January, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: An Insurer Cashes Out, Obama Causes Healthcare Costs To Rise andMOre

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) First Unitedhealthcare announced that it was seriously considering stopping its selling of Obama Care policies because of the unprofitability of such policies. But the bad news is that a real Obama Care insurer is actually taking the real step of actually getting out of the Obama Care business. 

Cleveland based HealthSpan insurance company recently announced that it would no longer sell Obama Care policies, it is disbanding its doctor network, and told its brokers to stop paying commissions. The company raised its premium rates for 2016 policies from 9% to 32% since it’s Obama Care policy holders were less healthy than expected. In addition, the law required the company to pay over $17 million into Obama Care’s risk adjustment program in 2014, more than what had been planned for. HealthSpan also laid off a number of employees that were servicing Obama Care policies.

This comes on the heels of Unitedhealthcare stating they were thinking about exiting the Obama Care world after losing almost half a billion dollars on Obama Care policies. Ana Gupte, an analyst for Leerink Partners, told investors that she expected Unitedhealthcare and other insurers would leave the Obama Care market if they could not break even by the first half of 2016. 

She said that she believes the Obama administration could make changes to the law. This opinion is especially funny since the Republicans, none of whom voted for the law, now control both houses of Congress so the chance of changes is absolutely zero.

2) Avik Roy, writing for Forbes on December 6, 2015, did a comprehensive review of where Obama Care is today:

• The Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released its official estimates of the uninsured population and of health spending in the U.S.
• In 2014, Obama Care’s expected expansion fell millions and millions of people short of enrollment goals.
• Despite its goal of reducing healthcare costs in the country, it drove health care costs higher by the highest rate in 7 years. 
• The legislation has reduced the number of uninsured Americans by only 2.7 percentage points.
• Back in 2010, the law was expected to have enrolled 19 million uninsured Americans into Obama Care policies by 2014 and 30 uninsured million by 2016.
• However, in late 2105, CMS admitted that from 2010 to 2014 the number of uninsured fell by only 12.6 million.
• And Mr. Roy contends that 2010’s uninsured rate was artificially higher due to the Great Recession and if you use 2008 as the baseline prior to the effects of the recession, the number of uninsured Americans actually fell by only 6.7 million.
• Thus, all of the agony of millions of people losing access to their current doctors, policies, and hospitals, all of the billions and billions of dollars spent on setting up Obama Care processes, co-ops, exchanges, and bureaucracies, all of the taxes and fees that have stunted economic growth in this country, all of that has reduced the percentage of Americans without insurance by only 2.7% and has left all of the root causes of ever rising healthcare costs intact.
• This meager improvement in the uninsured rate is far smaller than expected and promised by Obama.
• And as premiums and deductibles and co-pays go up and insurance companies actually leave the Obama Care world, the pipe dream of getting to 30 million enrollees gets more and more unlikely.
• A set of economists and statisticians at CMS recently stated in the “Health Affairs” publication that the country’s 2014 spending on healthcare grew at an annual rate of 5.3%, the highest rate since 2007.
• These economists and statisticians attributed the accelerating cost of healthcare to, wait for it, the passage of Obama Care: “The return to faster growth was largely influenced by the coverage expansions of the Affordable Care Act.” 
• In other words, this is another Washington effort that actually did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do, rather than reduce rising costs it contributed to the acceleration of rising costs according to people actually in the Obama administration.
• Even more distressing was that the accelerated spending in healthcare costs was especially high within the Medicaid program, going up 11.0%. Since Medicaid expansion is a major component of Obama Care, an 11.0% annual increase is a major factor why Obama Care is directly responsible for the overall increase in the nation’s healthcare cost increases.

If we go by the numbers, as Mr. Roy did, there can be no doubt that Obama Care is a failure across the board relative to its original goals. It did NOT reduce healthcare costs, it appears to possibly even accelerated their rise and it did not come close to hitting its expected enrollment goals, missing those goals by millions of enrollees.

3)We will finish today’s post as we have done many other times when discussing Obama Care with some real life stories of how this law has negatively affected real Americans and their families. These examples come from the website, www.ourhealthcarestories.com which has compiled some of these heartbreaking stories of real Americans being forced to adjust their lives due to the stress that Obama Care put on them:

GRETA - WYOMING: Sen Enzi: In Wyoming alone, there are over 2,600 people who are losing health care coverage they like. I have received numerous letters from my constituents illustrating the scope of this problem. Greta from Laramie is one of them. Greta is in graduate school and paying for tuition out-of-pocket. She had the university's student BlueCross BlueShield insurance plan. In September, her husband and two daughters received notice that their family insurance policy was gone. They were happy with their coverage. Greta said their plan had very good coverage of maternity and well-child visits, low deductibles, and an affordable monthly premium. Her family can't afford a new health insurance plan which, according to her, ``costs more and gives me less.'' That is what we are facing as a Nation: Health care plans we can no longer keep and broken promises from the White House.

ROSE - PENNSYLVANIA: I can not believe what has happened to my health insurance at work. Last year it cost me about 85.00 a month with 80% coverage. This year it doubled! I now pay 171.00 and for less coverage, as with a very high deductible! When I went to the Doctors just recently, they paid only 0.896 cents. Last year they covered the cost at 80%, so I do not know how they calculate or what my deductible is! I have to get blood work done, sure it will cost a lot more this year! When I called my benefits office they claim it's because of the new laws. Tried to cancel my insurance due to the fact I can not afford to pay them, and they claim company policy I can not unless I have a different insurance or leave the job. Why shouldn't I be able to get rid of something I can not afford?

KYLE - ARKANSAS: My plan was not cancelled, it was transitioned to meet the new ACA requirements. The same plan that I had before, now costs me $70 more a paycheck. I have a family of 4, including 2 kids. I went from $204 a paycheck to $274 a paycheck. I get paid 2 times a month so that's $140 a month or $1,680 a year. That's money that would have been spent in the local community on buying goods and services. This figure does not include the slightly increased co pays when I go to the dr or the additional costs for prescriptions. I thought the ACA was going to save me $2,500 a year?

That will do it for today. High costs, lower enrollment, unkept promises, and family heartaches. Sounds about right for the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. More 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:

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

July, 2014, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 3: Costs Still Going Up, deaths Panels on The Horizon, and Dying While Waiting

Yes, the world has been a mess lately. Fighting in the Gaza Strip, downed airliners, Russians fighting Ukrainians, the economy still stagnant, Iraq being 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.

This is our third update post for this month’s Obama Care disasters. The first post can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/07/july-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

1) The Washington Examiner ran an article on July 10, 2014 by Philip Klein that discussed the coming rate increases that Obama care policy holders are likely to experience in 2015. Highlights from that article include the following:

• One driver of higher premium costs in 2015 is the fact that Obama Care policies must offer a certain, large set of benefits and services regardless of the specific needs of a specific customer, a set of benefits that is expensive and often unneeded but required by the law.
• The second cost amplifying reason is that insurers are now required to accept anyone who applies, including those with pre-existing conditions, so that their costs go up which means everyone’s premiums eventually must also go up. 
• Obama Care also limits the amount that insurers can charge older and sicker patients relative to younger and healthier patients, driving the costs up for the latter group who end up subsidizing the care of older, sicker customers.
• Obama Care will collect over $100 billion in taxes on insurance plans between 2014 and 2022. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the taxes “would be largely passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums for private coverage.”
• A June, 2014 detailed county-level analysis of insurance premiums by Avik Roy and a team at the Manhattan Institute found that, on average, individual market premiums jumped by 49% in 2014 as compared to 2013, likely due to the reasons listed above.
• A PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis of premiums across 18 states in which insurers have submitted filings for next year, found that in 2015, rates would be going up in those states by an average of more than 7%. 
• In six of those states, increases are likely to be in the double digits.
• According to eHealth, a website for purchasing medical coverage, the average monthly rate for health insurance premiums in Indiana was $172 in 2013. But by 2015, according the PricewaterhouseCoopers study, the state average will be $514, about three times higher after Obama Care is implemented.
• On top of all of these upward forcing pressures, the only factor keeping the rates from not going higher is the fact is that insurance companies have responded to Obama Care by reducing the choice of doctors and hospitals offered in their plans. This helps cap costs but results in increasingly narrow and inferior medical care and choices.

No surprises here to anyone who has read our ongoing commentary on Obama Care. Many other analysts and researchers have come to the same conclusion, namely that Obama Care is doing the opposite of what the President promised it would do. It is causing insurance costs to spike higher rather than decrease an average of $2,500 a year for an average American family.

2) We have seen the ever widening scandal at the Veterans Administration where it appears that the Federal government has been quite inept in providing care to our veterans. The fear, of course, is that the same incompetence and huge expense will occur as Obama Care rolls out and costs us much more with minimal benefit in return.

A recent report out of Great Britain adds more evidence to the argument that governments and politicians are quite incapable of operating a nationwide health system in an effective and efficient manner. Details of their latest nationalized health care scandal includes the following details:

• The Royal College of Surgeons recently issued a report claiming that the British National Health Services (NHS) is denying life-saving operations because of age discrimination in defiance of the law. 
• Recently uncovered documents prove for the first time that across large areas of the Britian no patients above the age of 75 are “receiving surgery for breast cancer or routine operations such as gall bladder removal and knee replacements.” 
• This should not come a surprise since nine years ago, back in 2005, the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a research report that predicted exactly what this latest report asserts: older citizens could be denied health care services because of a lack of funding combined with their advanced age. NICE concluded that it would just not be economically expedient to provide care for these older (and sicker) citizens.
• Because of budget considerations, the 2005 NICE report suggested that “patients could be denied certain health treatments because of their age.”

Can you say death panels? Maybe Sarah Palin was right after all. It is apparently happening in Great Britain when the government started running out of money to operate is version of nationalized health care. Given the ever escalating cost of Obama Care and the shoddy treatment of out vets relative to Federal government managed health care, who is to say the same thing will not be going on here as costs go up but funding levels cannot keep up. 

3) The saddest part of Obama Care is the reality that some Americans have already died as a result of the legislation. The Heritage Foundation recently reported on a recent fatality caused by Obama Care:

• A Nevada woman with a brain tumor who sued Nevada’s Obama Ccare exchange contractor for delayed coverage died recently as a result of complications from her illness.
• The woman, Linda Rolain, was among 150 Nevadans suing the contractor Xerox for lack of coverage via the Obama Care processes.
• Ms. Rolain’s lawyers issued the following statement as a result of her death: “We are worried that this is the first of many Nevadans who have life-threatening issues that may end up in such tragic circumstances.” 
• Rolain was diagnosed with the brain tumor in early 2014 but was unable to receive treatment for her cancer for months after her diagnosis due to enrollment problems with the state’s Obama Care exchange, Nevada Health Link.
• Her husband, Robert Rolain, asserts that his wife’s tumor went from treatable to fatal as they awaited coverage. 
• According to Las Vegas insurance broker Pat Casale, who helped Rolain with her enrollment issues, he knows several people who are “in serious need of care” but aren’t receiving it despite the fact that they’ve paid Obama Care insurance premiums: “This poor lady was told in January that she needed immediate attention. Her doctor said if she had begun treatment in March, he might been able to give her quality of care, and she might have lived longer. She had no chance because of the delay.”

This is what happens when politicians decide they know what is best for us, people die that did not need to die. Obama Care, even though it is a horrible piece of legislation, was not ready for reality when it was prematurely and selfishly rolled out last fall. 

The Federal government and the politicians who operate it had billions of dollars and years for the preparation of the program and still could not get it done. As a result, people are dying as they wait for the Obama Care mess to somehow mend itself, a miracle that is not likely to happen anytime soon or at anytime at all.

People are dying, costs are going up, and a clone of Obama Care in England has basically devolved into a death panel medical system. And there is more to come in the next few days, the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

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

November, 2013 The Unfolding Obama Care Disaster, Part 1: They Knew It Was A Disaster Three Years Ago

In the past two months, we have done well over a dozen posts describing the idiocy, chaos, and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Millions of Americans losing access to their preferred insurance policies, and doctors, Obama Care navigators being hired to handle sensitive personal information without a criminal background check being done first, a website that has already cost taxpayers over $600 million but does not work, meager signups for the exchanges, additions to the national debt, etc. This is truly the worst piece of legislation ever written and enacted by the Washington political class.

The September series of posts can be viewed starting at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/09/september-2013-obama-care-update-part-1.html

The October series of posts can be viewed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

Since those October posts, the failures of the legislation have been coming fast and furious. Many of these failures have actually been reported by the so-called main stream press who up until recently were more than willing to protect the failures of this President and his signature piece of legislation. However, when news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. are pointing out how bad Obama Care is, you know it is a bad piece of legislation.

In reviewing the latest insanity from Obama Care over the next several days, we are going to go through the bad news quickly, give how much bad news there is. We have already done more in-depth analysis of the law in the series of posts above so there is no need to go into great detail again. 

However, in some cases, we will repeat material we have already covered in order to show how widespread the negative but true reporting on Obama Care impacts is becoming. In some cases where in-depth reviews and analysis might be interesting, we will provide the actual link to the news report for the reader to follow up on.

Thus, in a quick but informative approach, the following bad news about Obama Care has arisen just in the past few weeks:

1) The following information was still up on the official White House website as of November 7, 2013:

The Affordable Care Act is designed to let Americans keep their health insurance if they like it while adding important consumer benefits to give businesses, families and individuals higher quality care at lower prices and more control over their own care.

The bottom line is that under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your doctor and plan, you can keep them. But if you aren’t satisfied with your insurance options today, the Affordable Care Act provides for better, more affordable health care choices through new consumer protections.

But as we know and will prove over the coming days, this is the most broken promise in the history of the White House. Millions of Americans are losing access to their preferred plans and doctors today, despite what the White House website, and the current resident of the White House, have promised from day on of Obama Care.

2) ABC News reported in early November that October enrollments in Obama Care exchanges is likely very, very low, given internal government memos that ABC has seen. ABC reported that as of Oct. 8, according to the memos, nationwide there had been 700+ enrollments through the online website for Obama Care. There had been more than 11,000 paper applications but only about 4,000 of those applications had been entered into the system as of Oct. 27. Of those, it’s not clear how many are completed and applicants officially enrolled. 

Given that the supporters of Obama Care had expected almost 500,000 people to be enrolled in Obama Care insurance plans as of the end of October and that the run rate for those applications have to be 39,000  a DAY to meet the required critical mass to make this a successful program, success does not seem imminent, according to ABC News.

2) Former Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, recently gave a talk at American University in Washington, D.C. During the question and answer period afterwards, Favreau let it slip that the President’s closest advisors suggested that the President terminate Obama Care back in 2010. The advisers tried to convince the President to replace Obama Care in exchange for a smaller, less controversial “patient bill of rights” type bill.

But the President overruled them and allowed Obama Care to become the law of the land. Thus, we have additional proof that many in the administration knew this was a horrible piece of legislation three years ago, they notified the President of their concerns, and he still went ahead with the effort. Which raises an interesting question: did the President act because of good faith that he could make it work in the end (bad assumption) or was his ego so large that he could not imagine failure in his signature piece of legislation?

3) Although the President promised dozens of times that if you like your current health insurance policy you can keep it in the Obama Care world, almost a million Californians might dispute that horrid promise. As reported recently by SFGate, some 900,000 Californians are expected to lose their existing healthcare coverage come December 31, joining millions of other Americans who have had their lives disrupted in a major way for no reason at all.

4) Forbes recently reported that a 2010 report that was located in the Federal Register laid out how the Obama administration knew all along that the Obama Care legislation would create massive disruptions in the health insurance market. The report asserts that Obama administration people already knew three years ago that nearly one-third of all Americans would lose their current health insurance coverage.

 These revelations prove  again proves that Obama was either massively out of touch with reality when he asserted over the three years that Americans could keep their current policies or he was intentionally deceptive in order to get the legislation passed. In either case, it is a massive lack of leadership and integrity.

According to Forbes writer Avik Roy: “It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.”

93 million Americans to lose access to their current policies when the President said that no one would lose access if they did not want to lose access. Missed that prediction by about 90 million now distraught Americans. Pathetic.

5) On November 4, 2013, Monday's CBS This Morning confirmed the Forbes accusation that Obama and his people knew that Obama Care would likely be a disastrous interruption into Americans’ lives. They asserted that a “trusted Obama health care advisors warned the White House he was losing control of Obama care.“ An important Obama advisor, Major Garrett, also made the following statements during a live TV interview on CBS:

His "warnings were dire and specific, and ultimately ignored" 
"The White House became secretive about the law's complexity and regulatory reach" because they were apparently "fearful of constant attacks from congressional Republicans." 

CBS News went on to report in the same news segment that “the White House had years of warnings." They reported that David Cutler, the "trusted Obama health care adviser," had sent a blunt May 2010 memo to economic adviser Larry Summers, casting serious doubt on a successful implementation of the law.

The CBS reporter stated that Cutler asserted that "the relevant members of the administration [do not] understand the President's vision or have the capability to carry it out", and that "no one was in charge who had any experience in complex business start-ups". Apparently,  "the White House dismissed these and other warnings."

More news that the promises the President has made for three years were empty and false, his administration knew for years that this was a bomb waiting to go off and screw with the health insurance security of tens of millions of Americans.

Enough bad news for today, but rest assured that much more will follow over the next few days as we try to wade through the disaster that is Obama Care.

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