August, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care, Part 2: 2015, Costs Still Going Up, Doctors Shunning The Legislation, and Americans Hating The Legislation

Every month since last August we have had to do multiple posts each month in order to keep up with the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It is easily the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Federal government under any previous Presidential administration. Runaway costs, dysfunctional or non functioning website, high potential for identity theft, less coverage for more cost, cancelled insurance policies, etc., it was a failure in every way imaginable.

And those failures have continued to unfold every month, which is why we are going to take a few days now to cover what has happened just since last month’s updates. Before we do that, let’s do a quick reminder of where the program is from a numbers perspective:

• The Obama administration claimed that about 8 million Americans signed up for an Obama Care health care insurance plan during the initial sign up period.
• However, recent research from reputable sources found that it is likely that only between 80 and 90% of those who signed up actually followed through and paid for and bought a policy.
• If we take the midpoint of that range and assume only 85% followed through with payment, that 8 million sign up number is really only 6.8 million real policy holders.
• But other reputable research found that only about 57% of those who signed up for an Obama Care policy were previously uninsured, the other sign ups already had health insurance coverage and just churned out to an Obama Care policy.
• Thus, the actual number of INCREMENTAL Americans with health insurance via Obama Care is 57% of 6.8 million or around 3.9 million people.
• That means that 2.9 million Americans were not incremental insurance policy holders, they just churned from an existing policy into an Obama Care policy.
• Somewhere between 5 and 6 million people had their current health insurance policies cancelled as a result of Obama Care, policies that often were perfectly fine and acceptable to those carrying those policies.
• If we assume a best case view from the Obama Care perspective and assume all of the 2.9 million people who were not incremetnal to the Obama Care numbers came from this pool of 5-6 million people, than the net number of Americans who lost health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care is between 2.1 and 3.1 million people (5 or 6 million less 2.9 million people).
• Thus, we have to take the 3.9 million people that were truly incremental because of Obama Care and subtract out either 2.1 or 3.1 million, ending up with a net gain in insured Americans of between 800 thousand and 1.8 million.
• After years of trying, billions and billions of dollars spent, we may have gotten incremental, expensive, and narrow insurance coverage to less than two million Americans.

Only in Washington can the nation spend billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth and end up with a problem that is hardly any better than when before the program started. Insane.

That is where we stand today. Let’s follow up our conversation and discussion from yesterday and see what additional disasters have come to the surface since we last talked about Obama Care:

1) One of the main objectives of Obama Care was to reduce the cost of health insurance and thus, theoretically, make it more widely available. In fact, the President promised that the average American family would see a $2,500 annual savings in their health insurance costs every year. 

That may have been the legislation’s objective but that is not what is likely to happen. The wonderful website, Bankrupting America, on August 6, 2014 did a great summary of how much health insurance premiums and rates are likely to INCREASE in 2015, not decrease by $2,500:

• Florida state officials recently announced that Florida Blue, the state’s largest health insurer, would be raising its Obama Care policy premiums by an average of 18% for 2015. 
• Overall, Florida health insurance rates are likely to go up between 11 and 23%. According to state officials, “Fourteen companies, including three new insurers, are planning to sell to Floridians through healthcare.gov in 2015. Of the 11 returning plans, eight filed average rate increases ranging from 11 to 23 percent, and three filed rate decreases ranging from 5 to 12 percent. Florida Blue, the largest insurer, is raising its premiums by an average of 18 percent. Humana proposed an average 14 percent increase for its HMOs, while Molina proposed a 12 percent average rate decrease.”
• According to recent reporting in the New York Times: “in their requests for 2015, some of the exchange’s most popular companies are asking for double-digit rate increases. MetroPlus is asking for an average increase of 18.5 percent, including 28 percent for customers in its high-end Platinum plan. Empire HealthChoice H.M.O. is asking for an increase of 18 percent, and Health Republic, conceived by the Freelancers Union, is asking for a 15 percent average increase, including nearly 19 percent for some customers.”
• The Obama Care policy purchasers in North Carolina tended to be older and less healthy customers than what was expected. For example, North Carolina Blue Cross initially sought to have a marketplace customer pool of about 50% being 34 years old or younger. But only 32% of those that signed up for state Obama care policies matched this younger demographic. As a result, North Carolina Obama Care customers are likely to see increases in 2015 to make for this bad mix that befell insurance companies selling Obama Care policies in the state. 
• A recent analysis and report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 27 states and D.C. have already released Obama Care premium rate increases for 2015, with Nevada having the highest average increase, 36%, and the average increase across all of the studied states being about 7.5%. 
• So far, Iowa is also among one of the states with the highest average premium rate increases for 2015 with Obama Care policies in that state expected to raise rates by an average of 11.5% with the range being between 8.7 and 14.3%.
• At these rates, the cost of an average Obama Care policy in Nevada will double in cost in less than three years, less than seven years in Iowa, and less than 10 years across the national average.

You cannot claim the legislation was successful when the cost of insurance is doubling in cost in such relatively short times. Thus, it has to be concluded that Obama Care failed in both its promise of reducing health insurance costs and its ability to support Obama’s claim that health insurance rates would go down dramatically in cost, not double in cost.

2) A story on the NPR website from August 4, 2014 examined a problem that we have been discussing for months: Obama Care insurance policies are many times so narrowly focused on very few doctors and hospitals that even though Obama care policy holders now have health insurance, they may have trouble getting health care.

The article centered on doctors in the state of Connecticut but you can be sure that what is happening there is happening around the country. They discussed the situation of a doctor in Hartford. Dr. Doug Gerard usually gets reimbursed about $100 for a patient he might see that has private insurance. However, a similar patient needing similar care with an Obama Care policy might give the doctor only $80 for the same level of attention and treatment.

As a result, Dr. Gerard only accepts patients from one of the three insurance companies serving Obama Care policies in Connecticut and that one provided him the highest reimbursement of the three: 

"I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates. You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on."

Thus, customers of two of the state’s Obama Care insurers are out of luck when it comes to using the services of this doctor and apparently, many others in the state. And this type of behavior is not restricted to just doctors. Hospitals are also being more selective, especially high end, specialty hospitals, with some of them not accepting customers of low reimbursing Obama Care policies. Conversely, the insurance companies themselves are not allowing better, usually more expensive hospitals into their networks in order to keep costs down but allowing medical care to suffer.

Again, the good news is you now have health insurance. The bad news is that the insurance policy is so inadequate that you cannot get health care. 

Why is this happening? As we have said countless times, Obama Care never attacked and tamed the root causes of our ever escalating health care costs. It mistook public health and other issues for a deficiency in health insurance coverage. By focusing on health insurance coverage, ignoring the root causes of higher and higher costs, all it did was to move costs around within the country’s health care market without reducing them.

3) One last unfolding disaster for today, we continue the disasters review again tomorrow; According to the recent polling on the view of Obama Care by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

• 53% of Americans now have an unfavorable opinion of Obama Care.
• This is up a whopping 8% from the previous month's poll results.
• This is the largest unfavorable opinion of Obama Care in the survey's four year history.
• Only 37% of people actually have a favorable opinion of the law.
• Those polled also felt Washington should spend more time on issues like the economy, the federal budget deficit, education and immigration rather than health care.

Thus, not only did the Washington political class screw up again, passing legislation that does not do what it is supposed to do but costing billions of dollars to fail, but focusing on an issue that the rest of America finds secondary in their lives.

Costs are going up, not down as promised. People are getting health insurance but are having trouble getting health care. A strong majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of the legislation and think it should be a secondary priority of Washington. How many ways can you screw up? In the case of Obama Care, countless. And we will count some more 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2014 Update, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 2: An Incompetent Enrollment Process, Likely Cost Increases In Florida, and More

Yes, the world has been a mess lately. Fighting in the Gaza Strip, downed airliners, Russians fighting Ukrainians, the economy still stagnant, Iraq begin torn apart, Syrian civil war still killing thousands, veterans still not getting the proper medical treatment, a border that is a humanitarian crisis, etc. In the background though, has been the continuing and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

We have had to devote many posts every month to this fiasco since last August. The fallout from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by Washington just keeps on giving and messing up Americans’ lives. This month is no exception. We will probably need most of this week to cover it all, that is how bad the law is many, many months after it was rolled out in such a disastrous manner last fall. 

As with previous months, we will likely stop talking about it this month not because we ran out of material but because it can get so depressing going over the damage the legislation is doing to lives, health, freedom and the economy.

1) Besides the big problem Obama Care is facing that we discussed yesterday, namely that a court ruling may have gutted the main thrust of the legislation which was to give out subsidies to low income Americans to purchase overpriced and under featured Obama Care insurance policies, the logistics and operations of the entire effort continues to be a disaster.

The General Accountability Office of the Federal government recently announced that it had completed a sting operation on the sign up process of the Obama Care process. What they found was very discouraging, but not surprising, given how poorly every other aspect of failed to meet even minimal standards of quality:

• Despite using totally fake ids, undercover GAO investigators were able to obtain taxpayer-subsidized health care coverage in 11 of 12 attempts, according to Associated Press reporting.
• This latest disgrace and dysfunction appears focused on Obama Care call centers that handle applications from those people who were unable able to enroll in the system via online the online exchanges.
• Members of Congress had some correct if cynical, remarks about non-existent people being able to get enrolled in Obama Care policies. Congressman Dave Camp said the GAO finding is just more proof that Obama Care is rife with “incompetence, waste and the potential for fraud.” Senator Orrin Hatch said: “Obama Care is working really well — for those who don’t exist.”

It seems ironic and pitiful that many of our real, living, breathing veterans cannot get basic medical care from the Federal government but fictitious people have no trouble getting health insurance coverage from the same Federal government. Talk about incompetence.

2) Not surprisingly, more states are finding out that the premiums likely to be paid next year on Obama Care policies will be much higher than today’s premiums. Kaiser Health News recently did a story on what is going on in Florida relative to the latest cost increase news. Highlights of their report include the following:

• The top executive of Florida Blue, the state’s largest health insurance carrier, recently went public with the announcement that his Obama Care customers will see an increase in their policy costs in 2015.
• Apparently, the company, which picked up the most Obama Care enrollees in the state, were stuck with a larger percentage of older and sicker patients than they expected.
• In addition to not getting enough younger and healthy enrollees, the company ended up paying more than expected for people seeking more expensive health services: “We will be under tremendous financial pressure initially given the age, risk profile and high utilization of the new membership. It is far from clear that large enrollment in the marketplace is a financially beneficial place to be.” 
• In other words, expect your Obama Care policy premiums to go up next year because we are getting killed financially by those same policies.
• Florida Blue has not yet gone public with its 2015 rate increases, that information will be made available in a few weeks but the news does not sound good for none or minimal rate hikes.
• About 23% of those who bought Obama Care policies from Florida Blue this year were in the 18-to-34 age category, far below the national rate of 28% and farther below the 40% threshold that the Federal government said was needed for the entire Obama Care process to be viable.

Another state whose residents will probably not see their annual health care costs go down $2,500 as promised by the President. But that should not come as a surprise since we have not seen ANY state whose health care costs went down enough to justify that claim.

3) Given how poorly every aspect of Obama Care has unfolded so far, is there any hope that it will work itself out for the greater good over the next decade or so? If you believe the latest forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, the answer to that question is not good. 

Remember, one of the utmost, primary goals of Obama Care was to get affordable health insurance coverage for every American. That is why it is officially called the “Affordable Healthcare Act.” But that primary goal will not be attained, even ten years from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office‘s April forecast of what will happen to enrollment in health care plans from 2015 to 2024:

• By 2024, about 31 million Americans will still remain uninsured.
• Starting with an estimate that 56 million Americans did not have health insurance coverage prior to Obama Care, that number will be reduced by 25 million people who will purchase Obama care coverage in the exchanges in the next ten years.
• 13 million more Americans will gain health insurance coverage coverage through the dysfunctional Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program as a result of Obama Care.
• 7 million Americans will lose health insurance coverage from their employees as a result of Obama Care.
• 5 million fewer Americans will carry individual coverage directly from an insurer.
• Add all of these additions and subtractions up, account for rounding, and we find that the official CBO estimate forecasts 31 million Americans will still be uninsured in 2024.

Even more discouraging, the CBO estimates that the reduction in uninsured will come at a cost to the country, its taxpayers, and its economy of $1.8 TRILLION over those ten years. If we divide the net gain in insured Americans, about 25 million, into the cost of insuring them, $1.8 TRILLION, simple math shows that it will cost an amazing and mind numbing $75,000 per person to insure those under an Obama Care policy.

It is an amazing and stupefying cost and yet, despite the high cost, more than half of today’s uninsured Americans are still uninsured ten years from now. Failure is the only way to describe such a high cost to meet less than half of the overall and primary goal of the entire Obama Care operation. There has to be a simpler, more effective way.

4) We have often made the case in past Obama Care posts that the legislation, as it is written, hinders economic and employment growth in so many ways. That reality was reinforced recently n a Heritage Foundation interview with Billie Baggett of IHT Staffing, a temp agency located in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Under financial and work hour pressure to comply with the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Baggett claims many South Carolina businesses are cutting back by hiring more part-time rather than full time employees. He points out that while unemployment levels have dropped, to pre-recession levels at 6.1% nationally, his staffing agency work in South Carolina shows that this number may be skewed. Many employees have returned to work, but in new part time positions.

He blames Obama Care for the shrinking work week and the growth in part time vs. full time hiring: “I would say 90% of our employers, businesses today, are hiring part-time as opposed to full-time, because of the Affordable Healthcare Act.” 

A primary provision of the 2009 law, the employer mandate, requires all business with more than 50 workers to provide healthcare benefits to full-time employees. The law defines a full time employee as any employee who works more than 30 hours a week. While the Obama administration has put off this employer mandate until 2015, Baggett believes that it still discourages business from filling full time posts: “It’s not something a corporation wants to do.” 

James Sherk, a senior economic analyst at The Heritage Foundation, agrees and believes that the Obama Care employer mandate has already affected the job market, the economy, and predicts additional downsides in the future: “Obama Care will further reduce hours by increasing the costs of hiring full-time employees while discouraging workers from working full-time. Fewer work hours will impede income mobility for low-wage workers.”

That will do it for today. More of the same for those affected already by Obama Care: faulty and criminal fraud-ready sign up processes, likely insurance premium cost increases in Florida, failure to reach fully insurance status in ten years despite an astronomical cost of failing to do so, and the continuing proof that Obama Care is stifling earnings, work hours, and the economy.

And we still have a lot more disasters to cover in this month’s Obama Care disaster updates.

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