November, 2017, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Three Simple Non-Obama Care Ways To Reduce Costs and a Governor Who Gets It

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

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

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

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and 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.

1) We have previously reported on how the state of Maine took things into its own hands when it came to Medicaid and proved highly successful in reducing its Medicaid bills while providing much better healthcare support for many, many more of its citizens. That post and the details of this great effort can be accessed at:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-2017-part-2the-unfolding-disaster.html

The following summarizes what they accomplished:

• In six years, the state has reduced its Medicaid program enrollment by 24%.
• Its annual growth in Medicaid costs is down to a respectable 2% a year, compared to the national annual cost growth rate of 6% a year.
• The growth rate in 2017 is expected to be just .7%.
• At the same time, funding for nursing home facilities has increased by 40%, home care funding has increased by 60%, and an additional $100 million was found to support state citizens with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
• In addition, the state increased its financial support for primary care to better help individuals with chronic diseases while also increasing support for those with mental illness.
• And despite slashing the Medicaid enrollment levels, the uninsured rate in the state has actually declined.

Reduced costs but improved healthcare for more people, does not get much better than that.

But when you make changes like this, even if they are the right changes, embedded interests, who have long thrived off the use of taxpayer wealth, tend to get a little pissed off. Such is the case in Maine as hospitals that have seen their Medicaid payments drop are not happy with the governor who has accomplished so much:

- According to Paul Chesser, writing for the Liberty headlines website on October 27, 2017, Maine Governor Paul LePage is in a confrontation with hospitals in his state over Medicaid.

- Apparently, CEOs of Maine hospitals have been pushing hard to expand Medicaid in the state and thus, expand their revenue streams.

- Although the Maine legislature has voted to expand Medicaid in the state five times since 2011, Le Page has vetoed the proposed legislation every time.

-While advocates claim that expanding the Medicaid program in the state would be richly supported by matching Federal taxpayer funds, LePage disagrees: “It’s obvious the CEO of Maine Med and other hospitals do not care about taking resources away from our most vulnerable Mainers—including our elderly and intellectually and physically disabled people—just so they can give free, taxpayer-funded healthcare to adults who should be working and contributing to the cost of their own health insurance. 

Medicaid expansion will cost Mainers $500 million over the next five years. The last time Maine expanded Medicaid, the elderly and disabled were sent to the back of the line so working-age adults without dependents could get free healthcare. Now Maine Med and other hospitals want to do it again. 

These CEOs make millions of dollars a year, and now they want to raise taxes by $500 million on the backs of hard-working Mainers who will have to pay the bill. Shame on them. Hospitals are only concerned with their pocketbooks, and they don’t care about the hardships it will cause for taxpayers, the elderly and the disabled. Hospital CEOs claim the federal government will pay 90 percent of the costs of Medicaid expansion, but it’s not true. The 90 percent only covers a portion of those who would be added to Medicaid rolls: able-bodied adults without children. 

Since hospitals are nonprofit organizations, they don’t have to pay taxes on much of their vast real estate holdings. Mainers do not have that luxury—in addition to paying their own high premiums and deductibles, they will have to pay to give ‘free’ healthcare to adults who should be working. As I always say, ‘free’ is very expensive to somebody. If hospital CEOs have their way, that somebody would be Maine taxpayers.”

Bravo to the governor. He understands that Obama Care was a disaster when it comes to Medicaid. Medicaid was designed to support the truly, truly, needy in our society, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, not the non-poor, not the non-disabled, not the non-elderly. 

We have given this analogy before: Medicaid is like a 50 year old truck that was designed to haul up to two tons. Obama Care came along and without fixing this old truck, expects it to now haul four tons. It is not going to work and LePage realizes it. He knows that Medicaid costs will skyrocket and the less capable in his state will suffer along with the state’s taxpayers if it is not kept under control. Medicaid now eats up over 30% of the state government budget in four states, he does not want that monster to do the same in his state as a result of Obama Care.

2) The National Review website on October 12, 2017, ran an article entitled, “the Most Wasteful Health Spending is Also the Most Popular.” It was an extensive essay on the current status of health care in this country today but let me just pull out a few relative facts:

• The author claims that about half of the health care expenditures spent today in this country are wasted expenses: “That half, approximately, of all U.S. health spending is wasted, is simultaneously scientifically uncontroversial, ignored by health-policy experts, and totally absent from public debate. But that’s not the worst part. In fact, it could be good news in a way: The magnitude of the problem suggests that there’s a lot of room for improvement.”
• The article points out how simpler, more direct ways to save lives and improve healthcare were ignored by the Obama Care advocates: “One of the most celebrated pieces of health-care journalism in recent years has been Atul Gawande’s New Yorker exposé on the Herculean efforts by a handful of scientists to get intensive-care physicians to implement basic hygiene measures so as to stop hospital-borne diseases, which kill about 100,000 people per year according to the CDC. The “checklist” was of no cost to the doctors, and its scientific rationale was unquestionable. Doctors still resisted it with all their might because they found it mildly inconvenient.” 
• And finally, do we need to rethink the reality that a lot of medical and healthcare does not need the expensive use of highly paid doctors: “Countless procedures that doctors have a legal monopoly on could just as well be performed by less skilled experts. This is hugely wasteful, but it only scratches the surface…. In Africa, which suffers from a dire doctor shortage, there are examples of professionally run clinics that deliver a first-world standard of care to hundreds of patients without a single doctor.” 

Three simple, effective ways to reduce healthcare costs, and deaths, in this country: eliminate current wasteful spending, have doctors wash their hands, and reexamine where we REALLY need a highly trained doctor for medical care. Three ways that Obama Care never addressed, more concerned with applying an insurance solution to a public health problem.

The disaster that keeps on unfolding. One more summary of disasters tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

February, 2016, Part 2, Will The Center Hold: Praying In West Virginia and Common Sense Welrare Programs Clean-ups

We occasionally do a review of the theme, “will the center hold.” Given the ever growing reach and encroachment of the Federal government and Obama administration into state matters and citizens’ lives, we have often reported on the increasing push back against that overreach. From everything from Obama Care to Common Core to gun control to NSA spying, Americans are reasserting their right to tell the Federal government and Washington politicians that citizens in this country hold the power, not them.

Which has led us more than once to contemplate what would happen if Washington enacted a law or the President executed an executive order and the rest of the country simply ignored it? Would the center hold or would we be looking at serious fissures within the country?

For a few days let’s review where the rest of the country is telling Obama and the Washington political class to stop their power grab and overreaching into our lives: 

1) Most of the posts in this blog review the ineptness, the incompetence, and idiocy of the American political class. But that is not to mean that there are not a very small sample of politicians across the country that are trying to do the right thing for the country, its taxpayers, and the Constitution. They are actually using common sense and staying in integrity, traits that are in short supply with the overwhelming percentage of politicians.

But by using common sense, these good politicians are often fighting back against the overreaching and bad attitudes of the Federal government and the Obama administration. The first example of this behavior we will discuss today involves the state politicians in North Carolina who recently decided that if you are receiving taxpayer wealth via welfare payments, than you should have to pass a drug test to receive them. Because seriously, if most taxpayers have to take a drug test to get hired in many jobs, why shouldn’t those taking taxpayer wealth be subjected to the same requirement?

And if the taxpayers were no longer forced to support drug addicts, then eventually the hope would be that the tax burden on those taxpayers would eventually go down. Or those saved funds could be used to help the truly needy, our veterans, our homeless, our hungry.

The details of the North Carolina fraud crackdown include the following details:

• The state has begun testing all individuals receiving welfare benefits.
• While the initial results come from a small sample, 24% of the first batch of welfare recipients tested positive for illegal drugs, as reported by the Raleigh News and Observer.
• 89 people were tested in the first batch and 21 were found to test positive for illegal drugs, and thus, 24%.
• Some people who think that welfare users should not be drug tested will point to the small sample size and pooh pooh the results.
• However, 70 welfare recipients never showed up for the test and thus, had their benefits cut. The obvious assumption is that a lot, if not all, of the 70 would have also tested positive for illegal drugs.
• If all of the 70 welfare recipients were addicted to illegal drugs, than the total number of people that were supposed to be tested is 159 and 91 would have been drug addicts in the worst case, a percentage of 57%. Thus, the range of probable drug addicts that taxpayers were supporting ranges from 24% to a whopping 57%.

I am pretty sure that the Obama administration would be against this type of common sense approach to being compassionate and being worthy of safeguarding taxpayer wealth. In the past, the administration wanted there to be no restrictions, work or otherwise, on welfare recipients. North Carolina is telling the administration to back off when it comes to common sense approaches to welfare.

If the these early results hold true, than the state can reduce its welfare budget by upwards of 57%. Some of this money could be returned to taxpayers in the form of lower future taxes and some of it could be used to help those addicted to get treatment help. In either way, the North Carolina way certainly beats the Obama way.

2) A recent article by Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, writing for the Heritage Foundation, described some actions Maine politicians have taken in the same vein as what they did in North Carolina. But before describing the incredible results these politicians attained in the area of saving taxpayer wealth, consider the following statistics:

• Over one trillion dollars was spent on various forms of welfare last year including welfare payments for food, housing, medical care and social services.
• This comes out to over $8,000 for every American household.
• Federal food assistance is the country’s second biggest welfare program.
• In the year 2000, 17.2 million Americans were receiving Federal food assistance.
• In 2015, 45.8 million Americans were receiving Federal food assistance, two and a half times more in just 15 years.
• The fastest category of people getting food assistance in recent years has been among able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs), going from 2 million in 2008 to 5 million today. These are work-capable adult between the ages of 18 and 49 who do not have children or other dependents to support.

One reason for the incredible increase in ABAWDs getting food assistance is that the Obama administration did not require these types of people to actively look for work in order to get the welfare benefits. In light of this reality, Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, recently established work requirements on Maine welfare recipients who are without dependents and able-bodied. Alternatively, these people could also enroll in job training or do community service, a meager six hours per week.

Despite a major communications effort to ABAWDs in Maine, very few people enrolled in the training and community service programs. This resulted in those people losing access to their welfare benefits. And the drop in people receiving benefits was an amazing 80%. The number of people in the welfare program went from 13,332 to 2,678 in just four months. 80%.

Thus, now we have two states that are showing the Federal government how to stay compassionate for those less fortunate in our society but respecting taxpayer wealth by cracking down on the fraud within the welfare bureaucracy. And they are doing it in the face of a Presidential administration that would rather not clean up the mess they created in the welfare society of today. If this same effort and same results were done on the national level under Obama, the Heritage Foundation estimates that:

• Annual taxpayer savings would be $8.4 billion a year.
• Additional reforms of the food assistance bureaucracy would get another $9.7 billion in annual savings.
• Combined, these savings would come out to over $150 for every U.S. household from just cleaning up a single Federal government program.

As we said before, a small percentage of American politicians are doing the right thing relative to common sense and taxpayer respect.

3) The American News website recently reported that Massachusetts also has gotten into the clean up welfare act. One driver of the effort is that the state found out that $2.39 million in welfare benefits went to people who had been dead between 6 and 27 months.

As a result, legislation is moving through the Massachusetts state legislature to require that fingerprinting be implemented in the welfare programs to ensure that those entitled to welfare, and only those entitled, receive those benefits. The legislation passed by a vote of 158-0 in the house and is waiting for approval in the state senate.

More common sense.

4) Let’s leave the world of cleaning up welfare programs that the Feds screwed up and talk about a state fighting back against the Federal government’s intrusion into the energy industry via Obama’s Clean Energy Plan. This plan wants to cripple the U.S. coal industry in the name of man made climate change that may or may not exist. And that crippling will have disastrous effects on the state of West Virginia.

West Virginia is one of more than two dozen states that are pushing back on the Clean Energy Plan through the court system. Those states recently won a Supreme Court round when the Court ruled that the plan could not go into effect until all legal challenges had been met, certainly a legal defeat for the Obama administration. But in West Virginia, they are also pursuing another avenue of push back against the Federal government.

West Virginia citizens got together and set aside January 31, 2016 as a day of prayer for coal miners. According to reporting by the Heritage Foundation, on that day: “A congregation of pastors, businessmen, and lawmakers will seek divine intervention in one of the nation’s hardest-hit coal economies. Doubtless, though, many will ask for deliverance from what they consider a man-made crisis.”

Roger Horton, president of Citizens For Coal: “West Virginia’s absolutely in dire straits. The point we’re trying to stress is that we need a higher power to change the hearts and minds of those who want to destroy Appalachia.” At least in this case, when the Federal government gets too intrusive and stupid these folks are calling on an even higher power to overcome the stupidity. 

Remember, the Obama administration is trying to kill the domestic coal industry at the same time that the rest of the world is on track to build 2,400 new coal fired power plants in the next few years. Thus, anything that Obama succeeds in doing to destroy the coal industry in this country will be dwarfed by the huge increase in coal burned around the world. Even John Kerry, the Secretary of State is on record saying that anything the U.S. does for the environment in this area will be nothing compared to what the rest of the world has planned. All it does is wipe out thousands and thousands of American jobs for no environmental gain.

And the folks of West Virginia are pushing back, both legally and religiously. 

That will do it for today's edition of “will the center hold.” West Virginia citizens uniting in more than one way to push back on the Federal government’s overreach on coal and at least three states telling Washington we will run common sense, efficient and compassionate welfare programs,unlike what the Washington political class does, and in the process save taxpayers loads of money.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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