August, 2019, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Payer Health Care Systems Around the World, Continued

Most months 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.

Four posts ago we reviewed the many, many failures and disasters of Obama Care, probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed when it comes to comparing it to its objectives and its promises. This was the Federal government’s most recent and deepest attempt to try and control the healthcare of Americans and it has ended badly. 

In our previous three posts, we showed the numbers and realities around the world of how single payer healthcare systems always fail to provide effective and efficient health care to its citizens. Despite these realities, many Democratic candidates for President want to implement a failed system like this in this country. Today we will continue that discussion of failed single payer healthcare systems from other countries, further proof that this approach to healthcare is a bad, bad idea.

We continue that discussion today, the failures of the single payer healthcare model:

1) Let’s start up in Canada today. The Fraser Institute has completed a research report on the Canadian healthcare system called, "Waiting Your Turn." It found that:

• A Canadian citizen has to wait about 18.2 weeks on average to see a specialist doctor in Canada if they need specific medical care, i.e. more than four months.
• This average wait time of 18.2 weeks up from 9.3 weeks in 1993, i.e. the wait times are getting far worse over time.
• And this is the median average amount of wait time, which means half of those Canadians needing specific medical help wait more than four months to see a health care specialist
• Canada "rations" healthcare through long waiting times and limited access, according to Dr. Roger Stark, a healthcare policy expert at the Washington Policy Center who told The Heartland Institute: "These long waits would not be acceptable to Americans, who are rightly accustomed to timely healthcare."
• And the wait times vary significantly across Canada with the New Brunswick median wait time being 37.3 weeks, (an astonishing nine months plus) to Ontario where the median wait time is 14.1 weeks, still over three months.
• Wait times also vary greatly according to what type of specialist you need to see with the median wait time for orthopedic surgery being 42.2 weeks, neurology patients median wait time is an average of 31.2 weeks, and the wait for radiation oncology is 4.2 weeks.
• Think about this last statement: if you are fighting cancer, on average you have to wait over a month to get radiation treatment, four weeks where your cancer continues to spread.
• Canadians are waiting 3.8 weeks for a CT scan, 8.7 weeks for an MRI scan, and 3.3 weeks for an ultrasound.
• Extensive wait times can have serious consequences, Fraser report co-author Bacchus Barua points out: "For example, they may force some patients to endure months of physical pain and mental anguish, they may result in lower worker productivity and [forgone] wages, they can sometimes result in a potentially treatable illness being transformed into a debilitating permanent condition, and in the worst cases, they may result in death."
• Barua goes on to claim that the extensive wait times are not due to lack of funding and resources since Canadian healthcare expenditures per person have gone up by 50%, adjusting for inflation, since 1993.
• Thus, he claims the likely underlying causes of these gross waiting times are the government monopoly on the financing and delivery of medical services and the lack of appropriate incentives for providers.
• "This is indirect rationing," said Dr. Dale Dunn, a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. "Almost 30 years ago I started seeing doctors leaving Canada because they were disgusted with the system because it prevented them from treating patients."

Steadily increasing costs for steadily decreasing quality, a fatal combination in many cases.

2) Despite these blatant disasters of the single payer model around the world, our politicians continue to ignore reality and continue to push for a single payer system in this country:

• The New York State Assembly's Health Committee actually held a hearing on a proposed legislative bill to adopt single-payer healthcare in the state of New York, proving again there is no cure for stupid.
• Bernie Sanders’ single payer proposal for us is estimated to cost $32 TRILLION just in the first ten years.
• This would be about $3.2 TRILLION a year, equal about 80% of the entire Federal government budget today.
• This $32 TRILLION would require an annual average tax increase of $24,000 for every American household.
• The state of Vermont looked at a single payer system for their state in 2014 and gave up when the estimated costs would require a state tax increase of 160%, about $27,500 per Vermont household per year.
• In California, the estimated cost of their entry into a single payer system was a whopping $440 billion a year, a sum greater than the entire state government budget.
• The $440 billion came out to a per household annual cost of $26,500.
• As we discussed in yesterday’s post, in Canada, a country that has had a single payer system for a long time, a whopping three quarters of Canadians also see fit to purchase supplemental health insurance to cover prescription drugs, ambulance costs, dentistry, and other services not fully covered by the single payer system, which kind of defeats the whole concept of a single payer system which is supposed to cover “all” medical costs.
• And even if a liberal thinks these astronomical costs are manageable, keep in mind that no government program has ever come in under budget so the $32 TRILLION estimate is probably too low by orders of magnitude.

Astronomical costs for low quality healthcare, rife with long wait times for treatment, again, a fatal combination. More single payer failures to follow.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

August, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Foricng The IRS To Return Stolen State Money and Medicaid Is Killing The Truly Needy

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.

1) As readers of past Obama Care disaster posts, we know that Obama played fast, loose, and often illegally with the Obama Care tenets and rules. According to a recent article from the PJ Media website by Tyler O’Neil, we have another example of such shenanigans where Obama treated actual, passed legislation as mere suggestions that could be violated whenever he deemed it appropriate to do so:

• A Federal judge recently ruled that the IRS has to return $839 million to six states because it was illegally collected under the auspices of the Obama Care law.
• According to the article: “In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had unlawfully required six states — Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Texas, and Wisconsin — to foot the bill for health care providers, paying a fee that Obamacare clearly exempted them from.”
• The legislation imposed a fee on any excess profits insurance companies were supposed to earn from Obama Care forcing Americans to buy health insurance for themselves from those companies.
• Although the fee was supposed to come from the insurance companies, the Obama administration forced the state governments to pay those fees, a clear violation of the wording and intent of the law that was passed.
• According to Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry: "Obamacare has always been an economic house of cards, and this ruling has again exposed it for what it is: a money laundering scheme. This is a prime example of the deep administrative state doing something that Congress expressly forbid. Even though the Affordable Care Act forbid imposing the Health Insurance Providers Fee (HIPF) on states, the federal government found a way to do it anyway." 

Obama violating the centerpiece of his administration? Horrors! No, not really. We have shown any number of times how Obama ignored the legislation that bears his name, illegally delaying and changing the law’s tenets to suit his whims. For a detailed look at his past history of changing or ignoring passed legislation, both as it relates to Obama Care and other laws and Constitutional principles, go to:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2016/11/retro-2-obama-presidency-end-of-error.html

2) One of the basic lynch pins of Obama Care was to expand the number of able bodied Americans who could get healthcare and health insurance under the Medicaid program. Medicaid was originally designed to provide basic health care to the truly needy in our country: the disabled, the blind, the really, really poor. Obama Care basically eliminated those restrictions and said as long as you do not earn more than 400% of the poverty level wage level then you could sign up for Medicaid.

We have previously made the analogy of Medicaid to a 50 year old pick up truck. The truck was built back in the mid-1960s and was designed with a towing power of 2 tons. Fifty years later, Obama comes along and without doing any enhancements to the truck, now expects it to pull five tons. Much like the truck that is going to break down trying to pull the extra weight, the same thing has happened with Medicaid. It was never fixed to handle the additional tonnage (i.e. the addition of able bodied people to the Medicaid rolls) and it has now resulted in increased suffering and death, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do:

• According to another Tyler O’Neil article on the PJ Media website on March 4, 2018, a recent study estimates that 21,904 needy Americans have died waiting to get on Medicaid rolls while millions of able bodied people got Medicaid support ahead of them.
• The study was done by the Foundation For Government Accountability and it estimated that, “At least 21,000 needy people have died while waiting for Medicaid coverage, while 13 million able-bodied adults received coverage from Medicaid in the states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, an explosive new study revealed Tuesday. At least 247,295 people are currently on waiting lists to enroll in Medicaid.”
• The research director for the Foundation, Nic Horton, stated that: "This really is a tragedy. Medicaid was designed as a safety net for the truly needy. But it's become bloated and lost its focus. ObamaCare expansion is perhaps the best example of this: nearly 13 million able-bodied adults have been added to welfare while truly needy individuals on waiting lists die before ever getting the services they needed."
• The studied estimated that 21,904 have died while on the Medicaid waiting list and this number includes only 12 of the 32 states that expanded Medicaid under Obama Care, making the 21,904 estimate extremely conservative.
• While Medicaid was designed to serve the truly disabled and needy, the study found that while there are currently 10.7 million disabled persons on Medicaid, Obama Care has caused Medicaid to now also handle 29.2 million able bodied adults.
• Much like the 50 year old truck we discussed above, the program cannot handle the additional load of Obama Care people since it was not designed to do so.
• As a result, we end up with situations like that of Skylar Overman, a 12 year old from Little Rock who has a rare neurological condition that requires 24 hour care.
• After 10 years, she is still on the Arkansas Medicaid waiting list but in the meantime, as a result of Obama Care, over 300,000 able bodied Arkansas adults have been accepted into the program since the Federal government via the Obama Care legislation pays the states more money for these types of Medicaid enrollees.
• Across the country there are more than 650,000 truly needy Americans on Medicaid waiting lists while millions of able bodied adults have gotten onto the Medicaid pick up truck.

Just another disaster from the litany of unfolding disasters from Obama Care. A law that was supposed to hep Americans actually kills and prolongs the suffering of truly needy Americans. Insanity.

To get a get breakdown on a state by state basis of how many are truly needy are still on Medicaid waiting lists and the number of Obama Care newly minted Medicaid patients who jumped the line, go to:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obamacare-medicaid-scandal-21904-truly-needy-people-died-waiting-behind-13-million-able-bodied-adults/

Ignoring the law and killing Americans, just two more unfolding disasters of Obama Care. More to follow.

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

Februrary, 2018, Part 2, the Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Death of the Obama Care Cousin In England

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.

1) The failures of Obama Care have become so rampant and bad that even some of its original supporters are reluctantly admitting that it was a failure. But rather than learn from its failures, these folks want to double down and give the Federal government even more control over our lives, our health, and our freedom by implementing a so-called “single payer” healthcare system in this country. 

In a single payer system, Federal bureaucrats and politicians would control every aspect of your healthcare, from diagnosis to treatment, to cost to the massive amount of tax increases required to implement such a system. This type of system has almost always been a failure both around the world and in this country:

• In England, we have often discussed the reality that recovery times and mortality rates under their single payer system is always higher than in this country.
• In Canada, tens of thousands of their citizens come to this country every year for treatment since they have such long waiting times for even an appointment with a medical specialist that they give up and pay out of pocket costs for treatment in this country.
• When the Federal bureaucrats and politicians do have almost complete control of medical care in this country, e.g. the Veterans administration, Medicare, Medicaid, the costs are often out of control, the medical treatment is often delayed and inadequate, and the long term fiscal viability of these government health care systems are doubtful.

Let’s continue the British single payer discussion today using a recent Freedom Outpost website article by Mac Slavo on January 24, 2018:

• According to a recent BBC broadcast, hospital patients are dying in British hospital hallways according to 68 British doctors.
• These 68 doctors sent out an open letter that was addressed to the British Prime Minister which detailed what they called inhuman conditions that are occurring in the nation’s socialized National Health Services (NHS) hospitals.
• In addition, the doctors cited statistics that show that just in December, 2017 alone, over 300,000 British patients were forced to wait for more than four hours in hospital waiting rooms before being seen by medical personnel.
• And those folks did not include the thousands of others that were forced to wait hours in ambulances since they could not even fit into emergency rooms.
• The letter further noted that it was now routine for patients to be left on gurneys in hospital hallways for as long as 12 hours before getting a regular hospital bed.
• In further disgusting details the doctors showed that around 120 patients a day actually receive medical treatment while in public hallways and waiting rooms, and are “made to undergo humiliating treatments in the public areas of hospitals, and some even dying prematurely as a result….One patient reported having gone to the emergency room with a gynecological problem which had left her in severe pain and bleeding, a lack of treatment rooms led hospital staff to examine her in a busy corridor, in full view of other patients. “
• In the first week of 2018, over 97% of the National Health Service facilities were operating at levels deemed overcrowded which made them “unsafe.”

Pretty disgusting and discouraging stuff. Now, many people claim that if only more taxpayer money was spent, the single payer system in England would be great. But the article points out that funding for the single payer system in England has been quite robust and yet medical care is still atrocious. Funding for the system has gone up year after year since the turn of the century and yet failure is pervasive. 

Giving more and more money to a failed system run by failed politicians and bureaucrats is a formula for disaster. Obama Care, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid have proven this theory in the U.S. every day for decades.

2) Let’s get another view of the British single payer system from a recent Businessweek article:

• The NHS is currently being overwhelmed by patients and complaints while complaining about being underfunded.
• One driving force for all of this is that under their single payer system, everyone gets any medical treatment they can get to, no questions asked, even if those treatments are highly likely to be unnecessary.
• A year ago, the British Red Cross said the British single payer system was on the verge of a humanitarian crisis.
• And this observation/finding was before the current flu epidemic hit the NHS system.
• There are currently too many patients, whose overall average age is increasing along with the medical needs of an older population, and not enough medical staff.
• Britain has fewer doctors, CT scanners, and MRI units per capita than most European nations.
• It ranks near the bottom of European countries when it comes to infant mortality.
• Many other European countries score better when it comes to avoidable deaths, cancer survival, innovation, consistency of service, and other medical and health measurements.

What a mess. The article does try to make the case that more money might solve a lot, but not all, of these problems. But then it turns around and quotes a former government official who calls the NHS a “bottomless pit” when it comes to funding, implying that shoveling money at the problem will not resolve the lousy healthcare that the British people currently get for their tax dollars.

As always, in none of these articles do we see the simple truth that if you do not attack the root causes of high health care listed above, e.g. obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, etc., you will never get health care spending under control no matter how much money you throw at it. We learned that lesson under Obama Care, a program that was not supposed to not “add a single dime” to the national debt but according to the Congressional Budget Office will add almost $2 trillion to the national debt WITHOUT reducing the long term trend of ever higher health care costs.

One more post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care 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:


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

January, 2018, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Real Life Horror Stories From Real Life Americans

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.

We will finish up this month’s review of the unfolding disasters from Obama Care with real life horror stories that the legislation has inflicted on millions of Americans across the country. It is one thing to review data and statistics that summarize the failures of the law but to hear real Americans tell their real stories of how Obama Care has negatively affected their lives, it makes it so human. As always, the source of these horrors is:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

SHIRLEY, UTAH - I think it is horrible what has happened to Medicare since Obama took office. Coverage has gone down, out of pocket expenses have gone up, they've stolen money out of our Social Security and Medicare fund that I paid into for 46 years, to subsidize the Affordable Care Act, (which isn't affordable for most people ). Doctors and medical facilities don't want to take care of people on Medicare anymore because they've cut what they will pay them now.

MARGIE, NORTH DAKOTA - As if they have not stolen enough of our SS with obamacare my insurance has really hit me hard. I was paying $70.00 for my Diabetic Insulin every 90 days, now it costs me $800.00 every 90 days for the same product.

MICHAEL, NEW YORK - Michael Kennedy, who runs two family-owned dog-grooming salons near Albany, said changes to his cut-rate insurance coverage mandated by ObamaCare had more than doubled the cost, from $132.99 to $325.92 a month per person.

And when he checked the cost of buying an ObamaCare policy instead, it was “basically the same price, or even more,” he said.

Kennedy, 46, said that he and his wife clear only about $60,000 a year from their Pink Dog Parlor and Resort business, and that paying the new, higher premiums will be “a huge challenge.”

“It’s like another 100 dogs we need to groom,” he said.

MICHAEL, VIRGINIA - About 5 years ago, I changed my health plan to an HSA through Anthem, to reduce my costs. We had just had our daughter, and the reduced plan seemed perfect in my favor. Gradually, that planned increased to 535/month by August 2010 - No thanks.

I switched to Golden Rule in 2011, and we enjoyed a 249/month plan, keeping my HSA. We have a 5k deductible. It increased yearly to 281, 317, and then 392 after adding my newborn son. Then the "Letter" came in August, something like "...due to rising healthcare costs...518/month."

The increases on my plan previously were in the 13% range, and suddenly it goes up 32% and we're in perfect health.

I scream when I hear the President say, that costs have not gone up as much as previous years...and I wonder who he's talking about. Any other plans I have investigated, just 1 in my current price range, are 10-20% higher for the same coverage, deductible, etc.

JUDY, ARIZONA - My primary care physician and 2 specialists I saw quit practicing because of Obamacare. The insurance company we had for many years increased their premiums by 60% in the last 2 years, costing $1200+ per mo. We had to change insurance companies to one with lower costs but fewer benefits...because of Obamacare.

DIANE, ILLINOIS - We got a letter from our insurance company stating that our premium for both my husband and me was going to be $1120 a month with a $12,700 deductible. This through a private company. Our policy was being cancelled. I went on Medicare in January. Prior our premium on cancelled policy was $679 for both of us. After policy was cancelled 12/31/2013 then reinstated for just my husband his premium for just him was $475.13. The reinstated policy term was to be from January til December. The old policy ran from May of last year and was to go to May of this year. So my husband's premium got increased in January and then we got a letter from insurance company stating his premium was going up again this May to $538.56. So they used the January date and the original May date to levy premiums twice. So what's going to happen next year. Are we going to get two premium increases in one year again? We are all at the mercy of this disgusting messed up law and Obama keeps changing it at will to push his political agenda. 

DEAN, GEORGIA - From WTOC-GA:

Reporter: New details on the Chatham county commission's move to cut hours for over 100 part-time seasonal employees. The Affordable Care Act would require the county to pay for insurance for those seasonal employees if they work more than 30 hours a week. The county says they can't afford it

The change mostly affects summer lifeguards at the county's aquatic center. . . 

Dean: We have to guard the taxpayer's money, and there's no way to fund full-time positions when only part-time work is actually needed.

MICHAEL, MICHIGAN - Insurance broker Michael Harp said small businesses, part of what's known in the industry as the "small group market," are used to seeing health insurance premiums climb about 10 percent a year, but it's never before been this dramatic. For Extreme Dodge to have kept deductibles and out-of-pocket costs at last year's levels, he said, would have cost the dealership almost 50 percent more than last year.

Harp says what is happening at this dealership is representative of the other small businesses he deals with. Businesses with 50 or fewer employees currently provide health insurance to about 17 million U.S. workers, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

He said the biggest surprise to him in how the law impacts small business clients is "how many people are losers versus winners. … There are some people who do come out ahead, but I would say the overwhelming majority, they're paying much higher rates and they have lower benefits."

Higher costs, lost of work hours, lost access to preferred doctors, the disasters just keep on coming.

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

December, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Drugs Costs Up, Root Causes Not Addressed, and Illegal Immigrants and Their Medical Burden On the Country

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.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Often we have discussed the lies and/or deceptions of Obama when it comes to Obama Care. How he often promised that the Obama Care legislation would reduce what an average family annual pays for health insurance by up to $2,500.  How the Obama Care legislation would “bend the cost curve” downward on health care services.

We have just as often pointed out how wrong both of these lies were. How Obama Care premiums and deductibles continue to skyrocket upwards, most often by double digit values. How overall costs have not bent downwards as promised.

A recent article the New York Times that was summarized in the November 18, 2016 issue of The Week magazine provides additional proof of how wrong the President was: “In a recent review of more than 1,400 generic drugs covered under Medicare Part D, the Government Accountability Office found that more than 300 of the drugs had at least doubled in price between 2010 and 2015.” So much for bending the cost curve. Down.

And keep in mind these are generic drugs, not leading, cutting edge, expensive-to-develop new drugs. These drugs should have been old hat to the generic drug companies, not requiring any new research, testing, or massive government approval, they are generic. I cannot imagine what the newer, better drug costs have done over the same period, roughly the same period that Obama Care has been in effect, if hundreds of generic drugs more than doubled in price. Insanity.

2) One of the root causes that we constantly come back to is smoking cigarettes and other tobacco products. Smoking causes a whole slew of health issues that often require extensive medical and health care which drives up the nation’s health care and health insurance costs. Attack this root cause of high healthcare costs, something that Obama Care never really did, and you drive down healthcare costs, it is that simple.

How critical is it to cut down the smoking of tobacco when it comes to health care costs? Consider some facts from a recent article in The Week magazine:

• According to a recent study by the American Cancer Society, a whopping 30% of all cancer deaths in the country are related to tobacco use.
• 167,000 Americans over the age of 35  die every year from smoking.
• Three quarters of these deaths are related to lung cancer caused by smoking but at least 11 other fatal diseases that occur in the kidneys, bladder, and liver are also caused by smoking.
• And you can bet that a lot of medical resources and costs were expended prior to these 167,000 deaths, resources that are costly and expensive and which drive up overall healthcare costs in this country.
• 34% of deaths in American men are due to smoking.

This obvious cause of ever higher and higher national health care costs is a public health issue and should be attacked with a public health campaign and solution. Insead, Obama Care attacked this and every other root cause of high healthcare costs with a hoaky health insurance solution which has obviously not attacked and minimized the root causes of high healthcare costs.

This is not rocket science. It is a direct linkage between the stupidity of smoking and high healthcare costs to treat the ramifications of smoking. So sad that the Washington political class cannot make this simple deduction and come up with a simple solution, a solution that the lead author, Joanie Lortet-Tieulent,  of the referenced American Cancer Society proposed, based on her findings: increase the excise tax on cigarettes, ban smoking in public places, and reduce the nicotine levels in cigarettes to non-addictive levels. No massive government bureaucracies, no massive health insurance company subsidies, no IRS penalties, no meddling in the patient-doctor relationships, just a simple, straight forward public health initiative to attack this root cause.

3) One reason that American healthcare costs and the taxpayer dollars that support ever rising government healthcare costs could be the reality that the American taxpayer forks over billions of dollars every year to pay for the healthcare costs of illegal immigrants in this country. According to a November 4, 2016 article by Robert Tenery on the Lifezette website:

• The National Research Council estimates that the cost of supporting an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in this country is about $346 billion annually.
• If we assume there are about 125 million U.S. households, than theoretically, every American household pays about $2,800 every year to provide medical care, housing, education, and police protection to the 11 million illegal immigrants.
• This is $2,800 that an average American household cannot spend on the needs of their own family including their own healthcare and health insurance needs.
• The center For Immigration Studies estimates that $4.3 billion a year is spent to provide medical treatment for illegal immigrants just by the use of emergency rooms and free clinics, the $4.3 billion does not include the billions more incurred by hospitals and inpatient care.
• In a 2010 analysis,  the Texas Health and Human Services Commission found that an estimated $717 million in uncompensated medical care was incurred by undocumented immigrants just in the state’s public hospital districts that included 99 facilities.
• That same report showed that prenatal care for the unborn children of low-income women who were undocumented immigrants just in Texas was $118 million.

Look, I am not a heartless bastard, If another human being needs medical care in this country, legal or illegal, they should be able to get it. But maybe those people here illegally should not be here in the first place and the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend over time would be better spent on the people who actually earned those dollars, the American taxpayer and their family’s medical and healthcare needs.

4) One of the problems with fixing the Obama Care debacle is that while it has failed on so many fronts, it has provided some needed health insurance coverage to about 20 million Americans. The coverage and resultant medical treatment might be too expensive via Obama Care health insurance policies or poor and possibly ineffective, via expanded Medicaid enrollments, but some people are getting some benefit, with the quality and quantity of that benefit often subpar.

So how do you fix the whole mess without making those getting at least some benefit out of the mess suffer? Long term, you put forth a public health drive and program that addresses the root causes of our high healthcare costs listed above. Short term, you take the advice put forth by Dick Morris, former top advisor in the Bill Clinton administration:

• Effective immediately repeal any requirement that anyone has to buy health insurance or any mandate that any employer purchase it for him.
• Let people choose how much insurance they want and repeal the Obama Care requirement that everyone buy expensive, full soup-to-nuts coverage.
• Continue Obama Care requirements that bar discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions and that make parental plans cover children through age 26.
• Make health insurance premiums deductible on Federal tax forms
• Allow inter-state competition among insurance firms to broaden choice and reduce costs
• Continue subsidies to those who qualify --whether or not they buy policies through the Obama Care exchanges.
• Let people keep their Obama Care policies if they like them.

Why would this work? Consider Morris' logic: “And then, let Obama Care wither away from the inside out.  Millions now covered will want to switch to lower cost policies more closely tailored to their needs.  Why pay extra premiums to cover drug abuse therapy or sex change surgery if you don't want it?  Many young and healthy men and women will opt for low cost catastrophic coverage since it's all they need.”

In other words, let the market dictate what products and services people want rather than the bureaucrats in Washington and their high paid consultants. This approach protects those currently covered by Obama Care policies but allows them a wider array of policies that may better suit their specific needs and affordability levels.

Over time, as the public health initiative kicks in, Americans will be healthier, as the root causes of their unhealthiness are attacked, which in turn will reduce demand for health care services. Basic economic theory and reality tells us that if you reduce the demand for a product or service, the price of that product or service will go down, which should have been the main objective of Obama Care in the first place. Instead, Obama and his cohorts forced an insurance solution on a public health problem, failing miserably, and saddling with the disaster we live with today.

Tomorrow we will wrap up this month’s discussion on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care to review specific American family hardships and stress that this legislation has imposed on millions and millions of Americans.

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