June, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Senator's Disaster Review and The Bumbling Republicans

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming recently did a nice job in an article he wrote for the Heritage Foundation where he outlined the “5 Ways Obamacare Proves That Government-Run Health Care Is A Disaster":

- Disaster #1 - Obama Care insurance policy costs continue to skyrocket even though Obama promised numerous times that American families could see up to a $2,500 decrease in their annual insurance costs. But Obama Care insurance premiums, on average, have increased 105% since the law went into effect in 2013, hardly the $2,500 annual decrease Obama and the Federal government promised.

But it is not just Obama Care policy premium costs that have risen since 2013. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that premiums for employer sponsored insurance plans have gone up, on average, $4,372 from 2010 to 2016. 

And Obama Care deductibles levels have also gone up substantially with Obama Care bronze policies’ deductibles now costing $6,092 and silver deductibles now costing $3,572. Thus, many Obama Care policy holders have policies that are useless to them since they cannot afford to pay the high deductibles before their insurance coverage kicks in.

- Disaster # 2 - While Obama claimed that Obama Care would increase competition and choice for insurance policies, the exact opposite has happened:

• Of the 23 health co-ops created by the law, 17 have already gone out of business and the remainder are under intense financial pressure. Their failure has cost taxpayers $2 billion.
• In 2017, about 70% of U.S. counties had access to only one or two Obama Care insurers and 2018 will likely be worse as more and more insurers pull out of the Obama Care marketplace due to unprofitability.

- Disaster # 3 - Although Obama promised dozens of times that if you like your current insurance policy, you could keep your current insurance policy, that was both a crude lie and crude joke. Probably 6-7 million Americans lost their insurance coverage and policies since the Obama Care legislation resulted in the policies held by those people to be illegal and thus, had to be terminated.

- Disaster # 4 - Obama constantly promised that those earning less than $250,000 would not be paying a single incremental dime in taxes as a result of the law. In reality, the country and most Americans will end up paying an incremental $800 billion in Obama Care taxes and fees over the next ten years. These increased tax burdens covered such a wide variety of categories including medical devices, prescription drug makers, and individual and employer tax mandates.

- Disaster # 5 - Medicaid was designed to serve the poor, sick, aged, and blind in our society. And it was designed poorly, disappointing both customers and doctors. Doctors get paid far less for serving Medicaid patients than other patients and as a result many doctors, likely higher quality doctors, do not serve the Medicaid market. The problem is infested with incompetence and criminal fraud which results in tens of billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted every year.

Which begs the question why Obama Care would now dump millions and millions of new people onto this decrepit and wasteful program, people who are not poor, sick, aged,or blind? So stupid, a program designed for one segment of people is now forced to support an entirely different segment of people, a program that was imploding before Obama Care even went into effect.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obama Care will add $1 TRILLION of new Medicaid spending over the next decade, a TRILLION dollars being spent on a broken, corrupt, and ineffective program. Insanity.

A nice summary by the Senator on a law that is still the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington.

2) And while Washington Democrats and only Washington Democrats are responsible for the worst piece of legislation ever passed, Republicans are turning out to be not much more competent themselves. For many years, Republicans correctly complained about how bad Obama Care was and is. Thus, this is not a problem or an opportunity that suddenly cropped up for the Republicans.

One would have thought that once they had a chance to repeal the law, they would have been ready to go right out of the gate, that they would have written a replacement bill and that the skids were greased to pass it quickly. That they would have worked the issue long before they had to move on it. 

An alternative approach would have been to do nothing and let the Obama Care process collapse on its own, and thus blaming the Democrats. They then could have put forth their own replacement bill at that point.

Instead, the Republicans have done the worst thing possible: look like bumbling idiots as they rush at the last moment to try and pass a replacement, any replacement legislation that they seem to be writing hastily and on the run. Insanity.

It never ends, the unfolding disasters of Obama Care. More disasters to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

December, 2015, Part 6, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Death Spiral Talk and Realities

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating health care costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high health care costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our health care costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Let's conintue looking at the fiascos of the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) A recent article by Bloomberg summarized many of the Obama Care problems and disasters that we have been reviewing:

• UnitedHealth’s recent announcement that it might withdrawal from offering Obama Care policies in the near future is a potential sign that Obama Care is imploding onto itself.
• While UnitedHealth’s Obama Care policies represent only about 6% of the Obama Care policies issued so far, if a large insurance carrier like UnitedHealth care cannot be profitable with Obama Care, expecting to lose half a billion dollars in 2016 with Obama Care policies, it makes one wonder if smaller carriers can ever be profitable within the Obama Care framework.
• According to Larry Levitt, a health care insurance expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation: “The ACA [Obama Care] marketplaces are not yet profitable for most insurers. It’s going to take enrollment growth, especially among healthy people, to make it an attractive market for insurers. If enrollment stagnates, we could very well see insurers thinking twice about their participation.”
• As we have discussed, not enough healthy people signed up Obama Care policies, healthy people whose good health and payments were supposed to be used to subsidize the less healthy Obama Care insurance policy holders.
• According to the Robert Johnson Foundation, of the 24.1 million Americans who would be eligible and who could benefit from an Obama Care subsidy, only 8.6 million have actually signed up for an Obama Care policy, less than 40%.
• Overall, according to McKinsey, insurers lost $2.5 billion on their Obama Care policies in 2014 despite getting subsidies from programs like the law’s risk corridors.
• One of the problems that was forecasted long ago, is that sick people have signed up for Obama Care policies since under the law they cannot be turned away, received the expensive treatment and medical care that they needed, and then dropped their policy, knowing that they can sign up again anytime they want in the future.
• As late as last March, 2015, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was sticking close to its original enrollment estimate for Obama Care of over 20 million people being enrolled in an Obama Care policy by 2016.
• Now, the CBO does not believe it will attain more than about half of the original forecasted enrollment and the March estimate, instead seeing Obama Care enrollment in the 9.4 million to 11.4 million range, about half of what was expected and promised.

While Anthem is a much larger Obama Care player than UnitedHealth, its chief financial officer, Wayne DeVeydt recent said his company would be “patient” relative to its Obama Care business, i.e. they are willing to stick around for a while, unlike UnitedHealth. But being patient is far from being exciting and happy.

2) A recent Breitbart article by Andrew Mark Miller on November 24, 2015 highlighted the five bad headwinds beating up Obama Care:

1. Insurance companies are withdrawing in droves - Possibly an overstatement but with the death of over half of the Obama Care co-ops and the high potential of UnitedHealth pulling out of the Obama Care market, the trend is not good. If another major company should decide to bail out and the remaining co-ops shut down, than droves is the appropriate term.

2. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” was a cruel lie.

Obama continually promised Americans: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” After millions of Americans had their plans cancelled, Obama’s infamous fabrication was named the 2013 PolitiFact Lie of the Year. In fact, three Obama and Obama Care lies made the top ten list of their lies in 2013.

3. Still waiting on that $2,500 in savings Obama promised you? Beside continually promising that if you liked your current insurance policy, doctor and hospital you would be able to keep it under Obama Care, his other big deception was his continual promise that American families would see up to a $2,500 reduction in their annual insurance costs. Instead, premiums have increased, not decreased, deductibles have risen, and quality and choices have deteriorated.

4. Obama care customers say their plans are “useless” due to soaring deductibles. Not only have premiums gone up under Obama Care but deductibles have also risen leading to the problem that “you now have health insurance but you cannot afford health care." The New York Times recently described this type of experience Obama Care customers: “The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.”

That same article reported that more than half of the Obama Care policies in effect have deductibles above $3,000 a year, making many of them useless for many Americans.

5. The Obama care “death spiral” conservatives warned about is real. According to Breitbart and the Obama Care death spiral: “Basically, too many sick people are signing up, and too few healthy people are doing so. This causes prices to surge, and that causes fewer healthy people to sign up. The death spiral continues until the insurance program collapse completely. The 20.3 percent price increase for 2016 is probably the cause of the current round of the Obscure death spiral.”

A former U.S. Senator from Montana once described Obama Care as “Train wreck.” Turns out that was one thing that any U.S. politician has gotten right in decades. It is a train wreck and that wreckage discussion will continue 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