The Obama Epic Fail Series - Obama Care

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:

• Transparency and integrity
• Economic policy
• Foreign policy
• Healthcare policy
• Government management policy

Healthcare policy, a.k.a. Obama Care

This is the fourth topic in this series which examines whether and where the Obama administration was an epic fail. The first post in that series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-obama-epic-fail-seriespart-1.html

Today we will take a summary look at Obama's legacy piece of legislation, Obama Care. Of all the areas to determine if this administration has been an epic fail, Obama Care is probably the easiest one to conclude...epic fail. We have been documenting and discussing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care for a number of years now.

In fact, every month there have so many unfolding disasters from this law that we usually have to devote multiple posts to cover all of the bad things that have been spawned by Obama Care. To review the dozens of disasters from the legislation, just enter the phrase, "the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care" in the search box above.

As we have pointed out many times, Obama Care is doomed to failure since it never addressed the underlying root causes of high and growing healthcare costs in this country. The main reason for high health care costs is not the fact that people do not have health care insurance, there are many other reasons that drive the cost increases. 

Even if every American had health care insurance, the overall costs to the nation would not change and would continue increasing. These root causes of ever higher costs include the following realities:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans smoke too much and drink alcohol too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• Current Federal government programs encourage the production and use of inexpensive high fructose corn syrup and plain old sugar, two ingredients that infest and infect the nation's food chain.
• The legislation does nothing to encourage break through research to attack and conquer the major cancers and diseases of our time.
• Americans are getting older on average, increasing the likelihood aging diseases (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.) will become more prevalent and costly.
• Medical tort reform of the entire industry is required.
• Insurance company competition across state lines is discouraged.
• Current government healthcare programs already waste tens of billions of dollars every year, money that could be used to improve health care in the country.

As we said above, even if every citizen got health care insurance as a result of Obama Care, these root causes and underlying problems would still exist. They would still be driving health care costs ever higher. 

Basic economic theory and reality teaches that if you reduce demand for a product or service and not change supply, the price has to go down. If we consider health care to be the service and we reduce the demand for cancer treatments, alcohol treatments, heart disease, obesity, dementia, etc., then price and and costs would go down as would the cost of health care insurance.

Consider some information from a previous post we did that illustrates what we are talking about and what is possible:

Dr. Delose Cosgrove, the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic is one of the best and well known hospitals in the world. Despite being the best and serving some of the richest people in the world, they also have one of the lowest costs structures. How did they accomplish this double play of outstanding care at low costs? According to the article and Dr. Cosgrove's experiences:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well.
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs.
• Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to  40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and account for 75% of the nation's total health care.
• At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated fro Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons.
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Get people to eat right and reduce national health care costs by up to 10%.  Get people to stop smoking, exercise, and eat better and reduce health care costs by up to 75%. Imagine how much less expensive health insurance would be if health care costs were reduced by 75%? Get the government to stop subsidizing the production of corn fructose syrup and sugar and see how fast the food chain might get healthier.

Obama blew it it two big ways. First, he mistook a public health problem for a health insurance problem. Much like the long term seat belt usage public health initiative, we need a long term healthy living public health initiative in this country. Get people to understand the benefits of healthy living, much like most now understand the value of seat belts, and the cost of health insurance will take care of itself.

Second, he could have been epic in the realm of John F. Kennedy's epic declaration in the 1960s that the country would put a man on the moon within the next decade. Obama should have put forth a set of national challenges that would have focused the country on curing major cancers, eliminating Alzheimer's, etc. within the next ten years. That focus and success on any of these bold ideas would have significantly reduced health care costs while making life much healthier, longer, and better for millions of Americans. 

Alas, Obama did nothing like that. Rather than being bold and out front leading the nation, he and his minions went behind closed doors to craft a secret health care bill that:

• Never addressed the root causes of high healthcare costs.
• Will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt in the next ten years.
• Will leave tens of millions of Americans without health care insurance ten years from now.
• Has resulted in almost as many Americans losing their current health care insurance coverage than those that attained it under Obama Care.
• Has exposed millions of Americans to easy identify theft fraud via its inadequate data systems processes.
• Has resulted in health care insurance premiums and deductibles being higher for individual health insurance policies in most states after Obama Care took effect than before it took effect.
• It made criminals out of ordinary Americans who decide they know what is best for themselves and their families and who refuse to purchase health care insurance as mandated by Obama Care.
• It has resulted in a higher rate of doctors leaving the profession or retiring earlier than expected in order to avoid the hassles of dealing with Obama Care requirements, making a national doctor shortage even more severe.
• In many cases it has lessened made the quality of health care since many Obama Care policies do not allow policy holders to have access to the best treatment options available in order to reduce insurance company costs.
• For Obama Care Medicaid customers, many are finding out that although they have health insurance, they may not be able to get health care as fewer and fewer doctors are taking on Medicaid patients due to the reduced doctor fees that Obama Care pays Medicaid doctors.
• Has stymied economic growth and wage growth since it has forced many companies to reduce the work hours of current employees, forced some companies to move jobs overseas due to the increased business costs of the law, and curtailed the hiring of new employees.
• Has set up programs that subsidize insurance company losses with taxpayer backed financial guarantees.
• Has substantially increased the cost of certain medicines for those Americans in need of medicinal help, pricing many of those medicines out of the reach of people even though they have Obama Care insurance policies.
• Caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred, insurance policies, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals even though the President lied and said those preferences would remain intact if Obama Care was enacted.

We could go on but you get the idea. Rather than being an epically good thing to do, reduce suffering, reduce costs, and improve the quality of life of Americans relative to health care, this administration misdiagnosed the root causes and put together a Rube Goldberg-like bureaucracy that is ineffective, dangerous, and expensive.

Rather than being half way there to curing cancer and other major diseases, rather than being half way there to better public health, we are in many ways much worse than where we were as a nation five years ago. Obama could have been Kennedy-esque by setting the nation on a path to healthier, and less expensive living, much like Kennedy set us on the path to the moon. Instead, Obama Care has been an epic fail that will cost the country trillions of dollars over the next generation while doing nothing to improve the overall health of the nation.

When you are closer to be Rube Goldberg than being JFK, epic fail is the only conclusion.

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

May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care, Part 2: What Should Have Been Done Vs. What Obama Did

Yesterday we laid out all of the Obama Care operations, strategies, and tenets that have already gone wrong and which are highly likely to go wrong in the coming months and years. Identity theft, higher deficits, higher national debt, higher insurance premiums, higher deductibles, loss of privacy, IRS harassment, failing government websites, millions of Americans losing access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans, millions of Obama Care policy holders being denied access to the top medical facilities and doctors in the country, etc. The list seems endless.

We also explained how the legislation never had a chance of successfully reducing our ever escalating health care costs in this country since those that wrote it never understood the true root causes of our increasing health care costs: Americans smoke too much, Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans do not exercise enough, the government restricts insurance company cost reducing competition across state lines, much needed medical tort reform never happened, etc.

Since Obama, Pelosi, Reid and other Obama Care architects never understood the root causes, we ended up with 2,500 pages of legal mumbo jumbo that created a Rube Goldberg-like subsidized government insurance program that will ultimately fail. The problem is that we have a public health crisis that is causing our higher and higher health care costs, we do not have a lack of insurance problem. High insurance costs are a symptom of the root causes, they are not the cause themselves.

Starting in two days, we will again start reviewing the unfolding disasters still coming out of the Obama Care legislation, much like we have done on a monthly basis since last August. Today and tomorrow, however, we have gone back through our blog posts over the past few years and gathered up all of the suggestions that subject matter experts and informed, logical people have put forth to identify the true root causes of our high health care costs. That information leads one to the needed public health initiatives which should be put forth to resolve those root causes. We have also added some additional information and reports that we have not previously covered which also make our point.

I maintain that if we were successful in attacking the true root causes, as proposed below, the cost of health care would drop dramatically as would the cost of health care insurance, making it affordable for all who wanted it. The Obama Care approach, raising taxes to cover everyone with health care insurance without eliminating the underlying root causes is a fallacy solution.

The following observations, government and independent reports and analysis, success stories, and realities are in no particular sequence. However, at the end of the two posts I think you will agree that the Obama Care approach to the problem has missed the mark completely by focusing on health care insurance rather than health care solutions.

1) Several years ago, a report from the National Research Council had some very interesting findings, findings that continue to prove that Obama Care got the whole approach to solving the nation's escalating health care costs. The National Research Council is part of the National Academy Of Sciences, an independent organization of the Federal government. It is chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific matters. Thus, the government did not even listen to itself when it cobbled together the unfolding disaster know as Obama Care.

According to the report:

• The United States spends more on health care than any other nation in the world but has worse life expectancy than many other nations who spend less.
• The U.S. average life expectancy at birth for women is 80.8 years and 75.6 years for men.
• In France, women's life expectancy is 84.4 years and for men it is 77.4 years.
• In Japan, women's life expectancy is almost 86 years and for men it is 79.2.
• The report concludes that smoking and obesity are the primary drivers of the U.S.'s poor performance since, according to the findings, over the years, the U.S. led those unhealthy trends of eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and smoking too much.
• The report found in countries where women's life expectancy was high, there was a strong correlation with low smoking levels and in those countries where women's smoking levels were comparable to U.S. smoking levels, life expectancy was about the same as in the U.S.

Smoking and obesity are the primary drivers of the U.S.’s poor performance. Interesting, a possible set of root causes of bad BEHAVIOR for our high health care costs in this country? Note that the report did not find that lack of health insurance was the primary driver of poor health or high healthcare costs.

2) According to a March 25, 2010 Associated Press article, recent studies have shown that the incidence of breast cancer (190,000 new cases and 40,000 deaths every year in the U.S.) can be reduced by 25-30% through the modification of BEHAVIOR as it relates to smoking, diet, and exercise. “Modification of behavior” sounds like a need for a public health initiative, not a massive government health insurance initiative.

3) A March 28, 2010 article in Parade magazine reported that the New England Journal of Medicine found that reducing the daily intake of salt by just three grams by every American would "reduce the annual number of new cases of heart disease by 60,000-120,000, stroke by 32,00 to 66,000, heart attack by 54,000 to 99,000" cases. This would reduce annual health care costs by up to $24 billion a year. 

Another vote for the changing of BEHAVIOR, not the implementation of a government insurance bureaucracy. 

4) In a Fortune article in the March 1, 2010 issue, an interview of the head of the Cleveland Clinic asserted that smoking, poor diet, and exercise BEHAVIOR was the cause of 40% of the premature deaths in this country every year. Obviously, reducing the amount of premature deaths would significantly reduce health care costs.

The same article reported that these same bad habits and BEHAVIORS are responsible for 70% of the chronic diseases in this country such as heart disease and diabetes. Imagine how much health care costs and health care insurance costs would come down if you could eliminate 70% of the chronic diseases. 

Consider the other assertions made by the head of the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delose Cosgrove:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well. 
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs. 
• At the Cleveland Clinic facility, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated for Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available.
• In the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost amazing 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons. 
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Smoking reduction and better eating habits, imagine that as a way to reduce disease and health care costs vs. getting everyone an expensive insurance policy.

5) Consider an article in a past issue of AARP's magazine. The article focused on the residents of Albert Lea, Minnesota which was a participant in the AARP/Blue Zones Vitality Project. This program started in May, 2009 and focused on lessons learned in so-called "blue zones" - regions in the world where people have a long life span. 

The lessons learned in these zones focus on exercise, good eating habits, connecting with others, and finding purpose in life. Outputs and activities from this towns efforts included fifteen healthy initiatives, among which were the following:

• Cooking classes to help people learn to eat healthier. 
• Formation of walking groups to get people more active and connected to others. 
• Construction of pedestrian-friendly paths. 
• Creation of community gardens. 
• Two thirds of the city's restaurants began serving health food options.

Within just five months, town residents participating in the program had lost three pounds on average which had added about three years to their estimated life spans. One resident, used her participation in dance classes to lose thirty pounds. Another resident has lost 55 pounds and has increased his life expectancy from 52 years to 78 years by eating smaller portions at meal time, walking daily, and doing community theater work.

A year later, according to the article, more and more people were walking, dancing, and bicycling. Residents had accumulated over 42,000 miles in distance traveled via exercise. Twenty two town employers now offer work-site wellness programs to their employees, which has resulted in over 1,000 free health assessments. 

These Americans are living healthier, living longer, and not contributing to our rising health care problems since they took personal responsibility for their health, not nameless and numerous government agencies

6) A December 24, 2010 article from The Week magazine reported on how Americans take in too much salt in their diet. The article reported that just a small reduction in that amount could save upwards of 100,000 lives a year that occur as a result of excess salt (a 13% decline), and the incidence of new heart disease and stroke cases would decrease by 11% and 8% respectively.

7) On October 17, 2013, the health.com website ran an article based on the latest obesity results and research from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC). The CDC reported that about one in three U.S. adults are obese from a body weight perspective. 

This obesity epidemic costs the nation’s economy an estimated $270 billion a year due to health care costs and loss of productivity associated with obesity and overweight, according to a 2011 report produced by the Society of Actuaries. This cost burdens every U.S. household with an average cost of almost $2,400 a year.

That will do it for the first half of our theory, what should have been done vs. what Obama did, in the crisis of high health care costs in this country. Rather than making Americans healthier via a public health strategy of diet, exercise, and reducing smoking, his administration and supporters created a massive insurance apparatus that is expensive, inefficient, and ineffective. Why? Insurance plans and strategies do not resolve the undelrying public health care issues of obesity, smoking, and the government programs that encourage both. 

Tomorrow, we will conclude our analysis and theory that other, different steps should have been taken, based on a root cause analysis, vs. the wrong path that the Obama administration took, making a bad siutation worse.

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

Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works, Part 1

Over the past two weeks we have reviewed in detail the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We cited dozens and dozens of Americans, industry experts, and the realities of this disastrous piece of legislation. The first in that long series of posts can be accessed at:

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

For a good summary of how bad this legislation is, consider the following general conclusions we have reached over the past two weeks:

• Many, many Americans are reporting on how their health insurance rates and deductibles are going up dramatically as a result of Obama Care despite the promise from Obama that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by $2,500.
• Many, many Americans are losing access to their doctors and hospitals despite the fact that Obama promised that if you like your current doctor, you would be able to continue seeing that doctor under Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are reporting that their current insurance policies are being terminated as a result of Obama Care.
• Many, many businesses and other organizations across America have curtailed hiring, stopped hiring, or have fired existing workers in order to stay profitable, a condition severely threatened by Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are having their work hours curtailed as a result of Obama Care and are being turned in to part time workers.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are deplorably designed and fraught with errors, down time, and other technical problems, resulting in extremely low successful attempts to actually sign up for insurance.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are likely turning into identify thieves’ paradise because of faulty or non-existent security protocols.
• The expected long term cost of Obama Care has tripled in just three years.
• The legislation will add trillions of dollars to the already too high national debt over the next decade or so.
• Many components of the failing legislation have already been terminated ( e.g. CLASS) for a variety or reasons or have been postponed because of implementation obstacles.
• In order to make the Obama Care financials look good, the legislation steals over $700 billion in proposed funding for Medicare over the next decade, further endangering the financial health of that government process.

Since we reached these conclusions, the situation has gotten even worse as more and more people find out how much more they are going to have to pay for insurance as a result of Obama Care and we learn more and more about what an epic failure the rollout has turned out to be, especially the website where all of the magic was supposed to happen. We will cover those latest instances of disaster in November.

But if not Obama Care, what? There is no debate that health care costs are going higher and higher in this country for less and less quality and service. Something has to be done. Today and tomorrow we will propose a problem solving approach that was first laid out in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.”  The twin philosophies of this approach include the following tenets:

1. Understand the root causes, the underlying causes of a problem because without that understanding you cannot resolve those problems.
2. And a favorite saying, “Try to pare things down. Few moves do a lot.”

These are obviously two tenets that Obama Care never understood. Those that created this monstrosity never understood the underlying root causes of escalating health care costs. Thus, their failure to resolve those causes. Second, the original legislation was over two thousand pages long and the regulations the law spawned are well over 10,000 pages and counting. Remember, few moves do a lot, over 10,000 pages do not.

Today and tomorrow, we will outline what we perceive are the true root causes of our high health care costs and propose steps to address and resolve those causes. After these two posts, we will review three alternatives to Obama Care as proposed by Republicans in Congress that have never seen the light of day because of  the mainstream media bias.

Root Cause #1 - Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food. On October 17, 2013, the health.com website ran an article based on the latest obesity results and research from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC). The CDC reported that about one in three U.S. adults are obese from a body weight perspective. 

This obesity epidemic costs the nation’s economy  an estimated $270 billion a year due to health care costs and loss of productivity associated with obesity and overweight, according to a 2011 report produced by the Society of Actuaries. This cost burdens every U.S. household with an average cost of almost $2,400 a year.

$270 billion a year, unreal. Imagine how much less heart disease, heart attacks, and diabetes health care costs could be avoided if the obesity monster was successfully addressed. Basic economic theory tells us if you reduce the demand for a product or service, in this case medical services for obesity's byproducts, the price of that product or service has to decrease. Obama Care does little, if anything, to address this $270 billion cost. 

Unfortunately, the Federal government is a top culprit in this obesity issue. Go to your pantry and refrigerator and read the ingredients on the label. How many of them of high fructose corn syrup (i.e. sugar) as a main ingredient? 

The U.S. government heavily over subsidizes the growing of corn in this country, resulting in extremely inexpensive fattening corn syrup that often ends up in our food chain, helping make people obese in just about every meal they eat. A quick, thirty second review of my refrigerator and pantry uncovers at least five products where high fructose corn syrup is a major ingredient, from tomato sauce to pancake syrup to jelly to soda to peanut butter.

 For a staggering view of how this fructose obsession and infestation works, I suggest that you view the documentary, “King Corn,” a scary review of how government subsides encourage the fructosing of our food supply.

So, how do we attack this root cause:

• Eliminate Federal government farm subsidies and no longer support the overgrowing of corn which ends up as inexpensive high corn fructose which ends up in our food chain which ends up as an obesity statistic.
• If farm subsidies are needed, they should be target specifically for bringing down the price of fresh vegetables and fruit, not the creation of obesity friendly foods and ingredients.
• Put together a five year plan that encourages food companies to phase out and remove damaging obesity ingredients such as high corn fructose from their product lines. Those companies that decide not to do so would face ever stiffening penalties, taxes, and fines for not dong so. 
• Those fines would be circulated back into education programs on health and diet for consumers. 

This root cause is really a public health issue which requires a change in behavior. It should be treated like the seat belt problem from decades ago to change behavior, steadily and logically over time. You need a rational, long term plan which eventually changes behavior at the farm level, the food processing level, and the consumer level. 

Find a way to leverage the food scientists at the food companies and challenge them to come up with new ingredients that provide the flavor without the obesity, especially since they would no longer be able to rely on cheap high fructose corn syrup. Failure to do so would eventually result in heavy fines, taxes, and penalties for those companies. 

Also, rather than hiring thousands and thousands of IRS agents to track down citizens that do not purchase health insurance under Obama Care, you would only have to hire hundreds and hundreds of government food scientists to ensure that the food companies are making their products healthier. This would result in  a substantial personnel cost savings for the Federal government.

Obama Care never understood this root cause. Even if it was able to get all Americans health insurance, those Americans would still be obese and would still be incurring the heavy medical price of being so. The root cause would be unchanged.

Root Cause # 2 - Americans smoke too much. How much cost savings there would be if no one smoked? Much less lung cancer, much less throat cancer, much less mouth cancer, much less heart disease, and much less of other types of diseases that inhaling smoke into your body causes. 

Much like the obesity problem, this root cause is a public health issue, not a health insurance issue. You can have all of the insurance in the world but if you still smoke, you are still likely to get a variety of cancers and diseases, you have not reduced the demand and cost for medical services. 

And just like with high fructose corn syrup, the Federal government is a major culprit. Every year, American taxpayers allow the Washington political class to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in farm subsidies to …tobacco farmers.. These farmers than grow tobacco that ends up in tobacco products which ends up in people’s bodies which causes costly medical expenses, disease, and death.

According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, every year the tobacco industry gets about $190 million in Federal money subsidies. This past summer, the Federal Health and Human Services department announced a $54 million campaign to get people to stop smoking. Talk about insanity, one part of the government is paying farmers to grow more tobacco and another part of the government is trying to get people to stop using tobacco. You cannot make this stuff up.

There are five steps needed to address this root cause:

• First, stop the insanity of paying tobacco farmers to grow tobacco. This will drive up tobacco production costs and hopefully stop some people from smoking from an economic perspective.
• Second, put a two prong research effort in place. One part of that research would be to more fully understand the smoking habit and addiction and find ways and treatments to reduce the desire and addiction to smoking, 
• The second research effort would be to find a way to either use tobacco products in non-lethal ways (e.g. bio fuels) or find a way to encourage tobacco farmers to switch to other, more profitable crops, further reducing the supply of tobacco.
• Third, continue and expand existing smoking cessation programs as much as possible, spending a little money up front to keep people from smoking and saving a lot of money down the road from treating their medical conditions from smoking.
• Fourth, put together a sustained public health program that discourages smoking at all ages, specially targeting the younger generation before they start smoking.
• Five, make tobacco users pay substantially more for their health insurance, let the cost causer be the cost payer. Maybe if the true medical cost of smoking was actually borne by smokers there would be less smoking. Obama Care actually tried to institute this type of policy but like everything else in this horrid piece of legislation, this component has been postponed for at least another year.

Public health efforts, supply and demand techniques, scientific research, easier and more effective approaches to this root cause than the Obama Care approach of making sure that people have health insurance but not reducing the levels of medical services needed to treat tobacco related diseases.

Would these public health approaches work? Consider the assertions made by the head of the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delose Cosgrove, in a Forbes magazine interview in 2010:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well. 
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs. 
• Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to 40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and cancer account for 75% of the nation's total health care. 
• At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated for Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons. 
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Wow, no 10,000 pages of regulations, no failed and expensive government website, no one losing their current health insurance, just good, old-fashioned  root cause analysis and solutions. In this case, the solution was focused on a public health effort to change behavior for the better and for the healthier, not to install an unworkable Rube Goldberg insurance process that did nothing to reduce the demand for health care services. 

Imagine how much heart disease was avoided because there was 60 fewer tons of fat stressing people’s bodies. Imagine how many cancer cases were avoided because the smoking rate in a county went down form 28% to 18%. Again, simple economics: reduce the demand, reduce the cost and price. Reduce the demand/need for health care services the cost of those services goes way down. Obama Care completely missed this simple fact of life.

For more on Dr. Cosgrove and an example of a town in Minnesota that got their citizens together to get the whole town healthy, go to the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/12/healthy-solution-to-our-unhealthy.html

We will finish up our root cause analysis tomorrow. You will see that addressing the true underlying causes of our high health care costs is not that hard but that Obama Care’s architects missed the boat completely. Remember: "Pare things down. A few moves do a lot." Ten thousands pages of unreadable government regulations accomplish very little.

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

More Proof That Obama Care Is Fatally Flawed

Many times in this blog we have gone over the reasons why Obama Care is likely to fail and place an unbelievable financial and bureaucratic burden on the nation. Our theory is that Obama Care never attacked the underlying root causes of the nation's escalating health care costs, most of which should be addressed as a public health problem. Rather, the legislation went after the problem as a government regulation, taxing, and bureaucracy solution, mostly bypassing the underlying root causes and dooming it to an inglorious failure.

The underlying root causes for high health care costs in this country are relatively straightforward:

1. Americans smoke too much.
2. Americans eat too much.
3. Americans eat too much of the wrong types of food.
4. Americans do not exercise enough.
5. Americans' average age is getting older.

The first four likely root causes are public health issues and that is how they should be addressed. The fifth issue is a graying of the population issue and that should be attacked by a focused effort to minimize the effect of aging diseases, the top cancers, heart disease, and all forms of dementia. Even if Obama Care attained all of its taxing and bureaucratic goals, the bottom line is that the above five conditions would still be around and would still contribute to an ever escalating health care cost crisis.

Now, more and more evidence is starting to pile up, beyond what we have already presented, that further indicates that Obama Care is fatally flawed in so many different ways:

- In a February 15, 2011 article in USA Today, "Heart Disease Gets Real," author Mary Brophy Marcus reviewed the latest guidelines from the American Heart Association regarding ways to prevent cardiovascular disease in women. According to the article, every minute of every day a woman dies in this country from heart disease, making it the leading cause of death for women in this country, more than breast cancer. According to the American Heart Association, what should be done to reduce this pubic health and private health issue:

• Avoid smoking and exposure to environmental smoke
• Be physically active, getting 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise.
• Achieve a healthy body weight.
• Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, chose whole grain, high fiber foods, eat oil fish at least twice a week, limit saturated fat, cholesterol and sugar, avoid trans-fatty acids.

Sound familiar? Virtually the same list from above. The root causes of a deadly and widely suffered disease has its root causes in smoking, eating, and exercising. If all Americans did this, disease rates would go down and by reducing the number of times Americans get sick, the costs would go down. Simple, basic economics: reduce demand, keep supply the same and prices have to come down. This was the same advice we wrote about last year from the experts at the Cleveland Clinic, when they were interviewed by Fortune magazine, and other sources. It is not hard if you know how to solve a problem and identify the underlying root causes. Obama Care did none of this.

- One of the major selling and talking points about Obama Care was that needy Americans would rush to enroll in the new programs to get health care coverage. Not so fast, says Amy Goldstein in her Washington Post article from February 11, 2011. According to Ms. Goldstein:

• Although some Americans have signed up for special health plans for people that have been spurned by the insurance industry, signups are far below the levels expected by the Obama Administration.
• The number of people enrolled in these so-called high risk pools is only up to 12,500 across the entire nation, about 250 per state on average.
• Last spring, less than ten months ago, the government's chief actuary forecasted that 375,000 Americans would have signed up for the pools by the end of 2010.

Thus, the government's forecast was off by over 96%.

These are not numbers from Fox News. These are not numbers from the Tea Party. These are not numbers from Rush Limbaugh. These are Obama administration actuals vs. Obama administration forecasts. Missed it by 96%. Pitiful.

Some administration officials say the low numbers are because awareness is so low, which does not change the fact that the administration was so wrong in its forecast and expectations. However, other experts say the new Obama Care program is too expensive for people with existing medical problems. Thus, even when the political class designs a program specifically for certain Americans, by not understanding underlying root causes, they still cannot get the solution right.

- Another major selling point from the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Obama Care trifecta was that the legislation would actually end up being a job creation vehicle, as she stated just days before the final vote: "It's about jobs. In its life, (the legislation) will create four million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately."

How is that prediction coming along? According to an article in the National Review on February 10, 2011 by Yuval Levin, not so good. Mr. Levin was covering a House Budget Committee on that day when he heard Congressman John Campbell ask a question of Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf:

Campbell: You just mentioned that you believe - or that in your estimate - that the health care law would reduce the labor used in the economy by about one half of one percent. Given that, I believe you say, there's 150 million full time people working in 2021, that means that, in your estimation, the health care law would reduce employment by 800,000 in 2021. Is that correct?
Elmendorf: Yes. the way I would put it is that we do estimate, as you said, that household employment will be about 160 million by the end of the decade. Half a percent is 800,000.

Obama Care supporters do not dare challenge the credibility of the CBO on this issue since they used the CBO numbers to help pass the legislation. Thus, if anyone believes the CBO was right in their original estimates of how much this legislation would reduce the Federal deficit (which we have proven was based on faulty data and assumptions), you cannot now say the CBO is wrong in their estimates when the say that Obama Care will actually reduce U.S. employment by 800,000, not increase it by 4 million as Ms. Pelosi claimed. Another horrendous estimate.

- However, while I still firmly believe that the five reasons listed above are primary underlying root causes of our high health care costs, I recently came across a potential other reason, unrelated to the public health causes. In the March, 2011 issue of Life Extensions magazine, William Faloon had an interesting article entitled, "No Real Health Care Cost Crisis." (Note: there is a potential conflict of interest here since Life Extension the company is in the business of selling supplements whose sales are likely sometimes competitors with drug company products.)

Mr. Faloon's conclusion is that a leading cause of our high health care costs is the cozy arrangement the drug companies have with the Federal government. His theory goes as follows: the Federal government gives pharmaceutical companies a virtual monopoly over patented and generic drugs which result in outlandish profits earned from their protected drugs which are then used to use lobbyists who work on Congress to pass legislation that leaves the taxpayers on the hook for paying for these over priced medicines.

He gave several examples of this model and potential reality including the following:

• In July, 2009, the FDA officially announced something that those in the medical field knew for a long time: an old drug called colchicine was effective in treating acute cases of gouty arthritis.
• The drug had been around since the 19th century and has its original with the ancient Greeks.
• The FDA wanted the ancient drug officially tested for safety and efficacy and offered one company an exclusive three year protection plan, i.e. they would have no competitors in the sale of the drug for that time period even though the drug predated the FDA.
• In return the company conducted a ONE WEEK trial and proved the drug was all it was supposed to be and was safe.
• Before the Federal government via the FDA got involved, the drug sold for $.09 a pill.
• Once the government granted the monopoly, the price shot up by a factor of 50 to a cost of $5.00 a pill.
• Before the FDA got involved, the Federal government and the American taxpayer had paid out about $1 million a year through Medicare-Medicaid to supply colchicine for Americans who needed it.
• After the FDA intervention, the government and the American taxpayer will now pay about $50 million a year for the same drug that they used to pay $1 million for.

If you repeat this outrageous price mark up strategy across all drug categories, you can see why the nation is paying such high medical bills.

The article lays out another example for the drug Valtrex. According to Life Extension, the raw material to make a one month supply of Valtrex costs about $.60. Yes, $.60. The article estimates that the cost of production is about $1.50 so the total end product to the drug company is $2.10. However, given the government/drug industry connection, one month of Valtrex retails for $200, resulting in about $198 in gross margin for every month's worth of Valtrex sold.

Is Mr. Faloon wrong and biased? I do not know but I am sure most Americans have gagged many times when told what the actual costs of their drugs are. At least his line of reasoning is worth an unbiased, scientific  analysis to see if this is another root cause of our high health care costs.

- Our final example has not been written up in an unbiased, national publication. It is based on a sample size of one but much like high priced drugs, I would bet many people have experienced or heard of the following situation. A good friend of mine runs her own business. She is the only employee of the business. She had a health care plan but dropped it because of its expense and the fact that it never seemed to live up to the hype and coverage it received when she purchased the policy.

Thus, when she needed a relatively major operation, she knew that she would have to pay for it herself out of her funds. However, once her doctor realized she had no insurance, the costs of the operation dropped dramatically. This is a situation I have seen a number of times. There is often two price lists: one for those that have insurance (the higher price) and one for those that do not have insurance (a lower price).

Seems many doctors are artificially inflating their prices since they know the end customer, the sick American, will be getting help in payment via their insurance company. If the operation costs the uninsured $10,000, it might cost the insured $15,000. Since the insured person is getting help in payment from the insurance company, they are not as diligent as they might be if they were using their own money. Thus, another potential, underlying root cause.

In summary, now what do we know about Obama Care:

• The political class never understood the underlying root cuases of our high health costs, public health issues, and thus, Obama Care's heavy handed government bureaucracy approach is likely to fail.
• Americans currently with health care insurance coverage are likely to lose that coverage because their companies can save money by paying the fine for not having insurance under Obama Care rather than continuing to provide health care coverage.
• The numbers that Obama Care is based on, from a deficit reduction perspective, are flawed since the CBO estimates do not include all of the costs components that were in the final legislation.
• The law criminalize millions of honest Americans if they do not purchase mandatory health care insurance under Obama Care.
• Promised job creation under Obama Care is unlikely to materialize.
• Promised program enrollment under the early components of Obama Care are staggering short of expectations.
• The Federal government via the FDA and the drug companies may be in such a close relationship, along with the Congress and the drug company lobbyists, that the Federal government might actually be a major source of cost escalation.
• The "two price list" syndrome, not addressed under Obama Care, may actually be another major cost factor.

It appears that the major causes of escalating health costs in this country are the ones NOT covered by the burdensome Obama Care legislation. It is fatally flawed and needs to be repealed as soon as possible. In its place, Step 28 from "Love My Country. Loathe My Government" needs to be implemented. Step 28 would impanel a group of smart Americans, similar to the success we enjoyed using the same process for the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Space Program, the Military Base Closing Commission, the Grace Commission, etc. They would identify and quantify the underlying root causes and come up with proposed solutions, sans lobbyists and politicians. These alternative proposals would be voted on by the American voters and the winner would be implemented.

The political class has proven via Obama Care that they cannot solve a problem because they cannot understand the underlying root causes. Obama Care is fatally flawed, lets pull the plug and start over before it is too late and the nation, its citizens, and the country's financial health straight lines.


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 http://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.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment

Fixing Health Care Without Spending Trillions Of Dollars

Many times we have reviewed the fallacy that the current health care bills President Obama is pushing are fatally flawed by one simple fact: no one in the political class did the necessary analysis to determine the root cause of the problem. High and rising health care costs are the symptoms of the problem,they are not the root cause of the problem. For a simple to understand analogy, read Step 28 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Every past and current political class solution to the health care cost problem has treated the symptoms without eliminating the cause.

Today we will look at a few simple, inexpensive fixes that could be implemented that probably address the root causes of high health care costs. The first of these is medical malpractice tort reform. The good thing about these fixes is that they have been successfully implemented at the state level. According to many sources on the Web, the following states have had great success in medical tort reform:

• In 1975, California passed the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) which, among other things, capped the amount of medical malpractice awards. Since then, the California cost for medical malpractice insurance has gone up 168% on average while nationally the cost has gone up 420%.
• In the 1990s and again in 2003, Texas passed major medical malpractice tort reform. Since then, the number of malpractice awards have gone down 25% and the cost for malpractice insurance from the state's largest insurers is down over 50%. See another post we did in late 2009 that detailed other positive, cost reduction details on the Texas tort reform experience.
• In 2005, Georgia also capped malpractice awards and has seen the number of malpractice lawsuits go down 39% and medical insurance rates go down 18%.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that medical malpractice tort reform would reduce the cost of medical insurance anywhere from 10-30%.

By significantly reducing the overhead cost of running a medical establishment as a result of reduced insurance premiums, general health care costs should go down. Also, the costs of defensive medicine, i.e. running additional, unnecessary tests just to make sure there are no potential loopholes left open for a devastating malpractice suit, should also go down once the threat of frivolous and expensive lawsuits is reduced.

Now, a few things to note. Most Internet articles and blogs that think this is a bad idea are written by lawyers or law associations, those that stand to lose the most in any type of tort reform. Thus, be careful when you read contrary opinions for this type of reform, understand where the writer is coming from. Second, there should be an exception to capping damages when, and only, there is gross, gross negligence, on the doctor's behalf. Third, a mechanism would still have to be implemented to continue to reduce defensive medicine that is unnecessary but is done because the doctors get paid for running excess tests. Some defensive medicine would be reduced by tort reform, it is doubtful all unnecessary defensive medicine would be eliminated since the doctors would still benefit from doing some unnecessary defensive medicine.

Given that some states have been successful with reducing health care costs without massive government intrusion into individual's lives, just a little mix of tort reform, does it not makes sense to try this approach and see how it goes before devoting TRILLIONS of dollars via the current health care reform bills that have not yet identified the root causes?

How about another way to simply and inexpensively reduce health care costs? This approach would mimic some of the policies at the Cleveland Clinic which, according to an article in the March 1, 2010 edition of Fortune magazine, "provides the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm." How does the clinic do it? According to the article, an interview with its CEO, Dr. Delos Cosgrove, they understand the root cause of health care problems:

• Three activities, smoking, diet and lack of exercise cause 40% of the premature deaths in the country.
• These three activities are major causes to 70% of chronic diseases including heart disease and emphysema.
• In turn, these chronic diseases eat up 75% of the nation's cost of health care, i.e. control the root causes and you could control up to 75% of the health care related costs.

How would one control these root causes? The CEO provides a number of proven strategies:

• Given that two thirds of the U.S. population is overweight and one third is obese, getting the weight problem under control is imperative. At the Cleveland Clinic they addressed that problem directly by removing all fryers from the cafeteria and they no longer use trans fat in any cooking they do. They also removed the candy and soda machines from their facilities.
• They also encouraged their employees to exercise by providing free Curves memberships and Weight Watcher memberships, free access to their gyms, free pedometers, etc. In the first year of the program, their employees lost a combined 120,000 pounds.
• They also made their entire operation smoke free and provided free smoking cessation classes to their employees They helped get a state law passed that banned public smoking throughout the entire state of Ohio. Not satisfied, they offered free smoking cessation classes to everyone in the county where they have their offices. This offer helped reduce the smoking rate in the county from 28% to 18%. Finally, they stopped hiring people that were smokers.

All of these measures are relatively inexpensive but they had dramatic results with significant numbers of people now slimmer, smoke free, eating better, healthier and thus, less likely to incur health care costs. You do not need to spend TRILLIONS of dollars to get these types of significant results.

The other aspect of medicine that has allowed the Cleveland Clinic to keep costs down is that their doctors are paid a salary rather than being paid on how many tests they do. This removes the incentive to do any extra, unnecessary and expensive tests. However, the Clinic also gets the finest medical people to come work for them since they are able to practice medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, not practice filling out insurance forms.

The article also touches on other, logical solutions to the health care cost problem including technology and insurance/doctor relationships. All of their actions are simple, cost efficient and effective since the Cleveland Clinic takes the time to understand the root causes of the problem. It is a novel approach relative to the political class, i..e understanding what is causing the problem before you write 2,500 page, multi TRILLION dollar legislation that may or may not (more likely outcome) solve the problem. Given the skyrocketing Federal deficits and national debt, simple, inexpensive but effective steps to curbing health care costs (diet, smoking cessation, exercise, insurance bureaucracy reduction, tort reform, etc.) are definitely something to try first and see what works and what does not.

Because, seriously, ask yourself: name one major Federal program in the past forty years that 1) has worked as planned and 2) has come in under budget? I cannot come up with one either. That makes it highly, highly unlikely that Obama's current health care bills will work either. Simple and cheap and already proven effective beats a 2500 page complex, TRILLION dollar expensive and yet to be proven effective solution. For more examples of how to fix this problem, go to Step 28 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" for the process that Obama SHOULD have used to write health care legislation.

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.