August, 2019, Part 8, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Pay Health Care Systems Around the World, Continued

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.

Several posts ago we reviewed the many, many failures and disasters of Obama Care, probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed when it comes to comparing it to its objectives and its promises. This was the Federal government’s most recent and deepest attempt to try and control the healthcare of Americans and it has ended badly. 

In subsequent posts, we showed the numbers and realities around the world of how single payer healthcare systems always fail to provide effective and efficient health care to its citizens. Despite these realities, many Democratic candidates for President want to implement a failed system like this in this country. Today we will continue that discussion of failed single payer healthcare systems from other countries, further proof that this approach to healthcare is a bad, bad idea.

We continue that discussion today, the failures of the single payer healthcare model:

1) Obama Care, along with Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, have proven how poorly government performs when given health care responsibilities. Medicare and Medicaid are hurtling towards fiscal insolvency and the Veterans Administration’s inability to serve our veterans’ healthcare needs is an ongoing scandal. But some people still think that giving government even more control over our healthcare needs is a good idea, often pointing to other countries that have total government control over their citizens’ health care needs.

One of those countries is England but according to the Foundation For Economic Education, for those in England, where government controls all aspects of one’s health care needs, it is not a good idea:

• In the United States, the age-adjusted breast cancer 5-year survival rate is 88.9%, compared with just 81.1% in England.
• The United States leads the world on the equivalent stat for prostate cancer (97.2%) vs. 83.2% in England.
• Lung cancer: 18.7% in the United States vs. 9.6% in England; bowel cancer: 64.2% vs. 56.1%.
• U.S. survival rates are also better for leukemia, ovarian cancer, stomach cancer, and liver cancer.
• The age- and sex-standardized 30-day mortality rate for ischaemic stroke is just 3.6% in the United States vs. 9.2% in England; for haemorrhagic stroke, the figures are 22% vs. 26.5%.
• Thus, real data shows us that giving the Federal government more control of our health care needs, going even beyond Obama Care, would not be healthy for us. Just ask the English folks, those have not died prematurely already vs. what would have happened in the U.S. 

The Foundation quoted a line from The Guardian newspaper summary of a Commonwealth Fund Report where the report found that England’s health system was“the best in the world” with “the only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive.” In other words, the operation was a success even though the patient died. Obama Care is dying, replacing it with a program that is even more like Obama Care would be fatal to so many Americans.

2) We often talk about the high level numbers and results of Obama Care. How premiums and deductibles have increased dramatically over the years for Obama Care policies. How millions of people lost access to their preferred doctors, policies, and hospitals. How most of the 23 Obama Care co-ops went bankrupt. But consider the personal agony and stress below the high level numbers that Obama Care has caused a typical American:

• James Rogers, writing for the Heritage Foundation on February 17, 2017, documented the harrowing Obama Care trip of Kim Quade.
• Ms. Quade left her job as a school speech pathologist after 17 years to work solo, knowing that she would have to replace her school provided health insurance with an individual health insurance policy.
• She did her research and found a plan that suited her particular needs for $188 a month with a $5,000 deductible and health savings account, terms she could afford.
• She liked the concept of a health savings plan since it empowered her to take care of herself:“It was something that I was able to take care of on my own and I was happy about it. It’s the way I was raised: You take care of yourself.” 
• By 2015, her monthly premium cost had more than doubled to $188 (despite Obama’s promise that Americans could see an up to $2,500 annual reduction in their health insurance premiums).
• But despite the whopping increase in premiums, she kept the policy since she liked the doctor network that it covered.
• But shortly after the doubling of the premiums, they went up another $200 a month, at which point she switched to an Obama Care policy.
• She ended up getting a policy with monthly premiums of $773 a month which was reduced to $333 after Federal subsidies, cheaper but still much more expensive than her original policy of $188 a month.
• And that original policy covered flu shots and physicals, which her Obama Care policy did not, and after a bout with pneumonia, her Obama Care policy paid out only $50 towards the cost of two x-rays.
• And now she has to go back out into the market again since the original Obama Care policy she took on is no longer available as insurance companies have left the area she lives in outside of Kansas City.

High costs, lower quality, fewer choices, higher turnover, that is how Obama Care played out for a regular American who just wanted some affordable health insurance coverage. And yet some Democrats and liberal want even more government control over our health care needs even though Obama Care’s intrusion into our healthcare needs was such a failure.

That will do it for now: single payer healthcare systems around the world have always resulted in higher costs,higher taxes,lower quality, and more suffering and agony as health care is delayed and worse. We have shown that four examples of government intervention into the health care market has always been a disaster: Medicare and Medicaid are hurtling towards bankruptcy, Obama Care was a failure along every imaginable perspective, and the operation of the Veterans Administration has resulted in delays in treating the healthcare needs of veterans, likely leading the deaths of many veterans in need.

And yet Democrats running for President still think that government intervention into the healthcare market is a good idea. Proving again that there is still no cure for stupid.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

April, 2013 Wasteful Government Spending, Part 2: How To Use Condoms, Studying Old Folks Knees, and Ignoring The Spending Problem

I would like to talk about different topics than the many ways that governments and politicians waste our hard earned wealth but the avalanche of wasteful spending examples keeps piling up. I feel if I do not continually clear them out at one point I will never be able t talk about anything else.

Yesterday's post discussed a compilation of idiotic government spending programs that was compiled by the Independent Journal Review. It included such lunacy as spending half a million dollars to create a prom week video game program, $27 million dollars to help people in Morroco become better pottery makers, $325 million dollars to create a robotic squirrel and 22 other equally stupid expenses which can be accessed at the following link:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/04/april-2013-wasteful-government-spending.html

To that list of 25, let me two more horrific wastes of spending:

1) A recent news report described how the University of Florida received a $712,714 grant under Obama’s economic stimulus program to fund a study to “characterize ethnic differences in experimental pain sensitivity, endogenous pain inhibition, clinical pain and pain-related disability among older African Americans and non-Hispanic whites with knee osteoarthritis.” Huh?

A couple of problems with this type of wasteful spending:

* It was part of the stimulus program, a massive $800+ billion program that was supposed to create jobs and get the economy moving. The stimulus program was jammed with programs like this, short term, small scale, pitiful projects that resulted in no long term economic growth or sustainable job growth, the basic premise of spending $800 billion.

In fact, according to the government's own website that tracked stimulus spending, this program even admits that not a single job was created for this $712,714 expenditure. It makes you wonder how many other hundreds of similar programs within the stimulus spending also created not a single, lasting job but still wasted billions in funding.

* Putting stimulus spending aside, in times of $17 TRILLION debt levels do we really need to spend scarce Federal government resources exploring a SINGLE condition concerning a SINGLE part of the human body, namely the SINGLE condition of osteoarthritis on a SINGLE joint, the knee? If we are going to spend limited funds on health research, let's spend it major problems affecting a major segment of the population like lung and breast cancer, dementia and Alzheimer's, Parkinsons Disease, etc. rather than one affliction of one joint.

2) Staying with the economic stimulus program but moving onto the really absurd area of wasteful spending, it has come to light that $423,000 of taxpayer money was spent on a study about how to properly use a condom. Yes, the Department of Health and Human Services allowed a grant to someone in Bloomington, Indiana to study "Correct Condom Use."

Never mind that condoms have been around forever and most people should know how to use them.

For those that do not know how to use them, instructions are included with every package.

For those that do not read the package, they could access this information on correct usage form the library, the Internet, their partner, or they could ask their friends.

Of all the idiotic uses of taxpayer wealth, this has to be in the top five. Of course, no long lasting jobs were created from this expense, according to the government's own website, how could it?

This puts yet another program in the failed category of Obama's economic stimulus program. I only wish that I could have gotten in on this giveaway several years ago. I would have studied how drinking alcohol impairs my golf game. How lying out in the sun causes sun burn. How buying a new car improves one's self esteem. I could have made a killing if I knew that programs like correct condom use were worth over $400,000 to the Obama administration.

As we have said before, these two program alone would not have solved our $17 TRILLION debt problem. Together they total only abut $1.1 million. But before you can save trillions of dollars you have to save billions of dollars and before you save billions of dollars you have to save millions of dollars. You have to start somewhere and these two expenditures would have been a great start.


Plus, just because you can do something, waste taxpayer wealth, does not mean you should do it, waste taxpayer wealth. And an even sadder part of this disgrace is that there are some people and entities within the Federal government that have done a fine job of identifying waste and insanity spending like this but their voices and recommendations have gone unheeded.

Consider a posting by the fine website, Bankrupting America, that went up on April 2, 2013:

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the Federal government’s internal audit and investigation branch.
• It was created in 1921 to help better manage government finances, spending, and expense streams.
• According to Bankrupting America, their sources estimate the GAO saves taxpayers $81 for every dollar the Office spends.
• And the GAO is not the only the Federal government entity that is assigned the responsibility with identifying waste and fraud and offering suggestions for how to reduce it.
• The Offices of the Inspector General (more than 70 Federal agencies have them) also research and highlight areas of government waste in hopes that these mistakes would be corrected.
• For example, it was an inspector general that uncovered the over $800,000 that GSA employees wasted on lavish party for themselves in 2012.
• However, according to a recent report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a majority of inspector general recommendations were ignored.
• The committee found that during 2012, government agencies failed to implement 16,906 IG recommendations that would have saved $67 billion worth of taxpayer wealth.
• Implementing just these changes would have wiped out about 7% of the Federal government deficit in 2012 and relieved pressure on our $17 TRILLION national debt.
• In 2011, the committee found government agencies ignored 15,784 recommendations that could have saved $55 billion.
• Thus, the Federal government and Obama administration knew about at least $120 billion in spending savings over just the past two years and did nothing to avoid those unnecessary expenses.
• A possible reason for the lapse: currently the position of Inspector General is vacant in six different agencies including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and USAID.
• The House report explained that there was a direct relationship between these vacancies and recommendations being ignored. According to the report, “In 2012, those agencies [State, Homeland Security and USAID] ranked first, second, and fourth among agencies with the most unimplemented recommendations.”

Well, duh! Sinfully incompetent government. The latest Senate budget from the Democrats controlling the Senate (after four years of unlawfully not producing a budget) is asking for another $1 TRILLION in tax increases over the next ten years. If they were truly doing their government oversight job and following the advice of the Inspector Generals and the GAO, they could fund the vast majority of that ten year increase by just implementing the changes these two fine organizations have already identified.

If you add in cleaning up the fraud in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment programs along with finally getting the out of control Defense Department spending, there would be so much extra money laying around that every American could see their taxes go down without any personal significant downside from the reduced level of government spending.

But as always, we are left with the same question: Do politicians not reduce wasteful spending because they are incapable of doing so from a process or intelligence perspective, they do not want to reduce wasteful spending, or they are too lazy to reduce wasteful spending?

Whatever answer you arrive at for that question, the subsequent action is unchanged: ALL current Washington politicians need to be replaced as soon ass possible, either through elections, election process reform, or the best way possible way, the implementation of term limits, as outlined in Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." These people have blown their chance to make government efficient and effective, they need to leave, the sooner the better, and take their knee studies and condom studies with them.

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.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

 

Bruno's Health Care Reform Proposal - Update #2

Recently we published our analysis of the contents and the process of passage of the so-called Obama Care health care reform legislation and several days ago we published our first follow up to that analysis. That update focused on the work underway to use genetically altered tobacco as a biodiesel fuel source. Such a breakthrough would not only wean us from foreign energy sources but it would also reduce disease from personal tobacco usage since simple economics would continue to drive up the cost of tobacco products if tobacco land usage was diverted to use for biofuels.

Today's update focuses on behavior changes, which as we pointed out in our overall analysis of Obama Care, is sorely lacking. Regardless of what the Obama bill does from a financial and funding perspective, since it does not vigorously address changes in behavior, the underlying root causes of high health care costs will not be eliminated. The question that is the basis of our proposed solution to Obama Care is very basic: can you modify personal behavior to the benefit of people's health? Three instances of just that happening say that you can:

1. Although difficult to find the latest data, I did find a report from 2007 at the NHTSA website (www.NHTSA.gov) that addressed the levels of seat belt usage of car seat belts in the country. According to a study described on the government website, the national seat belt usage in cars continued to grow, reaching 82% of U.S. drivers in the 2007 study. This was up from less than 60% in 1994 when the government started collecting seat belt usage information. Usage was probably a lot less prior to 1994. A report on the CDC website went a step further and looked at seat belt usage in states that have an aggressive ticketing approach to non-seat belt wearers and compared that to states that do not have an aggressive approach. They found a very strong correlation, i.e. high enforcement states had a significantly higher usage rate than states that did not have a high enforcement priority for seat belt usage. They also present a chart that shows that highway crash fatalities are strongly but inversely related to seat belt usage, i.e. as seat belt usage has grown the number of highway fatalities has decreased, probably due in some part to the increased seat belt usage. While the national average 82%, some states have usage over 90%, indicating there is still room for improvement. Thus, a good example of the government changing personal behavior and reducing health care costs via the reduction in highway fatalities.
2. An April 5, 2010 Associated Press report reviewed the results from a European study which showed that "one hour of moderate to vigorous exercise a day can help teens beat the effects of a common obesity-related gene with the nickname 'fatso'." The study showed that even if a teenager had the fatso gene, the one hour of exercise could result in their body measurements being in line with those teens that do not carry the gene. The article quoted Dr. Alan Shuldiner of the University of Maryland: 'The message is clear: genes are not destiny. Those with obesity susceptibility genes should be especially motivated to engage in a physically active lifestyle." The article reported similar findings of Amish adults who exercised vigorously. In other words, the obesity epidemic and the resulting high health care costs int his country can be reduced through behavior changes, i.e. exercise.
3. An article in the April 12, 2010 issue of Business Week magazine by Simon Bennett and Tom Randall reviewed an AIDS drug initiative that was hopefully going to produce a drug that could be used prior to infection infection and protect a person from acquiring the disease. That is good news and is similar to our proposal that a concentrated effort should be undertaken to cure a small number of the most deadly diseases in the country today, diseases that create the biggest costs for the U.S. health care system. Examples proposed by our health care solution included breast cancer and Alzheimer's. Additionally, numbers cited in the article showed yet another example where long term focus on changing behavior has been successful. According to the article, AIDS-related annual deaths peaked at 52,000 in the U.S. in 1994 and have since dropped to 14,600 in 2007. The combination of behavior changes and new drug treatments for a major disease, i.e. a disease that affects the greatest number of people, has reduced the health care costs of treating AIDS patients and would likely have the same effect reducing other health care costs.

As review, our hypothesis was that some of the major reasons for high health care costs in this country were smoking, lack of exercise, and poor eating habits. According to information we reported on from the Cleveland Clinic, significantly reduce underlying root causes and behaviors and you will significantly reduce the health care costs in this country. Do not change these behaviors, and no matter how much Obama taxes us and moves money around in the Federal bureaucracy, you will not solve the problem. These four examples, different uses for tobacco fields, exercise, seat belt usage, and multiple approaches to reducing AIDS prove that we can change behavior and make America healthier, something that Obama, Reid, and Pelosi never understood.


Our new 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.