January, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 3: Real Life Obama Care Disasters, Medicaid Increases Hospitals Visits, And Bronze Plans' Expensive Surprises

This is our third post this month in what has become a monthly series on the idiocy and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Millions of Americans have lost access to their preferred insurance policies, their preferred doctors, their preferred hospitals, and needed medicines, they have lost access to work hours and actually jobs,, the economy has suffered terribly, identity thieves are going crazy with glee, the national debt is going up faster, and a whole myriad of other threats and troubles have occurred as a result of this heinous piece of legislation.

Things are so bad that we are having a difficult time documenting and review all of the insanity. Over a six day period we will do our best to bring you the worst from Obama Care.

1) As we have discussed many times, there has been a lot of problems with Obama Care’s information systems processing and operations including the website where theoretically a person could easily sign up for an Obama Care insurance policy. The problems including the snafu that many people might think that they have health insurance via Obama care but the systems never properly processed the application and payment, leaving the person uninsured despite their belief that they are covered. 

And that reality is starting to come true. There are news reports starting to arise where people are going to the doctor or hospital and finding out that they are indeed NOT covered by an Obama Care insurance policy and either need to pay cash up front for the entire medical expense and fix the problem later or are walking out and not receiving the medical treatment they need because of the sticker shock of the price unadjusted for insurance. 

Regarding the top selling type of Obama Care plans, so-called Bronze plans, Kaiser Health News reports on the following developing problems:

• Newly issued Obama Care Bronze Plans may not pay a dime of a simple doctor costs until an annual deductible of $5,000 is met/paid for by the policy holder: “This could be the next shoe to drop, as people don’t realize that if they’re buying a bronze plan, they may have to pay $5,000 out of pocket before it contributes a penny,” said Carl McDonald, senior analyst with Citi Investment Research, speaking at a Washington, D.C., conference.
• Some health industry experts are concerned that some new Obama Care enrollees will be discouraged from seeing doctors if they have to pay the full charge, rather than simply a copayment. This would be the exact opposite behavior that Obama Care was supposed to be encouraging.
• First -time insurance buyers via Obama Care may not realize they’re on the hook for additional costs before insurance and benefits kick in, having chosen a plan based solely on the lower monthly premiums.
• In seven major U.S. cities, half of Obama Care’s bronze plans on require policyholders meet the entire deductible before insurers help with the cost of a simple doctor visit, according to an analysis by eHealthinsurance.com, a private online marketplace, for Kaiser Health News. 
• A typical office visit can run $65 to $85, while more complex visits can cost more.

Thus, people are going to see higher monthly premiums, higher deductible levels, and delays in seeing any benefit of their Obama Care policy until they have paid out thousands of dollars in their own cash for any medical care. How does this reduce the cost of medical care int his country, an severely broken promise of the President?

2) Consider the following recent video news headlines regarding Obama Care and the human stories behind the numbers and agony of Obama Care‘s failures:

New York Woman’s Medical Care Delayed And Insurance Cancelled Due To ObamaCare Broken Promises

WWLP-MA: New ObamaCare Taxes Are Bringing Higher Costs To Massachusetts Residents

Faces of Obamacare WBOY-WV: 18,000 West Virginians Forced To Enroll In ObamaCare Again Due To Website Glitch

Oregon Mom Can’t Afford Health Coverage From ObamaCare

ObamaCare’s Taxes Are Hiking Costs For Small Business Owners

The actual videos of their heartbreaking stories can be accessed at:

http://obamacosts.gop.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=obamacosts

3) A Washington Examiner article from January 3, 2014 pointed out the next likely huge failure of Obama Care. One of the original Obama Care promises was that the legislation would reduce the amount of visits, time, and costs for medical treatments that go through hospital emergency rooms. The faulty reasoning is that if previously uninsured Americans now had health insurance via Medicaid, they would be much less likely to us emergency rooms.

But if the writers had done their homework and a little research beforehand, they would have realized how inane this assumption would turn out to be:

• According to the article and a just-released results of a new study published in the Journal Science, based on 10,000 low-income residents in Oregon newly covered by Medicaid, emergency room visits were actually 40% higher than those with no insurance at all and no access to Medicaid.
• Supposedly, a big driver of our high expenditures in ever increasing health care costs has been due to those people without insurance going to emergency rooms.
• According to this study, increased ER visits as result of expanded Medicaid coverage increased spending by $120 per covered individual.

The article points out that several factors could be at work here.

• Being covered by Medicaid does not necessarily increase the chances of getting personal care in a private office since many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients and the related payment schedules. Thus, this may be another Obama Care example of people having healthy care insurance but who cannot get health care medical attention.
• Another factor might be that behavior is driven by cultural experience. Anyone who understands the culture of low-income Americans who do not have experience with health insurance, knows that these are not communities where health care is associated with private physician visits. It is associated with emergency rooms and hospitals.
• It may well be that as more lower-income individuals get under the Medicaid umbrella, they simply feel even more comfortable doing what they always have done — going to the emergency room.

Thus, rather than putting the fire out, i.e. reducing the costs and visits associated with hospital emergency rooms, Obama Care may actually be throwing gas on the fire by adding to the emergency room usage crisis. Just another bad, unintended consequence of a bad piece of legislation.

4) Let’s look at another real life example of how Obama Care is crushing Americans finances and health care insruance coverage using an NBC news report about a car delaership in Michigan, a classic American small business that President Obama was likely referring to in this quote from june 22, 2010: 

“This law will cut costs and make coverage more affordable for families and small businesses.“

In reality, at least for the Michigan car dealership, not so much, just another broken Obama promise. Highlights of the NBC story include the following points:

• The car dealership had its current employee health insurance policy canceled directly as a result of the Obama Care legislation, a policy and benefit the dealership had provided to its employees for 35 years.
• The car dealership owner decide at that point to give every employee a lump sum payment of $2,400 to each employee so they could individually purchase insurance. On their own. This increase his business costs from the previous year under the old insurance policy, rebutting the President’s assertion that Obama Care would reduce small business costs.
• These additional costs prevent him, like any other business owner, from expanding his business, hiring more employees, taking better care, financially, of current employees, all actions that would help grow the economy.
• As a further courtesy and help to his employees, he brought in a professional insurance broker to help his employees get on a group health insurance plan.
• The best group plan that the broker could develop did benefit a small minority of the dealership’s employees by getting them lower costs.
• However, for the vast majority if employees, relative to the previous plan that Obama Care killed off, deductibles are rising from $1,125 to $3,000, out of pocket costs went from $2,250 to $6,350, family deductibles jump from $6,000 to $12,700.
• During a company meeting to discuss employee benefits and health insurance, one employee asked: “How is this helping the average American that works 40 to 50 hours a week? How are we supposed to live?”
• Another employee is quote in the piece stating: “There’s nothing wrong with trying to help people, but there’s a better way. This isn’t the way.”

There has to be a better way, truer words about Obama Care have never been spoken. The original TV piece that NBC aired can be accessed at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/01/106283-video-watch-obamacare-actually-affecting-small-businesses-employees/

This is what happens when inept politicians that do not understand the root causes of a problem pass a piece of legislation that most did not read which was written by insurance company interests and which runs a mind boggling two thousands plus pages long. Americans and their families suffering, economic growth being stunted, and the original problems made worse, not better. The trifecta of incompetence that unfortunately, continues tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 8: More Americans Losing Coverage, Congressional Greed and Entitlement, and More

Over the past week and months we have been reviewing and documenting the many disasters of Obama Care. Frankly, we are getting tired and depressed of doing so, the legislation is that bad. Thus, today and tomorrow we will wrap up the latest fiascos and move onto to other political class insanity and lunacy. We will come back to Obama Care failures in December but really need a break from the mounting bad news.

1) I love hearing Nancy Pelosi speak since she is obviously in a different reality than me, one that seems quite interesting. The official White House/Federal government numbers on how many people signed up for Obama care policies in the Federal and all of the state health insurance exchanges since October 1 were released late last week.

The Federal government exchange, which covers about two thirds of the states, has signed up less than 27,000 Americans so far. All of the exchanges have signed up just over 106,000 Americans. These are Obama administration official numbers. Given the administration penchant for lying, one could question if these are actually correct but that is a discussion for another day. These are the official government numbers.

Except in Nancy Pelosi’s word, given that on her official Twitter account, she claims that half a million Americans have already signed up, five times more than what Obama claims, as we see from this Tweet from her account:

*****************************

Nancy Pelosi ✔ @NancyPelosi Follow

FACT: Despite website glitches, ≈1m have applied and are eligible to #getcovered on #ACA marketplaces. 500,000 have already secured coverage

4:40 PM - 13 Nov 2013

226 Retweets 80 favorites
****************************

You have got to love it when someone like her cannot even get elementary numbers right.

By the way, at this rate, by the end of the enrollment period at the end of March, 2014, less than 700,000 people would have enrolled, far short of the 7 million the legislation needs to be feasible and considered a success. In addition, the 7,000,000 target does not take into account the millions of Americans who have already LOST their health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care, an estimate that lies somewhere between 3.5 million and over 5.0 million, depending on the source.

2) How about we introduce a little levity into this deadly serious fiasco? The following video clip has been adjusted dozens of times on the Internet to cover all kinds of different situations. For example, it was used to explain to Adolph Hitler how the New England Patriots were upset by the New York Giants in the Super Bowl.

Some clever person has adapted the same clip for simulating what would have happened if Adolph Hitler had lost his health insurance coverage under Obama Care. It touches on just about every sub-tragedy that has unfolded under Obama Care so it provides a nice, satirical and funny summary of what has happened to millions of Americans already:

http://conservativevideos.com/2013/11/angry-hitlers-health-insurance-gets-cancelled-obamacare/

3) In my opinion, NBC News has been the most Obama-friendly news source since day one of his administration. Many times it looks like it is nothing more than extensions of the Presdient’s public relations department. Thus, when NBC News accuses the President of lying, you know it is bad. Consider an article from NBC News from October 29, 2013 on how the President constantly told Americans that they would be able to keep their current health care insurance policy and doctors under Obama Care but in reality, the administration knew three years ago that millions and millions of Americans would not be able to keep their policies and doctors.

As reported by NBC correspondents Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye of NBC News:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.” 

Disgusting deceptions and lies, pathetic leadership, patriotism, and compassion for humanity.

4) A CBS News poll from late October relative the Obama Care rollout found the following results:

• Only 12 percent of Americans think the Obama Care rollout is going well. 
• 49 percent said it's not going well 
• 38 percent had no opinion. 
• More Americans disapprove of Obama Care (51 percent) than approve of it (43 percent). 

Note that this poll was taken before we found out about the lying and the millions of Americans who were losing their insurance policies and doctors access as a result of the charades, lies, and deceptions. More current results are probably worse from an Obama administration perspective.

The real question from this survey is who are the 12% who think things are going well? Are they all insurance executives who are seeing their companies’ stock prices go through the roof?

5) The Associated Press confirmed in a November 12, 2013 article that 1,000,000 Californians have now been sent health insurance cancellation notices as a result of the tents of Obama Care. Thus, about ten times more people have lost their health insurance in just one state as a result of Obama Care than have signed up for Obama Care polices in all 50 states. Not a recipe for success.

6) In late October, 2013, Congressman Charles Rangel was asked if members of Congress, who make $174,000 a year should be allowed to get almost $11,000 a year in subsidies to help pay for their Obama Care insurance. He said yes, “no question,” since that should be considered part of the overall compensation and benefits plan of Congressional members, wrongly claming that this would be consistent with what is going on in the private sector.

Unfortunately, as he usually is, the Congressman is basically wrong. Ordinary Americans who earn $174,000 per year would have to have at least nine dependent children to qualify for the same level of subsidy if they bought insurance in the Obama Care exchanges. Thus, while the Congressman is technically correct, I would bet that very few members of Congress have nine dependent children, the only criteria that would justify $174,000 a year politicians getting another $11,000 or so to cover their health care expense.

7) Consider a quote from the head of Health And Human Services and person in charge of the Obama care rollout, Kathleen Sebelius, when interviewed in late October on CNN:

"What I know, though, is that lots of people, and people I talk to every day, are not tech-savvy, want a live human being to sit and answer questions, want to talk to someone over the phone, want to talk with their friends and neighbors about what heath care providers are in the network and go back and ask some questions." Sebelius said.

"So we anticipated at the outset that everyone would never use the website."

Everyone would never use the website? Huh? Then why did the American taxpayer pay over $600 million for a website that does not work if everyone would never use it? She went on to say in the interview that the $600 million failed website was just a tool for “tech savvy” Americans to use. Again, $600 million spent on a tool for only the tech savvy? What a disaster.

8) Kaiser Health News on October 21, 2012 reported on some of the localized carnage from Obama Care and how it was causing hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their current, preferred health care insurance in just three geographic areas:

• Florida Blue is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. 
• Kaiser Permanente in California has sent termination notices to 160,000 people , about half of its individual business in the state. 
• Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent. 

That is enough for today. Just more Americans getting screwed out of their preferred health care and insurance situation because of lies and deceit from the White House and Congress, another politician thinking how he and his peers are entitled to more and more taxpayer wealth regardless of how badly they screwed up the health insurance industry for millions of Americans, and the approval rating of the legislation continues to sink further into negative territory. More bad news tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w