July, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Failing Co-ops And More Denials Of Failure Realities From The Obama Administration

Earlier this month we did a single post on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been doing this theme for years and years where we have been constantly amazed and depressed about how much havoc this poor piece of legislation has rained down on Americans and how much of a medical, insurance, economic, and operational disaster it has been. We did mention at that earlier post that we only had to devote one day of discussion to the disaster this month vs. the multiple days we have had to do just about every other month for the past four years.

But apparently we spoke too soon. In just the few days since we did that solo post, a number of other Obama Care disasters have hit the fan that we should discuss before next month rolls around. So here goes, with the typical introduction of missed root causes that we always preface our unfolding Obama Care disasters with.

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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) Obama Care co-ops were supposed to be marketplace based competitors in the geographic areas in the country that did not have a lot of competitors offering health insurance policies to Americans. They were seeded with over $2 billion of taxpayer wealth and set off to compete in the world.

Twenty three co-ops were eventually launched, providing health insurance policies to hundreds of thousands of Americans. However, there was a problem. Most of them were dismal financial failures. Since the Obama Care legislation demanded that all insurers take on any and all customers, regardless of their pre-existing health, and given that Obama Care never addressed the root causes of high healthcare costs as listed above that would have reduced the nation’s health care costs, the co-ops were swamped with high cost customers whose premium payments could not cover their operating costs.

The last time we had checked in with the co-ops, 15 of them had already gone belly up financially, stranding hundreds of thousands Americans without health insurance coverage and burning up over a $1 billion of taxpayer wealth with nothing to show for it in return. And according to Toni-Anne Barry, writing for the Americans For Tax Reform website on July 13, 2016, the Illinois Obama Care co-op recently went bankrupt also, the 16th co-op out of 23 to do so.

Details of this failure including the following:

• 49,000 customers of the Illinois Obama Care co-op are now without health insurance coverage.
• The Illinois co-op and the other failed 15 co-ops have cost the American taxpayer at least $1.7 billion so far.
• The Illinois co-op lost a whopping $90 million in 2015 and in an odd twist of irony and lunacy is suing the Federal government because of the Obama Care legislation, the same legislation that formed and funded the co-op in the first place.
• The article cites a Daily Caller article that showed the while co-op executives were raking in salaries that were often multiple times higher than the average health insurance executive salaries, many of these high paying co-op executives had little or no experience in the health insurance industry.
• 21 out of the 23 original Obama Care co-ops lost money in 2015, i.e. Illinois may not be the last one to go down in ruins.

A list of all failed co-ops and their cost to taxpayers as compiled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee is found below:

• CoOportunity Health - Iowa and Nebraska: Cost: $145,312,100
• Louisiana Health Cooperative, Inc.: Cost: $65,790,660
• Nevada Health Cooperative: Cost: $65,925,396
• Health Republic Insurance of New York: Cost: $265,133,000
• Kentucky Health Care Cooperative - Kentucky and West Virginia: Cost: $146,494,772
• Community Health Alliance Mutual Insurance Company - Tennessee: Cost: $73,306,700
• Colorado HealthOp: Cost: $72,335,129
• Health Republic Insurance of Oregon: Cost: $60,648,505
• Consumers' Choice Health Insurance Company - South Carolina: Cost: $87,578,208
• Arches Mutual Insurance Company – Utah: Cost: $89,650,303
• Meritus Health Partners – Arizona: Cost: $93,313,233
• Consumers Mutual Insurance – Michigan: Cost: $71,534,300
• InHealth Mutual – Ohio: Cost: $129,225,604
• HealthyCT – Connecticut: Cost: $127,980,768
• Oregon Health’s CO-OP – Oregon: Cost: $56,656,900
• Land of Lincoln Health – Illinois: Cost: $160,154,812

Total Taxpayer Dollars Lost -  $1,711,040,390

These costs obviously do not include the costs and risks that hundreds of thousands of customers of these failed co-ops endured as a result of this unfolding disaster.

2) Let’s stay with failing co-ops for the second topic today and focus on a Washington Free Beacon article by Ali Meyer from July 14, 2016. She points out that not only have 16 out of the original Obama Care co-ops gone out of business already but 6 of the remaining 7 are on the financial results critical list. 

Kevin Counihan, who is a top executive within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, the organization that operates Obama Care procedures, recently testified before Congress that of the seven co-ops that are still in operation, six have been placed on “corrective action plans.” This means that these co-ops have at least one major problem in the areas of financials, operations, compliance, or management effectiveness. 

When asked during his testimony how many of the remaining 7 co-ops were profitable, Counihan gave the following ridiculous answer: “Profitability very much can depend on the month.” Really, if a co-op was a financial wreck for eleven months and barely made a profit for the twelfth month, would one then say that it “depends on the month?” Stupid, elusive, bs answer.

But inane Counihan answers still followed to other questions from members of Congress. Congressman Jim Jordan, who predicts that all 23 co-ops will eventually fail, asked: “Would it be a complete failure if every single co-op you guys authorized just two years ago failed? We all know that’s where it’s headed—16 have already failed, the seven left, six are on corrective action plans, they’re going to fail too so when all 23 fail would that be a complete failure?”

Counihan responded with this elusive non-answer: “I think it underscores how tough this business is.” How tough the business is or how bad an idea the co-op option was from both a management and financial perspective?

Congressman Jordan: “It seems by definition if 23 out of 23 fail, you should be able to say that of course by definition is a complete failure.”

Another nonsensical Counihan answer: “The co-op program has provided more choice, it’s provided more competition. It’s helped consumers in a variety of different states, given them opportunities that they may have not had before.” You cannot provide competition when you have already gone out of business just a few years into the venture. The choices in sixteen states with failed co-ops are already gone, the competition they would have provided is already gone. What a nonsensical stupid answer, a denial of what failure looks like.

3) One last update on the unfolding disasters of Obama Care for today, more to follow tomorrow. Remember how Obama constantly promised that the annual health insurance costs for an average American family could go down by up to $2,500 a year? How Obama Care was going to “bend the health care cost curve” in the country and reduce everyone’s health care costs? Numerous times in this series of Obama Care posts we have shown with actual government and insurance industry data how both of those claims are either outright lies or incredibly stupid statements that show how out of touch Obama was with reality.

Ali Meyer, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on July 18, 2016 shows how out of touch with reality these boasts and claims were. A recent analysis by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid concluded that the nation’s total health care expenditures will hit a record $3.35 TRILLION in 2016. This is up 4.8% over 2015, six years after Obama Care was enacted and more than twice the rate of inflation. In addition, for the first time ever, the annual national cost for healthcare is over $10,000 for every American.

Going forward, the Centers’ analysis predicts even worse financial results:

• Annual average increases in health care spending will average a whopping 5.8%.
• This will be far higher than the expected annual rate of inflation and certainly higher than the expected growth in the overall economy which has never had a sustained growth rate anywhere close to 5.8%.
• Health care spending represents 17.5% of the economy today but will grow to 20.1% of the economy by 2025.

So much for reducing annual health insurance costs by $2,500 or bending the cost curve. Of much like the blather from Counihan above, Andy Slavitt, the acting head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, tried to spin his own organization’s bad news top make it seem like a victory: “The Affordable Care Act continues to help keep overall health spending growth at a modest level and at a lower growth rate than the previous two decades. This progress is occurring while also helping more Americans get coverage, often for the first time...As we look to the future we must continue our efforts that keep people healthy, providing access to affordable, quality care, while spending smarter across all categories of care delivery.” Such nonsense in light of what was promised and what his own organization found out in their analysis.

Nathan Nascimento, senior policy adviser to Freedom Partners, had a much more reality based view of the findings from the report, without the spin of Slavitt: “It’s absolutely insulting for this administration to say that the Affordable Care Act is keeping the growth rate for health spending at a ‘modest level. While this administration continues to turn a blind eye to the harmful impacts of this failed law, the reality is that health spending is now projected to represent one-fifth of our country’s total GDP in less than a decade. At a time when our national health spending now tops $10,000 per year for every living person, the truth is plain to see—there’s nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act.”

There you have it for today. More co-ops dying on the vine, wasting millions and and millions of taxpayer money and cancelling health insurance coverage for hundreds of thousands of Americans and Obama administration mouthpieces that deny the numbers that are right in front of them: the co-ops are a failure and health care costs keep going up, the “cost curve” has NOT been bent as promised. More unfolding 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.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

March, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: MIsmanagement and Ineptness Across the Board

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.

Yesterday and today we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Yesterday, we talked a little about the latest GAO report which proved again how poorly the Obama Care data systems were put together and performing. The Las Vegas Review Journal also did a report on that GAO report and dove into some more of the details:

• The Obama administration and the Federal bureaucracy that administers Obama Care’s regulations have resulted in “stunning levels of Obamacare fraud — which the government is doing little to nothing to combat — reinforces just how unaffordable the so-called Affordable Care Act has become.”
• Billions of Obama Care subsidies have been paid out to people with “unresolved inconsistencies” regarding their eligibility for coverage.
• By April, 2015, 431,000 Obama Care applications had received a whopping $1.7 billion in taxpayer funded subsidies despite having paperwork issues.
• Another 22,000 applications that may have been filed by people currently serving prison sentences may have illegally gotten another $68 million.
• The Federal government failed to get its databases up to date to make sure this fraud did not occur despite Obama Care being live for years.
• 35,000 applications got subsidies even though there were inconsistencies with their Social Security numbers.
• According to the article, “the agency [responsible for Obama Care compliance] has limited ability to detect and respond to attempts at fraud..." So basically, what’s going on here is that Obamacare fraud is rampant — because nobody has the responsibility of rooting out fraud. Perfect.

Such a broken law, a broken process, and broken government processes which continue to waste taxpayer wealth day after day.

2) Peter Sullivan, writing for The Hill on February 23, 2016, reported on how the government agency responsible for implementing the Obama Care law ignored many warning signs that its data systems processes were in trouble. Details of the report include:

• The Centers For Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) repeatedly ignored warning signs about the impending disasters, according to a new report from its inspector general (IG).
• The IG report found that CMS received 18 “documented warnings,” implying that there may have been other warnings.
• The warnings occurred between July, 2011 and July, 2013 but they were neither ignored or not properly communicated.
• One lower ranked worker told the IG that: “[CMS senior officials] would sit in meetings across from me and not know there is an enormous fire burning behind them.” 
• Not only did CMS ignore bad news they were also guilty of not passing bad news on to others.
• Just days before the launch of the Obama Care software, CMS executives realized that they had only half the capacity that was needed. “Just days before” they realized they were off by 100%.
• According to the IG: “CMS leadership and staff took little action to respond to warnings, remaining overly optimistic about the launch, and developing few contingency plans.” 
• Additionally, and most embarrassingly: “A member of the ad hoc technology team noted that in the absence of comprehensive monitoring tools, ‘There was no place to look to find out whether the site was up today or not except CNN, which was literally how we found out about problems a good part of the time in the beginning.’” They found out about the problems on CNN, how pathetic.
• Even by 2014, the IG found that the systems “could not confirm the accuracy of payments.”

Pathetic is still synonymous with any and every aspect of Obama Care. 

3) Melanie Hunter, writing for CNS News on March 10, 2016, showed how the head of CMS testified that his organization was flying blind when it came to understanding what was going on relative to Obama Care’s co-op entities. Andy Slavitt, acting head of CMS, said that there was “very limited actual performance information” to help the Federal government understand how poorly the co-ops were performing.

How badly did they actually perform? Twelve of the 23 have already folded, costing taxpayers at least $1.2 billion and terminating insurance coverage for 740,000 Americans in 14 states. In addition, at least one state co-op, the one in New York, is being investigated for criminal violations and fraud. And of the remaining co-ops, most are also still in dire financial straits.

Even worse, according to reporting from Melissa Quinn of the Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration ignored warnings from a private consulting that at least some of the co-ops were not going to be financially viable long before they failed. Deloitte Consulting analyzed the business plans and applications of the dozen defunct co-ops and knew early on they were in trouble:

• The company, hired to evaluate the co-ops’ business plans and loan applications, specifically pointed to issues with the financial forecasts submitted by the nonprofit insurance companies. 
• The consulting firm’s warnings were ignored by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the subcommittee’s report.
• “These failed co-ops were a costly experiment gone wrong, and real people got hurt, including the more than 700,000 Americans who lost their health plans,” Sen. Rob Portman, chairman of the subcommittee, said today at a hearing on the co-ops.

Ms. Quinn also reported that although the Obama administration had the warning from the consulting company, they decided to ignore the warnings for a couple of years or until the co-ops were too far gone to save. Only one out of 23 co-ops is actually profitable so far.

So, it was not the Obama administration’s fault that all of this bad news happened because they did not have the information they needed to fix what went wrong before it went really wrong? How lame of an excuse is this? The administration controlled the entire process and blamed themselves for not having the data they needed so it is not their fault. Insane logic.

What a mess, what arrogance, what ignorance.

4) As we often do with these Obama Care failure posts, we end them with real stories of real Americans suffering real problems as a result of Obama Care. Today;s sufferings come from the website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com
TARA, FLORIDA: I work for a fortune 100 company. We used to have blue cross blue shield, good insurance, $500 deductible. Under Obamacare we lost or insurance company, my deductible went up to $1500, with another 20% out of pocket to the next $1500! I have been told that I need to have a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound. The cost of the tests and the 2 fees for a radiologist to read each one will come to about $1700 which must be paid up front. I don't have it and have no way to get it, so now, I live in fear each day that I have breast cancer and no way to find out! Thanks Obama . . . NOT!

ROGER, TENNESSEE: My Epilepsy medication (generic) has gone from the $10 per mo. copay to $180. My acid reflux medication (generic) has gone from $60 per mo. copay to over $800 per mo. My premium did drop $300,but it's decieving, because the net effect will cost me over $8,000. This all kicked in April 1.

MARIANNE, OHIO: Have had affordable insurance my entire life, both individual, and employer based. Now I am uninsured due to the huge premiums and deductible I found on the exchange when I lost my coverage as of 12/31/13. Never has insurance been based on my income and never have I been so devastated to find the premiums for my son and I more than a house payment. Thankfully, I HAD a great affordable plan last year when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had surgery, chemo and radiation. I am SO VERY fearful of this returning even though the oncologist said I am cured. No insurance and I absolutely cannot afford this. As a young widow who lost my husband to cancer, I am the sole provider and parent to my son. This law is unjust and I am just sick with worry without insurance for the first time in our lives

That will do it for today’s and this month’s unfolding disasters of Obama Care. Higher costs, lost coverage, mismanagement of the co-op process, and mismanagement of the data systems processes. Seems they could not have done a more inept job if they were trying. More disasters next month.

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