May, 2017, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Personal Disasters That MIllions Have Had To Endure Because Of Obama Care

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 copays 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 close out this month's updates on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care with real life stories from real life Americans on how ObamaCare has screwed up their lives. The source of these stories is, as always, the following website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

We can talk about the number of jobs lost because of Obama Care we can talk about the trillions of dollars Obama Care will cost the country, we can talk about the number of insurance companies that are pulling out of Obama Care markets, we can talk about the number of Obama Care co-ops that have already gone bankrupt, but those cold numbers, while informative. Do not capture the agony, stress, and added household expenses this legislation has caused real Americans with real health care stories. These are their Obama Care horror stories:

DAVID, NEVADA: I was really looking forward to my $2,500 savings I was promised. My total yearly cost instead went up by $2,620 with a higher deductible. President Obama could not have been this far off in his prediction which means he knew he was lying and said it anyway.

JANET, MONTANA: I have been upset for some time with ObamaCare and Medicare. My daughter cannot get ObamaCare as she is below the poverty line, and she cannot get Medicaid either. I thought ObamaCare was here to help people like her. Just like she was my caregiver for over two years, but could not receive any payment from the government as she had not taken the caregiver course at the community college. This woman was better than any of the caregivers that have come out of the course. I needed someone five days a week, with my husband taking over at night and on the weekend. Most caregivers do not work that many days, or do the many things she did.

She still comes here if she is not at work at her part-time job. That's all anyone around wants to hire you for, and not enough hrs. that you could get any benefits. I bought gas and helped with her groceries some. People in her position have fallen through the cracks and no one is interested in doing anything for her. So I am not enamored with Obama Care or Medicaid.

STEVE, ALABAMA: Like many, my health premium has nearly doubled ,and my deductibles and co-pays have increased some four fold. Yesterday my wife, who has a serious illness that has attacked her eyes over the years, learned that she could no longer receive a prescription that her doctor wants to write for her. This drug would help maintain her condition as to avoid flair ups with her eye problems. Her doctor informed her he can no longer prescribe the medication due to the recent health care law changes.

TINA, VIRGINIA: In the fall of 2013, Cordova received a memo regarding the company-wide decision that the Cheesecake Factory would no longer offer plans to part-time employees starting in January of 2014—the famed start date for Obamacare coverage. The memo instructed employees to go to the ACA website for new coverage options.

When the Obamacare website went live in October of 2013, Cordova tried and failed to log on every day for the first week. Two weeks later, she was able to access the information she needed. “The cheapest plan was $170 in premiums and it offered way less services. I didn’t qualify for a subsidy,” she recalled.

[. . .] Cordova ended up settling for a non-ACA plan with a $169 premium and slightly higher copays.

EMILY, FLORIDA: I'm a retiree that worked for a Fortune 500 Company and had Wonderful Insurance Coverage which included Medical, Hospital, Dental, Rx, Vision and Mental Health. Due to Obamacare I lost my Insurance because of the Employee Mandate. I have Epilepsy, as a result I find myself in the emergency room often and admitted to the hospital all too often. 

Also, my prescription drugs cost are very high. The ACA did not meet my needs and what came close was not affordable and deductibles were very high. I took a policy on my own which was 3 times what I contributed through my employer but I had to cancel it because I could no longer afford it. So I have no insurance except Medicare. I had to go to the Hospital last week for 5 days, I don't know how I'm going to pay the bill.

MARY, MICHIGAN: Supporters of Obamacare have argued that the insurance plans being canceled offered substandard coverage. Swanson said that was not the case for her family. "Our coverage from before was far from substandard. It was excellent," she said during a phone interview.

In June, when her husband's appendix ruptured, he spent five days in the hospital. The medical bills totaled about $32,000, Swanson said.

"All we ended up paying out of pocket was $165," she said.

The plan covered annual physicals and mammograms, but not mental health services.

"We didn't care about that," she said.

She's unsure about whether it included maternity coverage, but "obviously, we didn't care about that."

Because both she and her husband are over 55, she said, their rates have jumped substantially.

"We're in the worst spot we could be, because we're over 55 and we're too young for Medicare. And we are self-employed," said Swanson, who participated in a Google Hangout Thursday sponsored by U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, who is a harsh critic of the Affordable Care Act.

ROSE, PENNSYLVANIA: I can not believe what has happened to my health insurance at work. Last year it cost me about 85.00 a month with 80% coverage. This year it doubled! I now pay 171.00 and for less coverage, as with a very high deductible! When I went to the Doctors just recently, they paid only 0.896 cents. Last year they covered the cost at 80%, so I do not know how they calculate or what my deductible is! I have to get blood work done, sure it will cost a lot more this year! When I called my benefits office they claim it's because of the new laws. Tried to cancel my insurance due to the fact I can not afford to pay them, and they claim company policy I can not unless I have a different insurance or leave the job. Why shouldn't I be able to get rid of something I can not afford?

JACKIE, SOUTH CAROLINA: For Jackie Fowler, Obama was correct: She got to keep her plan and her doctors. But that comfort costs a hefty fee. As predicted by the CMS report released last month[ . . .] she and her seven other employees are eight of the 11 million people whose premiums will increase because of Obamacare.

Last year, they paid $24,300 for their institutional group healthcare plan. Now they will have to pay $55,632 in 2014. Non-smokers in their mid-fifties and good health, she and her husband must dole out $2,000 a month for their personal coverage – double what they paid last year.

Fowler and her single fellow female employee had no need for maternity care, so they used to opt out of the coverage. Now, however, even the men in the office must be covered for their next birth.

"I don’t know what we are going to do," Fowler said, citing concern for the company’s longevity.

When asked if they will cancel their group plan and send their employees to the marketplace, Fowler said the options on the website are very limited. Although there are some plans which offer comparable care, "none of [their] doctors or their affiliate hospital are in the provider network." She is forced to choose between her doctor and an enormous insurance bill.

"I don’t know where they get the ‘affordable.’ This is anything but affordable," Fowler said. "We should be saving for retirement, not paying for insurance."

KYLE, ARKANSAS: My plan was not cancelled, it was transitioned to meet the new ACA requirements. The same plan that I had before, now costs me $70 more a paycheck. I have a family of 4, including 2 kids. I went from $204 a paycheck to $274 a paycheck. I get paid 2 times a month so that's $140 a month or $1,680 a year. That's money that would have been spent in the local community on buying goods and services. This figure does not include the slightly increased co pays when I go to the dr or the additional costs for prescriptions. I thought the ACA was going to save me $2,500 a year?

Just a small sample of the agony Obama Care has caused millions of Americans without coming close to fulfilling a single promise that Obama and the legislation promised. More failures next month.

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, 2017, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Real Life Disasters, The Failure Of Government Healthcare In England and More

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 focus on some of these root causes to show how they are the main drivers of our high healthcare costs, causes that Obama Care never addressed and which still stay unresolved:

1) We often talk about the high level numbers and results of Obama Care. How premiums and deductibles have increased dramatically over the years for Obama Care policies. How millions of people lost access to their preferred doctors, policies, and hospitals. How 18 out of 23 Obama Care co-ops have already gone bankrupt with more to follow. But consider the personal agony and stress below the high level numbers that Obama Care has caused a typical American:

• James Rogers, writing for the Heritage Foundation on February 17, 2017, documented the harrowing Obama Care trip of Kim Quade.
• Ms. Quade left her job as a school speech pathologist after 17 years to work solo, knowing that she would have to replace her school provided health insurance with an individual health insurance policy.
• She did her research and found a plan that suited her particular needs for $188 a month with a $5,000 deductible and health savings account, terms she could afford.
• She liked the concept of a health savings plan since it empowered her to take care of herself: “It was something that I was able to take care of on my own and I was happy about it. It’s the way I was raised: You take care of yourself.” 
• By 2015, her monthly premium cost had more than doubled to $188 (despite Obama’s promise that Americans could see an up to $2,500 annual reduction in their health insurance premiums).
• But despite the whopping increase in premiums, she kept the policy since she liked the doctor network that it covered.
• But shortly after the doubling of the premiums, they went up another $200 a month, at which point she switched to an Obama Care policy.
• She ended up getting a policy with monthly premiums of $773 a month which was reduced to $333 after Federal subsidies, cheaper but still much more expensive than her original policy of $188 a month.
• And that original policy covered flu shots and physicals, which her Obama Care policy did not, and after a bout with pneumonia, her Obama Care policy paid out only $50 towards the cost of two x-rays.
• And now she has to go back out into the market again since the original Obama Care policy she took on is no longer available as insurance companies have left the area she lives in outside of Kansas City.

High costs, lower quality, fewer choices, higher turnover, that is how Obama Care played out for a regular American who just wanted some affordable health insurance coverage.

2) Michael Tanner, writing for the National Review recently, pointed out that the average cost of prescription drugs rose 11% last year and are expected to rise at least that much in 2017. So much for Obama Care reducing healthcare costs in the country. It has not worked for insurance premiums and insurance deductibles, and apparently it has not worked to stem the tide of ever rising drug costs.

3) Obama Care, along with Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, have proven how poorly government performs when given health care responsibilities. Medicare and Medicaid are hurtling towards fiscal insolvency and the Veterans Administration’s inability to serve our veterans’ healthcare needs is an ongoing scandal. But some people still think that giving government even more control over our healthcare needs is a good idea, often pointing to other countries that have total government control over their citizens’ health care needs.

One of those countries is England but according to the Foundation For Economic Education, for those in England, where government controls all aspects of one’s health care needs, it is not a good idea:

• In the United States, the age-adjusted breast cancer 5-year survival rate is 88.9%, compared with just 81.1% in England.
• The United States leads the world on the equivalent stat for prostate cancer (97.2%) vs. 83.2% in England.
• Lung cancer: 18.7% in the United States vs. 9.6% in England; bowel cancer: 64.2% vs. 56.1%.
• U.S. survival rates are also better for leukemia, ovarian cancer, stomach cancer, and liver cancer.
• The age- and sex-standardized 30-day mortality rate for ischaemic stroke is just 3.6% in the United States vs. 9.2% in England; for haemorrhagic stroke, the figures are 22% vs. 26.5%.

Thus, real data shows us that giving the Federal government more control of our health care needs, going even beyond Obama Care, would not be healthy for us. Just ask the English folks, those have not died prematurely already vs. what would have happened in the U.S. 

The Foundation quoted a line from The Guardian newspaper summary of a Commonwealth Fund Report where the report found that England’s health system was “the best in the world” with “the only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive.” In other words, the operation was a success even though the patient died. Obama Care is dying, replacing it with a program that is even more like Obama Care would be fatal to so many Americans.

4) Vox considers itself a new age news operation but it really is nothing more than a liberal, Democratic Party, left leaning cheerleading organization. Several years ago, Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox, put out an article that tried, and failed, to show how successful Obama Care was despite the reality of the legislation’s failing numbers.

But having not learned from that failure, it recently tweeted out a request to its readers to send Vox success stories as it related to Obama Care. Unfortunately, it kind of blew up in its face as Obama Care policyholders shared their failures relative to Obama Care, not their successes with Obama Care:

Mccahill told Vox: my family premium went from $789 a month w/1k ded. to $1929 w/8k ded. In 3 years. We also lost several key doctors.

Adam Prenger told Vox: I have given several thousands of dollars to a company and a service that I have never used.

ClemsonGrl told Vox: the hospital I work for is freezing raises because insufficient reimbursement for services rendered. The ACA needs to go.

Alexis In NH told Vox: We lost our insurance and I became a Republican as a result. 

Never ask a question you do not want the answer to or you have not wired the right answer in advance.

More real life stories tomorrow relative to the unfolding disasters that is Obama Care.

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