December, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Medicaid Disasters and a Personal Story of Disaster

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, sugar, 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 copays 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.

1) We have often reviewed what a disaster Medicaid has been relative to Obama Care and reality:

• More than twice as many people signed up for Medicaid under Obama Care’s rules and tenets than expected.
• This put tremendous pressure on state government budgets as a result of increased Medicaid expenses.
• These increased expenses as a result of Obama Care has caused at least four states now having to devote over 30% of their state government revenue solely to Medicaid.
• Numerous university studies have shown that despite more people being enrolled in Medicaid and greatly increased Medicaid expenses, Medicaid is not making Americans any healthier.
• Many people enrolled in Medicaid still cannot get medical care since fewer and fewer doctors accept Medicaid patients so that even though they have health insurance (Medicaid) they cannot get access to doctors.
• The increase in Medicaid enrollment as a result of Obama Care has resulted in decreased Medicaid funding and resources for those that were originally targeted by Medicaid, the disabled, the elderly, pregnant women, and impoverished families and increased funding for people that were never intended to be in the Medicaid fold, able bodied adults.
• And recent studies now indicate that it is highly possible that the increased enrollment in Medicaid has been a major contributor to the increased opioid addiction levels across the country.

A recent National Review article followed up on the disaster that Medicaid has become under Obama Care:

• The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) found that 24 Obama Care Medicaid expansion states have added more able bodied, working age adults to Medicaid roles than what had ever been expected.
• Those states were expected to add only 5.5 million people to state Medicaid roles but over twice as many, 11.5 million, signed up for free health insurance under Obama Care and Medicaid.
• For example, Kentucky’s enrollment was 134 percent higher than the projected all-time maximum, West Virginia’s was 84 percent higher than its projected peak, and Maryland’s was 62 percent greater than state officials expected it would ever be.
• These much higher enrollment totals caused Federal government/taxpayer funding to increase far beyond original estimates, estimates that were used to falsely sell Obama Care to the country and which now look obscenely underestimated.
• Kentucky’s state government Medicaid expenses ran almost $2 million over budget in just 18 months and Ohio’s Medicaid expansion cost almost twice as much than expected.

The disasters of Obama Care keep showing up every month, especially when it comes to Medicaid.

2) What would an Obama Care disaster update be without a review of the ever increasing Obama Care insurance policy cost increases. According to Javier Manjarres, writing for the Shark Tank website on December 18, 2017:

• Five years ago, Manjarres had a Florida Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance policy with a monthly premium of $150 and an annual deductible of $2,000.
• This plan allowed him to get access to any doctor he chose to see and use.
• But then he got a notice from Blue Cross that “because of the Obamacare law,”, his current plan, the plan that he liked, could afford, and worked for him, was being terminated.
• The notice said he had to find new insurance via an Obama Care exchange.
• Five years later, he is currently working under his FIFTH policy as a result of Obama Care (Aetna, Humana, AvMed, Blue Cross, Coventry).
• His fifth and current insurance policy put him back with his original insurance carrier, Florida Blue Cross and Blue Shield, with a current monthly policy premium cost of $555 (more than three times his first policy with Blue Cross), and annual deductible of $6,200 (more than three times the cost of his first policy with them), and a much more narrow list of doctors that he can use.

Higher premiums, higher deductibles, more narrow doctor networks and incredible stress fo constantly trying to find insurance. Years after Obama Care was made law, the same problems keep recurring over and over.

More disasters to follow in the coming days.

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

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