February, 2017, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Lying Politician, Less Competition, and Jerking Americans Around

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) One of Obama’s constant selling points, and lies, about Obama Care is that it would increase competition for health insurance policies, resulting in a wider and cheaper choice of policies. As we have discussed many times, this situation never, ever materialized, as a new report from the Heritage Foundation again points out:

• Four years after Obama Care came into existence, there are fewer and fewer insurance companies participating in the Obama Care policy market.
• The number of competitors is at the lowest level ever with about 70% of U.S. counties having access to two or fewer insurers to do business with.
• Prior to Obama Care there were 395 insurance companies selling health insurance policies in the individual health insurance market across all states. 
• In 2017, there are only 218 insurers selling Obama Care insurance policies across all states, making the Obama Care market 45% less competitive than what the individual market was prior to Obama Care.
• Relative to 2016, there are 24% fewer insurers in the Obama Care market in 2017 with 33 states having fewer insurers, 16 states having the same number and only Virginia having more Obama Care insurers.
• Five states, Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming, have only one Obama Care insurer in 2017. 
• Another 12 states (Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia) and the District of Columbia have only two Obama Care insurers offering coverage in 2017.
• County level Obama Care insurer competition can be even worse than when just looking at the state level coverage.
• For example, in Texas at the state level, there are ten companies offering Obama Care policies statewide but 86% of Texas counties have only one or two insurers offering Obama Care policies and only six counties have as many as six competitors.
• In 2016, 7% of U.S. counties had only one Obama Care competitor in the county while in 2017 33% of U.S. counties have only one Obama Care insurer.
• In 2017, 80 insurance companies got out of the Obama Care business while 11 insurance companies entered it, a net loss of 69 companies.
• Many of the exiting insurance companies were big companies with a lot of customers such as UnitedHealthcare which exited 31 of the 34 states where it offered exchange coverage in 2016, Aetna which exited 11 of 15 states, and Humana left four out of the 15 states, in which they sold coverage in 2016.
• According to government analyses, the average increase in the monthly premium cost for the Obama Care benchmark plan went up 25% in 2017 in the 39 states using the Federal exchange database to purchase insurance, a problem that will cause more and more people to not buy insurance which will decrease insurance companies’ customer base which will lead to less profitability which will drive up rates….and we are now in a death spiral.

Such a sad state of affairs and such a long, long way from the fake Obama promise that Obama Care would increase competition.

2) It is always a pleasure when a liberal, left leaning media company, in this case the Washington Post, calls a liberal left leaning politician a liar of the top degree. Kyle Feldscher, writing for the Washington Examiner on January 14, 2017, pointed out that the Washington Post gave a top liar rating of “four Pinocchios” to Bernie Sanders when he claimed that 36,000 Americans would die every year if Obama Care was repealed. You cannot be considered a worst liar under the Post’s rating system than what Sanders was rated.

Apparently, the Senator’s reasoning was not only based on some bad numbers from a left leaning think tank but it also assumed that there would not be a replacement for Obama Care that maybe could actually be better. But reasoning, reality, and accurate numbers rarely fit into a politician’s position and at least the Post had enough integrity in this case to punch incredibly large holes in this false and misleading assertion.

3) Melissa Quinn, writing for the Heritage Foundation on February 1, 2017, reviewed the very frustrating case of a Nebraska women who lost her individual health insurance multiple times as a result of Obama Care. Yes, the legislation that was going to make getting health insurance so easy, that was going to provide a large selection of policies and companies to choose from, and was going to be cheap, did not quite work out for Pamela Weldin:

• First, though, consider that Ms.Weldin was a prime member of Obama Care’s target market: she qualified for a tax subsidy and had a pre-existing condition.
• In the lead up to the ObamaCare rollout she lost access to her existing policy with Humana as a result of Obama Care requirements.
• She then purchased an Obama Care platinum policy through CoOportunity Health the local Obama Care co-op program.
• But in a year, the co-op cancelled her platinum policy and she had to downgrade to a silver Obama Care policy.
• But she then got a message from the co-op that it was going out of business because of financial reasons, like many other Obama Care failed co-ops, causing her to look for yet another policy.
• She ended up getting an Obama Care policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska, paying a little more each month so that she could get access to a network that included her favorite doctor.
• But then again, in 2016 she was notified that her latest insurer was pulling out of the Obama Care program.
• But by 2016, she had only two Obama Care insurers to choose from, Aetna and Medica.
• She chose Aetna and paid a little bit more to keep access to her favorite doctor.
• But after the first month she was notified that her favorite doctor was now considered out of network and that she would have to meet a whopping $20,000 out of network deductible before her insurance would be useful.
• And while Nebraska had four Obama Care insurers in the state in 2015, it was down to only two in 2016, consistent with the trend across the country.
• And with fewer competitors, the number of policies has also decreased significantly, down from 31 policies in 2016 to 13 in 2017.
• Nebraska Congressman Adrian Smith summed up the plight of Ms. Weldin and others quite nicely: “That speaks volumes in terms of ultimate consumer benefits. Fewer choices most often means higher prices and less quality.”

Ms. Weldin was very clear in telling what she wanted: “Allow us the choice of what kind of policy and coverage suits our needs. Allow us the choice of deductible and to cross state lines for provider care so we can choose and keep our own doctors. Allow insurance companies to compete across state lines so we have more options and have more choice of providers….Something has to be done because this is not sustainable. I’m fine paying a little bit more if it’s what I need. But let me choose a policy that’s appropriate for my needs. Let me have a policy that’s appropriate to my medical needs. Let me choose a deductible that’s appropriate for my budget.”

Seems reasonable and logical, something that Obama Care never was.

That will do it for this today’s unfolding disaster that is Obama Care: jerking Americans around to different insurers with less choices along the way, another lying politician when it comes to Obama Care, and dwindling competition,the exact opposite of what Obama promised. More disasters next tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

October, 2016, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - Making Up Excuses For Failure, IRS Harassment of Citizens, 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, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) The October 14, 2016 issue of The Week magazine did an article on the downfall of Obama Care called, “Why Obama Care Is Struggling.” It covers much of the failures we have already discussed this week and adds in a few others along with the very few, and very weak, Obama Care success stories:

• Some of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Humana, and Blue Cross Blue Shield are rapidly pulling out of the Obama Care market because they are losing billions of dollars by being in those markets.
• Only 12.7 million people enrolled in the Obama Care exchanges this year, far short of the forecasted and promised 21 million who should have already enrolled. [Note: not included in the article is the reality that over 1.6 million original enrollees out of the 12.7 million have already been kicked out of their policies because they never paid the first installment of their premiums so the miss relative to the 21 million is even worse.]
• As many as 19% of those customers will have access to only one Obama Care insurer in 2017, very short of Obama's promise that Obama Care would increase competition, not reduce competition to only one provider.
• The main reason cited for the failure is that not enough young people have signed up for Obama Care policies, preferring to pay the penalty for not having insurance.
• While the business case and financials of the Obama Care effort required at least 35% of the enrollees to be aged between 18 and 34, in reality that percentage is only a meager 28%.
• Another problem with the shortfall is that small businesses did not kick employees off of their business insurance plans and onto the Obama Care policies as often as the Obama Care planners and forecasters expected, leaving the Obama Care insurers with older, sicker, and more expensive customers than expected.
• As a result, Obama Care insurance companies either have to hike up premium costs which drives away customers or strip down the benefits of their insurance policies, forcing customers to pay higher prices for less robust insurance coverage which drives away customers so much that many insurance companies decide that from a financial perspective, it is better to be out of the Obama Care world than be in it and take a financial beating.

What a mess, missed customer forecasts, higher premiums, less competition. Now, to be truthful, the article does point out that 20 million more people have health care insurance vs. the times previous to the Obama Care legislation. Also, the percentage of Americans without insurance coverage has dropped from 16% to 9% since Obama Care was passed. But there is a problem with considering the increased quantity of people having healthcare insurance vs. the quality of their healthcare insurance:

• Many of those with Obama Care policy customers are paying more and getting less than what they had with their previous insurance policies, policies that Obama Care outlawed and doomed to termination.
• Which gets us to another point, the 12.7 million who enrolled in Obama Care policies in 2016, were not all people who had not had health insurance before the law was enacted; likely more than half of the 12.7 million just traded their existing policies for Obama Care policies, often under duress, so that the incremental number of Americans insured under Obama Care insurance policies is likely closer to 4 or 5 million.
• Half of those Americans that are now insured as a result of the law, have gotten insurance via Medicaid, a reality that places upwards of 10 million people on a government program that will add tremendous costs to our national debt, provide health care via very narrow networks of less than the best doctors and hospitals, it is a government program that is hurtling towards financial insolvency, is corrupted with inefficiencies and criminal fraud, and if a Harvard study is to be believed, being a Medicaid patient does not make you any healthier vs. not having Medicaid coverage at all.

So yes, Obama Care did increase the number of Americans with health care insurance coverage. But Obama never promised that it would be lousy coverage that costs a lot, has high deductibles, had narrow networks of doctors and hospitals that were not of the highest quality, the reality that we see today. Quality also matters, it is not just quantity that matters.

[Note: the article tries to make the point that “overall government spending on healthcare was $2.6 trillion less last year than what it was expected to be before Obama Care…” This is obviously a ridiculously wrong number. The entire Federal government budget is just under $4 trillion a year so to claim that it is spending $2.6 trillion LESS, not in total, $2.6 trillion LESS, a year on healthcare is obviously either a falsehood meant to make Obama Care look better than it is or a gross typo.]

2) Zachary Tracer, Katherine Doherty, and Tatiana Darie, writing for Bloomberg on October 14, 2016, continued the bad news train coming out of the Obama Care disaster:

• According to an analysis by Bloomberg, 1.4 million Obama Care policy holders in 32 states will lose access to their policies in 2017, forcing them to find other insurance options. 
• Most of the damage is being caused by major insurance companies pulling out of the Obama Care world.
• The search for replacement policies will like lead to fewer insurance policy choices that are more expensive.
• S&P Global Ratings predict that 2017 enrollment in Obama Care insurance policies will be down by 8%.
• Just in Washington DC 7,800 Obama Care customers will lose access to their current policies.
• Kaiser Family Foundation has predicted that at least 19% of people in the Obama Care individual market will have the ability to choose from exactly one provider in 2017.
• In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield will be the only Obama Care option in 95 out of the state’s 100 counties since Aetna and UnitedHealthcare have withdrawn from the state, leaving 284,000 state residents without Obama Care health insurance policies.
• 117,000 residents in Tennessee will lose access to their Obama Care policies.

Another article, another set of implosions.

3) Obama Care from the beginning always had a little bit of the “Big Brother” syndrome ala George Orwell’s 1984. The government was forcing you to buy a product/service that you may or may not want to buy and making you a criminal if you did not heed their warnings and tracking your behavior to make sure you obeyed.

That Big Brother feeling came about again with a current IRS program that was put in place to ensure your compliance. The IRS, the enforcement arm, the “muscle” behind Obama Care is sending out official IRS letters to uninsured Americans (“reaching out” in their words) to remind them (“attracting” in their words) they need to get insured or be fined. The emphasis of the IRS has been to “remind”younger Americans to get insured because in order for Obama Care to work, younger Americans have to subsidize older, less healthy Americans, kind of a cross generational subsidy program from Americans with generally less wealth paying the bills of Americans with generally more wealth to their name.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise and Ways & Means Chairman Kevin Brady recently sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. It stated, “We strongly object to any action by the Administration to improperly use sensitive taxpayer information to identify and harass individuals who have rejected the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by choosing to pay a tax rather than be forced into a health care plan they don’t need and don’t want.” 

Their other concern is that the IRS was using “protected taxpayer information” to conduct the outreach program and that “We do not believe it to be an appropriate tax administration activity, or a good use of scarce taxpayer resources, to use protected return data to direct taxpayers on their personal coverage decisions.”

So yes, Big Brother IRS is watching and like Santa Claus, knows if you have been naughty or nice when it comes to your personal decision on health care insurance, the First Amendment be damned.

4) This next story is great because it shows how out of touch many of the Obama Care architects are relative to the current meltdown of the program and how deep they are into denial. According to David Ruiz, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on August 16, 2016, Zeke Emanuel, one of the more primary and certainly one of the more obnoxious architects of Obama Care, implied that Aetna’s decision to withdrawal from 70% of the Obama Care exchanges markets is not because they were losing money on Obama Care policies but it was to spite the government for not allowing its merger with Humana.

Is he that much out of touch with reality or just pissed off that his work is turning out to be a disaster? Let’s consider some facts:

• Blue Cross and BlueShield have also pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• UnitedHealthcare has pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• Humana and other insurance companies have pulled out of a bunch of Obama Care markets because of heavy financial losses.
• 17 out of the 23 Obama Care co-ops have gone out of business already because of heavy financial losses.
• We know for a fact that younger, healthier Americans did not sign up for Obama Care in the volume expected which increased insurance company costs more than expected.
• The primary objective of any business executive is to maximize shareholder wealth so no executive would stop operating in a profitable market category if they were maximizing shareholder wealth in that category, i.e. being profitable serving that category.

And despite all of these realities, this sore loser blames Aetna for doing something the whole market has done or is considering doing. By the way, Emanuel provides not proof, no income statements, no Aetna financial disclosures, no Aetna SEC documents, he just accuses them of doing what everyone else is doing. Pathetic.

One last set of unfolding Obama Care disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

October, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Even Obama's Friends and Allies Admit That Obama Care is Failing

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) We have often been very critical of the Obama Care legislation, calling it the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington, based on facts and realities. So, it was very refreshing when I came across a Washington Examiner article by T. Becket Adams that was written on October 3, 2016 where she reported that Bill Clinton called Obama Care a “crazy system” where small businesses are “getting killed.”

This is important since the creation of new small businesses has traditionally been the greatest source of job growth in the economy over time. If Obama Care is killing small businesses, than it is logical to assume that job creation is being severely suppressed by Obama Care. This may explain why this economic recovery orchestrated by the Obama administration is so anemic.

Specifically Clinton said: "The people who are getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies. Why? Because they're not organized and they don't have any bargaining power with insurance companies and they're getting whacked." 

He continued to point out the realities of Obama Care that we have pointed out many times, Obama Care insurance premiums continue to got up substantially with benefits going down: "So you got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have healthcare, and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It's the craziest thing in the world."

Of course, his solution is just as bad as Obama Care. It wants to junk the entire U.S. insurance company model and let people sign onto Medicaid and Medicare. Yes, two government programs that are hurtling towards fiscal collapses, two government programs that are ineffective, inefficient, and riddled with waste and criminal fraud and he wants to expand them. Insanity.

But his wife is even further out of touch, given her support of Obama Care: "[T]he fact is, we have the Affordable Care Act. That is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party and of our country." If this is one of Obama’s greatest accomplishments, I cannot imagine what some of his lesser accomplishments and failures are.

2) If Bill Clinton’s dumping on a primary Democratic “victory” is a true indication of really how bad Obama Care is, consider the fact that the New York Times, the paper that loves anything that involves Obama, is actually critical of the legislation. That is the real indictment for being bad, an Obama program that even the New York Times is critical of. Robert Pear, writing for the Times on October 2, 2016, reported that:

• Janet S. Trautwein, the chief executive of the National Association of Health Underwriters, which represents more than 100,000 health insurance agents and brokers, recently stated: “In many states, the individual market is in a shambles.”
• Even Obama, who is usually so narcissistic that he cannot ever admit a shortcoming, has said that “more work to reform the health care system is necessary.”
• Specifically, he actually pointed out the many problems that we have been pointing out for years: “Too many Americans still strain to pay for their physician visits and prescriptions, cover their deductibles or pay their monthly insurance bills; struggle to navigate a complex, sometimes bewildering system; and remain uninsured.” 
• But wasn’t Obama Care supposed to reduce what we pay for physician visits and prescriptions, help cover deductibles and monthly insurance bills?
• This year’s registration period for Obama Care insurance begins November 1, a period that will see many Obama Care customers and would-be customers seeing higher premium levels and fewer insurer options.

The pathetic outcome of recognizing this failure is that Democrats want to double down on the disaster: they want the Federal government to go into the insurance business to provide competition and another insurance choice for Americans (the so-called “single payer" system). Consider the following realities that top Democrats, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the New York Times seem to forget when the Federal government tries to operate a healthcare organization:

• Government run Medicare is hurtling towards fiscal insolvency with runaway costs and fraud.
• Government run Medicaid is hurtling towards fiscal insolvency with runaway costs and fraud.
• The majority of Obama Care insurance co-ops have already gone bankrupt, suffered criminal activities, and the rest of them with the exception of one out of 23 is likely to eventually go out of business also.
• The majority of Obama Care online exchanges never came close to meeting their enrollment targets.
• The medical process that the Federal government completely controls, the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been scandal filled and underperforming for years, resulting in the premature deaths and underserving of our veterans.

Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. To think that the Federal government could ever run an efficient and effective health insurance program after the butcher jobs they did with Medicare, Medicaid, Obama Care co-ops and exchanges, and the VA system would prove Einstein’s theory to the max.

3) One last set of facts from the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Katherine Rodriguez, writing for Breitbart on October 4, 2016, laid out the “5 Devastating Obamacare Facts Every American Should Know.” We have covered some of them in other posts but this article updates some of the regularly occurring disasters:

• According to the Baltimore Sun, only six of the original 23 Obama Care co-ops are still in operation because they cannot “attract enough members, draw enough premium revenue and withstand the weight of new and costly regulatory hurdles created under the health reform law.” Not enough customers, not enough revenue, and too much regulation. Sounds about right.
• In Minnesota, Obama Care policy premiums are expected to increase between 50% and 67% in 2017 in a last ditch chance to keep insurance companies from abandoning the state. Ever escalating premiums are not unique to Minnesota.
• 8.1 million Americans have already had to pay $1.7 billion in Obama Care penalties for not having health insurance, as reported by Investor’s Business Daily. This is $1.7 billion that Americans can not use to grow the economy or to use to help pay the medical needs of their families and themselves.
• One of the very bad side effects of Obama Care is that policy deductibles have soared on Obama Care policies, which makes Obama Care policies virtually useless since many families cannot afford to go the doctor, given how much money they have to pay before attaining their high deductible: “According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 18 percent of covered workers in 2008 had a deductible of at least $1,000, up from only 10 percent in 2006. For workers with employer-sponsored plans at small firms, 35 percent had deductibles of $1,000 or more in 2008, up from 16 percent in 2006. In 2016, 51 percent of all covered workers, and 65 percent of workers in small firms, face deductibles of at least $1,000, TIME reported. “Workers at smaller firms must pay an average of $2,069 out of pocket before insurance payments kick in, versus $1,238 for workers at firms with 200 or more employees,” the article reported.”
• The final devastating fact covers the same Bill Clinton Obama Care conclusions we listed above, namely, “So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.” 

That will do it for today’s review of the unfolding disasters of Obama Care. Even supporters of Obama are starting to admit to the reality that Obama Care is failing and failing badly. More disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

September, 2016, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Higher and Higher Rates, Less and Less Competition and Choice

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) We have already discussed the many disasters of Obama Care when it comes to delivering actual health insurance policies to Americans.Most of the Obama Care exchanges never came close to achieving their promised enrollment levels and at least one exchange never even got to provide one American an Obama Care insurance policy. More than two thirds of the Obama Care co-ops have already failed dramatically, causing their customers to lose their insurance coverage. And large insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare and Humana have withdrawn from the Obama Care business because it caused them to lose billions of dollars. 

And according to a USA Today article by Nathan Bomey on August 16, 2016, the carnage just got worse. The third largest health insurer in the country, Aetna, has announced that it will be folding down 70% of its Obama Care policies. It will exit all but four states it is currently operating in with Obama Care policies due to heavy financial losses from those Obama Care policies. This will cause thousands of its current Obama Care policy holders to lose their coverage by the end of the year and either go uninsured or seek out other options.

As with UnitedHealthcare and Humana, Aetna blamed its financial loses on the reality that not enough younger, healthier people signed up for Aetna’s Obama Care policies. This caused the company to not be able to suck money out of the healthy and young to service the unhealthy, the economic model that Obama Care is based on. 

Maybe, just maybe, we can now have a discussion on how fatally flawed that economic model is, Obama Care’s architect, MIT’s Jonathan Gruber’s arrogance notwithstanding. Worst piece of legislation ever passed based on a failed economic model and its utterly failed economic assumptions regarding human behavior.
2) So not only are Obama Care policy holders losing their insurance coverage as companies flee the market, those that remain are going to get hit with some massive insurance rate hikes in 2017. Hannah Bleau, writing for the Chicks On The Right website on August 28, 2016, reviewed what state insurance commissioners are seeing when it comes to Obama Care insurance rate requests for 2017:

• Obama Care policyholders in 19 states could see double digit rate hikes in 2017 for their Obama Care policies.
• The double digit rate hikes requested by Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware and Aetna in Delaware (one of only four states it will continue to serve), blamed their massive double digit rate hikes on the reality that the Obama Care subsidy program is expiring.
• The steepest estimates for rate hikes include Tennessee with rate hikes likely to exceed a whopping 51%, Arizona (39%), Montana (35%), Delaware (29%) and Pennsylvania (25%).

What is likely to happen in these and other states is that healthy people who do not think they will have an immediate need for health insurance will drop their now costlier policies and forego these rate hikes altogether. This will further damage insurers’ financial results since they will be stuck serving less healthy customers causing them to raise their rates the following year driving more people out of their policies, forming a classic definition of a death spiral.

3) The iPatriot website recently ran article entitled, “Obamacare Scheme Imploding Ahead Of Schedule!” It covered a lot of what we discussed above with some additional twists of disaster:

• The article cited an article from the Investor’s Business Daily which reported that an Illinois state insurance regulator stated that Obama Care policy premiums could jump as much as 55% next year.
• Specifically, Bronze plans could go up 44%, Silver plans could go up 45%, and Gold plans could go up 55%.
• The article reiterates our discussion above that Illinois is not atypical of what is going on in other states which are also seeing double digit increases in Obama Care policy costs.
• But the article also steps outside of Obama Care’s disasters to discuss another government healthcare disaster, Medicare: “The latest Medicare Trustees report, warns that by 2040 half of all hospitals, 70% of all skilled nursing homes and 90% of home health care services will not be able to survive under Medicare’s increasingly skimpy fees.”

And as hospitals, nursing homes, and home health care services go out of business, the lack of competition will drive prices up even further, leaving poor and middle class families with little affordable health care option for them and their loved ones in just a few decades. This is what happens when you do not attack the root causes of a situation, as we laid out above. You never have any chance at all of resolving the real problem, be it Obama Care or Medicare.

4) Shikka Dalmia, writing for Reason magazine on September 6, 2016, also pointed out that “Obama Care is Failing Spectacularly!” Details from her article include the following realities:

• Obama Care is failing so badly that the attempted fixes might make a bad situation even worse.
• Aetna is pulling out of the Obama Care business in 11 of 15 states after losing about $300 million annually and the fact the company sees nothing in the near future that will reverse that trend.
• Seventy percent of Obama Care co-ops have already gone belly up, a concept that was supposed to provide competition to insurance companies in areas with little insurance competition. 
• The failure of the co-ops have left many counties across the country with only one insurance company option, with Pinal County, Arizona have no one providing health insurance options to that county’s citizens.
• The only Obama Care insurance companies that appear to be hanging in there are those that have long been serving the Medicaid market which have resulted in policies that skimp on benefits and have very narrow and lean hospital and doctor networks, networks that are typically not the best.
• The article debunks the Obama Care supporters’ myth that the exit of the big insurance companies from the Obama Care markets is normal and represents a competitive marketplace: “Obamacare's boosters on the editorial page of The New York Times and elsewhere maintain that the exit of all these biggies is no big deal because it represents the normal weeding-out process of a competitive market. That's a nice try—but no sale! In a functioning market, companies die when their customers take their business to alternative suppliers. In this case, customers are unwilling to purchase the product in the first place given that total enrollment in Obamacare exchanges is 40 percent less than Congressional Budget Office projections last year.”
• The article also visits the death spiral that is going on with Obama Care that we discussed above and in previous posts: “This riskier-than-expected patient pool is forcing insurers to raise premiums, which prices even more healthy people out of the market, which causes more hikes, unleashing a death spiral of adverse selection—exactly as many critics of the law had predicted would happen.”
• Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt also believes that Obama Care is in a death spiral, one that was actually historically experienced back in the 1990s when New York and New Jersey forced insurance companies to not discriminate in their policy writing based on the health status of a person, a policy that failed back then also.

The article concludes that the next President should be very worried when it comes to Obama Care, given how badly it has screwed up the entire health delivery system in this country.

Another month and another set of Obama Care disasters: higher and higher rates, less and less competition, and a death spiral forming. More disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2016, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama Admits to Failure, Obama Bailouts The Insurance Companies, and More

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

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

*********************

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Yesterday, we talked about the reality that 16 out of 23 Obama Care co-ops had already flamed out financially and gone out of business. As a result, they took over $1.7 billion worth of taxpayer wealth down the drain with them and caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their health insurance coverage. We also discussed the reality that six of the seven remaining co-ops are also on the verge of going out of business. 

And now it seems that even Obama has faced the reality that his vaunted co-ops are a disaster. Remember, the co-ops were supposed to serve as a competitive counter weight in geographic areas where there was little competition for health insurance customers, which theoretically allowed those that serve those areas to jack up insurance rates. However, if the co-ops all go out of business, those competitive advantages will never appear.

According to a Wall Street Journal report that was summarized on the Legal Insurrection website, Obama recently proposed that the Federal government step up and “Congress and his White House successor add a government-run, or public, insurance option to the Affordable Care Act and increase federal financial assistance for people to buy coverage [in geographic areas with little or no insurance competition].” Does this not sound remarkably like the original co-op plan, a plan that has had expensive and disastrous ramifications and results? 

Let’s review the Federal government’s track record in the healthcare industry:

• Sixteen out of 23 Obama Care co-ops have already failed and the remaining ones are more likely to fail than succeed.
• Medicare and Medicaid are so criminally infested that together they likely lose upwards of $100 billion a year to criminal fraud and inefficiency.
• Medicaid is so bad that one out of three doctors in the country do not accept Medicaid patients, probably resulting in Medicaid patients not getting access to the best doctors in the country.
• An extensive Harvard study of Medicaid patients in Oregon showed that Medicaid patients were no healthier than comparable people that had no health insurance.
• Obama Care has missed its customer enrollment forecast and promise in 2016 by almost 50%.
• Obama Care policy premiums, deductibles, and co-pays have increased substantially over the past few years despite Obama’s many promises that those costs would go down.
• The Veterans Administration, that operates a network of government run hospitals across the country to serve our veterans, has been found to be inefficient, poorly run and managed, and fatal to many veterans who did not get the care they needed in time.

In this reality Obama actually thinks that the Federal government is capable of operating an effective insurance program across the country? Have we forgotten how horrific it was to sign up for Obama Care health insurance policies via the Obama Care exchanges? Have we forgotten that many of those exchanges, like the Obama Care co-ops, have already gone out of business? Have we forgotten how the Obama Care data systems exposed millions of Americans to identity theft and fraud? Talk about the potential for another unfolding disaster.

2) The Americans For Prosperity website on July 15, 2016 ran an article where it described how the Obama administration was likely illegally bailing out insurance companies offering Obama Care policies even though Congress never approved funding for such an activity. 

Recall, the original Obama Care legislation had provisions for creating a subsidy fund using excessive profits on Obama Care policies from insurance companies doing well under the Obama Care legislation which was given to insurance companies that were not doing well with Obama Care policies. This plan was supposed to ease the industry into the Obama Care world and be temporary, with this subsidy fund expiring after just a few years.

Apparently and allegedly, the administration has been sending billions of taxpayer dollars to various insurance companies after this subsidy program went out of business. A Federal judge recently ruled that this funneling of funds to the insurance companies was unlawful since Congress did not authorize the transfer of taxpayer wealth to the companies.

In addition, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services has also allegedly been sending billions of taxpayer dollars to cover the losses of insurance companies through another provision known as Obama Care reinsurance. According to the article, $3.5 billion has already been sent to the insurance companies as the administration tries to avoid the inevitable: the death spiral of Obama Care.

3) I recently came across one of the more infamous video clips of the Obama Care era. It involved an MIT economic consultant to the Obama administration’s development of Obama Care, Jonathan Gruber. Gruber famously called Americans stupid and how the legislation was written in such a convoluted manner as to make it very hard to understand what the legislation actually did. To view an adjunct member of the Obama administration calling you stupid, go to the following link:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2014/11/obamacare-architect-the-stupidity-of-the-american-voter-is-why-obamacare-passed-video/

4) We often finish off these unfolding disasters of Obama Care by showing real life cases of real life American families who have suffered under the legislation. The sources of these heartbreaking stories comes from the following website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

ED - OHIO: Even after the administration made hundreds of improvements to the troubled Obamacare website, many people are still encountering difficulty.

Ed Anderson, a graphic designer from Columbus, Ohio, who was recently bumped from his wife’s insurance policy for reasons relating to the new law, discovered that his family’s monthly premiums will double even if he chooses the most inexpensive plan available to him through the new federal insurance exchange in his state.

Anderson said he and his wife currently pay a monthly premium of $460 through Blue Cross Blue Shield. But now that he can no longer stay on his wife’s plan, he will have to get his own coverage. The most inexpensive option would cost him a $428 monthly premium. And he and his wife can’t qualify for a federal subsidy because their joint income exceeds the cutoff. The new insurance policy will cost the Andersons an extra $5,000 a year in premiums alone.

“When you’re trying to keep your house, pay car insurance and put your kid through college, it’s tough,” Anderson said. Everything we do is going to be affected by this. Getting groceries, eating out. Going anywhere. It’s just crazy.”

MARK - IDAHO: Mark A. York, a 60-year-old freelance writer in Hailey, Idaho, said he began shopping after he received a letter saying that his current insurance policy would be canceled because it did not meet the requirements of the health care law. In the exchange, he said, he found policies with premiums similar to what he is now paying, $440 a month, but “the deductibles were so high — $4,000 to $6,000 a year — that it defeats the purpose of having insurance."

JOSH - TEXAS: All I have to say is that it's way too expensive. I make 1600 hundred a month they want me to pay 650 bucks a month that's BS I live check to check already I'll be homeless if I get health care. I'm 28 with 1600 a month barely enough to put food on the table pay bills and gas in my vehicle I have to borrow money every month as it is so this would just be ridiculous it's cheaper for me to pay the penalty at the end of the year oh well what do you do

KEN - COLORADO: My wife and I have been on the same health insurance plan for 12 years. The cost of that plan has gone up 110% in the last three years and we had to go with different plan due to the cost. The new plan covers less with higher deductibles. It is due to the Obamacare act. We called BCBS to ask why the cost has gone up each year (that's three calls, one a year) we where told the same each time, to get ready for the new health care act. So much for cheaper insurance. IT IS A SAD, RECKLESS LAW! All those who voted for it should be ashamed for what they did!

P.S. We are now slaves to our government, we now have to buy something from a private company or pay a fine, to live in this country.

That will do it for this month’s review of unfolding disasters from Obama Care. The President finally admits that a major component of his legislation is a disaster that needs to be remedied, the same President tries to illegally and secretly bailout the suffering insurance companies, we are reminded that those who constructed Obama Care thought we were all too stupid to understand what was being forced onto us, and a reminder that many,many Americans are suffering serious hardships from the worst piece of legislation ever passed. More disasters sure to come around by next month.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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