November, 2018, Part 1 , The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Stupid Politician, More English Single Payer Failures, 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, 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 start today’s discussion on the failures of Obama Care with a videotape clip from 2017 that I recently came across. It contains an assertion by Congresswoman Maxine Walters and it is totally ridiculous. During an interview on MSNBC Walters stated that 700 billion people would lose their health insurance as a result of Trump’s actions. 

Now, 700 billion is a lot of people who will lose healthcare insurance especially since there are far less than 8 billion people in the entire world. Think about this reality: this is the type of person who wants to be in charge of your entire healthcare future, either via Obama Care or the bigger disaster, a single payer health care system. Do you really want to trust your future health care needs to someone like this who has no concept of reality?

Her idiotic statement can be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndt0qM05cIg

As a side note: the interviewer does not even try to correct her insanity, another example of the mainstream press accepting anything that Democrats say without ever questioning the validity of it.

2) Speaking of a single payer healthcare system, many Democrats still think that would be a good idea for the U.S. even though the concept has failed miserably around the world. We have shown how bad the system is in previous posts where we see that health care quality, quantity, and health care access goes down substantially when a single payer system is put in place:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-2018part-2-unfolding-disaster.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/01/january-2018-part-1-unfolding-disaster.html

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

This reality in England was proven again in a recent headline in a leading London newspaper which said that: “A Million People A Week Cannot See a GP” [a regular doctor]. To see a copy of the actual article got to: 

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2017/07/08/ari-fleischer-shares-newspaper-headline-from-the-single-payer-future-liberals-want/?utm_campaign=socialflow_twitchy&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social

The good news under a single payer system is that you now have health care coverage but the bad news is that you cannot receive health care coverage. A single payer health care system: a bad idea that refuses to die.

3) One of the major problems we always had with Obama Care is that it forced Americans to do things that were against their will, a clear violation of their First Amendment rights. And this forced coercion usually related to birth control. If a charity or hospital or company did not want to implement the draconian rules of Obama Care relative to birth control and abortion, they were then most likely sued for having their morals dare to conflict with Obama Care.

Fortunately, according to a recent article on the Liberty Planet website, Trump is relieving this violation of the First Amendment:

• According to the article, “Under Obamacare, employers had little choice in the matter of contraception coverage or religious freedom; they had to cover birth control pills and even abortion, even if their faith and beliefs oppose these methods.”
• The Department of Health and Human Services under Trump is now rolling back some of these requirements in order to allow people and companies to live their lives as they see fit regarding abortion and birth control.
• Insurance companies are no longer required to provide such services within their health insurance plans: they can provide them but do not HAVE to provide them.

A good start in restoring freedom and killing off another anti-freedom, stupid Obama Care tenet. More Obama Care insanity 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

July, 2013 Obama Care Update, Number 1: The Complete, "Dirty Dozen" Inventory of Failures To Date

With all of the other political class insanity going on, insanity that required us to use eight consecutive posts to cover it earlier this month, we have been ignoring the biggest insanity of them all, Obama Care. The failures within the overall structure of the Obama Care legislation have been mounting up on almost a daily basis. Thus, we are going to take a few days to cover all of the disasters and hardships that this fatally flawed legislation is dumping on America and Americans.

To set the stage of the next few days, let’s review a list of sub-failures within the overall failure that is Obama Care, as documented by the Heritage Foundation. This will give us a context of how much is falling apart within the law. We will follow up these “dirty dozen” global failures with more detailed news of other failures in subsequent posts.

1. The CLASS Act: ABANDONED, THEN REPEALED

The CLASS component of Obama Care was supposed to provide quality, reasonably priced long term health care to cover the potential costs of nursing home stays. However, it became the first of many failures of Obama Care when Obama’s Health and Human Services (HHS) department admitted early on that the CLASS parameters could never be implemented in a financially sound manner.

Even a Congressional Democrat called the CLASS Act “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” Congress eventually repealed this component of Obama Care because of its insanity.

The bad news from a financial and taxpayer perspective was that CLASS was supposed to be one of the few positive financial contributors to the overall profitability of Obama Care. Once it was repealed for being idiocy, the overall Obama Care financials went from horrible to worse than horrible.

2. Health Care Exchanges: MISSED DEADLINES

Health care exchanges were an invention of Obama Care and are supposed to be places where Americans without health care insurance could go and purchase low cost health care insurance. Each state was supposed to set up their own state exchanges and allow different insurance companies to present their insurance plans and compete for customers.

Obama Care made the exchanges optional for the states and promised that if the states elected not to operate their own state based exchanges, the Federal government would step in and operate a Federal exchange in that state. As a result of the voluntary aspect of the legislation, the majority of states opted out of setting up their own exchanges to save the expense of operating one and let the Feds operate them in their states, increasing the cost, complexity, and likelihood of failure of the exchange process.

And the likelihood of failure is getting larger as time goes by. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in June found that “critical” activities to create a federal exchange have not been completed, and the missed deadlines “suggest a potential for challenges going forward.” It seems like in this case, “challenges” is a government code word for “failures.”

3. HHS mandate: DELAYED; UNDER LEGAL CHALLENGE

Last year, the Obama administration announced a partial delay for Obama Care’s birth control mandates, mandates that would go against the tenets and beliefs of various religious organizations and business owners. This is a blatant attack on the Constitution’s freedom of religion protection.

However, many employers, e.g. the Hobby Lobby retail chain, have filed legal actions against the mandates, which forces them to fund products they find morally objectionable or pay massive fines. Thus, if the court actions are successful, and chances are some of them might be successful, given how many there are, another component of Obama Care would have gone down in flames.

4. Small business plan choice: DELAYED

The original plan of the health insurance exchanges was that people could go to the Obama Care exchanges to get a choice from a menu of competing health care insurance plans. But the Obama administration basically admitted in April that this choice option will not be ready on time for the small business health exchanges. i.e. there will only be one choice and one choice only.

This breaks another promise of Obama Care. Liberal blogger Joe Klein called “a really bad sign” of “Obama Care incompetence.” “Really bad sign,” I believe is yet another code word for “failure.”

5. Child-only plans: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

According to the Heritage Foundation analysis of the legislation, something they call a “drafting error” in Obama Care has led to less access to health care for children with pre-existing conditions. A 2011 report found that in 17 states, health insurers are no longer selling child-only health insurance plans as a result of Obama Care because they fear that individuals will apply for coverage only AFTER being diagnosed with a costly illness.

6. Basic health plan: DELAYED

This government-run plan for states created as part of Obamacare, has also been delayed. According to Heritage, one Democrat criticized the Administration for failing to “live up” to the law and implementing the plan as it written in the legislation.

7. High-risk pools: UNDERPERFORMING; FUNDING LOW

Like everything else the political class and government do, this program for individuals with pre-existing conditions is mired down and much higher costs and much lower enrollment than originally forecasted. This program was originally expected to cover up to 700,000 Americans.

However, only about 110,000 people have enrolled and the Administration has already had to halt new enrollments into the program since the $5 billion program is already running out of funding. This halt had to occur even though it has attained only about 14% of its expected enrollment. As a former professional forecaster in the corporate world, if my forecasts had been off by such a wide margin I would have been fired for incompetence.

8. Early retiree reinsurance: BROKE

More bad forecasting. The original $5 billion in funding for this program was supposed to last until 2014 but the program’s money ran out in 2011, years ahead of schedule.

9. Waivers: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

After the legislation originally passed, HHS found that some of the law’s mandates would raise costs so much that employers would drop coverage rather than face skyrocketing health insurance premiums. This forced the administration to grant temporary waivers of compliance, which only delayed the pain of Obama Care. More than half of the waivers went to union health insurance plans even thought most unions were supporters of the legislation when it was being debated and written. Talk about hypocrisy.

10. Co-ops: DEFUNDED

In early 2013, Congress blocked additional funding to this Obama Care program, and with good reason: In one case, a new health insurance co-op was called “fatally flawed” by Vermont’s state insurance commissioner.

11. “Employee free choice”: REPEALED

This provision, which would have allowed certain workers to use contributions from their employers to buy exchange health plans, was repealed in April 2011. Apparently, businesses generally considered it too complex and unworkable.

12. Medicaid expansion: REJECTED BY MANY STATES

In its 2013 ruling on Obama Care which found it Constitutional, the Supreme Court also made Obama Care’s Medicaid expansion optional for states. The court ruled that Obama Care, as it written and enacted, engaged in “economic dragooning” that puts “a gun to the head of states.” Many states are rejecting Obama Care’s call to expand Medicaid, knowing that expansion will saddle them with additional, unsustainable costs going forward.

There you have it in a very succinct direct description, the “dirty dozen” major failures of Obama Care. Consider the words used to accurately describe what has happened since the legislation was passed: Abandoned, delayed, repealed, broke, unintended consequences, rejected, defunded, and underperforming. Hardly a robust endorsement of the law.

Has any other piece of legislation in our history been written so poorly, so poorly thought out, and so poorly executed as this piece of garbage? As any piece of legislation ever been so blind to the root causes of an issue, in this case, our high and rising health care costs? Has any piece of legislation ever had such a negative impact on economic growth and unemployment?

The answer to these questions is an easy “no.” No legislation has ever been so horrific as this legislation. And in the next few days we will get under these major disasters to examine some of the other disasters and disgraces that are unfolding underneath these more global issues and failures.

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/