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