Over the past few years, but especially over the past thirteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:
- It has and will continue to increase the national debt.
- It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now.
- It has restricted overall economic growth.
- It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways.
- It has reduced the job growth rate in this country.
- It has turned many full time workers into part time workers.
- It has generally increase the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed.
- The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people.
- The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the ramifications of the law.
- It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had.
- It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
- It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms.
- It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law.
- It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate a successful program.
- It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves.
- It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.
I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.
Let’ see what new disasters of Obama Care we can find today:
1) Amy Ridenours National Center Blog recently carried a story written by Project 21’s Kevin Martin. Many people, seeing the disaster that is Obama Care, are now clamoring for a so-called single payer system in this country, a system in which the government controls each and every aspect of health care delivery.
A sane person, knowing the reality of government’s ineptness, would say that this is a very bad idea. And based on the disastrous health care the government has provided to our veterans in a pseudo-single payer system, that reality of government incompetence in the health care field became crystal clear. However, for those that still cling to the false utopia of a single payer system, consider the research and realities that Mr. Martin presents:
1) Canada has had a single payer government controlled health care system for a long time. Keeping that in mind, consider the fact Angela Johnson, president of Medical Confidence, Inc., has just written a new book entitled “Step by Step Guide to Navigating your way through Canada’s Health Care System and Minimizing Your Wait Time.” The book is billed as “a first of its kind and must read for Canadians, providing them with 14 valuable tips to overcome these issues and minimize their wait times.” If you have to read a book in order to understand and cope with medical wait times, maybe the single payer system is not the most efficient way to deliver health care.
2. Let’s stay with Canada’s single payer system. In Canada’s capital, Ottawa, Mr. Martin writes that “1,195 children and youth are waiting for mental health outpatient and outreach services at CHEO and the Royal, up 10 per cent from 1,082 a year ago,” according to an article in the Ottawa Citizen. The wait time for mental health treatment Canada could be up to a year. Not a good situation when our mental health needs might go a year before being addressed, never mind cured.
3. Great Britain also has a single payer system. It’s National Health Service (NHS) recommends that no cancer patient should wait more than 62 days to start treatment. That does not mean you will be treated within 62 days, the 62 days is just a recommendation.
However, the Daily Mail recently reported just over 9,900 British cancer patients waited longer than that in the first six months of 2014. Like the mental health patients in Canada, waiting for cancer treatments is never a good thing since according to a recent article in the journal, Radiotherapy and Oncology, where the researchers assert that for breast cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 1.0% per month of delay” and for head and neck cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 3.7% per month of delay”.
4. Staying in Great Britain, the Daily Mail reported in August that the “number of patients languishing on NHS waiting lists for operations is at its highest for six years…There are 3.2 million people awaiting surgery – a rise of 700,000 compared with 2010.” Not only are their 3.2 million people on the wait list for surgery, 809,000 patients were waiting for a diagnostic test and 15,600 operations were cancelled at the last minute in the second quarter of 2014. And these numbers may be an under count due to errors and incomplete records. Delays, cancelled tests, sounds just like our own government’s mistreatment of our veterans.
The single payer model is not a solution to our nation’s ever escalating health care costs for the simple reason that the Obama Care model is a failure: both approaches fail to address and resolve the underlying root causes of high health care costs:
- Americans eat too much.
- Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
- Americans do not exercise enough.
- Americans smoke too much.
- Americans are aging and being afflicted more and more with aging diseases, e.g. dementia, Parkinsons, etc., diseases that are not addressed by Obama care.
- Government health care systems, e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, are infested with inefficiencies, waste, and outright criminal fraud, resulting in the wasting of upwards of $100 billion a year, $100 billion that could be spent on health care and cure research.
- The American health care system is in need of significant and common sense tort reform.
Until you address and resolve these root causes, Obama Care, single payer systems, or any other government bureaucratic approach will fail miserably. Obama Care proves this point exquisitely.
2) Adding onto the root causes of our high health care costs, a recent article in the July 11, 2014 issue of The Week pointed out that one in ten U.S. deaths of working age Americans are due to alcoholism. More than half of these preventable deaths are due to binge drinking.
There is likely high medical costs involved in liver treatment and transplants and other alcohol induced medical conditions that add to our high health care costs. Thus, one of the nation’s and Obama's top priorities should have been a national public health effort to reduce the incidence of alcoholism, in addition to reducing the incident of smoking. Both public health efforts, if successful, would have had the major effect of reducing health care costs and the cost of health insurance. Unfortunately, Obama Care gives little attention and focus to both of these major root causes.
3) According to a recent New York Times article that was summarized in the September 12, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, the number of American workers employed through temp agencies has skyrocketed to a record 2.9 million workers. These workers now make up a record 2% of the nation’s workforce.
However, this should not come as surprise since this trend was predicted long before it came true, another ugly consequence of Obama Care. The law’s tenets often make it financially better for a small business to hire only temporary workers, given the law’s fines and penalties. This stresses out families and workers who desire full time work but who are stuck settling for part time and temporary work as businesses try to stay both in business and legal under Obama Care.
4) There is no disagreement that the roll out of Obama Care’s data systems programs, websites, and processes was an unqualified disaster. The Health and Human Services Inspector general has found a good reason why that was so: The entire effort was badly coordinated, with $800 million spent and spread out over 60 contracts with 33 different companies.
You cannot possibly get something done efficiently and effectively when so many different entities are involved and the overall coordination, what little there was, is handled by an incompetent company, CGI Federal, a company that was relieved of its duties a few short months after the disastrous roll out. CGI was paid a quarter of a billion dollars just to be relieved of duties by Accenture Federal Systems who was paid an additional $45 million to clean up the CGI mess.
5) Everything about Obama Care was poorly thought out and executed even worse. Whether it was the online website headaches and failures, the negative impact on business hiring, employment and the negative impacts on the economy, the increased threat and reality of identity theft, the stress and heartache of cancelled policies, the complete missing of the underlying root causes of our high health care costs, etc., you probably could not have done a worse job at legislating in this area if you tried.
As a result, we are no closer to taming high health care costs than when the legislation was passed despite spending billions of dollars and screwing up millions of lives over the past four years or so. The entire disaster was nicely summed up in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial piece that touched on the many obvious and more salient points of the entire fiasco:
Whether the Affordable Care Act lives up to its name depends on how, or whether, you consider its consequences for the wider economy.
Millions of people pay a significant portion of their income for health insurance so they and their families can get good health care when they need it. The magnitude of their sacrifices demonstrates the importance that people ascribe to health care.
The Affordable Care Act attempts to help low- and middle-income families avoid some of the tough sacrifices that would be necessary to purchase health insurance without assistance. But no program can change the fundamental reality that society itself has to make sacrifices in order to deliver health care to more people. Workers and therefore production have to be taken away from other industries to beef up health care, or the workforce itself has to get bigger, or somehow people have to work more productively.
Although the ACA helps specific populations by giving them a bigger slice of the economic pie, the law diminishes the pie itself. It reduces the amount that Americans work, and it makes their work less productive. This slows growth in both personal income and gross domestic product.
In further expanding the frontiers of redistribution, the ACA reduces the benefits of employment for both employers and employees. Employers that don’t provide health insurance are either subject to large penalties based on the number and types of employees that they have, or are threatened with enormous penalties when they get the opportunity to expand their business.
About a quarter of the nation’s employees, more than 35 million men and women, currently work for employers that don’t offer health insurance. These tend to be small and midsize businesses with employees who already make less than the average American worker. The result of penalizing businesses for hiring and expanding is going to be less hiring and expanding.
Another sixth of the nation’s employees—almost 25 million people—are in a full-time position that makes them ineligible for the law’s new and generous assistance with health-insurance premiums and cost sharing. They are ineligible for subsidies simply because they are working full time and thereby eligible for their employers’ coverage. Because the only ways for them to get the new assistance is to move to part-time status, find an employer that doesn’t offer coverage, or stop working, we can expect millions of workers to make one or more of those adjustments.
Most people wouldn’t give up working merely to qualify for a few thousand dollars in assistance. But it is a mistake to assume that nobody is affected by subsidies, because there are people who aren’t particularly happy with working, planning to leave their job anyway, or otherwise on the fence between working and not working. A new subsidy is enough to push them over the edge or to get them to stop working sooner than they would have otherwise.
So much stress, aggravation, and failure for so little upside. And the sad part is that this time next month we will be back with more disasters and no successes from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted, legislation that was enacted by the worst set of Washington politicians ever put in office.
