October, 2014 Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care: Less Competition, More Insurance Company Sleaze, and Heading For A Massive Court Defeat

Over the past few years, but especially over the past fourteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:

• It has and will continue to increase the national debt.
• It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now.
• It has restricted overall economic growth.
• It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways.
• It has reduced the job growth rate in this country.
• It has turned many full time workers into part time workers or into unemployed workers.
• It has generally increased the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed.
• The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people.
• The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the negative ramifications of the law.
• It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
• It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms.
• It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law.
• It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate any kind of successful program.
• It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves.
• It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.

I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. To see what disasters have popped up over just the past month or so, read on:

1) Richard Pollock wrote a recent article for the Washington Examiner where he showed that the smaller health insurance companies, those that have a relative small potion of the health insurance market, look to be getting out of or being driven out of the Obama Care exchanges.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently published some of its research which showed that in 40 states, the largest insurers either maintained or boosted their market share through the health exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. The GAO analysis is the first government analysis study which examined how competition within the health insurance market has been affected by Obama Care.

The study found that in 2012, consumers in the individual health insurance market on average could choose among 36 small-market company carriers in their state, each holding a market share of five percent of or less. However, by 2014 those same consumers could on average choose from only three insurers in their state exchanges, a decline of more than 90%.

Similarly, in the small-group/small business insurance market, at least 15 small-market carriers were available, on average, to consumers before Obama Care. But within the Obama Care exchanges, now only three insurance companies still competing on average.

Thus, let’s use some logic here. Before Obama Care stormed the market for health insurance across the country, premium and deductible costs were less and the number of competing insurers was more, probably a cause and effect relationship: more competition usually means lower consumer costs. 

Obama Care comes along, and the number of competitors dwindles while the cost of deductibles and premiums generally go up substantially across the country. Less competition usually means higher consumer costs, basic economics, something that is constantly lost on the American political class. And as always, when the political class acts out of ignorance, the American consumer pays more.

2) Charles Ornstein, writing for the ProPublica website on September 17, 2014, analyzed the many ways that insurance companies within the Obama Care tent are finding new and interesting ways to reduce their costs but endangering the financial and medical well being of Obama Care policy holders. My source of the story noted that his story was co-published with The New York Times’ column,  The Upshot.

A little background. Under the Obama Care legislation, health insurance companies are no longer allowed to deny coverage to any consumer with a pre-existing medical condition. Since these customers are likely to have more of a negative cost impact on the company, they are also likely to depress earnings of those insurance companies. Of course, Obama Care also required ALL Americans to have health insurance so those same insurance companies were willing to trade off some high cost customers, i.e. those with pre-existing conditions, to get millions and millions of new customers.

According to the article, in order to protect profitability, some health policy experts say health insurers may be pulling some subtle shenanigans to protect their profits by forcing customers with certain illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and epilepsy to pay more for their drugs. If potential customers with pre-existing conditions find out that a certain health insurance provider makes them pay a lot for their medicines, they might be more inclined to look elsewhere for their insurance coverage.

In this way the insurance company wins from a profitability perspective: they avoid high cost patients with high cost medical needs while still fulfilling their legal requirement to accept any and all potential consumers as customers. Very subtle, very profitable, very sleazy.

Wayne Turner, a staff lawyer for the National Health Law Program described the process: “It seems that the plans are trying to find this wiggle room to design their benefits to prevent people who have high health needs from enrolling.” In the article, Turner stated he feared a “race to the bottom,” in which plans don’t want to be seen as the most attractive for sick patients. “Plans do not want that reputation.”

The article also points to research showing that as medicine gets more expensive, customers are more likely not to take the medicine or to take the prescribed amount do to the high costs. Thus, the consumer gets screwed again by this legislation. Sick Americans who thought their prayers would be answered by the legislation are finding that the legislation gives them little protection from health insurance companies who still do not want them as customers. 

And as a result, this discourages these people from even applying for insurance, placing them right back where they were prior to the legislation being approved. Much ado about nothing.

3) In the midst of all these disasters, there is a much bigger issue that is working its way through the courts and whose fate could crash the entire Obama Care legislation. Some background:

• The legislation was written so that individual states could set up their own online Obama Care health insurance exchanges where each state’s citizens could obtain Obama Care insurance policies.
• But the states did not have to set up their own exchange process, they had the option of defaulting to the Federal government’s exchange.
• However, in order to entice the states to operate their own state level Obama Care exchange, the law made it crystal clear that only insurance policies obtained from a state exchange would come with the possibility of receiving Federal subsidies to pay for the premiums.
• Customers who got their Obama Care policy from the Federal exchange website would NOT be eligible for subsidies.

But Obama and his supporters outsmarted themselves since about three dozen states did not take the bait and allowed their citizens to go through the subsidy free Federal website. Without subsidies, Obama Care insurance policy costs become even less financially attractive.

The Obama administration decided just ignore that part of the law, basically breaking the law, and allow everyone who got an Obama Care policy, regardless of where they got it, to be eligible for subsidies. They realized that if two thirds or so of the Obama Care customers did not receive a subsidy, the entire operation crashes from high costs.

But this is breaking the law, as decided by a Federal judge’s recent ruling. Despite an IRS ruling that approved them, subsidies to residents in states without a state insurance exchange violate the language of Obama Care, according to a Federal judge in Oklahoma: “The court holds that the IRS rule is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law,” wrote Judge Ronald A. White in his decision, according to Politico.

White’s ruling accords with a similar decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals that was later vacated when the entire court decided to hear the case, as opposed to the three-judge panel that issued the ruling. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, however, sided with the Obama administration, meaning that the issue is likely to go to the Supreme Court eventually.

“Today’s ruling is a consequential victory for the rule of law,” said Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who filed the lawsuit. “The administration and its bureaucrats in the IRS handed out billions in illegal tax credits and subsidies and vastly expanded the reach of the health care law because they didn’t like the way Congress wrote the Affordable Care Act.”

Most legal experts expect the issue to eventually get decided by the Supreme Court. But given that the law’s language explicitly excludes customers coming through the Federal exchange from receiving a subsidy, odds are good that the entire house of cards will coming crashing down all because the writers and supporters of the law got too cute with the language. 

More disasters due in tomorrow on top of the three we discussed today: less competition, sleazy accounting, and trying to deny they wrote what they wrote. Every day a new disaster in a different form, the legislation that keep on giving.

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

April, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Wasting Taxpayer Money In Every Conceivable Way

Every month since this blog began back in 2009, we have spent some time writing about the insanity, idiocy, ineptness, and wasteful spending of the American political class. Back then, we could usually cover all of the insanity in one post. 

However, over the years, it seems as if the politicians in this country have created more insanity and problems at a faster and faster rate. This has pushed the number of days each month required to cover such insanity to more and more over the years.

This month should be no exception. Even though we spent two weeks last month covering the idiocy and fiascos of Obama Care and political class corruption, there is still enough insanity this month to cover at least a week or so of posts. Today starts the process. Hopefully, at the end of this week of insanity you will feel compelled to join our effort to implement term limits at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, as you will see from the political class incompetence we will document this week, how much worse could it get with a whole new set of people sitting in elected office?

1) Many Americans like to think that we live in a capitalistic society where companies compete fairly in a free market. That is really not true. We live in a crony capitalistic society where cronies and friends of politicians use and abuse those political connections to get favored treatment at the expense of their competitors of the American taxpayer.

This point was recently driven home by a study from an organization called Open the Books. They issued a new report that went to great effort and detail to document all Federal grants, loans, direct payments, and insurance subsidies that the Federal government and political class hands out at taxpayer expense. The amount of money given to each company is relatively small in the context of the multi-TRILLION Federal budget. But when added up together, we see that the American taxpayer is paying out tens of billions of dollars to some to the largest and least needy businesses on the planet.

For example, according to the website, www.openthebooks.com:

• $21.3 billion was doled out in the form of outright income-transfer subsidies to corporate America last year. 
• On average, each Fortune 100 company received about $200 million in such handouts.
• General Electric received $380 million in taxpayer financed handouts.
• General Motors received $370 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• Boeing received $264 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• Archer Daniels Midland received $174 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• United Technologies received $160 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• The $21.3 does not include the billions of dollars in housing, bank, and auto-company bailouts in 2008 and 2009 since those payments are kept mostly invisible within the Federal government accounting system.
• It also does not include the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve, indirect subsidies such as the ethanol mandate that enriches large agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, or special tax breaks for wind and solar manufacturers.
• About $8.5 billion of these financial gifts were in the form of taxpayer-subsidized loans. The big winners here were Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor Company, and other multibillion-dollar corporations whose franchisees who somehow qualified for Small Business Administration loans despite the financial size and power of their parent companies.
• Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agricultural business, got just under $1 billion for USDA farm-program loans which does not include ethanol subsidies, a fancy name for another form of crony capitalism
• The No. 1 federal insurance program, the Export-Import Bank provides subsidizes insurance and marketing aid to such financial giants as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase with both receiving more than $3 billion in such aid and Citigroup and Bank of America receiving more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer backstop insurance. (Remember, this doesn’t include TARP bailout money.) 
• John Deere, American Express, and even Walmart have historically reeled in taxpayer funded and backed Federal insurance support as well.
• The National Review Online article from March 27, 2014 that documented these findings pointed out that only one of the Fortune 100 companies did NOT receive taxpayer funded support and crony gifts from the American taxpayer over the time frame that Open The Books studied.

This documented $21.3 billion in crony capitalism/corporate handouts comes out to about $185 for each household in the country. Thus, as you are writing your check this month to pay your Federal income tax bill, remember that $185 of that payment is being used to give political and financial favors to the biggest banks, the biggest companies, and likely the biggest campaign donors to the politicians in Washington. 

It is just so unfair that we cannot claim Wells Fargo, American Express, Exxon and all the others as dependents on our tax forms since they truly are dependents, courtesy of the Washington political class.

2) But it is not just big corporations that the American political class wastes taxpayer wealth on. According to an April 1, 2014 article from the Independent Journal Review, the Federal government has recently spent taxpayer wealth on the following dubious projects:

• $3 million to create a safe street crossing for turtles.
• $137,500 for the creation of a video game called “Layoff.”
• $71,623 to study cocaine use in monkeys.
• $3 million for NASA to study Congress, giving hope that we may finally find out what color the sky is in Nancy Pelosi’s world.
• $15,551 to study drunk mice behavior.
• $544,338 to update the Justice Department’s Linkedin page.
• $17.4 million to install broadband capability to serve 30 people.
• $10,000 to develop a moose-themed musical called “Moosical.”

I dare anyone justify to me these kind of expenditures being worthy of taxpayer money. Useless, wasted spending on programs that do nothing to resolve the half dozen major issues facing the country today.

3) But the Independent Journal Review was not done with just documenting these eight wastes of taxpayer wealth. The day before exposing the above eight atrocities of waste, they identified massive wasteful spending by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in any number of areas that have absolutely minimal impact on the vast majority of Americans

Let’s start with the a Federal funded musical play. The NSF has spent nearly $700,000 of taxpayer money on a “climate change-themed theatrical production” entitled The Great Immensity. The theater company “The Civilians” applied for and won a grant in 2010 to produce the play. According to the musical’s website, The Great Immensity is “a thrilling and timely production,” presented by an “investigative theater company.”

Useless spending. The Federal government, especially one of its primary science agencies, should not be in the mode of financing the production of musical plays on an issue that is far from settled in the minds of many, many Americans, including myself.

This NSF musical funding effort was just one of several questionable expenditures that were recently scrutinized by U.S. Senator Lamar Smith of Texas. He recently interrogated the White House “science czar” John Holdren in a committee hearing about how the NSF is choosing to spend its money. Along with the musical, Smith specifically queried asked Holdren about the following questionable and idiotic NSF projects:

• A $15,000 study on the fishing practices in and around Lake Victoria in Africa. In Africa, not America, Africa. 
• $340,000 study on the examination of the “ecological consequences” of early human fires in New Zealand. In New Zealand, Not America, New Zealand. 
• $200,000 towards a three-year study of the Bronze Age. 
• Another $50,000 towards the survey of archived lawsuits from 17th century Peru. Not this century, not America. Three centuries ago in Peru. 
• $20,000 for a study on the causes of stress in Bolivia. In Bolivia, Not America, Bolivia.

Ridiculous wastes of money. If the Federal government is going to have a national science agency, and I question the need for one given the abject failure of the NSF to recently develop and deliver any kind of useful scientific breakthrough or technology despite spending tens of billions of dollars over the years, shouldn’t the projects it is funding be geared to resolving the major issues of our times?

I can think of seven areas where I would want scientific breakthroughs to happen to address the major issues facing most Americans today:

1. Find a cure for the leading cancers of today such as breast and lung cancer.
2. Find a cure and treatment approach for aging diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons, diseases that will ravage our aging population.
3. Find a way to make coal a clean fuel since most of the world will be using it for decades into the future on a worldwide scale.
4. Find a way to treat addiction to break the deadly hold drug addiction has on millions of Americans.
5. Find a way to make clean energy cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible.
6. Find a way to reduce the ever escalating health care costs in this country since it is now obvious that Obama Care will not be able to resolve that issue.
7. Find a way to make existing and new energy sources cheap, plentiful and clean.

If the NSA could fund research that would solve just these seven issues, most of America would be able to pay their tab. However, the political class has allowed the NSF to waste money in New Zealand, Bolivia, Peru, and Africa on projects that are of absolutely no concern to the American public. That is insanity and that is why the NSF should either get refocused on what is important to Americans or be disbanded and their budget redistributed back to Americans.

That will do it for today, the myriad of ways our politicians have found to waste our money on their business cronies and other stupid porgrams and projects. The insanity is just getting started, much more to follow in the next few days.

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

Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works: Part 2

Over the past two weeks we have been reviewing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The first seven posts were the result of our research into real life realities of people getting their work hours cut, their jobs terminated, seeing their insurance polices being cancelled, enduring their insurance premiums going up substantially along with their deductibles,  losing access to their doctors and hospitals, and the pitiful rollout of the Obama Care website.

The next four posts were detailed analyses and research by experts in the health care industry that verified what we had already proven: Obama Care is the worst piece of legislation ever created by the Washington political class. It fails on so many levels: data systems, logic, root cause problem analysis, cronyism, financials, etc,

Yesterday, we started to discuss how to fix what Obama Care has broken. Using the root cause analysis philosophy proposed in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” we started to list out a series of simpler, easier to implement and more effective steps to combat high health care costs in this country. Obama Care provides an aspirin to make the pain of high health care more palatable but with very serous side effects. Our approach attacks the root causes of our high health care costs with no side effects.

Yesterday, we discussed how to terminate two of the leading cause of high health care costs:

1. Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
2. Americans smoke too much.

While resolving those two issues would be a gigantic step forward to a healthier America and lower overall health care costs, several additional common sense steps are required:

Root Cause #3 - Americans do not exercise enough. Yesterday, we discussed a recent piece of research from the Centers For Disease Control that found about one third of American adults are obese. It is very difficult to be healthy and free of medical costs over the long term if you are obese. The strain on the heart and kidneys from obesity leads to heart disease and diabetes.

Thus, a public health effort is needed to get Americans up and moving. Having insurance under an Obama Care scheme does not reduce obesity, get Americans exercising, or reduce health care costs. I am not a public health care expert but here or a few things that could be done to get America moving:

• Make Americans pay more for insurance if they are overweight since they incur a higher level of medical needs than non-obese people, i.e. led the cost causer also be the cost payer, as a little motivation to get in shape.
• Leverage contacts with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB to get those high profile athletes involved in community health and exercise programs. If the leagues do not get involved then do not invite their championship teams to the White House for a photo op as has been the custom for decades. Help us get America in shape and get to visit the White House. 
• Subsidize YMCA and other gym memberships to get people moving, spending a little money now to avoid a lot more money down the road. Set up the program so that if people do not go to the gym, they pay more than if they do go to the gym.
• Make getting in shape a  national priority of the White House with high visibility events with celebrities to get America moving.
• Other efforts that true public health officials can come up with beyond my layman’s ideas.

It took America decades to get into the most obese situation in the history of mankind. Only a concentrated, long term public health effort can reverse that trend and start reducing the cost of obesity related health care costs. Obama Care does nothing of the sort.

Root Cause #4 - The age of America is getting older. With an aging population comes a lot of aging diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimier’s, higher incidences of cancer, etc. Without curing or mitigating these ravaging age-related diseases, it makes no difference if Obama care works or not, the overwhelming costs of these aging diseases will crush the health care industry and our economy.

What is needed is something akin to the bold challenge that JFK threw out to the country in the early 1960s when he dared the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That challenge gave the nation a focus and a drive that eventually was realized.

The same challenge should be laid down in this area: 

• Within ten years, reduce the incidence of breast and lung cancer by X%.
• Within ten years, find cures of dementia and Alzheimer’s diseases.
• Within ten years, find cures for Parkinson’s disease.

I am obviously not the right person to lay out the eventual goals and success criteria for such worthy goals. But somewhere in this country someone is capable of doing so and by putting together a plan, with regular benchmarks, maybe we can duplicate the success of the Kennedy moon dare with a handful of focused health care dares today.

Obama Care does nothing of the sort, making Americans healthier. All it does is provide overpriced, generalized health care insurance without regard to improving health.

Root Cause # 5 - Tort Reform. One of the important drivers of escalating health care costs is the threat of malpractice litigation by an over energetic legal class. This threat of malpractice legal action results in two bad drivers of high health care costs:

1. Doctors over prescribe tests and analyses in order to make absolutely sure that their actions could withstand a review in court even though defensive actions, loads of extra tests,  are usually not necessary or warranted.
2. Outlandish malpractice decisions and settlements increase doctors’ malpractice insurance costs which are  then passed on to consumers of those doctors’ services.

It does not have to be that way. Many states have taken tort reform action, resulting in substantial sanity brought into the litigation arena and the reduction in costs. We examined these success stories in the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2009/11/please-do-not-bother-me-with-facts.html

Highlights of that post include the following realities (source: American Tort Reform Association website):

• The state of Texas implemented significant tort reform in the medical field in 2003.
• Soon after the legislation, the AMA dropped Texas from its list of states in medical liability crisis.
• Malpractice claims went down and doctor recruitment and retention are up.
• The five largest Texas insurers actually CUT their insurance rates which saved doctors tens of millions of dollars.
• The Texas Medical Liability Trust, the state's largest liability carrier, reduced its premiums by 17%.
• Fifteen new insurance companies entered the Texas market.
• Health Care Indemnity, the state's largest carrier for hospitals, reduced its insurance rates by 15%.
• The American Physicians Insurance Exchange and the Doctor's Company also reduced their premiums.

Tort reform in Mississippi caused the following to occur:

• The Medical Assurance Company Of Mississippi, which provides malpractice insurance to 70% of the doctors in Mississippi, reduced premiums 5% in 2006.
• This comes on the heels of not raising premiums in 2004 and 2005 after raising them up to 20% a year in earlier years.
• Four other insurance companies returned to Mississippi to do business, likely resulting in more competition and further malpractice cost reductions.

Tort reform in West Virginia caused the following to occur:

• An increase in the number of doctors practicing in the state.
• West Virginia Physicians' Mutual sought permission to reduce malpractice insurance 5% in 2005 while insuring more doctors.
• Woodbrook Casualty Insurance also applied for a rate reduction.

Given these results, why wasn’t tort reform a major portion of Obama Care? Reduced insurance costs leading to reduced health care costs leading to more doctors and more competition, all good things. Want to bet the ABA lobbyists had a lot to do with that?

In our root cause analysis and solutions, tort reform is a major resolver of our high health care costs problem.

Root Cause #6 - Limited insurance company competition across state lines. More competition in any aspect of human events results in better products and lower costs. Unfortunately, in this country, there are a lot barriers to insurance companies competing across state lines. Simple solution: terminate those state line barriers and allow any insurance company to compete anywhere in the country for health insurance customers. There is very little, if any, downside to cross state competition.

Root Cause #7 - Atrocious Federal government inefficiencies in existing health care programs. Many times in this blog we have pointed out how inefficient and disgusting the waste and fraud is in the Federal government’s administration of Medicaid and Medicare:

• Medicaid wastes or loses to fraud and criminal activity between $30 to $40 billion a year.
• Medicare wastes or loses to fraud and criminal activity between $70 to $90 billion a year.

Thus, if Obama and the Washington political class were actually running an efficient government operation, they would have had anywhere between $100 billion and $130 billion a year to either get Americans healthier, leaner, and off of the smoking habit or would have been able to provide health insurance payment support without disrupting every American’s life and destroying the economy.

Consider the math. The latest, reasonable estimate of uninsured Americans I remember seeing is about 40 million. If we take the midrange of the waste listed above, $115 billion a year, we could give every uninsured American almost $2,900 a year to cover their health insurance costs. A family of four would get about $11,500 a year to cover health insurance, more than enough for a good family insurance policy. 

Instead, given the incompetence of Washington, that $115 billion or so is wasted every year and now the same people that cannot manage Medicare and Medicaid want to manage a whole new government program without fixing what is wrong today. Insane. 

There is enough wealth in this country to get everyone covered without new taxes, without cutting worker’s work hours down to under 30 hours a week, without killing job growth, without taking away freedom or choice, and without another massive government bureaucracy. Too bad the President and Congress have no idea how to operate efficiently.

That’s it, resolving the high cost of health care in this country without the idiocy and waste of Obama Care, is simple if you know how to solve a problem and define the underlying root causes:

1. Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
2. Americans smoke too much.
3. Americans do not exercise enough.
4. Americans are getting older on average resulting in a substantial increase in aging-related diseases.
5. There is an urgent need for tort reform to reduce doctors’ operating costs.
6. There is an urgent need to allow more insurance company competition across state lines.
7. There is an embarrassingly high need to force the Washington political class to stop wasting taxpayer wealth today on existing health care program, shifting that saved wealth into helping uninsured Americans survive health crisis without destorying the country and the economy in the process.

Seven root causes, all resolved with simple solutions that we have proposed over the past two days. However, simple solutions is usually a foreign concept to those in the White House and Congress, leaving us with a Rube Goldberg contraption called Obama Care with way too many moving parts, way too many unnecessary parts, and no chance of success. 

Remember, try to pare things down, few moves accomplish a lot. Public health drives, tort and insurance reform and fixing existing health care programs. Those are the only few moves that are needed to resolve a big societal issue. 

Tomorrow we will look at a few alternative solutions, based on work done by Republican politicians, work that the mainstream media has deemed to never show in the light of day.

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

April, 2013 Wasteful Government Spending, Part 2: How To Use Condoms, Studying Old Folks Knees, and Ignoring The Spending Problem

I would like to talk about different topics than the many ways that governments and politicians waste our hard earned wealth but the avalanche of wasteful spending examples keeps piling up. I feel if I do not continually clear them out at one point I will never be able t talk about anything else.

Yesterday's post discussed a compilation of idiotic government spending programs that was compiled by the Independent Journal Review. It included such lunacy as spending half a million dollars to create a prom week video game program, $27 million dollars to help people in Morroco become better pottery makers, $325 million dollars to create a robotic squirrel and 22 other equally stupid expenses which can be accessed at the following link:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/04/april-2013-wasteful-government-spending.html

To that list of 25, let me two more horrific wastes of spending:

1) A recent news report described how the University of Florida received a $712,714 grant under Obama’s economic stimulus program to fund a study to “characterize ethnic differences in experimental pain sensitivity, endogenous pain inhibition, clinical pain and pain-related disability among older African Americans and non-Hispanic whites with knee osteoarthritis.” Huh?

A couple of problems with this type of wasteful spending:

* It was part of the stimulus program, a massive $800+ billion program that was supposed to create jobs and get the economy moving. The stimulus program was jammed with programs like this, short term, small scale, pitiful projects that resulted in no long term economic growth or sustainable job growth, the basic premise of spending $800 billion.

In fact, according to the government's own website that tracked stimulus spending, this program even admits that not a single job was created for this $712,714 expenditure. It makes you wonder how many other hundreds of similar programs within the stimulus spending also created not a single, lasting job but still wasted billions in funding.

* Putting stimulus spending aside, in times of $17 TRILLION debt levels do we really need to spend scarce Federal government resources exploring a SINGLE condition concerning a SINGLE part of the human body, namely the SINGLE condition of osteoarthritis on a SINGLE joint, the knee? If we are going to spend limited funds on health research, let's spend it major problems affecting a major segment of the population like lung and breast cancer, dementia and Alzheimer's, Parkinsons Disease, etc. rather than one affliction of one joint.

2) Staying with the economic stimulus program but moving onto the really absurd area of wasteful spending, it has come to light that $423,000 of taxpayer money was spent on a study about how to properly use a condom. Yes, the Department of Health and Human Services allowed a grant to someone in Bloomington, Indiana to study "Correct Condom Use."

Never mind that condoms have been around forever and most people should know how to use them.

For those that do not know how to use them, instructions are included with every package.

For those that do not read the package, they could access this information on correct usage form the library, the Internet, their partner, or they could ask their friends.

Of all the idiotic uses of taxpayer wealth, this has to be in the top five. Of course, no long lasting jobs were created from this expense, according to the government's own website, how could it?

This puts yet another program in the failed category of Obama's economic stimulus program. I only wish that I could have gotten in on this giveaway several years ago. I would have studied how drinking alcohol impairs my golf game. How lying out in the sun causes sun burn. How buying a new car improves one's self esteem. I could have made a killing if I knew that programs like correct condom use were worth over $400,000 to the Obama administration.

As we have said before, these two program alone would not have solved our $17 TRILLION debt problem. Together they total only abut $1.1 million. But before you can save trillions of dollars you have to save billions of dollars and before you save billions of dollars you have to save millions of dollars. You have to start somewhere and these two expenditures would have been a great start.


Plus, just because you can do something, waste taxpayer wealth, does not mean you should do it, waste taxpayer wealth. And an even sadder part of this disgrace is that there are some people and entities within the Federal government that have done a fine job of identifying waste and insanity spending like this but their voices and recommendations have gone unheeded.

Consider a posting by the fine website, Bankrupting America, that went up on April 2, 2013:

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the Federal government’s internal audit and investigation branch.
• It was created in 1921 to help better manage government finances, spending, and expense streams.
• According to Bankrupting America, their sources estimate the GAO saves taxpayers $81 for every dollar the Office spends.
• And the GAO is not the only the Federal government entity that is assigned the responsibility with identifying waste and fraud and offering suggestions for how to reduce it.
• The Offices of the Inspector General (more than 70 Federal agencies have them) also research and highlight areas of government waste in hopes that these mistakes would be corrected.
• For example, it was an inspector general that uncovered the over $800,000 that GSA employees wasted on lavish party for themselves in 2012.
• However, according to a recent report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a majority of inspector general recommendations were ignored.
• The committee found that during 2012, government agencies failed to implement 16,906 IG recommendations that would have saved $67 billion worth of taxpayer wealth.
• Implementing just these changes would have wiped out about 7% of the Federal government deficit in 2012 and relieved pressure on our $17 TRILLION national debt.
• In 2011, the committee found government agencies ignored 15,784 recommendations that could have saved $55 billion.
• Thus, the Federal government and Obama administration knew about at least $120 billion in spending savings over just the past two years and did nothing to avoid those unnecessary expenses.
• A possible reason for the lapse: currently the position of Inspector General is vacant in six different agencies including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and USAID.
• The House report explained that there was a direct relationship between these vacancies and recommendations being ignored. According to the report, “In 2012, those agencies [State, Homeland Security and USAID] ranked first, second, and fourth among agencies with the most unimplemented recommendations.”

Well, duh! Sinfully incompetent government. The latest Senate budget from the Democrats controlling the Senate (after four years of unlawfully not producing a budget) is asking for another $1 TRILLION in tax increases over the next ten years. If they were truly doing their government oversight job and following the advice of the Inspector Generals and the GAO, they could fund the vast majority of that ten year increase by just implementing the changes these two fine organizations have already identified.

If you add in cleaning up the fraud in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment programs along with finally getting the out of control Defense Department spending, there would be so much extra money laying around that every American could see their taxes go down without any personal significant downside from the reduced level of government spending.

But as always, we are left with the same question: Do politicians not reduce wasteful spending because they are incapable of doing so from a process or intelligence perspective, they do not want to reduce wasteful spending, or they are too lazy to reduce wasteful spending?

Whatever answer you arrive at for that question, the subsequent action is unchanged: ALL current Washington politicians need to be replaced as soon ass possible, either through elections, election process reform, or the best way possible way, the implementation of term limits, as outlined in Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." These people have blown their chance to make government efficient and effective, they need to leave, the sooner the better, and take their knee studies and condom studies with them.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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