January, 2015, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Harvard Professors In a Snit, Vermont Abandons Single Payer, and A New Year With New Disasters

We spent the past eight days reviewing the latest insanity from the Washington political class. Wasteful spending by many different government entities but especially the Defense Department,  fraud riddled government programs, government programs that seem to always be over budget and under delivering, and a whole array of other insanity and idiocy

We stayed away from the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care since that piece of legislation deserves its own, dedicated set of insanity posts. For many years, but especially over the past two years, we have written extensively on the myriad of disasters that this law keeps spawning. To review these past disasters, enter the search term "the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care" in the search box above. 

The main reason why Obama Care is failing, and will eventually fail, is the simple reality that it never addressed the root causes of our high healthcare costs in this country.  Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans smoke and drink too much, Americans do not exercise enough, Americans on average are aging which brings a whole slew of aging disease into play, etc.  As we review the latest disasters from Obama Care this week, you will see that it has still not addressed these root causes and thus, it is still destined to failure.

Let’s see what disasters have popped up from this legislation in just the past month or so:

1) The website Minority Report recently did a nice summary of what disasters we are likely to experience in this new year from Obama Care:

• Effective in 2015, small businesses with at least one hundred employees must provide health insurance plans to their employees or pay a fine. You can bet that companies with 101, 102, or so employees are actively or have already trimmed their workforce to under 100 in order to avoid paying for health insurance that many small businesses simply cannot afford. That will result in higher unemployment and higher under employment and lower economic growth without having more people afforded health care insurance, the whole point of the legislation it the first place. Thus, all negative impacts, no positive impacts.
• For the first time ever, when American file their income taxes in a few months they may have to pay a fine if they did not purchase health care insurance in 2014. While this year’s penalty is small, it wil growth exponentially in the coming years, placing an additional burden on your annual tax filing.
• One of the big selling points of Obama Care is that the legislation expanded the definition of who could be enrolled in the Medicaid insurance program by raising the income threshold. This resulted in millions of lower income Americans getting enrolled in Medicaid. The bad news is that Medicaid payments to primary care Medicaid doctors will decrease an average of 43% in 2015, per the Obama Care legislation tenets. Thus, fewer and fewer doctors will accept Mediciad patients, especially if those patients are now 43% less valuable to them. Which gets us back to what we have often said about the whole Obama Care legislation: the good news is that you now have health care insurance. The bad news is that there are no doctors that accept that insurance, i.e. your have health care insurance but you do not have health care.
• The CHIP program, the Child’s Health Insurance Plan, has been providing low cost health care insurance for the nation’s lower income kids for 27 years. However, while Obama Care reauthorized the program through 2019 it only funded it until next year when the program will crash and burn unless reauthorized and budget money allocated. Given how dysfunctional Washington is, that budget reauthorization exercise is probably not a slam dunk and a 27 year old program that helps our kids will die off as a result of shortsightedness of the Obama Care legislation.

These provide a good baseline view of just some of the major disasters still unfolding out of Obama Care.

2) Sometimes there is justice in the world and a recent article in the New York Times provided that. Apparently, many Harvard University professors have supported Obama Care in the past, either with actual consulting and direct input or just cheerleading from the sidelines.

But recently, reality struck the faculty and the university and those that are the Harvard family are not happy, according to the Times article.  Apparently, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the main core of the university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes to their university health care plans which now require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay substantially more for health care and health care insurance. 

The university counters by stating that  the increases are in part a direct result of  Obama Care requirements and tenets, which many Harvard professors originally supported. I guess what goes around comes around...usually to bite your where the sun don’t shine. What did these professors think would happen, that they would somehow be exempt from the pain that the rest of the country is going through?

In its 2015 health care insurance enrollment guide, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by healthcare reform,” in the form of the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

Despite this reasoned argument, some of the Harvard professors went crazy, according to the article:

• Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”
• Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”

Poor babies, welcome to the real world. Millions of Americans have been living though these same financial and health care pains for over a year and they never endorsed the Obama Care legislation to begin with. Two quoted professors understood reality better than many of their peers:

• Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and a former provost who has been on the Harvard faculty for more than four decades, said the new out-of-pocket costs could lead people to defer medical care or diagnostic tests, causing more serious illnesses and costly complications in the future. Well, duh, that has been the reality for over a year in the rest of the country as a result of Obama Care.
• Meredith B. Rosenthal, a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, said she was puzzled by the outcry. “The changes in Harvard faculty benefits are parallel to changes that all Americans are seeing,” she said. “Indeed, they have come to our front door much later than to others.”

Advice to Harvard professors and others like them: be careful what you support and endorse, it could come back to haunt you and your pocketbook. 

3) One last piece of Obama Care disasters for today, more to follow tomorrow. Some liberals in this country think that Obama Care did not go far enough, that they wanted a single payer system where the government and the politicians that operate it have total control over your health care fate. 

Never mind that where countries have implemented single payer systems the costs have gone way up while the quality of care has gone way down. Also, never mind the reality that American politicians and government entities in this country cannot operate simple functions effectively and efficiently never mind managing the healthcare experiences and finances of over 300 million people. Do you really want people like Nancy “we have to pass the legislation to see what is in it” Pelosi to have anything to do with your health?  Never going to happen.

Nor should it from a financial perspective. The state of Vermont was once hot to trot about passing a single payer health insurance program in their state. However, their governor recently stopped its implementation based strictly on the reality of the financials, as recently reported by the Against Cronyism website from Forbes magazine:

• The state government baseline view for the state of Vermont estimated that the state revenue would be about $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2017.
• However, if the state implemented a single payer health insurance program for state residents, the state budget would have to increase an amazing 151% to cover the expenses of a single payer system.
• This translates into the state increasing its tax burden on state residents by $2.6 billion, on top of the baseline $1.7 billion budget, just to cover the single payer system costs.
• Obviously, this would have been the largest component, by far, of any operating expense in the entire state government budget.

Thus, even the politicians that wanted to go to a single payer system were not able to make the numbers work. And one reason for that is that they are trying to fix the wrong things. We do not have a health insurance problem in this country, we have a health problem in this country as we have said many times before.

Until we address the underlying root causes of high healthcare costs in this country, e.g. too many smokers, not enough exercise, too much obesity, a fat, salt, and sugar infected food chain, etc., no amount of any kind of insurance is going to reduce costs. It may move costs around due to fees, fines, taxes, and subsidies, but the overall healthcare costs stays the same or even gets worse. 

That is why Obama Care continues to be an unfolding disaster, they never addressed the real problems. And more disasters follow 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

Destroying Political Class Myths, Part 1: No Child Left Behind, Voter ID Laws,and Global Warming

We are going to have a little fun the next few days exploring the many myths that the politicians of this country would like us to believe. You see, if we believe the myths that they create than we are more likely to vote for them to resolve the unreal issues and problems associated with these myths. 

But what if what they tell is not the true reality? What if we are getting all worked up and headed in the wrong direction for a mythical problem that does not exist or for a mythical solution that resolves nothing? All it does is send us chasing our tails while the same inept politicians get reelected over and over based on nothing more than their own greed, their rigging of the election processes, and the myths that they feed us and control us with.

So starting today we are going to look behind the myth curtail and reveal what is the true reality. With that truth we may finally start resolving some of the major issues of our times. Lord knows the political class has failed miserably over the past fifty years in eradicating poverty, winning the lost war on drugs, fixing our failing public schools, securing our borders, etc. 

Maybe it is because we have allowed them to work on myths that they created and not the true problems of our age. Keep in mind the following wise words of Groucho Marx over the next few posts: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Sounds like myth building to me.

1) One of the biggest national initiatives under the Bush administration was the move to try and improve education in this country. He tried to do so under the banner of “No Child Left Behind. (NCLB). 

According to a late 2013 Education Action Group article by Ben Velderman, 89% of Congressional members voted for NCLB, which became law in 2002. Politicians supported the NCLB legislation because “it represented the first major effort by the federal government to impose academic accountability, through annual standardized testing, on public schools that received federal assistance.”

But liberals and Democrats pounded it for what they positioned as ineffective and an expensive failure. That became the storyline and assumed truth of this program that spend tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth.

But was total NCLB failure the reality or the political class myth?

According to Mr. Velderman’s article:

• Paul Peterson, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance completed an in-depth analysis of NCLB in 2013 and wrote a very credible defense of the legislation based on real data, more than a decade after the law became a reality.
• He goes as far to seriously call it one of the Bush administration’s “crowning achievements.”
• Using 2012 math and reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Peterson found that NCLB helped African-American and Hispanic students make “remarkable gains” in learning.
• Additionally, it actually helped close the achievement gap between white and minority students” “For the first nine years, the average gains (in reading and math scores) were six points annually for African-Americans, five points for Hispanics and three points for whites. Over that stretch, the test-score gap closed by two to three points each year, on average. While minority students did not attain the proficiency NCLB expected, the record shows steady positive momentum.”
• Unfortunately, according to the Peterson, those gains came “to a virtual halt” after the Obama administration decided to stop enforcing most of NCLB’s primary provisions and offered waivers to states that signed up for more lenient rules implemented by the Obama administration.
• According to Peterson, minority students benefited under NCLB largely because the law forced schools to produce learning results or face a series of penalties.
• In other words, the law held people accountable for results, a novel idea when it comes to government programs and employees.
• This notion of accountability was another key to NCLB’s success, according to Peterson, since it required that students’ test scores be made public. Letting parents and taxpayers know how much (or little) their students were learning in school put pressure on administrators and teachers to step fix their broken educational processes. But that transparency has been lost under the Obama administration, an administration that was supposed to be the “most transparent ever.”

So, what was supposed to be the worst bill ever passed turns out to be not so bad, according to an education expert from a university that will never be mistaken for a right leaning, conservative, Republican institution. The sad thing is that the Democrats and Obama, in this case of myth building, destroyed something that was working to some degree and replaced it with nothing that is working to no degree.

But somehow they got the myth established and minority kids, the people they brag they support, are the losers.

2) The Obama administration, via Eric Holder and his renegade Justice Department, have been going around the country and pressuring state government’s to abandon or severely water down their voter id requirements for elections. The mythical reason for the crackdown was to avoid the Jim Crow restrictive voting rules and laws of the past, laws that restricted the voting ability of African Americans. Holder’s public reasoning was that tight voter id laws restrict minorities’ abilities to vote.

The real reason, in many peoples’ minds, was to loosen voting rules so much that voter fraud could be practiced on a wide spread basis. What is reality and what is a myth of Holder’s intentions does not matter in this case. Late last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of its investigation into how Georgia’s strict voter identification had affected the voting behavior of different demographic groups. The tight voter id laws had been in effect for about five years. 

Their findings kill the Holder myth that tight voter id laws suppress minority voting volumes:

• While it is a reality that the tighter Georgia state voter id laws failed to catch a single documented case of voter fraud, it did not suppress minority voting in the state either.
• The paper’s analysis found that during the five years of tighter voter id rules, minorities are actually turning out to vote at a higher rate than the rate that their population of their demographic is growing: “Turnout among black and Hispanic voters increased from 2006 to 2010, dramatically outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period,” according to reporter Shannon McCaffrey.
• Elections data reviewed by the paper’s research proved that black voters election participation actually rose by a whopping 44% from 2006, before the law was implemented, to 2010. 
• The increase for the Hispanic population during the same period was even more impressive, 67%. 
• As a benchmark, voting turnout among whites rose only 12%.

Thus, according to real life data, the Obama administration was perpetrating myth, at least in the state of Georgia, when they claimed that voter ID laws were discriminatory and detrimental to minority voting. Minority voting rates increased during the five years after the tighter restrictions took hold: “If you look at the numbers, they clearly show that critics of this law were wrong,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former legal counsel to the Justice Department’s civil rights division who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the newspaper. “Their argument has always been it would depress turnout, but it didn’t happen — quite the opposite.”

Political myth destroyed by real life results. And really, given how easy the state of Georgia made it to get a valid id to vote besides making getting the id for free, shouldn’t the price of citizenship include at least a little effort on the part of citizens to get an id to exercise their right AND privilege to vote?

3) One more myth destruction for today. For well over as decade, we have been bombarded with politicians telling us that we had to give up a lot of our wealth and a lot of our freedom because of global warming. Passively implied in this campaign, or this myth, was the reality that we were giving up these precious things, our wealth and freedom, to politicians which would increase their control over our lives.

But what has happened to global warming over the past 17 years or so? In reality, the myth died on the vine since global warming stopped a long time ago despite the dire warnings and forecast models of the political class’s climate scientists:









That is why the myth had to be adjusted in mid stream by the political class. After almost 18 years of no warming and the failure of almost every climate forecast model to take this into account, we now have a rebranded new myth called “climate change.” But like most myths, how can we believe this new political class myth when the old myth they so passionately and vehemently defended for decades turned out to be false?

So what is the lesson learned today? The political class stays in power and office by manufacturing myths to excite their base and show how important they are. In reality, the myths are not important because they never resolve real issues but we end up paying with our wealth and freedom for very little in return.

I once worked for a boss whose favority saying was: “There is nothing more devasting to an opinion [or in our case, a myth]than the right number.” The No Child Left Behind failure myth was destroyed by the number analysis done by a Harvard professor. The voting id laws prevent minorities from voting myth was destroyed by a newspaper research effort of real life data and numbers. The global warming myth is destroyed by simply looking at a single graph's numbers. Boy, who thought destroying political class myths could be so much fun? More fun at least through 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