, risk profile and high utilization of the new membership. It is far from clear that large enrollment in the marketplace is a financially beneficial place to be.” 
• In other words, expect your Obama Care policy premiums to go up next year because we are getting killed financially by those same policies.
• Florida Blue has not yet gone public with its 2015 rate increases, that information will be made available in a few weeks but the news does not sound good for none or minimal rate hikes.
• About 23% of those who bought Obama Care policies from Florida Blue this year were in the 18-to-34 age category, far below the national rate of 28% and farther below the 40% threshold that the Federal government said was needed for the entire Obama Care process to be viable.

Another state whose residents will probably not see their annual health care costs go down $2,500 as promised by the President. But that should not come as a surprise since we have not seen ANY state whose health care costs went down enough to justify that claim.

3) Given how poorly every aspect of Obama Care has unfolded so far, is there any hope that it will work itself out for the greater good over the next decade or so? If you believe the latest forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, the answer to that question is not good. 

Remember, one of the utmost, primary goals of Obama Care was to get affordable health insurance coverage for every American. That is why it is officially called the “Affordable Healthcare Act.” But that primary goal will not be attained, even ten years from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office‘s April forecast of what will happen to enrollment in health care plans from 2015 to 2024:

• By 2024, about 31 million Americans will still remain uninsured.
• Starting with an estimate that 56 million Americans did not have health insurance coverage prior to Obama Care, that number will be reduced by 25 million people who will purchase Obama care coverage in the exchanges in the next ten years.
• 13 million more Americans will gain health insurance coverage coverage through the dysfunctional Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program as a result of Obama Care.
• 7 million Americans will lose health insurance coverage from their employees as a result of Obama Care.
• 5 million fewer Americans will carry individual coverage directly from an insurer.
• Add all of these additions and subtractions up, account for rounding, and we find that the official CBO estimate forecasts 31 million Americans will still be uninsured in 2024.

Even more discouraging, the CBO estimates that the reduction in uninsured will come at a cost to the country, its taxpayers, and its economy of $1.8 TRILLION over those ten years. If we divide the net gain in insured Americans, about 25 million, into the cost of insuring them, $1.8 TRILLION, simple math shows that it will cost an amazing and mind numbing $75,000 per person to insure those under an Obama Care policy.

It is an amazing and stupefying cost and yet, despite the high cost, more than half of today’s uninsured Americans are still uninsured ten years from now. Failure is the only way to describe such a high cost to meet less than half of the overall and primary goal of the entire Obama Care operation. There has to be a simpler, more effective way.

4) We have often made the case in past Obama Care posts that the legislation, as it is written, hinders economic and employment growth in so many ways. That reality was reinforced recently n a Heritage Foundation interview with Billie Baggett of IHT Staffing, a temp agency located in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Under financial and work hour pressure to comply with the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Baggett claims many South Carolina businesses are cutting back by hiring more part-time rather than full time employees. He points out that while unemployment levels have dropped, to pre-recession levels at 6.1% nationally, his staffing agency work in South Carolina shows that this number may be skewed. Many employees have returned to work, but in new part time positions.

He blames Obama Care for the shrinking work week and the growth in part time vs. full time hiring: “I would say 90% of our employers, businesses today, are hiring part-time as opposed to full-time, because of the Affordable Healthcare Act.” 

A primary provision of the 2009 law, the employer mandate, requires all business with more than 50 workers to provide healthcare benefits to full-time employees. The law defines a full time employee as any employee who works more than 30 hours a week. While the Obama administration has put off this employer mandate until 2015, Baggett believes that it still discourages business from filling full time posts: “It’s not something a corporation wants to do.” 

James Sherk, a senior economic analyst at The Heritage Foundation, agrees and believes that the Obama Care employer mandate has already affected the job market, the economy, and predicts additional downsides in the future: “Obama Care will further reduce hours by increasing the costs of hiring full-time employees while discouraging workers from working full-time. Fewer work hours will impede income mobility for low-wage workers.”

That will do it for today. More of the same for those affected already by Obama Care: faulty and criminal fraud-ready sign up processes, likely insurance premium cost increases in Florida, failure to reach fully insurance status in ten years despite an astronomical cost of failing to do so, and the continuing proof that Obama Care is stifling earnings, work hours, and the economy.

And we still have a lot more disasters to cover in this month’s Obama Care disaster updates.

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:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w