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

October, 20013 Obama Care Disaster Update, Expert Review 2: It is Not About Health Care Reform, It Is About Control

We have spent the last week or so describing and documenting the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We cited numerous examples, expert opinions, and the realities that is turning this legislation into the worst piece of legislation  ever written by Washington. The first in this long series on the failures of Obama Care can be accessed at:

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

The latter parts of the series are not my work, research, and analyses but the work and expert opinions of others in the field of health care that just happen to verify what a disaster Obama Care is. Rather than me trying to summarize their fine work, I felt it better to have their entire line of thought, reasoning, and analysis presented by themselves to preserve the validity of their conclusions.

The first expert opnion analysis and review can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update_21.html

Today’s opinion piece is from a health industry expert, Jon Rappoport. He does an excellent job describing what is starting to happen already under the guise of health care reform as created under Obama Care: this is really not about health care reform, it is about the political class using government edicts and laws to control your life, not make it better. 

Of his many examples, I think the best one is how he documents how many people are unnecessarily killed each year by the current health care industry in this country. The total, over 200,000 Americans a year, makes it the third largest killer in the country, trailing only cancer and heart disease.

Obama Care does very little to change this status quo even though the status quo kills so many people every year. In fact, Obama Care reinforces the status quo, forces more people through this killing machine, and restricts choices regarding a person’s own medical treatment preferences and the alternatives available to them. It is an interesting approach and effective argument that casts another long shadow on the unfolding disaster that is care.

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The Devastating Truth Behind Obamacare
October 4, 2013 by Jon Rappoport 
Personal Liberty Website

I want my Obamacare! I want my Obamacare!

It’s vital to look at the real meaning of this sinister plan. It’s all about the toxic effects of mainstream medicine. That’s what the sold-out press is refusing to examine.

A year ago, I discussed the case of a young Michigan boy whose parents had been taken to court three times to force them to submit their child to intensely toxic chemotherapy treatments, despite these facts:

• The boy’s latest scans revealed no sign of cancer. 
• The drugs that would be forced on him can cause cancer. 
• The drugs have not been approved to treat children.

And I warned: This is what waits for you and your children, up the line.

The “share and care” humanitarian mask will be peeled away. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will create, as ordered, a complete list of approved treatments for every disease label under the sun. And everyone in the insurance plan will be forced to take what the doctor tells him to take.

For a bonus, unapproved treatments will be banned. People and practitioners who try to use alternative treatments will find themselves in trouble.

This is the hidden agenda of Obamacare. This is what it will morph into in the future.

I’m not dreaming or fantasizing. I’ve been following and reporting on the medical cartel for 30 years, and I know the mindset of these people, these doctors, these bureaucrats, these pharmaceutical string-pullers behind the scenes. Obamacare is right up their alley. It’s about control, so it’s an answer to their prayers.

So what do we know about their mainstream medicine, the hospital-based drug-addled modern version?

On July 26, 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a landmark paper by Dr. Barbara Starfield: “Is US health really the best in the world?” In it, Starfield revealed what many people inside the medical establishment already knew: Every year, like clockwork, the medical system was killing huge numbers of people.

Each year in the U.S., as Starfield reported, there are:

• 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries. 
• 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals. 
• 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals. 
• 80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals. 
• 106,000 deaths from Food and Drug Administration-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total number of medically caused deaths in the U.S. every year is 225,000 (a conservative estimate).

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease and cancer.

In the wake of Starfield’s devastating report, other facts came to light: 2.1 million people in America, every year, are hospitalized as a result of reactions to FDA-approved medicines. Annually, 36 million serious adverse reactions to those drugs occur.
So inclusive health coverage for many more Americans under the Obama plan means these horrendous figures will rise.

This is the dirty secret.

Obama and his allies are promoting a medical system that is the third leading cause of death in America. It’s that stark, and it’s that simple.

The Obama plan involves appointing an “expert panel” to decide what treatments Americans should be given for what diseases, under the new regime.

Only a certified idiot would assume that, over time, alternative non-mainstream therapies would survive such an ongoing vetting. Hope may spring eternal, but common sense makes it easy to grasp the realities on the ground.

In the long run, alternative therapies will be edged out. Those that remain will be permitted for a narrow range of conditions, or as adjuncts to standard drug treatments and surgery.

Chiropractors and acupuncturists, who are temporarily basking in the notion that Obama “really cares,” are in for a very rude awakening. Their careers and practices will be significantly reduced. Not today and not tomorrow, but it will happen.

Doctors, under the plan, will be telling patients they may not take nutritional supplements while in treatment. This will assume the status of an irreversible edict. In many cases, “while in treatment” will mean years.

What happens to a person, conscripted into the mandated Insurance plan, who is told by his doctor that he should/must receive a vaccine? Suppose this person says no? What are the consequences? Will he then be labeled a defector? What penalties will he suffer?

Does a diagnosis of cancer imply a patient must submit to chemotherapy, radiation and surgery? Can these treatments be forced upon him?

Perhaps, in the early days of the plan, nothing untoward will happen. But then, as time passes and the system assumes tighter and tighter controls, the hand of government will close around the recalcitrant patient’s neck.

“Take this vaccine. Take this chemo drug. If you don’t, you’re in violation of the rules.”

Doctors, who are an integral part of the plan, will surely be punished if they give unapproved (alternative) treatments to patients.

And in order to make the plan operate on a day-to-day basis, the records and bookkeeping data of every healthcare practitioner in America will eventually be tracked on government computer networks.

Every person in America will have a traceable and trackable medical ID package. Government-issued. There is no way around it. The monitoring apparatus can’t work without it.

Orwellian consequences lie up the road in the field of psychiatric practice. In case you hadn’t noticed, the invention of “disorders” by committee is the preferred method for “discovering” more and more mental illnesses.

Yet, the science is completely fraudulent. For evidence, consult the many works of psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has done more than any other person to expose the guts of his own profession. Breggin establishes that mental disorders are not authoritatively diagnosed by a chemical or biological test. Conclusive tests do not exist. And, worse, in this undefined and arbitrary territory, the drugs that follow diagnoses are killers: for example, 300,000 cases of motor brain damage, as a result of the administration of major tranquilizers.

Under the Obama plan, you can bet your bottom dollar that psychiatric care will eventually become mandatory. A patient suddenly diagnosed with clinical depression or bipolar disorder will be told he must take the drugs — and suffer their adverse effects.

Very young children will be given more and more debilitating and dangerous brain drugs.

Under the Obama plan, it will be very convenient to declare new pandemics every few seasons, because these phony non-epidemics provide an opportunity to herd the sheep into clinics and remind them who is running the show. Go here, take this vaccine; go there, take that drug; the epidemic is endangering the herd, and you must help your brothers and sisters.

These are the figures on the past several “epidemics.” They are not yearly; they are grand totals, to date; global totals, except in the case of West Nile (U.S. only):

• SARS: 774 deaths. 
• West Nile: 1159 deaths. 
• Bird flu: 262 deaths. 
• Smallpox (terrorist threat): 0 deaths. 
• Swine flu: 18,500 deaths.

To give perspective, globally, 250,000 to 500,000 people die of ordinary flu-like illness every year. Yet this higher death rate accrues no interest as an epidemic. It is only the “teaching (brainwashing) moments” of the phony epidemics that are promoted by health agencies (e.g., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization) and their pharmaceutical allies, who rake in billions of dollars by manufacturing new vaccines.

Yes, under the Obama plan, there will be more declared health emergencies; and they will serve to cement the citizen to his new role as eternal patient in the medical march along bleak streets of the future.

Can you perceive the loss of individual freedom implicit in this universal system of health control?

The widespread (and false) assumption is that more medical care for more people is a good thing. That’s what the politicians and the press tell us. That’s what the medical bureaucrats and the drug companies tell us. This is the central piece of brainwashing.
It’s a bald-faced lie. It’s a death-dealing lie.

And now the American people are saddled with it.

Unless the current rebellion against Obamacare expands all over the country.

–Jon Rappoport

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It is not about health care reform, it is about control. That is what makes Obama Care that much more scary.

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

May, 2013 Obama Care Update, Part 6: Neener/Neener I told You So and More Bad News

This is the sixth in a series of posts that are reviewing the current situation relative to Obama Care. It has not been a pleasant journey through the first five posts, with the identification of skyrocketing legislation costs, past supporters of the legislation finally realizing what a disaster this law is, a growing and likely ineffective government bureaucracy to administer this fiasco, and the fact that the law will never come close to attaining its objectives, probably making things worse in the country’s health care industry.

Today’s post fails to wrap up these saddening current events since even this sixth post will not be enough to cover how poorly constructed, poorly financed, and poorly implemented this legislation is becoming.

1) We have already discussed the crumbling financials of Obama Care in detail. We reviewed how the original estimated cost of the law has already doubled. How government experts themselves now estimate that the legislation will add trillions of dollars to our national debt. And most importantly, how it now looks like the cost of health care for American citizens and American businesses will rise even more dramatically, the exact opposite of what the legislation and its supporters claimed would happen.

But let’s do a little I told you so. This escalating of health care costs is a surprise to only those that wrote the legislation. Clear thinking Americans and experts knew this was going to happen years ago, the politicians either did not believe basic math or did not understand basic math.

In a May 27, 2013 post on Liberty News website,

http://www.libertynews.com/2013/03/obama-2009-premiums-to-drop-3000-sebelius-today-not-so-much-in-fact-theyre-going-to-rise/

the website owners went back through history and reviewed what the experts were saying about Obama Care a few years ago. You will see that the disaster we see unfolding today because of the legislation was fully predictable when the legislation first appeared and was enacted (bold and italics added by me for emphasis):

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I) In 2009, the Wall Street Journal determined:

“No Big Cost Rise in U.S. Premiums Is Seen in Study,” said the New York Times, while the Washington Post declared, “Senate Health Bill Gets a Boost.” The White House crowed that the CBO report was “more good news about what reform will mean for families struggling to keep up with skyrocketing premiums under the broken status quo.”

Finance Chairman Max Baucus [the same Max Baucus that now claims Obama Care is a “train wreck”] chimed in from the Senate floor that “Health-care reform is fundamentally about lowering health-care costs. Lowering costs is what health-care reform is designed to do, lowering costs; and it will achieve this objective.”

Except it won’t. CBO says it expects employer-sponsored insurance costs to remain roughly in line with the status quo, yet even this is a failure by Mr. Baucus’s and the White House’s own standards. Meanwhile, fixing the individual market—which is expensive and unstable largely because it does not enjoy the favorable tax treatment given to job-based coverage—was supposed to be the whole purpose of “reform.”

Instead, CBO is confirming that new coverage mandates will drive premiums higher.

II)  In 2010, Forbes determined:

If you’re thinking the legislation will tamp down overall health care spending, reconsider. Policy analysts ranging from the neutral Congressional Budget Office to the HMO lobby see no abatement in the growth rate of health care spending.

That sector of the economy is growing at a 7.4% annual rate, says actuarial firm Milliman. Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, thinks the Senate bill would expand health spending by $234 billion above current projections.

The premium hikes will result from cost shifting, better known as passing the buck.

III) In 2010, Reason magazine determined:

…contrary to what the administration and its supporters claim, under ObamaCare, insurance would probably get more expensive, and any decrease in rates for some would come at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, President Obama was telling people they would see a 3,000 percent drop in the cost of their premiums, and probably get a raise!

IV) Fast forward to today according to Liberty News:

Some people purchasing new insurance policies for themselves this fall could see premiums rise because of requirements in the health-care law, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters Tuesday.

Ms. Sebelius’s remarks come weeks before insurers are expected to begin releasing rates for plans that start on Jan. 1, 2014, when key provisions of the health law kick in.

Premiums have been a sensitive subject for the Obama administration, which is counting on elements in the health law designed to increase competition among insurers to keep rates in check. The administration has pointed to subsidies that will be available for many lower-income Americans to help them with the cost of coverage

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“…could see premiums rise as a result of the health care law.” This was not supposed to happen folks but it took the Washington political class three years to see this disaster, as witnessed by the prime implementer of the legislation, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, whereas many Americans saw this happening as far back as 2009.

When you claim that something will reduce costs and then turn around and openly admit it will increase costs, there is no other word to describe your efforts than “Failure.”

2) Mike Ruff owns eight Five Guys burger franchises that employ 150 people, many of them full time employees. At a Heritage Foundation event in early March, this small business owner pointed out the likely impacts on his business and employees:

• The many added costs of the Obama Care legislation are going to have to be passed on to his customers in the form of higher food costs.
• He estimates that Obama Care will take the ENTIRE profit of one of his restaurants to pay for Obama Care‘s impact.
• He is also holding off on opening three new Five Guys franchises until the Obama Care regulations are fully understood and he understands if this can be done profitably.
• He may be forced to transition many of his full-time burger cooks and other employees to part time status if the health care insurance premiums become too onerous and unaffordable under Obama Care regulations.
• He estimates that additional healthcare insurance costs under Obamacare could total $60,000 annually for his small business.

Again, please explain to me how this legislation is helping America when it will escalate health care insurance costs, reduce hours for working Americans, cause many covered Americans to lose existing health insurance, and stunt economic growth?

The video where Mr. Ruff explains this reality can be accessed at:

http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/03/12/five-guys-owner-burger-prices-will-go-up-due-to-obamacare-55197

3) Consider a different but similar story of a small business owner relative to Obama Care, as reported in the March 20, 2013 issue of the Washington Post:

• Jody Manor has operated a small cafe and catering company for nearly three decades in Old Town Alexandria.
• Six years ago he purchased an adjoining building, and recently he started searching for a second location for expansion.
• Whether he moves forward with expansion depends on the price tag of the health care insurance requirements mandated by Obama Care.
• Manor’s company employs 45 people. If he brings in just five more, his business would soon be subject to new minimum coverage standards under the 2010 law and he does not know whether his current health plan would meet this threshold of coverage or how his insurance premiums might skyrocket.
• “These changes are less than a year away, and I still have no information about how much our premiums are going to cost,” said Manor, owner of Bittersweet Catering, Cafe and Bakery. “It definitely gives me pause when thinking about adding another location.

Two different food businesses, same quandary. Bad legislation followed by bad planning which is causing so much uncertainty that businesses are stuck in nowhere land relative to understanding how to keep their business alive and profitable and not break the law. Federal government and political class, neither has a clue what is going on.

But the steady beat of stupidity and fiasco continues on tomorrow where we review even more of the disgrace, disaster, and disappointment that is Obama Care, possibly the worst piece of legislation ever written in the history of America. Hopefully, one more post will finally get all of the disgraces, disasters, and disappointments up to date, at least for now.

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.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w  

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, February Update, Part 2: Killing Marriages, Killing Work Hours, and More

Just when you thought we could stay away from the devastating effects of Obama Care, another set of bad surprises pop up. We thought we had contained the damage in a series of posts from earlier this year that began with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-devastation-that-is-obama-care-part.html

Yesterday's post was Part 1 of a February update to that original series of Obama Care posts. Today is the second half of that update.

Unfortunately, more bad news has arisen:

1) One of the biggest reasons why Obama Care is falling apart is that the creators never understood the root causes of our high and escalating health care costs. Until you understand the root causes, you cannot develop the right solutions to address those root causes and anything you try to do without that basis is probably doomed to failure:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kinds of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• The Washington political class subsidizes these bad habits by paying American farmers to grow unhealthy food and making tobacco farming more lucrative via Federal subsidies.
• Government regulations inhibit health care insurance competition across state lines.
• Obama Care never included any major tort reform to remove unnecessary legal expenses out of the system.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to quantify who and what entities were making obscene profits off of obscene health care costs.

Without understanding the root causes of high health care costs, Obama Care turned into nothing more than a poorly structured, poorly run and poorly financed health care insurance program, not a comprehensive health care industry reform program. That is why some components of Obama Care, e.g. the CLASS program, which was supposed to provide long term care for Americans, have already been shut down because of their failure to address the true causes of our problems.

Which brings us to the next component of Obama Care which is about to be shut down even before the whole piece of legislation is implemented. According to a February article from the Washington Post:

• Tens of thousands of Americans who cannot get health insurance because of a preexisting medical condition will be no longer be able to get coverage from an Obama Care program because funding for that program is running out.
• These so-called “high-risk pools” will be closed to new applicants no later than March 2, depending on the state.
• According to an HHS spokesperson, the closing of the program to new applicants is being taken in order to protect the interests of those who had already signed up for the program, about 135,000 people.
• The program launched in 2010 and was supposed to last until 2014 but now will be shut down in the coming weeks because of a lack of funds.
• In another back handed slap at bad government forecasting, the original business case assumed that about 375,000 people would sign up for the program. However, only 135,000 enrolled, about a third of the expected enrollment, but the cost of servicing this one third is far higher than what was expected, causing the shutdown of the system to new enrollees
• In a moment of rare candid honestly from a Washington bureaucrat, that same HHS spokesperson is quoted in the article: “What we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.” Could not agree more.

Another Obama Care program blows its forecasts, exceeds its budget, and does not deliver what it promised to deliver. Par for the course.

And let’s do some simple math to see why this is another epic failure. The article states that between nine million and 25 million Americans are uninsured and have a preexisting health problem. If the current program has 135,000 enrollees and they have blown through $5 billion in three years or so, then the cost of insurance coverage for these enrollees comes out to about $37,000 per person or about $12,000 a year per person. If we take the mid point of the uninsured estimates, we end up with 17 million Americans (9 plus 25 divided by 2) who are uninsured because of preexisting health conditions.

Thus, using the results of this program, the average cost ($12,000) times the number needing insurance (17 million) comes out to an annual cost of over $200 billion a year. There is no way the country and the Federal government could afford this cost. This one program alone would eat up about 8% of the entire 2012 revenue stream of the Federal government:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

Which gets us back to our original point, you have to reduce the root causes of the high health care costs in this country, the root causes that cause these preexisting conditions. You cannot paper over them with complicated and expensive Obama Care insurance programs that just do not work since “what we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.”

2) Another perverse incentive of Obama Care is to make marriage less palatable for Americans and American families in the lower income ranges. Consider the opinions of two experts on the matter:

• Former Obama Treasury Department executive David Gamage was quoted The Wall Street Journal last year: “Consider a couple with children in which one of the parents earns most of the family’s income. If the couple marries, the family would lose thousands of dollars of subsidies that could otherwise be used to pay for health insurance for the children and the lower-income spouse. If the couple is already married, divorce may be their only option for obtaining affordable insurance for their children and the lower-income parent.”
• Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute testified in front of a Congressional hearing:“Health insurance premium credits in the new law are linked not directly to income, but to the poverty line, resulting in a particularly steep marriage penalty for low-income Americans. With $10,890 as the poverty line for one person and an additional $3,820 for a spouse, marriage means less government help with health insurance.

Thus, despite the President’s claim in his recent state of the union message that he wanted to strengthen families (“We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples,”) because that is best for Americans and American families, his health care reform disaster does just the opposite, financially incenting people not to get married or to get divorced.

3) We have reported on the many instances where private businesses and companies are cutting the hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week due to the asinine Obama administration ruling that anyone working 30 hours or more a week is considered a full time employee relative to Obama Care, forcing them to provide full health insurance coverage to these employees. Since many of these businesses’ business model, particularly those in the restaurant industry, cannot support these extra, onerous costs, they have cut their employees hours. Now these Americans still do not have health care insurance AND they have fewer hours to work and lower take home pay.

But this situation is not restricted just to private businesses and restaurant businesses:

• The Virgina Pilot newspaper reported on February 8, 2013 that thousands of part-time state workers will see their weekly working schedules reduced to no more than 29 hours a week going forward. The reason given for the drop in hours is that under Obama Care employees working 30 hours a week or more receive health care benefits, which would cost Virginia tens of millions of dollars a year. The new policy will mean a pay cut for many part-timers, including adjunct college professors.
• The Huffington Post reported back in November, 2012 that Youngstown State University will reduce the hours of part-time employees to ensure that the university is not required to provide them with health insurance coverage under Obama Care. Adjunct professors and lecturers would see their payable hours reduced to that magic number, 29 hours a week or less. Reason given for the decrease: onerous costs of Obama Care.
• We have already reported on how the Community College Of Allegheny County will cut the hours for some instructors to avoid paying for their health insurance coverage under Obama Care’s 30 hour rule, cuts that are affecting about 400 employees.

Again, insanity. These people will still not be able to afford health care insurance and will see a cut in take home pay nonetheless.

4) The Portland Press ran an article on February 18, 2013 that questioned the assertion made when Obama Care was passed that health care costs would go down. Many organizations, states, and politicians who supported the passage of the bill are now backpedaling on the potential devastating affects it may have on their constituents:

• State insurance regulators in California, recently sent a letter to the Obama administration in a recent letter to express their fears and concerns about "rate and market disruption."
• Oregon's insurance commissioner predicts that the new Obama Care regulations could push up premiums for younger Americans by as much as 30% and urged administration officials to slow the rollout of the new regulations.
• Insurance regulators in California, Oregon, Rhode Island and several other states have asked the administration to phase in the new requirement over several years in order to not jolt the insurance market or America.
• An advocate for consumers in their 20s, Young Invincibles, is also worried, sending a letter to administration officials suggesting that additional steps may be needed to protect young people from rising premiums. Remember, one of the insane aspects of Obama Care is that insurance costs for older Americans is reduced at the expense of raising insurance costs for younger Americans, those that are far more likely to have lower personal wealth than older Americans.
• Following up on that point, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that insurance costs for those who buy insurance coverage on their own probably will be 10-13% higher in 2016.

The article lays out a scenario that is very likely to occur in 2014 for many Americans, especially younger Americans:

• As health insurance rates come down for older people, the insurance rates will likely increase for consumers in their 20s.
• If that happens, young, healthy people could elect not to get health insurance and pay the small penalty if AND when they actually get caught by the IRS.
• This is the logical personal financial path for them to take since the cost of their insurance will be going much higher than the relatively minor fine they MIGHT eventually face.
• That, in turn, would leave an older, sicker population in the insurance pool on average, which typically inflates premiums and will leave millions of Americans without health care insurance.

In other words, the entire Rube Goldberg structure of this idiotic legislation will come tumbling down in bad financials, sick Americans, and much higher national debt.

Unfortunately, the bad news keeps oncoming from this massive, ill-conceived, complex, doomed to failure piece of legislation. But we should not be surprised, experts and news outlets have been correctly predicting this coming doom for years. For a nice synopsis of this history, consider going to the following link for a detailed, but easy to read, trek through the past few years to see what was predicted to fail is now actually failing:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/obama-concedes-obamacare-didnt-do-anything-for-rising-health-care-costs/

I am sure this is not the last set of disasters we will cover relative to Obama Care. Unfortunately.

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.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Thud, Another Obama Care Program Crashes To Earth

It does get tiring reporting on the constant failures of Obama Care, a piece of legislation that is turning out to be one of the worst laws ever passed by the political class in Washington. On the heels of the two year anniversary of the passage of the legislation, we know for fact the following atrocities that have occurred as a result of this law:

1. The original, ten year gross cost of the legislation, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), was pegged at around $940 billion. The two year update review estimate of the cost has been revised upwards almost 100%, with the latest ten year view of costs coming in at just over $1.76 TRILLION.
2. The CBO has stated that this cost will likely go higher when it reviews its estimates again since that annual estimate will contain ten years of costs/expenses and ten years of government revenue/taxes. The original estimate was intentionally deceptive since it included only six years of costs/expenses and ten years worth of government revenue/taxes.
3. Rather than reduce the Federal deficit by $130 billion or so in the first ten years like President Obama promised, Obama Care, according to a credible and detailed analysis done by the head actuary of Medicare and Medicaid, estimates that the national debt will increase by over $300 billion in the first ten years as a result of the passage of Obama Care.
4. President Obama also promised that those Americans who liked their current health care insurance coverage from their employers could keep it. The latest CBO report now estimates that this promise is also starting to collapse. It estimates that possibly 4 million Americans will lose their existing coverage, even if they like it. Other credible sources estimate that tens of millions of Americans could lose their employer provided health care coverage, given how poorly this legislation was written.
5. Obama Care is suppressing economic growth since it is well documented that many businesses are holding off hiring new workers until they figure out what the financial implications of expanding their employee base is under the law. Others are intentionally keeping the number of employees under 50 or are turning some permanent employees into temporary employees in order to stay under 50 permanent employees to avoid the steep penalties laid out by Obama Care. All of these actions suppress hiring, reduce economic growth, and help keep unemployment high.
6. We have documented the many ways in which Obama Care will significantly impact and control personal life decisions of Americans when it comes to marriage, retirement, health care coverage, and job selection. These impacts and controls on our life decisions are not consistent with living in a democracy.
7. Obama Care has or will intrude in two major facets of many lives when it forces all Americans to purchase health care insurance (turning ordinary Americans into criminals if they do not purchase) and when it imposes secular requirements on religious tenets and beliefs, truly not the characteristic of an enlightened government and political class within a democracy.
8. We also know that Obama Care was written so poorly  that some Americans that could easily afford to pay for their own health care insurance will get free, taxpayer-subsidized financial support since the law screwed up how it classifies certain types of income.
9. The CLASS component of the law was 1) supposed to provide reasonable and quality long term care support for older Americans and 2) offset the cost of Obama Care by upwards of $85 billion in the first ten years. The legislation was written so poorly that the CLASS market offerings were deemed to be more expensive and less beneficial than existing private market long term care plans. As a result, within two years of touting its profitability potential, the Obama administration has shut down the program, theoretically wiping out a lot of its supposed positive financial impacts.
10. The legislation was written so poorly that in less than the first two years of its existence, the Federal government had to grant over 1,500 waivers to companies, unions, and other organizations, exempting them from the early impacts of the law. Thus, on average, three waivers were granted every business day since the law was enacted. You cannot claim you enacted effective legislation when you exempt three American organizations EVERY DAY from complying with the legislation.
11. It is also obvious that this legislation will not work because it did not understand the root causes of our escalating health care costs. Americans eat too much (leading to obesity and heart related diseases), Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans do not exercise enough, Americans smoke too much, and Americans on average are getting older (leading to more age-related diseases). These are public health related root causes that Obama Care barely addresses while trying to solve the overall problem, and its root causes, with ineffective  taxation/government bureaucracy/criminal actions.

And the latest thud from Obama Care, a thud that will get us to a "dirty dozen" of reasons why this is the worst legislation ever imposed on Americans, turns out to be the "Early Retirement Reinsurance Program (EERP)." EERP was a short term Federal program to help employers pay for health insurance for early retirees age 55 and older until they’re eligible for Medicare. It was designed to be a bridge until Obama Care's health insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014. It was budgeted for $5 billion and was put in place in mid-2010.

I use the past tense to describe the program since by the end of 2011, a mere 18 months or so after it began and at least 24 months before it was supposed to end, the program ran out of money. By mid-December, 2011, 95% of the money had been paid out to unions, companies, non-profits, and other government entities, and the Federal government had to stop taking claims as of December 31, 2011.

Some observations:

• The United Workers Union received the largest payout from the $5 billion fund, $387 million, according to a Bloomberg article. Could this be a further bailout of the auto industry, another political favor from the Obama administration to union voters?
• Two of America's largest and more profitable companies, AT&T and Verizon, both received over a quarter of a billion dollars from the fund. Is this the best use of tax payer money or just another corporate welfare benefit at the expense of the American taxpayer?
• If you read a recent government document that describes why the program is being shut down, it shows that almost half of the $5 billion went to state and local governments. Shouldn't those government entities tax their own constituents to cover their misspending and not get bailed out by all taxpayers?
• What happens to the smaller companies and unions that were counting on this program as promised by the political class and probably did not have the resources and lobbyists to get their share of the $5 billion? I would bet many of them made personnel decisions based on the promises of Obama Care and this support program. Now, given the incompetence of the writers of the Obama Care, companies, and more importantly, their early retirees, are out of luck and maybe out of health insurance coverage.

As with the other components of Obama Care, this ill fated program did not address and resolve the root causes of high health care costs. It just redistributed wealth within the country to pay certain parties for a rising expense. It did not fundamentally reduce the root causes of escalating costs in the industry, keeping it consistent with every other component of this law.

This is just another example of how poorly Obama Care was conceived and written, how pathetic its time and cost estimates are, and how out of touch with reality those in Washington are. This is a support program that falls flat on its face less than half way through its expected life. A support program that will leave plenty of Americans without health care insurance that was promised. A support program that may have been a union vote generator for the political class. A support program that was just another form of corporate welfare. A support program that subsidizes poor fiscal management by certain government organizations.

Just another Obama Care program that does nothing to address the real causes of our health care problems. It just swooshes around, via taxes and bureaucracy, the current health care expenditures in this country without fundamentally reducing those expenditures. Pathetic problem solving skills and remedies.

Time to start over with a real problem solving approach as laid out in Step 28 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Root causes will continue to be out of control, now and if and when Obama Care is implemented. You cannot solve lung cancer by taking more aspirin, you have to address the underlying root causes. You cannot solve our health care problems without addressing the underlying public health and aging issues facing the country.

Thud.


We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/

The Continuing Disaster That Is Obama Care - Latest Poll Shows Doctors Also Think It Is Rdiculous, Ineffective, and Has No Chance Of Succeeding

Today's discussion will focus on the results of a recent opinion poll that was conducted by the highly respected consulting company Deloitte. The detailed results of the research can be viewed in the Forbes article from December 26, 2011 that summarized the findings. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2011/12/26/doctors-say-obamacare-is-no-remedy-for-u-s-health-woes/ ). The poll surveyed a statistically valid sample of U.S. doctors, the set of health care professionals that are most likely to be significantly affected by the legislation so they have a direct, insightful, and first hand knowledge of what is about to happen to our health care system.

The findings were extremely pessimistic about how well Obama Care will solve the issue of ever escalating health care costs in this country. Since those doctors in the survey know more about our health care processes than any politician, one would hope that our political class would pay close attention to their evaluation of Obama Care and find a way to radically alter or totally repeal this disastrous law, based upon the poll findings.

Highlights of the poll include the following results:

1. Two thirds of the doctors surveyed expect health care costs to rise as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite result the legislation was supposed to cause.
2. Only 27% expect health care costs to go down under Obama Care.
3. About 70% of those surveyed expect Obama Care to discourage the best and brightest of America's youth to go into medicine. This finding has serious ramifications for the quality of health care ten, twenty, or more years down the road. If the doctors are to be believed, we will have less intelligent and likely less competent doctors in the future delivering higher cost medicine.
4. Nine out of ten doctors surveyed believe that Obama Care will raise health care premiums for businesses and American citizens, the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen.
5. The article claims that Congressional Budget Office's latest analysis of Obama Care indicates that annual health care insurance premiums for the average American family will actually go up about $2,100, the exact opposite of what the law was supposed to do. This is not surprising since we already have discussed findings from the Kaiser Foundation which showed health care costs went up 9% in 2010 whereas they only went up 3% in 2008 and 2009, prior to the passage of Obama Care. This is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen.
6. Almost 70% of those surveyed expect emergency wait times to increase as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen.
7. 83% expect the waiting time to see your primary doctor will also increase.
8. Half of the doctors surveyed expect access to health care will get worse on average due to hospital closures that come about as a result of the legislation.
9. Less than 25% of those surveyed expect their paperwork load to decrease as a result of Obama Care.
10. According to the article, an analysis published in April 2010 by the head actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), concluded that the nation will spend $311 billion more on health care needs by 2019 then it would have spent if Obama Care had not been passed.

Scary, scary stuff. But this information gets truly horrific when it is combined with other Obama Care information that we have previously reported on in this blog or which is newly available:

• Tens of millions of Americans are likely to lose their existing health care coverage since Obama Care idiotically makes it less expensive for companies to terminate their existing employee health care plans then to continue them under this law. This simple reality is because the fines for not offering health care insurance to employees are less than the expense of continuing to offer the existing plans.
• Major companies including AT&T, John Deer, Caterpillar, McDonalds, and others have already made public their potential for shutting down their current employee and retiree health care insurance plans in order to save money as a result of the meager fines in Obama Care.
• These newly uninsured millions of Americans will look to the health care exchanges set up by Obama Care for insurance and the government subsidies they provide, significantly adding to the national debt.
• However, people who lose their company health care insurance coverage, coverage  that covers their entire family, can only get individual insurance coverage and subsidies under Obama Care; this condition will require these families to pay for additional health care insurance without any subsidy support in order to now cover everyone in the family.
• Obama Care administrators have already had to approve well over 1,500 waivers to the law. Any piece of legislation that allows over 1,500 waivers to its tenets within two years or so of passage is a significantly flawed piece of legislation.
• The law was written so poorly that it will allow middle class and upper class families with sufficient economic resources to get heavily subsidized health care insurance from the government's insurance exchanges even though they can afford to do without the subsidies. This foul up will cost the American taxpayer unanticipated billions of dollars a year.
• The law may even affect the marriage rate, given how poorly it was written. If a single man qualifies for government health insurance  subsidy support because his income is a little below the income threshold marries a single woman in the same situation, their newly formed family income total will definitely push them over the threshold, forcing them to either pay out significantly more for their health care insurance or stay single in order to still qualify for government subsidy support.
• One likely reason that the nation's unemployment rate is staying so high is the business uncertainty generated by Obama Care. Companies are afraid to hire full time people since the potential for tax increases, increased health care bureaucracy, and increased health insurance expenses is so scary that companies would rather muddle through with the work force they currently have then take on additional risk and uncertainty.
• Business Week reported in its November 28, 2011 issue that any American can now purchase a $400, ten foot by five foot chart (50 square feet!) that contains all of the 1,968 new and expanded powers and responsibilities granted to the Federal government as a result of Obama Care. You cannot be living in a free country when a single piece of government legislation gives the political class almost 2,000 more ways to control your life.
• The legislation does not include significant medical industry tort reform, an effort that has successfully decreased health care costs when passed at the state government level.
• The legislation does not include significant provisions and incentives to expand private health care insurance competition across state lines, increased competition that would help drive down health care costs.
• The legislation will dramatically increase the medical spending costs paid out by the Federal government without first fixing the fraud, waste, and criminal activity in the current government medical payment programs, Medicare and Medicaid. Without first fixing the fraud problems that exist today which wastes $100 billion or so a year, by increasing the size of the government's role in health care insurance, the amount of fraud and waste is highly likely to rise as well.
• The CLASS portion of the legislation had a two fold purpose. First, it was supposed to provide long term health care insurance for those Americans who wanted it. Second, it was to contribute a positive $80 billion cash flow financial impact in the first ten years of Obama Care. The CLASS effort has failed miserably since it has already been terminated because of an anemic enrollment rate caused by its poor provisions. The termination ends the theoretical positive financial impact on the overall Obama Care program, dealing a serious blow to the financial credibility of the entire legislation.
• And finally, Americans' sentiment for Obama Care has never been lower. The latest Associated Press/Roper/GIK poll shows that the percentage of Americans that support the legislation is at its lowest point ever, only 29%. Within the 29%, only 13% strongly support the law's provisions. Additionally, the poll shows that an overwhelming 84% of those polled do not think that the Federal government should have the power to force every American to purchase health care insurance, as mandated in the legislation.

And most important of all, the legislation does not effectively or substantially impact the true root causes of our ever escalating health care costs:

1. Our population is getting older from an average age perspective, requiring significant research and creative approaches to deal with an aging population and its related aging diseases.
2. Americans smoke too much.
3. Americans eat too much.
4. Americans eat too much of the wrong types of food.
5. Americans do not exercise enough.

By virtually ignoring these root causes, the legislation will have virtually no chance of being successful at reining in our out of control health care costs. This problem has to be treated primarily as a public health crisis that is solved by changing bad behaviors and not as a public policy crisis that can be solved by more bureaucracy, more government, and more taxes.

The doctors know this Obama Care approach will not work. Businesses know it will not work. Any sane American that looks at the track record of failure of the program so far knows it cannot work. Smart Americans from various organizations and think tanks know it will not work.The only ones who are blind to reality are the Obamas, Reids, Pelosis, and others who see expanded government bureaucracy, taxation, and power as a fix for everything even though government has not resolved a major issue for decades.

Two steps are needed to get us out of this rut. First, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) needs to do a completely new analysis of the entire legislation to quantify how bad the financial and health care impact of this law now appear to be. Obama used the initial CBO analysis to show how the legislation would decrease the national debt. We now know that analysis is nothing more than a fantasy with no connection to the real world, a new CBO analysis is sorely needed.

Once we find out how damaging the Obama Care is, we need to execute the process outlined in Step 26 of "Love My Country, Loathe my Government," to terminate Obama Care and replace it with a cogent, effective, efficient, and financially viable alternative. This process includes the use of smart Americans from all walks of life and disciplines rather than the political class and their lobbyist friends in Washington.

Not implementing these two steps would change Obama Care from its current disaster status into a fatal fiasco status. A fiasco that bankrupts the country, increases the  expense of health care, decreases the quality of health care, and decreases the access to health care while never solving the original problem.


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.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/