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

November, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 2: Lower Access, Higher Costs, Lower Quality, Higher Idiocy From a Politician

This is the second in this month’s review of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. It seems every day there is a new torrent of bad news regarding this legislation, news that is disrupting the lives, health security, and future of Americans across the country. The most blatant insult of the law is that many in this Presidential adminstration knew the chaos the law would rain down on Americans but decided to go ahead with the program anyway. 

And once the program started to be implemented, the disasters that were predicted years ago came true and the promises that were made years ago proved to be immensely misleading and outright lies. And the bad news continues below:

1) I will let two recent reports from the Associated Press speak for themselves. The first report documents how many Americans have already lost their current, preferred health care insurance policy as a result of Obama Care:

The Obama administration insists nobody will lose coverage as a result of cancellation notices going out to millions of people. At least 3.5 million Americans have been issued cancellations, but the exact number is unclear. Associated Press checks find that data is unavailable in a half the states.
Mainly they are people who buy directly from an insurer, instead of having workplace coverage. Officials say these consumers aren’t getting “canceled” but “transitioned” or “migrated” to better plans because their current coverage doesn’t meet minimum standards. They won’t have to go uninsured, and some could save a lot if they qualify for the law’s tax credits.
[…]
But in a nation of more than 300 million, 5 percent is a big number — about 15 million people.

The second AP story confirmed that even those that have current health insurance coverage are being hit with “sticker shock” when the find out how much more they will have to pay for insurance going forward under Obama Care:

The Griffins, who live near Philadelphia on the Delaware border, pay $770 monthly for their soon-to-be-terminated health care plan with a $2,500 deductible. The cheapest plan they found on their state insurance exchange was a so-called bronze plan charging a $1,275 monthly premium with deductibles totaling $12,700. It covers only providers in Pennsylvania, so the couple wouldn’t be able to see the doctors in Delaware whom they’ve used for more than a decade.

“We’re buying insurance that we will never use and can’t possibly ever benefit from. We’re basically passing on a benefit to other people who are not otherwise able to buy basic insurance,” said Griffin, who is retired from running an information technology company.

The Griffins are among millions of people nationwide who buy individual insurance policies and are receiving notices that those policies are being discontinued because they don’t meet the higher benefit requirements of the new law.

They can buy different policies directly from insurers for 2014 or sign up for plans on state insurance exchanges. While lower-income people could see lower costs because of government subsidies, many in the middle class may get rude awakenings when they access the websites and realize they’ll have to pay significantly more.

Those not eligible for subsidies generally receive more comprehensive coverage than they had under their soon-to-be-canceled policies, but they’ll have to pay a lot more.

The AP also told the story of a restaurant manger who lost his $100 per month employer-based health plan. While he will receive an annual  $500 subsidy from the government, the alternative he found on the exchange will still cost him $600 a month. 

So much for the promises of keeping your current policy, keeping your current doctors and saving $2,500 a year on health insurance. All lies, all deceptions, all a disaster.

2) Recent news reports out of Washington report that Senator Joe Donnelly, D-Indiana, said at a closed-door meeting of the Democrats that his son had received notice his coverage was being terminated. So much for Americans being able to keep their current insurance if they liked it. Maybe now those who voted to support this horrid piece of legislation will act to terminate it since impacts are starting to get real and hitting closer to home.

3) Many times we have reported that Obama Care will likely result in a severe doctor shortage in the coming years, resulting in delayed and likely inferior health care going forward. The reasons for this shortage are four fold:

1. The average age of the doctor population, independent of Obama Care’s negative impacts, is over 50 years old.
2. Many older doctors are retiring in order to not deal with the hassle and negative ramifications of Obama Care.
3. In theory, under Obama care, more people will have access to doctors and nurses, increasing demand in the face of a shrinking supply.
4. The legislation never made provisions on how to increase the number of doctors in the face of the increasing number of patients.

These realities were driven home by a recent New York CBS News report. Quotes from the report include the following:

• “It’s like shopping during Christmas time. I mean, you’re going to have a tough time if you have all of these people demanding services at the same time,” said Dr. Steven Lamm of the NYU School of Medicine.
• “I think the concern would be that the system will be overwhelmed, that there will be a greater demand that we can meet in a quality fashion and that we will have to delay services for a lot of individuals,” Lamm said.
• “Doctors are planning to retire. Anybody who is anywhere near retirement age is talking about retirement. … There’s just too much going on,” said Dr. Sam Unterricht of the New York State Medical Society.
• “It will be inferior care. They will end up going to clinics, to situations where they don’t have their own private physician. When they go to hospitals they are not going to know any of doctors who are taking care of them,” cardiologist Dr. David Hess said.
• “They are not training enough residents. The number of medical students has increased a little bit, but the number of residency spots has not. They’ve kept the number of residency spots frozen for, I think, 13 years now,” Unterricht said

Great, paying more and getting less and what we will be getting will be inferior to what we get today, could this legislation be any worse?

4) Let’s review: Millions of Americans are losing access to their preferred health care insurance and their preferred doctors. Millions of Americans are faced with paying much more for their health insurance premiums that come with higher deductibles. Those that want to sign up for Obama Care policies cannot because the website to do so is a piece of garbage. We will not have enough doctors as a result of Obama Care. Nasty stuff.

But what does one of the members of the Washington political class think about all of this? Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) recently defended Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, telling Obamacare critics at an event in Memphis to get over it: “Change is hard. Get over it. Barack Obama is President, and the Affordable Care Act is the law.”

So much wrong with this asinine statement:

• So little compassion for those Americans getting hit with higher costs and lost access, but possibly typical of politicians today.
• He fails to mention that his Congressional salary puts him in the top 2-3% of all workers’ salaries in the country, allowing him to to much more easily absorb higher health care insurance costs than the vast majority of Americans. 
• He fails to mention that he and his staff will each receive up to $11,000 a year in taxpayer wealth to help pay for their insurance under Obama Care, money that is not available to just about every other American.
• I guess in his world, slavery, the inability of women to vote, racial segregation, and other affronts to common sense, humanity, and freedom are okay since at one time they also were the law of the land.

Just another idiotic and out-of-touch statement from a typical politician. Which may explain why we have an idiotic and out-of-touch piece of legislation called Obama care.

Thus, more proof of less access, higher costs, inferior care, and a useless politician. Seems about right for  Obama Care, more to follow over the next few 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:

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

November, 2013 The Unfolding Obama Care Disaster, Part 1: They Knew It Was A Disaster Three Years Ago

In the past two months, we have done well over a dozen posts describing the idiocy, chaos, and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Millions of Americans losing access to their preferred insurance policies, and doctors, Obama Care navigators being hired to handle sensitive personal information without a criminal background check being done first, a website that has already cost taxpayers over $600 million but does not work, meager signups for the exchanges, additions to the national debt, etc. This is truly the worst piece of legislation ever written and enacted by the Washington political class.

The September series of posts can be viewed starting at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/09/september-2013-obama-care-update-part-1.html

The October series of posts can be viewed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

Since those October posts, the failures of the legislation have been coming fast and furious. Many of these failures have actually been reported by the so-called main stream press who up until recently were more than willing to protect the failures of this President and his signature piece of legislation. However, when news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. are pointing out how bad Obama Care is, you know it is a bad piece of legislation.

In reviewing the latest insanity from Obama Care over the next several days, we are going to go through the bad news quickly, give how much bad news there is. We have already done more in-depth analysis of the law in the series of posts above so there is no need to go into great detail again. 

However, in some cases, we will repeat material we have already covered in order to show how widespread the negative but true reporting on Obama Care impacts is becoming. In some cases where in-depth reviews and analysis might be interesting, we will provide the actual link to the news report for the reader to follow up on.

Thus, in a quick but informative approach, the following bad news about Obama Care has arisen just in the past few weeks:

1) The following information was still up on the official White House website as of November 7, 2013:

The Affordable Care Act is designed to let Americans keep their health insurance if they like it while adding important consumer benefits to give businesses, families and individuals higher quality care at lower prices and more control over their own care.

The bottom line is that under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your doctor and plan, you can keep them. But if you aren’t satisfied with your insurance options today, the Affordable Care Act provides for better, more affordable health care choices through new consumer protections.

But as we know and will prove over the coming days, this is the most broken promise in the history of the White House. Millions of Americans are losing access to their preferred plans and doctors today, despite what the White House website, and the current resident of the White House, have promised from day on of Obama Care.

2) ABC News reported in early November that October enrollments in Obama Care exchanges is likely very, very low, given internal government memos that ABC has seen. ABC reported that as of Oct. 8, according to the memos, nationwide there had been 700+ enrollments through the online website for Obama Care. There had been more than 11,000 paper applications but only about 4,000 of those applications had been entered into the system as of Oct. 27. Of those, it’s not clear how many are completed and applicants officially enrolled. 

Given that the supporters of Obama Care had expected almost 500,000 people to be enrolled in Obama Care insurance plans as of the end of October and that the run rate for those applications have to be 39,000  a DAY to meet the required critical mass to make this a successful program, success does not seem imminent, according to ABC News.

2) Former Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, recently gave a talk at American University in Washington, D.C. During the question and answer period afterwards, Favreau let it slip that the President’s closest advisors suggested that the President terminate Obama Care back in 2010. The advisers tried to convince the President to replace Obama Care in exchange for a smaller, less controversial “patient bill of rights” type bill.

But the President overruled them and allowed Obama Care to become the law of the land. Thus, we have additional proof that many in the administration knew this was a horrible piece of legislation three years ago, they notified the President of their concerns, and he still went ahead with the effort. Which raises an interesting question: did the President act because of good faith that he could make it work in the end (bad assumption) or was his ego so large that he could not imagine failure in his signature piece of legislation?

3) Although the President promised dozens of times that if you like your current health insurance policy you can keep it in the Obama Care world, almost a million Californians might dispute that horrid promise. As reported recently by SFGate, some 900,000 Californians are expected to lose their existing healthcare coverage come December 31, joining millions of other Americans who have had their lives disrupted in a major way for no reason at all.

4) Forbes recently reported that a 2010 report that was located in the Federal Register laid out how the Obama administration knew all along that the Obama Care legislation would create massive disruptions in the health insurance market. The report asserts that Obama administration people already knew three years ago that nearly one-third of all Americans would lose their current health insurance coverage.

 These revelations prove  again proves that Obama was either massively out of touch with reality when he asserted over the three years that Americans could keep their current policies or he was intentionally deceptive in order to get the legislation passed. In either case, it is a massive lack of leadership and integrity.

According to Forbes writer Avik Roy: “It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.”

93 million Americans to lose access to their current policies when the President said that no one would lose access if they did not want to lose access. Missed that prediction by about 90 million now distraught Americans. Pathetic.

5) On November 4, 2013, Monday's CBS This Morning confirmed the Forbes accusation that Obama and his people knew that Obama Care would likely be a disastrous interruption into Americans’ lives. They asserted that a “trusted Obama health care advisors warned the White House he was losing control of Obama care.“ An important Obama advisor, Major Garrett, also made the following statements during a live TV interview on CBS:

His "warnings were dire and specific, and ultimately ignored" 
"The White House became secretive about the law's complexity and regulatory reach" because they were apparently "fearful of constant attacks from congressional Republicans." 

CBS News went on to report in the same news segment that “the White House had years of warnings." They reported that David Cutler, the "trusted Obama health care adviser," had sent a blunt May 2010 memo to economic adviser Larry Summers, casting serious doubt on a successful implementation of the law.

The CBS reporter stated that Cutler asserted that "the relevant members of the administration [do not] understand the President's vision or have the capability to carry it out", and that "no one was in charge who had any experience in complex business start-ups". Apparently,  "the White House dismissed these and other warnings."

More news that the promises the President has made for three years were empty and false, his administration knew for years that this was a bomb waiting to go off and screw with the health insurance security of tens of millions of Americans.

Enough bad news for today, but rest assured that much more will follow over the next few days as we try to wade through the disaster that is Obama Care.

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

The Week The Obama Admiinistration Entered Lame Duck Status, Part 1: the Benghazi Coverup and Obama Care Deceptions

It's all about humanity, humility, and integrity. Debra Wilson

It is not often when you can pinpoint the exact time that a U.S. President becomes a lame duck. The evidence usually builds slowly over time until one day you realize that the approaching end of a term means that the ability of a President to champion, convince, cajole, and lead has ebbed away into the sunset of their term.

That may not be the case of the Obama Presidency. In a rapid succession of events, we may have just seen this administration lose its humanity, its humility, and its integrity in a very short time, and with it, thevery quick dawning of the Obama Presidency lame duck era. You cannot lead a country when all traces of humanity, humility, and integrity have left your administration.

The scandals of this Presidency had been percolating under the surface of the nation’s attention for some time. The mainstream press and the administration had done all it could to keep them under the surface.

However, that effort proved inadequate over the past week when any number of scandals erupted into the public space. And the amazing thing about the eruptions, they were not caused by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or other right wing/conservative news outlets. Most of the damage to the integrity and morals of this administration came from members of the mainstream press who had either been overly protective of this Presidency or overly blinded by this President’s charms and false integrity.

It started on a Sunday night in a CBS “60 Minutes” story which had culminated almost a year of investigative reporting. The main story line was that as the consulate attack at Benghazi was underway, members onsite at the consulate were in direct communication with the outside world, telling them that Al Qaeda terrorists were attacking and they needed immediate help and protection. 

Thus, during the attack, both at the actual consulate building and at the annex a mile away, we already knew that this was not a street demonstration that got out of hand. This was a highly coordinated, well thought out terrorist attack on American sovereignty and personnel. We also now know that this attack had already been predicted months in advance.

However, from a humanity perspective, those twenty plus Americans calling out for help in Benghazi were left to their own devices when someone, somewhere in the administration called off the military rescue parties that were geared up and ready to go. 
The heartless inaction of those decision makers resulted in a high ranking military leader to be yanked from leading the rescue mission and directly led to the deaths of four brave Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, Chris Stephens.

Despite knowing months in advance that the consulate and Americans would likely be a target of terrorists, that the Red Cross and British consulate had already been attacked by terrorists, that there had been security warnings from many security experts including British personnel, U.S. armed forces, and local Libyans contacts, and despite the fact that the ambassador had already told Washington that the Al Qaeda flag could been clearly seen flying over Libyan government buildings, nothing was done ahead of time to prevent the attack.

But the real lack of humanity and integrity comes after the attack. Jay Carney insists at a press briefing that there were no forewarnings that an attack was imminent. 

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., goes on  five Sunday television news to insist that the attack was not from Al Qaeda and was not pre planned, that it was a spontaneous eruption of emotions from a YouTube video. 

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton repeat the same lie and deception at the U.N. and elsewhere, despite the fact that the ambassador made the outgoing call DURING the attack that it was a planned terrorist attack, not a YouTube video reaction.

Four Americans die, another twenty or so were intentionally left in mortal danger and Hillary Clinton testifies in front of Congress, “What difference does it make?” Heartless, callow, and lacking of humanity, humility, and integrity. 

Outright lies and deceptions to promote the President’s reelection and protect his campaign position/boast that Al Qaeda was on the run and no longer a factor in the world. For that protection and the deceptions attached to it, four Americans unnecessarily died.

The sobering entire “60 Minutes: report can be viewed at:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50157981n

But the Benghazi scandal and death was just one of the exploding disgraces this week. NBC News, another mainstream media outlet that has been overly soft on the administration, released a very embarrassing investigative report relative to Obama Care. The NBC report maintains that the White House, the President, and others involved in pushing through the Obama Care legislation were well aware for the past several years that millions of Americans were likely to lose their current health insurance policy and coverages as a result of Obama Care. 

How do we know this? NBC News senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers found buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulation language predicting, “A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate is forty percent to sixty-seven percent.”

  Why is this such a big deal? Well, from an integrity perspective, the President had been claiming numerous times over those years that NO American would lose their current insurance policy or access to their favorite doctors as a result of Obama Care:

“If you got health insurance, it does not mean a government take over, you keep your own insurance, you keep your own doctor.”

“If you like your [health insurance plan], you can keep your plan.”

“Here is a guarantee that I make. If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you have a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Nobody is trying to change what works in the system.’

“If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you will not have to do a thing…we are not going to mess with it.”

But this was all a charade, according to NBC News. Those in the White House knew three years ago that millions of Americans (45% to 67%) were going to lose their access to their current plans and their favorite doctors but said nothing about that reality. Instead, the President keep coming forward in different venues with the same message: You will not lose access to the insurance plans and doctors that you want access to.

But millions of Americans will lose access. If you adhere to the definition of integrity that integrity it is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, than this escapade of the Obama administration could not be further from the reality of this definition.

Not only is there a gross lack of integrity on this issue and scandal but there is no humility or humanity either. From a humility perspective, the President is not coming forward to apologize for the deception or misspeaking, no one on his staff or in his press corps are owning up to the lie and deception. They could have at least apologized for the deception and asked for some sort of forgiveness going forward but no, humility is apparently non-existent in this administration.

And neither is a sense of humanity. If the Washington politicians and administration bureaucrats knew of this impending and dire situation years ago, any of them with a sense of humanity or compassion should have come forward then and told the American people that this catastrophe was coming and to make plans. Given a few years warning, most people could have adapted to the disaster of losing their insurance policy and doctors. 

But nothing was said to cushion the blow until just months before millions of Americans were to lose their current, favored insurance policies and doctor access. And if NBC had not done their investigative job, those months might have turned into just weeks for Americans to scramble for new coverage and new doctor access.

Some of the original video clips of the President deceptively stating that happy Americans would not have their health insurance disrupted and the NBC news report can be accessed at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/90588-watch-nbc-news-drops-bombshell-president-obama-knowingly-lied-obamacare-years/

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/90531-watch-white-houses-truth-video-turns-complete-sham/

And the sad thing, these are not the only two issues that exploded this week and put this administration’s lack of humanity, humility and integrity on full, naked display. We will cover them tomorrow.

If you lose all sense of humanity, humility, and integrity, you cannot lead, you cannot rule. No one will ever believe anything you say. If you make up stories and deceptions to cover up American deaths to protect your reelection campaign, how can we ever trust you on any issue going forward? If you constantly tell us one thing when you know the exact opposite is the reality, how can we ever believe you an any issue going forward? 

And that is the real definition of a lame duck: a leader that cannot lead. A leader that does not tell the truth. A leader that has no sense of humility or compassion. A leader that puts himself before humanity. It is going to be a long three years.

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

October, 2013 Obama Care Disaster Update, Part 1: Insurance Prices Are Up and Data Systems Are Down

Although we took a few weeks off from discussing the disaster that is Obama Care, the overwhelmingly bad news that has occurred since its October 1, 2013 rollout requires us to revisit this disaster. It is failing in so many ways: nonfunctional software, higher costs for existing people with insurance, data integrity, identity theft, etc. that not to review its failings would be a disgrace.

There is so much news to cover that we will not go into as much detail of the fiascos as we might usually do, that would take weeks to get through. We will hit the highlights/lowlights to give a sense of why this atrocious piece of legislation needs to be either repealed or massively overhauled.

1) 34 states were so scared of Obama Care that they opted out of creating their own so-called health care exchanges, as allowed by the law, and passed that responsibility along to the Federal government. Unfortunately, as we and many others predicted, the Federal government has not been able to build as simple, functioning website to execute one function, allow people to sign up for health care insurance.

According to news reports, the Federal website fails to load drop-down menus and other critical elements for users that successfully gain entrance, often does not confirm if a person has actually successfully completed the sign up process, and generally prevents uninsured Americans in the states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates. For this basically nonfunctioning website, the American taxpayer has already paid over $634 million for basically nothing.

And as with all government contracts, it has managed to overrun its budget at $634 million, by an amazing factor of seven. When the company who won the contract to build the Obama Care Federal exchange website was identified back in 2011, the contract stipulated that the cost of development could be as high as $94.7 million. Thus, the Federal government has already spent seven times what the original cost estimate was and STILL does not have a working website. Disgraceful.

Consider two benchmarks of success against which we measure the failure of the Obama Care Federal exchange website. Facebook received its first investment in June 2004 and operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in expenses in June 2010. Twitter was created in 2006, and spent only $360.17 million over the next five years until a $400 million investor boost in 2011. 

These two complicated web efforts spent far less in more years than the Federal government has already spent with the distinction being that they were fully functional sooner and for far less money. But to say the political class can run government functions that are fully functional for far less money are words that have never been uttered.

2) But maybe the supporters and implementers of Obama Care should have known this was likely to happen all along, given how badly the main company who built the Obama Care Federal exchange failed in Canada, according to an October 10, 2013 story from the Washington Examiner. 

That story reported that Canadian health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obama Care health exchange websites,  for nonperformance and missed deadlines.  CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s online medical registry.

The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011 but more than a year later was still not in operation. Other companies were eventually hired who were able to fix what this Obama Care data systems provider could not.

Three troubling issues here. Did someone in the Federal government procurement process know how incompetent this company was and still went ahead and awarded them the contract? The Federal government had three years to put this process and computer system in place, why did it fail so miserably on the first day and continues to fail? And finally, why did we send hundreds of millions of dollars to a foreign company? Were there no American companies that could have done the job? The whole episode smells of incompetence and shadiness.

3) We have previously reported on how many Americans are seeing the costs of their current health care insurance skyrocket as a result of Obama Care. The Heritage Foundation documented three recent examples of just how much those insurance costs are going up for Americans:

- George Schwab of  North Carolina was recently notified in a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield on September 23 that his current health insurance plan doesn’t meet Obama Care’s benefit requirements and would have to be terminated at the end of the year. While Blue Cross did suggest a comparable plan, it was $980 more than what he now pays.

“The President told the American people numerous times that  ‘If you like your current coverage, you can keep it,’” Schwab told The Charlotte Observer. “How can we keep it if it has been eliminated? How can we keep it if the premium has been increased 430 percent in one year?”

- Michael Yount and his wife, a retired couple in North Carolina, buy their individual insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield and pay about $380 a month with an $11,000 deductible. 

But they were recently informed that their new insurance plan will be THREE times the price, costing them $1,124.50 a month, The Christian Science Monitor reported. The couple said they plan to drop out of formal health insurance, pay the penalty, and “self-insure.”

- Cindy Vinson in California “will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy,” reports the San Jose Mercury News. She is an Obama voter who was surprised by the personal impact of Obama Care. “Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.” 

Who did she think was going to pay for it? Given that Obama Care does not resolve the underlying root causes of our high health care costs, all it does is move existing costs in an unworkable Rube Goldberg manner so that everyone pays more but the underlying problem and related costs never get resolved.

Losing a current policy, paying much more for a replacement policy, and going self insured, three things that any health care reform effort should not do but what Obama Care is doing.

4) According to a recent Washington Post story: 

Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch…Robert Laszewski, a health-care consultant with clients in the insurance industry, said insurers were complaining loudly that the site, www.healthcare.gov, was not working smoothly during frequent teleconferences with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services before the exchange’s launch and afterward. “People were pulling out their hair,” he said.

Which raises the question that if just about everyone knew this rollout was going to bomb, why did the Obama administration go ahead with a rollout that actually bombed? Could it be politics overrode common sense? If this aspect of Obama Care had also been delayed like many, many other aspects of the legislation that have already been delayed or terminated, it would have been a political nightmare for Obama. It would have provided further proof that the Federal government was unable to manage such a complicated, and unnecessary, process and that the associated legislation needed to be scrapped.

Thus, rather than do the right thing, the administration rolled out a disaster on a wing and a prayer, neither of which held up. Now the American taxpayer is probably paying big bucks for overtime, crisis fueled data programming resources in order to fix what never should have gone live. Americans who might actually have wanted to sign up for insurance may decide it is not worth the hassle even if the system is adequately fixed in the future since their first attempt to sign up was a frustrating failure. When politics overrides common sense there is never a good outcome.

Given all of the hassles, how many people have successfully signed up for Obama Care through the Federal process? No one knows and/or no one is telling. You can bet if this process was successful, the Federal government and Obama would be touting its victory. However, no touting has to mean no victory, for either the government, the American taxpayer, and the unresolved problem of high health care costs in this country.

We are just getting started, more to come on the following days on the unfolding Obama Care disaster.

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

September, 2013 Obama Care Update Part 2: Higher Costs, Less Choice, Loss Of Current Insurance, Identity Theft and More

Yesterday, we did an update of quick hits on how the rollout of Obama Care continues to be a disaster for just about everyone in America. As more and more of the legislation’s components get rolled out, delayed, or more thoroughly understood, it becomes abundantly clear that this is the worst piece of legislation ever written by the Washington political class. 

Detailed analyses of the legislation was included in a series of posts put out in August, starting with the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/08/part-1-august-2013-obama-care-update.html

Please refer to them for an in-depth view of this disaster. Yesterday and today contain a series of quick updates of the continuing damage Obama Care is doing to the country.

1) The Obama Care health exchanges, places where uninsured American theoretically can go and purchase health car insurance, are supposed to be up and running by October 1. However, problems apparently abound due to the complexity of training, data systems, etc. Oregon has already determined that its website won’t be functional until at least mid-October.  State officials in other states have said that they wish they had more time to implement the exchanges. There is also concern that the lax security on the state exchange websites could lead to instances of identity theft.

The Washington Post recently reported: “Some officials in charge of setting up the systems say that the tight deadlines have forced them to take shortcuts when it comes to testing and that some of the bells and whistles will not be ready.”

Given that three major components of the law have already been delayed, the employer mandate, subsidy verification requirements, and consumer-cost caps, it should not come as a surprise that another component is in such bad shape. Does not give one a lot of confidence that this is going to work anytime soon without major problems, the most dangerous of which is massive identify theft.

2) A recent Dallas Federal Reserve report and analysis that was focused on the Texas area showed that, probably as a result of Obama Care, the average employee work week collapsed at its fastest pace in 2 years (and the last 2 months have dropped the most in 3 years), smashing the work week back to its lowest level since October 2009. And if this is happening in Texas, the top job producing state in the whole country, imagine how work hours are being reduced for Americans in other areas with an even less robust economic situation.

3) Remember when the President declared, "if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan"? Certainly reassuring words at the time but certainly a lie today. Consider what is happening to over 100,000 New Jersey residents and their current health care plan, as explained in a recent article from the National Review:

The latest casualty of Obama Care may be a low-cost New Jersey health-care policy. Though President Obama promised “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period,” that will not be the case for approximately 106,000 New Jersey residents whose plans will disappear under the law.

Known as the “basic and essential,” or B&E, health-care plans, the policy costs as little as a few hundred dollars per month and is the choice of 71% of New Jersey residents on the individual insurance market. It provides minimum coverage for things such as doctor’s visits and procedures that do not involve a hospital stay. According to the Newark Star-Ledger, B&E policy holders will, under Obama Care, “be left with what may be a choice among pricey, pricier and priciest” plans.

Currently, the monthly plans go for $150 for a 25-year-old male or $1,100 for a family with parents in their 40s and, as Rutgers University’s Center for State Health Policy director Joel Cantor told the Star-Ledger, it would cost three or four times more for a standard policy under Obama Care on the individual market.

So what happened to the B&E plans? They don’t meet the regulations imposed by Obama Care because they do not cover services that the law will force every individual health-insurance plan to provide. The Star-Ledger reports that B&E customers who don’t qualify for a federal tax credit to purchase insurance “will see price increases” in the cost of their next plan.

Another Obama Care promise bites the dust and another 100,000 American lives are needlessly and dangerously upended.

4) The wonderful website, Bankrupting America, pointed out the five most devastating impacts of Obama Care in an article from August 21, 2013, the highlights of which include the following points:

1. Americans Will Lose Their Health Insurance; Pay More. According to the Congressional Budget Office, about seven million Americans will lose their current health insurance as a result of the Obama Care. Healthy Americans will also likely see their premiums rise by two to three times as much on the individual insurance market.
2. Businesses Won’t Expand; Employee Hours Will Be Cut. The mandate that requires employers to provider health insurance to their employees kicks in when a company has 50 or more full-time workers. The cut-off was put in the law so it would not be a burden on small businesses (a significant and worthy concern), but the mandate will also keep small businesses on the cusp of adding more than 50 employees from expanding. Businesses are dealing with the mandate by cutting current full-time employees’ hours back to the part-time level (30 hours). Schools in Florida have taken this action as have small businesses all over the country.
3. Spouses, Children Dropped From Employer Insurance Plans. The Atlanta Business Chornicle reported recently that UPS planned to drop spouses from 15,000 employee health care plans as a result of Obama Care. These individuals are assumed to be eligible for health insurance elsewhere, but carrying several different providers will make health care decisions more complex – and potentially costly – for the average family.
4. Fewer Choices. According to The Wall Street Journal, the insurance plans offered under Obama Care may severely restrict Americans’ choices of doctors and medical care. The newspaper reports a number of current health insurance plans in the Obama Care exchanges will likely have limited choices of doctors and hospitals in their networks.”
5. Higher Prices For Younger Workers. Young, healthy Americans are going to pay higher insurance prices than if they had bought health insurance before Obama Care took effect.

Still not seeing how the positive aspects, assuming there are anything, within Obama Care are outweighing the devastating negatives that are being reported everywhere.

5) The Bankrupting America website used two examples to illustrate the points made above. According to a recent Associated Press report, about a year ago Teresa Hartnett was on the verge of expanding her small business. The company had hit $1 million in sales, and requests from clients were flowing in. 

Ms. Hartnett had planned to transition from nearly 30 part time, freelancers to a full-time staff of 60 by 2014. Then, the reality of Obama Care began to become real. She realized she might not be able to afford to carry out her plan, based on the added financial burdens that Obama Care would place on her business expansion plans. The law undid all of Hartnett’s hard work, plans, and dreams: “At the end of that marathon of effort and sweat and stress, I’d face the impact of the ACA [Obama Care]. I decided against it.” 

Given that there are over 20 million Americans that are either unemployed, too discouraged to look for work, or who are underemployed, isn’t a shame that Obama Care is preventing the evolution of this business from thirty part time freelancers into sixty full time, taxpaying, productive Americans?

6) Another illustrative example from Bankrupting America. According to The Hill: “Young people in Colorado will pay more to buy a bare-bones insurance plan under Obama Care … The average premium for a middle-of-the-road policy will roughly hold steady across the state, but premiums for the cheapest policies appear likely to rise. A 27-year-old non-smoker would pay $135 per month next year for the state’s cheapest catastrophic plan — the skimpiest level of coverage available through the healthcare law’s new insurance exchanges. That’s about 140 percent more than the cheapest policy on the market today.” Higher costs with less benefits and quality, a recipe for disaster.

That will do it for today, more bad news through at least tomorrow as Obama Care’s disease spreads across the land. If you are as disgusted with Washington politicians as most of America is, may we suggest you visit our term limits website and sign the petition to enforce term limits on all Washington politicians:

www.howmuchworseoculditget.com

Because, really, given what Obama Care is turning out to be and that it was written by most of the people still in office in Washington, how much worse could it be if we started over with a fresh set of elected representatives?

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