July, 2016, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Costs Likely To Conintue Rising, Customer Base Likely To Continue Shrinking and The Obama Administration Likely to Continue To Break The Law

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, 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 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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Haley Johnson, writing for the Conservative Daily News website on June 28, 2016, reviewed the dire warnings about Obama Care in 2017 that were recently pronounced by the very person that helped Obama Care when she worked in the Obama administration. Marilyn Tavenner was once the head of the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services and helped launch Obama Care.

When she was recently asked what the immediate future held for Obama Care policy premiums costs, she replied: “I’ve been asked, what are the premiums going to look like? I don’t know, because it also varies by state, market, even within markets. But I think the overall trend is going to be higher than we saw previous years … that’s my big prediction.”

Whoa, hold on there! When she was rolling out Obama Care, didn’t her boss, the President claim that the annual costs for health insurance for families could down up to $2,500 a year? Didn’t he promise that the legislation would “bend the cost curve” of health care downwards? And now that very same person, who currently leads a health industry organization of insurers, is telling us that those promises are not going to come true? Horrors!

Of course, that is sarcasm. We have often shown how the cost of health insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays have gone up substantially under Obama Care, the exact opposite of what was promised. 

Anyone with a lick of common sense five years ago would realize that the Obama Care requirement that insurance companies must take anyone customer on and give them insurance coverage regardless of their current health condition was a recipe for disaster, as pointed out by Ms. Tavenner: “The problem with the exchanges … is people are still kind of seeing this as, ‘I use insurance when I’m sick, but I may not need it when I’m no longer sick."

Tavenner also correctly pointed out that the initial programs Obama Care put in place to cushion the blow of insurance companies having to accept anyone applying even if they had a pre-existing condition are going away. Once that financial crutch is removed, the Obama Care insurers will need to increase their premium rates even more to cover this new shortfall, further increasing Obama Care policy costs.

But again, anyone with a spec of common sense could see this coming years ago. We talked about it in this blog for months at a time. And now a former Obama administration insider is telling us the same thing: Obama Care will not reduce anyone's health insurance costs in any way and the shock of continually increasing deductibles, premiums, and co-pays is going to get worse not better in the coming year or so.

2) Well, maybe we do not have to wait a year to see if Ms. Tavenner’s predictions come true. According to an article for Breitbart that was written by Caroline May on July 14, 2016:

• An amazing 1.6 million Obama Care customers have dropped their Obama Care coverage already this year.
• This drop of 1.6 million customers happened in the remarkably short timeframe from late January, the end of the annual enrollment period, and the end of March, according to data from the Federal government.
• 12.7 million customers had enrolled in Obama Care policies prior to January 31, 2016 but that number dropped to 11.1 million customers just two months later, an almost 13% decline.
• The measurement for the drop is the number of people who signed up for an Obama Care policy during the enrollment and who were still paying their premiums and keeping their policy active by the end of March.
• Remember, the original estimate is that by this time, Obama promised that about 20 million Americans would have healthcare coverage via Obama Care policies, so having 11.1 million now means that the program has missed its objective by about 50%.
• And that assumes that no other Obama Care policy holders terminated their accounts in the past four months which would make that 13% drop even worse.

Now it could be that some of those in the 1.6 million got health insurance via a new job, or got health insurance coverage from a spouse’s new job, or qualified for Medicaid. Or more likely, Ms. Tavenner was right and these Obama Care customers decided that the increases in premium costs for Obama Care policies was just not a good value despite the fact that 85% of Obama Care customers get an average subsidy of $291 a month. 

With a handful of the remaining Obama Care co-ops under financial duress, a lot more Obama Care policyholders might be dropping out of the program before long, leaving the promise of 20 million people covered by Obama Care policies even further out of view. You cannot claim that you ran a successful program when you missed our own program objective by 50%.

3) We mentioned above and in previous posts how the programs set up to provide subsidy help in the initial years of Obama Care to help insurers financially ease into the Obama Care insurance world were expiring, putting additional financial stress on Obama Care insurers. Some of these insurers, seeing the writing on the wall of terminating subsidies and negative financial results from Obama Care policies, have already withdrawn from the Obama Care exchanges.

Alexander Hendrie, writing for the Americans For Tax Reform website on July 7, 2016, pointed out that Congressional committees recently issued a report that alleged that the Obama administration was illegally using taxpayer money to secretly, and probably illegally, to bailout Obama Care insurers. 

The report was put out by the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It accuses the administration of illegally funding Obama Care’s “Cost Sharing Reduction” (CSR) program for years despite the objections of IRS officials.

Key findings of the Congressional report, as written by Mr. Hendrie, include the following accusations:

-The administration initially submitted a CSR appropriations request for Fiscal Year 2014, but later withdrew it and began making payments illegally. As the report notes, Obama Care created CSR payments, but they have never been appropriated for. The Constitution explicitly makes clear that the power of the purse lies with Congress and the Executive cannot spend taxpayer money without Congressional approval.

-CSR payments were created as one way to artificially hide the true costs of Obama Care through a web of government spending programs. CSR payments would be given to an insurance company based on the income of an enrollee and the plan they purchased. Assuming certain criteria were met, the insurance company would receive federal dollars as an incentive to keep co-payments, deductibles, and other out of pocket costs low.

-After officials from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) withdrew the CSR appropriations request, the administration begun illegally shifting funds from a separate appropriation. The administration has refused to provide the legal memorandum that led to this decision even in the face of Congressional subpoenas.

-IRS officials expressed concern that this method of funding CSR payments was illegal so were briefed on the memorandum. As the report notes in an interview with one IRS official at the meeting, they were not permitted to take notes or keep a copy of the memo:

“We were given a memo to read. We were instructed we were not to take notes and we would not be keeping the memo, we’d be giving it back at the end of the meeting.”

-Following this meeting, IRS officials continued to have concerns that the CSR payments violated federal law and raised concerns with IRS Chief John Koskinen. As the report notes, these concerns were heard, but ignored:

“The IRS officials’ concerns that this course of action violated appropriations law were noted, but not addressed or ameliorated by OMB’s legal memorandum.”

-Shortly thereafter, DoJ and Treasury officials officially approved the decision to use an unrelated appropriation to make CSR payments.

Since Congress launched its investigation, multiple Obama government agencies have undertaken a concerted effort to hide the truth by refusing to provide, or unlawfully redacting documents, refusing to answer questions or allow witnesses to testify, and selectively applying the law. In at least one case, the Obama administration pressured a witness into not revealing information, and in another case the administration prevented a witness from answering questions.

As the report notes:

• The Department of the Treasury improperly withheld and redacted documents without any valid legal basis to do so.
• The Department of Health and Human Services improperly withheld documents without any valid legal basis to do so.
• The Office of Management and Budget improperly withheld documents without any valid legal basis to do so.
• The Department of the Treasury failed to search for records responsive to the committees’ subpoenas.
• Treasury used regulations and Testimony Authorizations to prohibit current and former IRS employees from providing testimony to Congress about the source of funding for the CSR program.
• Treasury officials selectively enforced the law by allowing witnesses to answer certain questions prohibited by the authorizations without objection
• HHS counsel prevented witnesses from answering substantive questions regarding the CSR, citing the need to protect “internal deliberations” and “confidentiality interests”
• Witnesses were instructed not to reveal the names of White House and DoJ officials involved in decisions regarding the cost sharing reduction program.
• The Department of the Treasury pressured at least one witness into following the restrictions set forth in his Testimony Authorization after the witness questioned Treasury’s ability to limit his testimony.
• OMB prevented a witness from answering factual questions regarding the dates or times of a meeting or conversation, refusing to invoke a legal privilege to justify withholding the information from Congress.

Breaking the law, illegally bailing out the insurance companies, tampering with potential witnesses, and failing to provide the requested documents to Congress, sounds about right when describing the worst piece of legislation ever enacted and the most lawless administration in my lifetime. And of course, the American taxpayer ends up paying the insurance company for this lousy piece of legislation.

4) One last piece of ObamaCare nonsense for today. I usually do not reference random pieces of writings that are sent through my email, I almost always want to rely on professional, legitimate, and identified news sources and government findings for our discussions in this blog. But the following, unsourced description of what Obama Care is does hit a home run in showing how inane the logic was in putting it together. It boils down the 2,000 pages of the legislation and the 10,000 ages or so of regulations as related to Obama Care to four succinct points: 

1. In order to insure the uninsured, we first have to un-insure the insured.

2. Next, we require the newly un-insured to be re-insured.

3. To re-insure the newly un-insured, they are required to pay extra charges to be re-insured.

4. The extra charges are required so that the original insured, who became un-insured, and then became re-insured, can pay enough extra so that the original un-insured can be insured, so it will be free-of-charge to them. 

Crazy and illogical and passed by the U.S. Federal government.

That will end our Obama Care review for both today and this month, things have been a little slow in this area. But we now know that a former, high ranking Obama Care insider predicts that costs will go up and not down as Obama constantly promised, that current Obama Care customers are dropping out of the program at a very quick rate, and that the lawlessness of the Obama administration extends and continues in this area with regard to blackmailing insurance companies with taxpayer money to stay in the program and continue to provide Obama Care policies. The unfolding disasters continue to unfold.

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

November, 2015, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Costs Conitnue To Skyrocket While Enrollment Continues To Crater

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 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 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 healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctor2, 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.

For the next several days we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) One aspect of Obama Care that we have not discussed recently is the employer mandate that forces employers to offer their full time staffs health insurance options or be fined $2,000 a year per employee. Previously, we have reported how hundreds, if not thousands of companies, could not afford either option, providing health insurance or paying the fine, and as a result took two actions in order to stay in business. 

First, many business owners made sure that most of their employees never worked enough hours to be considered full time employees, defined by Obama Care as those working more than 30 hours a week. The law allowed businesses to avoid paying the fine or providing health insurance coverage for those part time workers. The second option was to insure that businesses fell below certain thresholds of total number of employees employed.

Thus, Obama Care’s insurance coverage regulations reduced working hours of thousands of Americans, turning them into part time employees, without giving them the benefit of health insurance coverage, or restricted job and economic growth, denying a lot of unemployed Americans the opportunity to get a job.

But another problem has arisen as Obama Care has unfolded. It seems that even when businesses tried to offer health insurance to their currently uncovered employees, the vast number of employees decided to pass on the opportunity. 

For example, consider the situation of Billy Sewell who employs 600 restaurant employees at the Golden Corral restaurants he owns. He tried to do what the Obama Care legislation told him to do, i.e. offer a company sponsored health insurance program to all of his employees. 

Despite trepidations that his business could not afford to do so, he went ahead and offered health insurance to all of his 600 employees. His costs turned out to be far lower than anticipated because a grand total of TWO employees took him up on his insurance program offer. Why? It was too expensive even with Sewell picking up a majority of the insurance tab. 

And according to New York Times reporting, Sewell and his experience is not unique. Many small business companies with over 100 employees are finding that very few of those employees are taking the health insurance when offered. Michael A. Bodack, an insurance broker in Harrison, New York: “Based on what we’ve seen in the marketplace, we’re advising some of our clients to expect single-digit take rates. One to 2 percent isn’t unusual.”

Brad Mete, the managing partner of Affinity Resources, a staffing agency in Dania Beach, Fla., began offering insurance in 2015 to avoid the $2,000 per employee fine. He also saw a very low take on those employees who signed up for his company’s new insurance program. The cost of insurance to his employees is $30 a week to many of his employees who make $300 a week. Thus, many decided that giving up a whopping 10% of their weekly earnings for insurance is not worth it, given that there are annual deductibles that have to be met before the insurance coverage kicks in.

Which comes back to the point we have been making over and over during the past few years of covering the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The law never addressed the root causes of our high insurance costs, as listed above. As a result, insurance costs did not go down and we are now seeing that even when offered health insurance coverage through their company, it is still too expensive for the employees of companies that Obama Care forced to starting offering an insurance program.

2) Rich Edson, writing for Fox News on October 27, 2015, did a nice job summarizing the insurance policy cost increases that are going on around the country as people enroll in Obama Care policies for 2016:

• The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that the average cost for the average “silver” plan on the Obama Care Federal exchange will go up 7.5% in 2016.
• Keep in mind that Obama frequently promised that the typical American family would see up to a $2,500 reduction in their annual insurance premium costs, not a 7.5% INCREASE.
• In Oklahoma, the silver plan average will go up a whopping 36%, in Alaska the cost will go up about a third, and more than 34% in Montana.
• Some states will actually see an average decrease with Indiana silver Obama Care policy holders seeing about a 13% decrease and those in Mississippi seeing an 8% decrease.
• These double digit increases may be the reason that Obama Care is now forecasted to attain no more than half of the enrollees it expected and promised when the law was passed, 10 million enrollees vs. the 20 million forecasted.
• According to Robert Laszewski, president of the Health Policy and Strategy Associates: "Insurance companies by and large are losing lots of money in Obama Care. Obama Care's got some really serious problems here and the enrollment, the only way for Obama Care to solve problems is for enrollment to increase dramatically." 
• But if enrollment does not go up the financial losses will mount which will force more increases in the cost of Obama Care policies which will cause fewer people to keep their insurance which will force more increases in costs = death spiral.

Higher costs, lower than expected enrollments, disaster.

3) Richard Pollock, writing for the Daily Caller on November 1, 2105, reported that the increase in Obama Care policies in 2016 will not be 7.5% as described above but upwards of three times as much. Why? Because the Obama administration released cost increase information for only “silver” plans but withheld cost increase information for the other three types of plans that are available under Obama Care.

When the cost increase for the other plans, bronze, gold and platinum,  are considered, the cost increases for ALL Obama Care plans jumps to over 20%. Which obviously means that if the silver plans were at 7% or so, than the other plans must be experiencing increases that are much higher than the average of 20%. 

The Daily Caller News Foundation found the following bad news for Obama Care policy holders once one looks at all types of Obama Care policies:

• Some Obama Care policies in Utah will see a 45% price increase.
• In Illinois, the highest price increase will be 42.4%.
• In Tennessee, the highest price increase will be 36.3%.
• In South Dakota, silver plans will increase 24.7% in 2016 but the average increase across all plans will be 39%.
• In South Carolina, the average silver increase will be 10.8%, compared to 23.4% when all four plans are considering.
• In Colorado, silver customers will see a 12.94% price hike, but Gold users will see a 20.33% increase, and Platinum enrollees will see a 29.80% price rise.

Another case of the Obama administration not being transparent in publishing only a subset of data or an honest mistake? Given there has been very little honesty in any aspect of this administration, I vote for lack of transparency...again.

That will do it for today’s unfolding Obama Care disasters. Unfortunately, more disasters will be unveiled 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

October, 2015, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Higher Prmiums, Higher Deducitbles, Fewer C0-OPs and Shutting Down Some Schools

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 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 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 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 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.

Over the past several days we have been reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington, a review that continues today:

1) According to a recent Associated press report, a Tennessee school district has been forced to close the doors to all of its schools because the financial burden for employee health insurance as a result of Obama Care cannot be met by the financial resources of that school district. Clay County, Tennessee Director Of Schools Jerry Strong stated that the school board based its closing decision because of budget issues related to Federal government Obama Care mandates.

Strong is quoted as saying that Obama Care was the "straw that broke the camel's back" and that "it has made it very difficult for us to have our employees properly covered and meet the mandates of the law." County Commissioner Parrish Wright stated that the county did have enough money to operate the three county schools until the end of the year but not much beyond and made the decision to shut down now.

The county already has the seventh highest property tax in the entire state but overall is a poor rural county so tax increases are unlikely to bailout the schools’ budget. As a result, 1,150 school kids in Tennessee are out of school until further notice, their education delayed because of another unique disaster as a result of Obama Care.

2) One other note from the state of Tennessee. The Washington Examiner article that discussed the closing of Clay County schools also mentioned that the state’s Obama Care co-op is also closing soon. This is the sixth Obama Care co-op to close or announce that it is going out of business out of the 23 that were formed as a result of the legislation. Since only one out of 23 have been profitable so far, it is probably a safe bet that the Tennessee Obama Care co-op will not be the last one to close.

4) Kate Scanlon, writing for the Heritage Foundation on October 13, 2015, discussed the reality that a lot of insurance companies that opted to offer Obama Care insurance policies lost money as a result of that decision. According to a recent analysis conducted by Brian Blase, who is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, insurers lost at least 12% on their Obama Care policies in 2014, an estimate that he labeled as conservative.

He based his analysis on the so-called risk corridor data that came out of the Obama administration. Risk corridors were set up to aid insurance companies who may have been unprofitable as a result of Obama Care in the first few years of its existence. The risk corridor program is a temporary program embedded in the law that required insurers whose premiums exceed expenses to pay a portion of those profits into the program. That money in turn is paid out to insurers whose expenses were higher than their premiums in order to minimize financial losses during the first three years of the law’s rollout.

According to Blases’ analysis:

• A whopping $7.9 billion was paid out to offset insurance companies’ losses.
• He concluded that insurance companies intentionally under priced their initial Obama Care policies in order to gain market share.
• This under pricing will require them to raise prices in the following years to offset their losses, especially when the risk corridor program vanishes and they are stuck with their own financials to deal with.
• Even worse than their underpricing is the reality that the insurers mix of customers included more older, sicker customers than expected with their expected enrollees of younger, healthier people to help pay for the other policyholders falling well below expectations.
• But the death spiral mode has now been set because as insurance companies raise their premiums and rates in the coming years, even more younger, healthier people will not sign up for these more and more expensive policies which will make the financial results even worse.

All of this goes back to our basic premise that Obama Care will fail and is failing because it never addressed the underlying root causes of our high healthcare costs, the root causes we listed above. Despite the creation of subsidizes, risk corridors, exchanges, fines, taxes, etc., nothing has changed relative to the real causes of healthcare costs. And that is why insurers are still losing money and raising insurance policy prices and premiums and now we see that kids are being denied schooling because of this horrendous law.

3) But it is just not insurance policy premiums that will be going up in the future for Obama Care policies. We have already discussed the fact that Obama Care policies might sometimes look good for monthly payments but that deductible levels, the amount a policyholder must personally pay before getting insurance policy financial support, has been going up also. Consider some facts pointed out in an October 16, 2015 article in The Week magazine:

• Health insurance deductibles have risen six times faster than wages since 2010, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
• The average deductible has gone up from $900 to $1,300 since 2010.
• The article predicts, probably accurately, that more and more employers will be moving their employees to high deductible plans and that the deductible levels will continue to grow in the coming years despite of, or because of, Obama Care.
• With the whopping 40% Obama Care tax hitting so-called Cadillac insurance plans in 2018, many employers that currently offer these excellent insurance policies will be dropping them also, to avoid the 40% tax, moving their employees insurance coverage to less attractive high deductible plans.
• Many Americans are coming face to face with sticker shock on these higher and higher deductible plans with a recent Consumer Survey poll showing that on out of three respondents saying that they received a medical bill that was much higher than they expected as a result of escalating deductibles.

So not only is Obama Care forcing higher monthly premiums, it is also forcing higher and higher deductibles. A long, long way from the Obama promise that the average American family would see upwards of a $2,500 DECREASE in their annual health insurance costs.

5) As we often to in these posts, let’s end this discussion with some real life horror stories from real life Americans who are suffering the consequences of the legislation. These horror stories are compiled by the website:

www.myhealthcarestorycom

Ben from Virginia on October 17, 2013

I am retired but not of age for medicare. Employer dropped retirement healthcare. I am type 2 diabetic, policy on exchange with prescription drugs equal to one I lost premiums went from 9600 to 14600, with deductible from 1500 to 6000, copay from 15 to 120. WHAT IS SO AFFORDABLE ABOUT THIS!!!!!!!!!

Gary from Minnesota on October 14, 2013

I am a 29 year old male with no children and I am used to about a 9% increase each year. No preexisting conditions or major medical problems. I only use it once every couple of years for a standard check-up and the premium went up 20% this time. Still not a huge jump like some will experience but it is just shy of a $30 a month increase or another $360 out of my pocket each year.

Kevin from Minnesota on October 11, 2013

I have a $9,000 deductible policy that would have been good until June 2014. With the affordable health care act that policy is canceled in Jan.2014, and replaced with a new one.

Because I turn 60 before that it causes the premium to almost double.

This will cause my insurance costs to go up by at least $1,386 due to the affordable health care act, it is probably more but this is what I can prove.

More unfolding disasters tomorrow.

August, 2015, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Insurance Companies Get Richer and Bigger and State Exchanges Implode

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 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 but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

Today and probably for the next few days, we will look at the latest disasters from Obama Care, including the gathering evidence that Obama Care policy holders are in for a big and ugly financial surprise in their 2016 costs along with some personal stories on how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families.

1) Yesterday, we briefly touched on the reality that Obama Care is killing competition in the insurance and healthcare industries, a process that is likely to increase consumer costs while simultaneously reduce quality and choices. Chriss Street writing for Breitbart on July 26, 2015 provided some more details on the killing of competition and the reasons why health care costs will go up even faster as the range of competitors dwindles:

• Anthem insurance recently announced it was buying Cigna insurance for a whopping $54 billion. 
• This will make Anthem the largest insurer in the state of California.
• Anthem will have 40% of the California insurance when the merger is done, surpassing the current market leader, Kaiser, which has 35% of the state market. Thus, two giant insurance companies will control 75% of the insurance market in California.
• The five largest health insurance companies in the country will end up as three evenlarger companies once the large mergers are complete.
• The health insurance stock prices have tripled in some cases since the passage of Obama Care, far surpassing the growth of the overall stock market. The S&P Health Care index is up 305% since Obama took office.
• Since Obama took office, the rise in stock prices for healthcare companies has been the fastest growth rate in history.
• While overall economic inflation was .8% in 2014, health care spending grew six times as fast at 5.0%, something that was supposed to slow down under Obama Care.
• Even worse, prescription drug spending was up a whopping 13.0% in 2014.
• In 2014, health care spending in the country relative to our GDP was 17.8%, up from the 16% level when Obama took office.
• According to the article, “Influence Alley,” as printed in the National Journal, the American Health Insurance Plans organization, the industry’s lobbyist, spent $102.4 million to lobby Congress relative to the Obama Care legislation.
• And life could get even more lucrative in the next few years since, as we have previously reported, many states are likely to grant insurance rate requests that are quite high: New Mexico’s largest insurer, Health Care Service Corp, has formally asked for a premium increase of 51.6%, Tennessee’s largest insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, wants a 36.3% increase, Maryland’s largest insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, has asked for a 30.4% increase, and Oregon’s top insurer, Moda Health, wants a 25% increase.

So, in summary, the health insurance companies are getting richer, in all likelihood stockholders in many insurance companies are getting rich as merger mania spreads in the industry, costs for consumers are going up which makes them poorer, and healthcare costs for the country continue to skyrocket. Everyone see the problem with this reality? All caused because Obama Care rewarded insiders and lobbyists and never addressed the root causes of our high healthcare costs.

2) An Associated Press (AP) article by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar from July 26, 2015 pointed out another gross failure of Obama Care, the so-called state-based and run health insurance exchanges that were online marketplaces where consumers could log onto the exchange website and shop for and purchase insurance.

The highlights of their failure includes the following realities:

• Many of the states exchanges ended up with higher than expected costs and lower than expected enrolment, causing many of them to consider turning over their operations to the Feds, shutting down, or merging with other co-ops in other states.
• Hawaii's Obama Care exchange received $205 million in Federal startup grants, spent about $139 million, enrolled 8,200 customers at a whopping cost of about $17,000 per customer, and is imploding so fast that it is turning over its responsibilities to the Federal government.
• Twelve states and the District of Columbia have their own state level Obama Care exchanges and about half of them are under severe financial strain despite getting a total of almost $5 billion in taxpayer grants to get operational. Experts estimate about half face financial difficulties.
• According to a recent statement by Hawaii Governor David Ige: "The viability of state health insurance exchanges has been a challenge across the country, particularly in small states, due to insufficient numbers of uninsured residents." But wasn’t Obama Care supposed to be so good that people would flock to sign up and those that did not want insurance also sign up to avoid being fined?
• Covered California, the state of California exchange, missed its signup target by 20% this past year.
• To help cover their financial shortfalls, Justine Handelman, policy chief at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association thinks that the idea of the exchanges could actually make health care LESS affordable, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do: "Our biggest concern is that you may see many states looking to enact taxes and fees, and that makes health care less affordable." 
• Hawaii is the third state exchange defaulting to the Federal Obama Care exchange system, following Nevada and Oregon, which made their switch last year. 
• Minnesota's MNsure exchange cut its budget, also saw a shortfall in their recent set of enrollees, the legislature and governor have proposed no viable plans to fix the process, and Governor Mark Dayton has stated that MNsure's fate is on the table, including the option of shifting operations to HealthCare.gov.
• The U.S. attorney in Boston has subpoenaed records dealing with Massachusetts’ Health Connector, the Massachusetts exchange.
• Colorado officials are considering changes to its exchange ranging from pooling call centers with other states to folding down everything and defaulting to the Federal exchange. And the Colorado exchange is viewed as one of the most financially solvent of all state exchanges
• A Federal government audit found that the state of Maryland used taxpayer funded grants from Washington to pay for $28.4 million in costs that should have been allocated to the state's Medicaid program. 
• Vermont is also trying to fix its processes that has had major technology and system issues from the start.

What a mess. Billions of dollars wasted with little benefit in return, the incompetence at the state level exchanges appears to be as bad or worse than the incompetency at the Federal level. And remember, the Federal exchange system was barely working, requiring much more spending to fix it. What happens when multiple states start dumping their enrollee requirements onto the creaky and icky Federal exchange system? Probably more chaos, more identity theft issues and problems, and more taxpayer money spent and wasted.

The Obama Care legislation. The worst piece of legislation ever written and a piece of legislation that continues to unfold into new disasters every month. More disasters 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

June, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care Update, Part 3: Obama Care Increases Costs and the Number of Uninsured, Fining The Poor Becuase They Are Too Poor, and Rube Goldberg Would Be Proud

This is our third post in our regular monthly series on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been documenting this disaster for the past several years but over the past year or so we have had to go to multiple posts every month just to keep up with the waste, the lunacy, and failures of Obama Care.

The first post in this month’s updates can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/june-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_6417.html

Past posts can be found by just entering “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

1) One of the big promises of Obama Care and its supporters is that lower income people would see most of the benefits and little, if any, of the financial pain of the legislation’s tenets. However, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis and report, that is nothing more than another broken promise of this administration:

• According to the analysis, about one million low-income Americans will pay a fine under Obama Care.
• These one million Americans are among the estimated four million Americans who will need to pay the individual mandate penalty for not having health insurance by 2016 as a result of Obama Care: “All told, CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] JCT estimate that about four million people will pay a penalty because they are uninsured in 2016 (a figure that includes uninsured dependents who have the penalty paid on their behalf). An estimated $4 billion will be collected from those who are uninsured in 2016, and, on average, an estimated $5 billion will be collected per year over the 2017–2024 period.”
• A chart included in the report revealed that 200,000 of those estimated to be paying the Obama Care penalty will be earning less than 100 percent of the poverty line. 
• An additional 800,000 Americans are considered low-income, earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, will also be paying Obama Care penalties

What makes this situation doubly ironic is 1) the President claimed that health care costs would go down $2,500 on average for American families, and now we are seeing poorer American families being financially penalized for not making enough money to afford health care insurance and 2) at one point Obama actually campaigned against this mandatory insurance coverage option back in 2008. This happened during a debate with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, because he realized the insanity of a mandate for imposing fines on people who could not afford health insurance to begin with.

Apparently, that view was just for the campaign since his signature piece of legislation, Obama Care, did exactly that, mandated poor Americans to pay a fine for not buying something they could not afford. Insanity.

2) In another illegal move by the Obama administration, it is again going against the schedule and requirements of passed legislation by allowing 18 states to continue delaying a key part of Obama Care’s health insurance exchange for small businesses, “employee choice.” This latest delay puts off this component of the legislation until 2016, if then.

Which raises the same question that has been raised any number of times after this administration unilaterally and arbitrarily delayed numerous pieces of this legislation: if the President thinks he can change approved legislation according to any whim that strikes him, then why are we still paying the 500 members of Congress? We apparently do not need them if their only function is to pass legislation that turns into mere suggestions, rather than law, and Obama does what he wants? Obama Care is not only the worst piece of legislation ever passed it is turning into the most lawless piece of legislation ever passed.

3) We have previously discussed the top line results of a recent University Of Minnesota study that concluded that health care costs will accelerate because of Obama Care and that there will actually be more uninsured Americans five or so years down the road then there are today as a result of Obama Care. 

I recently came across a more in depth discussion of that work by one of the analysis’s authors, Mr. Parente, who is an associate dean of the Carlson School of Management and director of the Medical Industry Leadership at the University of Minnesota. Highlights of his analysis and what drives his conclusions include the following:

• Health-insurance companies who deal with Obama Care policies are expected to soon begin releasing insurance policy rate estimates for next year's plans, with most industry experts expecting consumers to experience far significantly higher premiums. 
• It is not expected by that Federal subsidies will increase by the same amount to keep current Obama Care policy holders financially whole, meaning that those policy holders will experience higher out of pocket costs in 2015.
• If this happens, both in 2015 and in the follwing years as expected, lower-income and some middle-income consumers will be forced out of the private insurance market, viewing the expense as more and more unaffordable.
• Using the 2014 health-insurance exchange enrollment data and a micro-simulation model funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Parente estimated the national and state impact of Obama Care on insurance prices and enrollment from 2015-24 to illustrate this phenomenon.
• The average premium for an individual exchange health plan (Silver) will increase by $1,375 by 2019 while the average family premium for the same plan will increase by $4,198. 
• The steepest price increases will not occur until 2017 and after, when three things happen.
• First, Obama Care‘s "essential benefits" requirements will kick in. All Obama Care insurance plans, including those currently exempted for hardship and old plans extended for various reasons, must provide all of the law's mandated benefits from January 1, 2017. On average, roughly 15% of plans offered in 2013 do not qualify for sale on the insurance exchanges once all of the time extensions run out. Depending on the state, as many as 60% of the plans sold in 2013 would not be permitted for sale going forward since they do not cover all of the essential and mandated benefits, forcing people to buy more expensive plans or drop health insurance altogether..
• Second, Obama Care’s program to subsidize those insurance companies that provide Obama Care policies will also expire in 2017, i.e. the bailouts end in 2017. 
• Other insurance companies subsidies also end in 2017. For example, health insurers will no longer be able to bill the government for 80% of a patient's health-care costs when they make more than $45,000 in annual claims. As all of these subsidies end, the insurance companies are highly likely to pass the now unsubsidized costs unto their policy holders, further increasing the cost of Obama Care policies, leaving consumers to pick up the tab through premium payments. Federal subsidies will be unable to keep up with such dramatic rate spikes. 
• Faced with all of these upward cost pressures, consumers will react the only way they know how: by looking for cheaper options such as the remaining high-deductible health plans offered by private companies and the exchanges as well as plans with very limited physician and hospital networks established to maximize efficiency but not quality care for the average patient. These plans are likely to provide no or limited access to specialized facilities and physicians. 
• And finally, rising premiums will create a death spiral exodus from insurance plans, with increasing departures forcing insurance companies to raise premiums even more on the remaining customers to make up for the shortfall which will drive out more customers from Obama Care plans, etc. 
• And these disasters and death spirals exclude what might happen with employer provided health insurance plans. It is expected that many businesses will find it less expensive to drop their company insurance plans and pay the Obama Care fines, forcing millions (the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the ACA will lead to a seven-million person decline in insurance provided by employers by 2020) of Americans to find health insurance coverage on the individual market at the same time that individual market insurance policy costs are spiraling upwards.

This leaves the newly uninsured with two options: If they qualify by their income, sign up for Medicaid or stay uninsured and face a penalty. Many will choose the first option but that will cover a relatively minor set of uninsured Americans since those people exceed the income limits of Medicaid. 

Whatever these millions of Americans do, there will be a significant number of uninsured Americans unwilling or unable to pay for the constantly increasing cost for health insurance available on the exchanges and forced to pay penalties. By 2024, the authors of this analysis and research estimate that there will be more than 40 million uninsured, roughly 10% more than today.

Thus, here we have another well researched and thought out piece of analysis that shows again that Obama Care will do the exact opposite of what it set out to do: rather than decreasing the cost of health insurance and making health insurance affordable for millions of Americans, it will make health insurance more and more unaffordable for every American and eventually result in a net gain of uninsured Americans when it was supposed to reduce the number of uninsured Americans.

4) One last piece of bad news today to chew on about Obama Care. The original legislation is supposed to be about 2,500 pages long. The number of pages of regulations that were created to implement the law is reported to be well over 10,000 pages. As we have said many times before, there is nothing elegant about this legislation. It is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that is so complicated it will eventually collapse and implode into itself from its own complexity and idiocy.

Someone actually tried to flowchart the actual information and process flows of Obama Care. This is legitimately what they came up with:






No way something this complicated has any chance of ever succeeding, especially if the Washington political class and Federal government bureaucracy are operating the levers.

Based on this flowchart, one of my favorite sayings comes to mind: “Try to pare things down, Very few moves to a lot.” It looks like Obama Care got this wisdom backwards, like it got everything else backwards: “Never pare things down. A lot of moves, spread over 2,500, pages accomplishes very little." 

We will finish up our latest Obama Care analyses tomorrow. As you read through these posts it becomes very clear that we have been right all along. We have always maintained that the legislation never went after the root causes of our escalating health care problems, a view we will explore tomorrow using some very interesting data and research. 

Because at the end of the day, regardless of what Obama Care does, Americans will still be overweight, they will still eat too much of the wrong kind of foods, they will not exercise enough, and they will still smoke too much. Those and a few other factors are the drivers behind our escalating health care costs, not whether or not someone has a bronze insurance plan from Obama Care. Obama Care will never succeed since it never understood the root causes of the problem, mistaking a public health crisis for a health insurance coverage crisis.

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