April, 2016, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Crae: INsurance Company Jitters and Massive Co-op Failures

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.

Today we will start reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Peter Sullivan, writing for The Hill on April 15, 2016, reviewed how some of the major insurers of Obama Care policies are warning that they may pull out of the program, given how unprofitable the policies are for them. Details of his article include the following realities:

• Larry Levitt, a health law expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation is quoted as saying: “Something has to give. Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”
• Unless more healthy and younger people sign up for Obama Care, there is likely to be a need for the insurance companies involved to push for big rates hikes which will make it more unattractive for young people to sign up which leads to a death spiral of increasing costs and dwindling enrollment.
• Mark Bertolini, Aetna CEO, has already publicly stated that the Obama Care policyholders his company are getting are sicker and more costly than expected or forecasted.
• Levitt of Kaiser is on record predicting there will big Obama Care policy cost increases in 2017.
• Some insurance companies may opt to just get out of the Obama Care market rather than fight the continuous battle of annual rate increases.
• The biggest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealthCare, has already withdrawn from two state markets, Arkansas, and Georgia.
• CEO Brad Wilson of Blue Cross of North Carolina, recently stated that his company had lost $400 million due to its Obama Care business: “We're not alone, and I think that that also is evidence to suggest that there are systemic and fundamental challenges that we all need to have a civilized conversation about.”
• He implied that unless his company get the rate hikes they say they need in 2017 that his company might drop out also.
• The Centers For Medicare and Medicaid, which administers the Obama Care law, tried to downplay the North Carolina exit talk but that seems to be a denial of reality, based on the CEO’s public statements, lamely trying to blame the $400 million loss on the company’s computer problems.

Not good news for Obama Care, not when huge companies like Blue Cross and UnitedHealthCare are threatening to get out of the market after sustaining such huge losses. Given that nothing will likely happen to change the status quo of the Obama Care landscape, expect either big costs increases in 2017 for Obama Care policy holders, exits of companies from the Obama Care umbrella because of huge financial losses, or both. This is what a death spiral looks like, and it is very hard to stop a death spiral once it starts.

2) Guy Benson, writing for Townhall on April 15, 2016, also reviewed the death spiral scenario regarding insurer financial losses vs. the need to exit or increase insurance rates:

• The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association released a report in March, 2016 that showed that new enrollees of Obama Care policies had 22% higher medical costs than people that got their insurance coverage from employees, which obviously places financial pressure on the insurance companies offering Obama Care policies.
• According to a report from McKinsey, at the state level Obama Care marketplaces, insurance companies lost money in 41 states and were profitable in only 9 states.

Not a long term sign of hope when sicker people have been using Obama Care policies, resulting in bad financial results in over 80% of the states. Mr. Benson gives a good description of what the Obama Care death spiral will look like: “The "death spiral" begins churning downward when young, healthy people decline to sign up for expensive plans, leaving older, sicker consumers as a disproportionate percentage of health market risk pools. When insurers incur additional losses as a result, they try to compensate by raising rates further (or withdraw from the marketplaces altogether), driving even more of the "desired" consumers away. The problem compounds itself until the risk pools collapse. Given Obamacare's the worse than expected enrollment figures and much-discussed warnings from major insurers, a slow death spiral is by no means out of the question.” 

Probably going to get much worse before it gets a smidgen better, if ever.

3) Richard Pollard, writing for the Daily Caller on April 10, 2016, summarized the current very shaky financial situation of the remaining 11 Obama Care co-ops. Recall from previous posts that Obama Care co-ops were established by the legislation to provide a competitive balance of insurance options in areas of the country that did not have a lot of private insurance competition. The idea was to provide a government funded counterbalance to the scarcity of other insurance competitors.

But readers of this blog know that of the original 23 co-ops established with taxpayer money, 12 of them have already gone bankrupt and out of business. Some of them are under law enforcement investigation for breaking laws. They have been a disaster from day one. As each one has closed, it has created a situation where thousands and thousands of co-op Obama Care insurance policy holders have had to scramble to find replacement insurance and they have wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

And the situation is not much better now for the remaining Obama Care co-ops. Mr. Pollard’s article takes an educated guess at which of the remaining 11 co-ops are viable long term, concluding that upwards of 8 of them are about to collapse themselves due to poor financial results:

• Mr. Pollard starts off with a quote from Thomas P. Miller, senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and former senior health economist for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee: “In general, there’s not a turnaround in sight. The same problems that plagued them before are continuing.” 
• The New York co-op, that has already failed, will leave hospitals and doctors with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
• The Daily Caller analyzed the annual financial reports of all remaining 11 co-ops and predict that 8 of them will be out of business by the end of 2016.
• Their analysis seems right given that the Federal government does admit that 8 unnamed co-ops are being analyzed and watched closely by the Federal government.
• The remaining co-ops with the most losses in 2015 were in Massachusetts, Oregon, Ohio, Connecticut, Montana, Wisconsin, Illinois and New Mexico. 
• Each of these 8 used up 50% of their assets already, assets that were supposed to last for 20 years under the Federal government rules for being funded.
• The Oregon co-op was founded by Sara Horowitz, a long-time New York Democrat political activist and former colleague of President Barack Obama, and in 2015 it somehow had financial operating losses that were greater than all of its assets, not an easy financial failure to accomplish.
• Despite being in desperate financial or bankrupt shape, many of the co-ops paid their executives very well.
• In 2015, the Illinois co-op had assets of $107 but had a net operating loss of $91 million despite paying its CEO almost half a million dollars and another executive almost a million dollars.
• The Connecticut co-op had $112 million in assets but almost half of that worth ($55 million) in net operating losses in 2015, but paid seven executives at least $200,000 each in compensation.
• The Connecticut co-op was supposed to enroll 25,000 customers but ended up enrolling less than 8,000.
• The Massachusetts co-op also did horribly on enrollments, enrolling only 14,000 vs. an expected enrollment of 40,000.
• The Montana co-op in 2014 had $67 million in assets but suffered net income losses of $41 million.
• The Ohio co-op reported that in 2015, its assets were $108 million but net losses last year topped $79 million.
• Wisconsin’s co-op had $37 million in losses in 2014, about half of its $74 million in total assets.
• New Mexico’s co-op had $61 million in assets and a net loss of $23 million.
• Maryland’s co-op saw its original assets of $65 million shrink to $37 million in 2015 and net cash available was negative $5.5 million.
• While the Maine co-op was the only one to operate in the black last year, it still lost about 40% of its asset base in doing so. 

What a mess. Poor management, poor enrollment forecasts, corruption, overpaid executives, financial waste, and worst of all, probably over $2 billion in taxpayer wealth that will never be seen again with little to show in return. But that is the story of the Obama Care legislation, a lot of expense with little to show in return except failing co-ops, failing state exchanges, missed enrollment forecasts, rising premiums, rising deductibles, rising co-pays, insurance company negative results, and a whole lot more unfolding disasters.

Unfortunately, there will be more of the same in tomorrow’s post.

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:

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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.

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May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care Update, Part 1:

Unfortunately, its that time of month again where we need to review the latest fiascos and disasters coming out as a result of Obama Care. Over the past few years, but especially since last August, we have been reviewing what is turning out to be the worst piece of legislation ever to be enacted by Washington. It is a law that is increasing rather than decreasing health care costs across the country, restricting our freedom and liberties, and failing miserably to get more Americans health care insurance.

The biggest failure of all is that the writers and supporters of this legislation never understood the true root causes of our ever escalating health care costs. By never understanding the root causes, their legislative efforts had little chance of actually eliminating the root causes. Instead, we are stuck with a Rube Goldberg like health insurance contraption that has little chance of fulfilling the President’s solemn vow that the average American household would see an annual $2,500 reduction in their health insurance costs.

The dozens of disasters we have previously reviewed can be seen by looking at past month’s posts or searching for the phrase, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. Of particular timeliness is the multiple monthly posts we have had to do since last August. We have proposed our simple, root cause based solution to our nation’s health care problem in previous posts and will not be reviewing them again in this series, that solution can be viewed in past posts. This week we will be blitzing through what is another sad list of failures from this legislation.

1) The Obama administration took a victory lap back in early April when they claimed that about 8 million Americans had signed up for Obama Care, claiming this proved that the law was a success. However, we have also covered the fact that reputable sources have shown that five to six million Americans LOST their current health care coverage as a result of Obama Care. Thus, the net gain due to Obama Care is not eight million but just around two to three million when you take out those Americans who lost insurance coverage.

But that is old news. The new news is the world renowned consulting group McKinsey did an analysis of Obama Care enrollees and found that only 25% of the enrollees had previously been uncovered for health care insurance. Thus, there were not eight million newly insured Americans under the program, only two million newly insured, 25% of eight million. 

Thus, billions and billions of dollars were spent only to get two million uninsured Americans insured, leaving about another 48 million uninsured. At this rate, it will take far more than two decades to get the primary objective of Obama Care fulfilled, hardly a success by any stretch of the imagination.

2) The LA Times recently ran an article that points out how the Obama administration is trying to manipulate the law to keep everything together as just about everything is coming apart. The Times article pointed out that an impending illegal Obama Care bailout is in the works for heath insurance companies across the country.

The Times found and reported on how a little noticed HHS regulation issued May 16 opened the door for the Department of Health and Human Services, and the American taxpayer, to spend billions of taxpayer dollars bailing out health insurance companies through Obama Care's "risk corridor" program. According to the text and intent of the law, the risk corridor programs were supposed to be revenue neutral for the Federal government and the American taxpayer. It was supposed to be funded by the insurance industry itself and the funds would be used to make up profit shortfalls of member companies relative to Obama Care.

But as the results of the Obama Care enrollees profile analyses became clearer, insurance industry lobbyists started doing their thing in Washington relative to the self imposed caps on the risk corridors' funds. Their lobbyist group in Washington, America's Health Insurance Plans, sent a letter to the Obama Care people in the government which demanded that, "risk corridors should be operated without the constraint of budget neutrality." 

In other words, the insurance lobby wanted a guarantee that if Obama Care's losers needed more money out of the risk corridor program than Obama Care's winners were paying in, that U.S. taxpayers would be forced to pay the difference. 

And that is what the HHS people did last week, according to the LA Times, putting the American taxpayer on the hook for another big industry bailout, not unlike the bailouts of General Motors, AIG, mortgage brokers, banks, etc. You cannot say this program was a success if billions of dollars are illegally paid out to some of the biggest companies in the country to cover their loses in a program they freely signed up for themselves.

3) The law was written so that if you are an Obama Care policy holder and your income falls below a certain level, the Federal government, via the American taxpayer, will pay you a subsidy to help pay for your Obama Care premiums. However, according to a recent Washington Post article, the Obama administration never built the necessary software that tie IRS records to the Obama Care subsidies data systems. 

This foul up exists even though the Obama administration had promised Republicans in Congress that it would be up and running in time so that the American taxpayer would not get screwed in paying too much out in subsidies. Thus, according to the Post, there is likely to be a lot of financial shock next year when Obama Care policy holders file their income tax. 

They will find out that as a result of the Obama Care income software having never been built and used, they received too large of a subsidy, requiring them to pay more in taxes next April. The Heritage Foundation recently discussed a study which estimated that up to 38% of Obama Care enrollees will see an incremental tax hit when they file their income tax returns.

How many Obama Care policy holders do we think will cancel their program next year when the find out that they are not entitled to as much financial help as the Obama Care effort promised them? That eight million claimed enrollees might take a mighty big step backwards next April.

4) We have previously reported on how hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands by now, of companies and other types of organizations have had to cut back hiring, cut employee hours, and cut down the size of their staffs as a result of Obama Care, all of which is killing the chance for decent economic growth in this country.

And the downsizing pain is not over. A Des Moines, Iowa NBC affiliate recently reported that Mercy Medical Center, a hospital in Des Moines, will have to lay off 29 staff people, a cut that is being partly attributed Obama Care, according to Bob Ritz, president of Mercy Medical Center: “As the federal government and state payment systems continue to ratchet down on what they pay us and our costs go up, we have to look for opportunities to create cost efficiencies. And one way you do that is you reduce your management costs. So if we have a department that has a director and a manager and two supervisors for let’s say 75 staff, we may remove one of those positions to what we say are the layers of management.”

Just a another few dozen people who likely lost their careers and futures as a result of this dysfunctional law.

5) We will finish up today with a quote from my favorite politician, Nancy Pelosi. She is not my favorite because of what she does for America but what she does for blog writers everywhere, speaking up on topics where it becomes obvious she lives in different reality vs. most Americans. She is constantly spouting off numbers and results that are not real and not true with little understanding of what she is saying, at least in our world and reality.

Her latest out of this world observation goes as follows: “So what this legislation has done is it will save a trillion dollars over the lifetime of the bill, and it will — it will reduce costs for people. And even if they pay a little more in some cases, they’re getting much better care.”

Couple of problems, Ms. Pelosi:

1. The Congressional Budget Office now puts the cost of Obama Care over the next ten years at comfortably above $2 TILLION in costs, not a TRILLION dollars in savings.
2. It will not reduce costs for the majority of Americans. The professional group representing insurance actuaries have already shown that health care premium and deductible costs as a result of Obama Care will go up, and up substantially, in 45 states and decrease or stay the same in only five states
3. They are not paying a “little more” in some states, they are paying a lot more.
4. And finally, they are not getting better care. The Obama Care policies they are stuck with has a highly restricted set of doctors and hospitals allowed under the terms of Obama Care policies, so that they are not getting better care, especially when you recall that many of the best hospitals and clinics in the country, e.g. Sloan Kettering in New York, are NOT included in Obama Care policies’ coverage.

It just amazes me that one person so intimately involved in the nation’s political business can be so out of touch with the reality of Americans’ lives and the unintended consequences of her legislative efforts. I still wonder what the color of the sky is in her world.

That will do it for today but rest assured plenty more disasters will be put forth in the course of the next week or so.

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

March, 2014, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 5: Missing Every Target Imaginable, The First Insurer Bailout Is On Record and More

This is the fifth post this month relative to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care, as we slog our way through the never ending nightmares that this legislation spawns. The first in this month’s update can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/03/march-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

Today’s disasters start now:

1) Theoretically, if you do not have health insurance coverage by the end of this month, you are supposed to pay a fine for being so negligent of Obama Care’s tenets and PR campaign. As we discussed earlier this week, this is really a shadow/faux deadline since the President recently, unilaterally, and un-Constitutionally decided that if you have any kind of self-determined “hardship” you can exempt yourself from this requirement. 

This is a new concept in government, self exempting yourself from a Federal law without proof. When we first reviewed this idiotic action by the President, we fantazied of exempting ourselves from other Federal laws, specifically the law that requires me to pay Federal income tax. I doubt the President would allow me to flaunt that law even though he is flaunting his own pet piece of legislation and the tenets it laid down.

However, the penalty is still on the books and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that from 2015 to 2024, the mandate penalty, which the Supreme Court ruled is essentially a tax, could cost Americans upwards of $51 billion. The irony and hypocrisy here is another broken promise/lie that came directly from the President’s mouth: the Obama Care legislation promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. Another promise broken because you can bet that the vast majority of people that end up paying this penalty, or tax, will come from the middle class and lower class.

Adding insult to injury, this administration thinks we are too stupid to realize this is another Federal tax. In pure Orwellian, and “1984” misspeak, the administration does not call this a tax, they call it the “shared responsibility payment.” If it smells like a tax, the Supreme Court calls it a tax, if it hurts to pay it like a tax, it is still a tax. 

2) How many times over the past three years did the President utter these words or similar words:

“No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.”

This turned out to be one of the President’s biggest lies or deceptions. Millions of Americans have lost access to their current and preferred health insurance policies, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals, all as a result of Obama Care. White House and other government documents prove that this administration and the writers of the legislation knew that tens of millions of Americans would lose access to their current health insurance and medical situations years ago but said nothing. Or even worse, lied about the reality.

But in the second example of showing how stupid this administration thinks we are, one of their favorite press representatives, Dan Pfeiffer, was recently on Meet the Press where he insisted that Obama Care was not causing millions of Americans to lose access to their doctors. It was the health insurance companies that were causing the lost access. 

Come oneMr. Pfeiffer, never in the history of the country have millions of Americans lost access to their preferred doctors in such a short time. Is it just a coincidence that the first time happened as Obama Care rolled out and that Obama Care had nothing to do with it? 

Please, do not insult our intelligence with such idiocy. If you are going to lie, at least make it believable whether it is lying about lost doctor access or telling us a tax is not a tax. Your lack of creativity in you PR deceptions are boring and insulting to us. 

3) On March 13, 2014, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the House of Representatives Ways and Means committee that nobody knows how many Obama Care enrollees have actually paid their Obama Care health insurance premium bills. Yes, in another epic screw up by the people that put the information systems specs together for Obama Care, no one seemed to think that actually counting the number of people that actually sign up for and pay forObama Care policies was important.

But as always, Kathleen Sebelius, the point person in this administration on operationalizing Obama Care had a lame excuse: “People are buying a product in the private market. As soon as we have accurate information, we will give it to you. But we do not currently have information about how many people have paid.”

Unbelievable that they do not have any way to count how successful or unsuccessful they are. As we discussed previously, can you imagine the Chairman of Amazon going to his Board of Directors and telling them that he knows how many people put products in their Amazon virtual shopping cart but he has no idea how many of those items in the shopping cart were actually paid for. He would be fired on the spot for incompetence.

The administration does think it knows that 4.2 million Americans have signed up for Obama Care insurance policies through the health insurance exchanges. But they do not know 1) how many of them were previously uninsured, 2) how many of them were younger and healthier, a requirement for the Obama Care financial model to work, and 3) we now know they have no clue how many have actually paid for their Obama Care policies. These are basic data collection processes that should have been primary specs in the website development. 

The bad news for the administration and the legislation is that a recent Mckinsey survey found out three things:

1. The percentage of people signing up for Obama Care policies that are younger and likely healthier (27%) is substantially below the threshold (40%) the administration says it needs for the legislation to be financially viable = bad news.
2. Of people signing up for Obama Care policies in the survey, only 27% of them were previously uninsured which implies that Obama Care is doing a bad job of hitting its target market (the previously uninsured) = bad news
3. The percentage of people in the survey who said they signed up for Obama Care policies AND were previously uninsured (27%) AND have paid for those policies was 13%, implying that less than half of those that signed up for Obama Care insurance policies actually followed through and actually paid for them = bad news.

If these survey estimates are valid, and given the high quality reputation of McKinsey as a consulting and marketing firm they probably are close to reality, this says that quite possibly less than half of the 4.2 million people that have signed up for Obama Care policies have actually followed through and purchased those policies. 

This puts the real number of Obama Care insured Americans not at 4.2 million or so but closer to about 2 million or so, far short of their 7 million goal by March 31, 2014.

5) And the McKinsey estimates might indeed be true, based on some early real life experiences of a major health care insurer. Kentucky base Humana insurance has indicated that it will ask for a payment of $450 million out of the Obama Care insurer back up fund to cover losses it anticipates on Obama Care policy holders.

It seems that Humana is already realizing that the Obama Care effort is severely missing its target mix of customers, not providing enough younger, healthier customers to offset the higher percentage of generally older and sicker customers coming across from the Obama Care health exchanges. 

Thus, it looks like McKinsey is right on this point and if they are right on the other points, Obama Care is not hitting its target market, its target enrollment estimate, and its target mix. In baseball that’s three strikes….and you’re out.

And we are out for today. More disasters to review, at least through 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

March, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 3: Endangering American Lives, Endangering Democracy, and More

This is our third in a continuing series this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been doing multiple posts every month since last August, posts needed to cover the massive insanity, ineptness, and idiocy of this horrible piece of legislation. The first post in this month’s series can be seen at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/03/march-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

Previous months’ reviews and discussions can be accessed from the menu on the right side of this page. 

1) We have made the prediction, a prediction that we did not want to make, that Obama Care will end up killing people that would not have died if the legislation had not been passed. We previously discussed the plight of Emilie Lamb whose previous health insurance paid for the expensive medicine she needed to cope with a dangerous medical condition. That insurance policy was cancelled as a result of Obama Care. 

This resulted in her losing medical coverage and financial support for the medicine she needed for her condition. Her new Obama Care approved health insurance does not cover the medicine she needs like her previous, preferred policy did. As a result, she now needs to work a second job just to pay for the medicine she needs to stay alive. 

On March 11, 2014, the Washington Free Beacon reported on a more recent story of heartbreak on an American family as a result of Obama Care. An Oklahoma man is facing over $100,000 in hospital bills because Obama Care caused him to lose health insurance coverage.

Lenny Hubbs is a self-employed contractor who was previously covered for health insurance on his wife’s health insurance plan. Her employer determined that his employees would no longer be allowed to pay for their spouses’ premiums and insurance coverage on his company’s health insurance plan, a decision driven by the tenets and financial burdens of Obama Care.

After doing their research, the Hubbs determined that they could not afford to purchase health insurance on their own for Mr. Hubbs. His wife told a local television station that good health insurance would have cost them $500 a month, which they couldn’t afford and that they do not qualify for Medicaid.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hubbs suddenly became sick about two weeks ago. His doctors told him his lungs were filling with blood and diagnosed him with pneumonia. He ended up going to two hospitals to seek treatment. 

The Hubbs are alleging that as a result of not having health insurance, he did not receive proper treatment at either hospital because they were uninsured. Tragically, he had to have part of his lung removed and the Hubbs are now looking at upwards of $100,000 in hospital bills.

I’m sorry, you will never convince me that Obama Care is a good piece of legislation when it causes such unnecessary and tragic consequences for Americans like Emilee Lamb and Lenny Hubbs. Their suffering and hardships were easily predictable ahead of time by anyone who understood what the legislation did. And still no one in the political class gave a damn what happened to individual Americans as long as they gained their selfish political victories. Despicable.

The video describing the Hubbs' ordeal can be accessed at:

http://webmail.c.earthlink.net/wam/msg.jsp?msgid=54908&folder=INBOX&isSeen=false&x=1345925325

2) Consider some grim recent research findings from McKinsey & Company:

• A survey they fielded found that only 27% of people joining the Obama Care health exchanges were previously uninsured through February. Thus, the primary target market and purpose of Obama Care, to get health insurance for EVERY uninsured American, is not being close to being met if only about one person in four signing up for Obama Care policies did not previously have health insurance.
• The survey also found that about half of people who shopped for a plan but did not enroll said premiums were too expensive. Remember, Obama promised that health insurance costs for the average American family would go down by thousands of dollars a year, not end up having premiums that were too expensive for many American families to afford.
• Even worse, 80% of the people who said that Obama Care premiums were too expensive actually qualify for Federal government subsidies under Obama Care. 

Thus, a large share of the people Obama Care was specifically supposed to help say it is a bad financial value. Missed that target market by a long shot. Pathetic.

3) Many times this President has violated the rule of law and the Constitution by unilaterally changing dates and rollouts of Obama Care schedules and programs. As we touched on briefly two days ago, last week he did it again. He secretly, almost silently, and un-Constitutionally decided that every American can be exempted from the so-called Obama Care individual insurance mandate if they want to.

That’s right, if you do not want to follow the Obama Care’s lawful requirement that all Americans have to get health insurance, you can ignore the law for two years, into 2016. Nowhere in the legislation does it grant the President to do such a delay but he seems to think he can do it anyway. 

We said he did it secretly because he never announced it via a press release or a news conference or a media interview. We said he did it almost silently since he buried this unlawful and un-Constitutional action deep inside an obscure rule that dealt with Obama Care insurance requirements. So much for his “transparency” pledge when he was running for President.

In order to escape from the insurance mandate requirement, you have to fill out a government form and attest that you find the individual mandate to be a financial or other type of “hardship.” You do not have to prove it is a hardship, just have to state it is a hardship and you are exempted. But just about anyone could fall into this self reported category if they wanted to.

Too bad we cannot do this type of self exemption from all Federal laws. Personally, I would exempt myself from the Federal income tax law, freeing up my money to be used for my family and my priorities and not be wasted by the Washington political class.

Two really pathetic aspects of this action:

• First, it is illegal and un-Constitutional. The President is charged with executing the laws that have been enacted as they were written and enacted. He does not get to treat laws as merely suggestions that he can chose to follow or ignore or change at his whim. They are laws, not suggestions.
• Second, the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that the White House claimed at the Supreme Court hearings that the Obama Care individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law’s success. Therefore, if the President continues to delay the insurance mandate for years into the future, does that make the law and legislation null and void? You cannot have it both ways, it is either indispensable or it is a trivial matter that can be unilaterally delayed. And if it is a trivial matter that can be delayed, does that void the Supreme Court decision and argument that it was Constitutional? 

The lawlessness of the President’s actions sets a tremendously bad precedent for the future. If he is allowed to get away with this type of behavior, what is to prevent future Presidents from doing the same types of things, using laws merely as suggestions and not requirements? At that point you are no longer living in a democracy, you are living in a dictatorship.

That will do it for today: a piece of Federal legislation that is coming close to killing Americans and placing tremendous and unnecessary financial burdens on them, a piece of Federal legislation that is coming nowhere close to attaining its objectives in being affordable and signing up people who were previously uninsured, and a piece of Federal legislation that the President is using to undermine the rule of law in this country, both relative to Obama Care and every other law in the land.

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

Ignorance, Lying, and The Growing Nonsense Of Obama Care

Many times in this blog we have reviewed the many facets of Obama Care and always come up with the same conclusion: this is one of the worse pieces of legislation ever passed and signed into law. The creators of the legislation never understood the root causes of our ever skyrocketing health care costs. Without an understanding of the underlying problems, there is virtually no chance of developing and implementing a coherent and effective solution.

Before looking at the latest nonsense to come out about the law, let's reviews what some experts have said in the past:

- In a March 1, 2010 article in Fortune magazine, an interview of Dr. Delose Cosgrove, CEO of the renowned Cleveland Clinic, revealed the following knowledge, from a leading expert in healthcare:

• Obesity accounts for at least 10% of the health care costs in the United States.
• Smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise accounts for 40% of the premature deaths in this country.
• These same factors account for the 70% of the health care costs associated with chronic diseases such as heart disease in the United States.
• Smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise account for 75% of the nation's total health care costs.

Thus, according to an expert's view, the root causes driving our high health care costs are public health related questions: diet, exercise and smoking. Rather than attack these true causes of high costs with a public health care effort, Obama Care basically constructed a massive taxation process and bureaucracy that adds complexity and taxation without solving the underlying causes.

Need more, consider the findings from the National Academy of Sciences, an independent Federal agency:

• The United States spends more on health care per person than any other country in the world.
• Despite the high expenses, life expectancy in the U.S. is less than the life expectancies in many other developed countries.
• Smoking and obesity are the primary factors driving the lower life expectancy, and likely higher health care costs, in this country.

More of the same. Rather than address the cause, Obama Care tries to solve the problem administratively.

But the latest research paints an even worse picture. Remember, one of the primary avowed objectives of Obama Care was to reduce the number of uninsured Americans in the United States, estimated to be between 30 and 40 million Americans. However, if you consider the following expert analyses, the legislation will fall far short of this objective also. 

According to a recent study by the McKinsey Consulting Group, as published in their publication, McKinsey Quarterly, 30% of the American companies surveyed by McKinsey said they would drop their employee health care plans because under Obama Care, it is a better business decision to not carry a health care insurance program and pay the small fine than it is to continue operating a health care insurance program.

The companies in the McKinsey survey's 30% said that even if they raised wages to compensate for dropping their healthcare plan, it would still be less expensive for the companies under Obama Care.

Mr. Douglas Holtz-Eakin is an economist and the former director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). He is obviously someone with some valid credentials to examine Obama Care. He did so in a recent analysis and report that was published by the American Action Forum. His results and findings are damning to the legislation:

• According to his analysis, Obama Care "is fiscally dangerous, raising the risk of higher labor (and other) taxes at a time when the job market is struggling."
• The legislation's weak fine system provides a strong incentive for companies to stop offering their employees and retirees health care insurance coverage.
• This could result in 35 million Americans, who are covered by employer provided health care insurance, being left without health care insurance.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimated, badly, that only 3 million individuals who previously received coverage through their employers will get subsidized coverage through the Obama Care insurance exchanges. Thus, they are off a factor of twelve in their forecast.
• By tossing 35 million more Americans into the uninsured pool, Federal subsidies will increase by over a TRILLION dollars in ten years, wiping out any perceived or touted savings Obama Care was supposed to bring to the national debt.
• Obama Care will have the greatest impact from a marginal tax rate perspective on the lowest earning workers in the country.
• The analysis reviewed individual company feelings towards Obama Care, noting that Caterpillar is on record of saying that Obama Care would reduce their employee health care costs by 70% if they dropped their employee and retiree insurance programs. AT&T has said it's annual health care insurance costs would drop from $2.4 billion to only $600 million since it would be far less expensive to drop their insurance program and pay the fine for not having one.

Great, a piece of legislation that is supposed to reduce the number of Americans without health care insurance will likely increase the number of Americans without health care insurance by tens of millions of people. These analyses were not done by Republicans or Tea Party advocates. McKinsey is a highly respected corporate consulting firm with a long history of high powered analysis and Mr. Holtz-Eakin has the experience and education to back up his work.

Let's look at the numbers a slightly different way. Obama Care advocates claimed that upwards of 40 million Americans did not have health care insurance. But there are subsets within that 40 million. Some more affluent people could afford to buy insurance but decided not to since they feel they could cover health care costs with out of pocket cash as the need arose. Some of the 40 million were found  to be sons and daughters of the more affluent and knew that their parents could pay for their health care expenses. Some of the 40 million were older Americans who had not yet gotten around to signing up for Medicare.

Thus, even if you buy the 40 million number, the actual, truly needy Americans who did not have health care insurance, was substantially below 40 million, let's conservatively say it was 35 million. 35 million Americans out of a total population of of 311 million Americans is about 11%. Thus, in order to fix the problem for 11% of the population, we changed the world for upwards of 89% of Americans.

But wait! Out of the 89%, Obama Care is likely to result in another 35 million Americans losing their health care coverage. Ridiculous and nonsensical. How can anyone say this is good legislation?

Want more? According to the statistics in this past Sunday's St. Petersburg Times, there is another set of numbers out that show how stupid Obama Care is. The numbers were within a St. Petersburg Times article on how companies are trying to get their employees involved in exercise and other healthy activities. 

The statistics from the article claim that 15% of the population drives 85% of the nation's health care costs, 5% of the population drives 60% of the cost, and 25% of the population have no healthcare costs. Would it not have been a better strategy to focus on these small groups of Americans that cause the vast majority of health care costs and fix their problems rather than upsetting the entire health care system in the country? Nonsense again.

How simple could it be? Address the underlying drivers of high health care costs: obesity, bad diets, smoking, and lack of exercise. Understand who is the primary drivers of health care costs and resources and fix their problems. Instead, we get a cumbersome, complex, expensive, and incoherent 2,500 page piece of legislation that addresses none of the underlying problems  while destroying health care insurance for tens of millions.

Which brings us to the the other two topics in our title, ignorance and lying. President Obama stated over and over that Americans who currently had health care insurance through their company could keep it under  Obama Care. Was he that ignorant of reality to understand that if a company could save millions or billions of dollars by dropping health insurance that they would do so? Who came up with the measly fines that companies would pay if they dropped health care insurance? Could he and Pelsoi and Reid have been that ignorant of simple business principles?

Or was he lying? Did he actually understand that by passing Obama Care, tens of millions of Americans workers would lose health care insurance but lied about the likely outcome in order to get the legislation passed? Nonsense, lying or ignorant, hardly traits I would want in the President of the United States.

Much like the lost war on drugs, failing public education, the lack of an energy program, the lack of an immigration policy, and a myriad of other problems that have been unsolved for decades, the lack of problem solving skills of the American political class are on constant display. That is why the steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" that address these very problems and provide processes to solve them, along with changes to our entire political process, need to be implemented as soon as possible.

Like the brilliant Dean Wormer quote from the movie Animal House, "Fat, drunk, and and stupid is no way to go through life," I am getting tired of living the political class equivalent: "Ignorant, lying, and nonsensical is no way to run a country."



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