December,2018, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Americans Say No To Single Payer Systems and A Texas Judge Says No To 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.

1) We have often talked about idiocy of having a single payer/universal healthcare system in this country. A single payer system is where private insurance companies go away and politicians and government bureaucrats control EVERY aspect of your health care. While it has been implemented in other countries around the world, it has almost always been an absolute failure from a quality, quantity and cost of health care provision:

• In England, recovery from disease and health issues is almost always worse than in the United States.
• In Canada, although everyone has “free” healthcare and health care insurance, the majority of Canadians have to pay extra for their health care since the “free” coverage is skimpy and it does not cover drug prescriptions, dental coverage, and vision coverage.
• As a result, tens of thousands of Canadians leave the country every year to get medical care elsewhere in the world that they cannot get in real time in Canada.
• While Americans wait hours or days to get basic tests (e.g. MRI scans, X-Rays, etc.), Canadians have to wait weeks or months for the same basic health care.

The following posts are just a sample of real data and reality of how bad single payer systems are:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-2018part-2-unfolding-disaster.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/02/februrary-2018-part-2-unfolding.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/february-2017-part-5-unfolding-disaster.html

And in a sense we already have a single payer system in various forms in this country and they fail just like other countries’ single payer systems:

• The Veterans Administration has been a failure for years as the VA executives got rich on bonus payments while veterans had to wait months to see a doctor, with many of them dying while they waited.
• Medicaid provides skimpy coverage with narrow networks and about a third of doctors across the country refusing to take on Medicaid patients.
• Medicare and Medicaid lose tens of billions of dollars every year from criminal fraud and inefficiencies.

Not a pretty sight. And it appears that it is not just me that thinks a single payer system in this country is a good idea:

• According to a NewsMax article by Jeffrey Rodack on December 6, 2018, a recent Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans think that a single payer/universal healthcare system in this country is a bad idea.
• 54% of Americans polled would reject such a healthcare system in this country.
• Only 40% were in favor of such a system for us.
• Sentiment is quite different across political ideals since 85% of Democrats, say it is the government’s responsibility to make sure all have healthcare coverage while only 27% of Republicans say it is the government’s responsibility to ensure Americans have healthcare coverage.

Hopefully the political class in this country take a long hard look at the failure of the single payer model around the world, the failures of this country’s experience with single payer-like system and the reality as uncovered by Gallup that the majority of Americans do NOT want such a system in this country.

2) For those that have not heard, a Texas judge recently ruled the Obama Care legislation as un-Constitutional. His reasoning, according to Bloomberg reporting: “U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that the Affordable Care Act, the signature health-care overhaul by President Barack Obama, needed to be eviscerated after Congress last year zeroed out a key provision — the tax penalty for not complying with the requirement to buy insurance.”

Remember, the original Obama Care legislation forced every American to have health insurance coverage or become a criminal subject to progressively heavier fines as time went by. Most Americans who value freedom found such a requirement, i.e. government and politicians, forcing us to buy something that maybe we did not want, did not need, or could not afford, repugnant to free choice and an extreme overreach of a central, overbearing government effort.

While this was certainly a right call from a freedom perspective, and you know that Democrats will appeal this up to the Supreme Court, I had to laugh at a ludicrous statement made by a Democratic official out in California: “Today’s ruling is an assault on 133 million Americans with preexisting conditions, on the 20 million Americans who rely on the ACA’s consumer protections for health care, and on America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care for all Americans,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Friday afternoon.

My gosh, such drivel on many different fronts:

• First of all, Obama Care was targeted at individuals who did not have employer provided health insurance and who had to purchase insurance on the open, individual insurance market.
• Those who get insurance from their employers do not have to worry about not getting covered because of pre-existing conditions. 
• There are nowhere close to 133 million Americans that a) have pre-existing conditions and b) need to get their insurance coverage on the individual market.
• Thus, his 133 million number is a ridiculous lie.
• Anyone who wants insurance via the Obama Care exchanges can still get it, the ruling just states that they do not HAVE to get it as the original legislation says.
• So those 20 million people he refers to, assuming that the number is right which I believe is inflated by at least 100%, have nothing to worry about since they can still get Obama Care insurance and this ruling is on hold subject to appeals.
• And the most idiotic statement of all, namely that “America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care” as a result of Obama Care could not be any further from reality.
• Obama Care caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred health insurance options resulting in every growing premium and deductible costs, doing the exact opposite of what it was heralded to do, reduce health insurance costs.

As always, single payer systems in other countries and Obama Care in this country tried to resolve a public health issue with an insurance solution and failure was inevitable. Higher costs, lower quality have always been the result. Fortunately, Americans as measured by Gallup and the judge in Texas understand the reality, namely that government meddling in this area of life makes a bad situation worse.

More Obama Care disasters to be discussed in the following posts.

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

September, 2018,Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Comparing The U.S. And Canadian Health Care Systems

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 just focus on the highlights of a recent article by Carlin Becker from September 18, 20918 that appeared on the Independent Journal Review website. The article took a great, in-depth look at whether ot not the current U.S. approach to health care was worse or better than the long term single payer system that Canada has lived under for years and years. 

It has been our opinion in this blog that the Canadian single payer system, like every other single payer system, provides expensive, low quality, and low quantity health care. But I was willing to have my statistic and reality based conclusions upset if the article could make the case, numerically, that a single payer system is better. So let’s start examining the numbers:

• In the U.S., 56% of the citizen have private health insurance, 35% are covered with government financed health insurance (i.e. Medicare and Medicaid), and 9% are uninsured.
• In Canada, the government provides “free” health insurance to 100% of the citizens but 67% of its citizens pay for additional, needed health insurance coverage.
• The Canadian system while promoted as "universal” does not cover prescription drug costs and dental care costs which leads to a majority of them shelling out additional money to supplement their "free" government insurance.
• Thus, according to the Canadian Institute for Health and Information, many Canadians go without drug insurance or dental care.
• According to the the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States spent 17.2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care in 2016 while Canada, on the other hand, spent less on health care, clocking in at just 10.3% of its GDP in 2016.
• In 2016, for instance, the average American spent around $10,345 on health care, including insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and other out-of-pocket costs while the average Canadian spent nearly half that, paying about $6,299 that same year.
• According to a Fraser Institute study, Canadians on average wait 21.2 weeks to see a specialist after a referral from a GP doctor while in the U.S. the average wait time is 24.1 days in metro U.S. areas, according to a Merritt Hawkins study, i.e. it takes about seven times longer to see a medical specialist in Canada than in the U.S.
• The Fraser study also found that in Canada, patients wait 4.1 weeks on average to get a CT scan, 10.8 weeks for an MRI scan, and 3.9 weeks for an ultrasound scan.
• These Canadian wait times for basic diagnostics health tools is very, very much longer than in the U.S., long waiting times that could result in far more serious health and pain levels while waiting.
• The long wait times has led 63,000 Canadians to travel outside of Canada for these basic tests in 2016, travel costs and diagnostic costs that were not covered by their government insurance.
• According to University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor , Mark Pauly, a professor of healthcare management, “the wait time for scans [in the U.S.] is minimal": “If you are in the ER and need a scan, you will get it right away. There may be some delay in scheduling at a particular facility if you want an elective scan. Though in any large city, I am sure you could find someone who would take you within a few days.”
• Pauly also pointed out in the article that Canadians patients are more likely to suffer from acute diseases, have less access to specialists, and experience worse health outcomes than in the U.S,. since the Canadian system emphasizes primary care vs. acute care medicine and health care: “If you are a basically healthy person and your needs can be satisfied with primary care, you're probably going to be better off under the Canadian system. On the other hand, if you are sick, and especially if you have a chronic condition, you're going to wait longer in Canada and have to hobble around in pain for a longer period of time than you would in the U.S.”
• Canadians have the 13th longest life expectancy rate, age 82, while Americans' expected life length at 79 ranks it 45th in the world.
• Infant mortality rates are also lower in Canada, 4.5 deaths per 1,000 live births vs. 5.9 deaths in the U.S.
• While about 1.7 million people in the U.S. are diagnosed with cancer every year with about 610,000 dying from the disease, according to the Canadian Cancer Society, last year only 206,000 Canadians were diagnosed with cancer with about 80,800 dying from the disease.
• However, since the U.S. has nine times as many people than Canada, the cancer diagnosis and cancer death rates are a little higher in Canada.
• Pauly stated in the article that “ordinary people in Canada are healthier than in the U.S., but outcomes for cancer and very serious illnesses are less good there. It's a great place to live as long as you don't get too sick, as one critic put it.”
• But he also stated that since Canada has many more primary care doctors that can catch bad health trends earlier, which may account for the better ordinary health care and the horrible acute health results.

So, a lot of data but let me summarize: if you are relatively healthy then the Canadian system is better for you. If you do not need specialists, diagnostic scans, prescription drugs, have good, strong healthy teeth, you do not need to travel abroad for basic tests, are willing to risk a slightly higher cancer rate of diagnosis and death, and are willing to wait longer and endure more pain and get sicker and sicker, possibly endangering your life, while waiting to get treated by a specialist for a disease that you do get, than Canada is for you. 

But if you need specialists and need them quickly, your teeth are a problem, you need prescription drugs, you do not have the resources to travel abroad for cheaper care, you want the pain and sickness to go away as soon as possible, but have to pay a higher price the U.S. is for you.

Or the best solution of all: stop treating health care as an insurance problem like the single payer advocates, Obama Care, and Bernie Sanders want to do. 

The health care crisis in this country is a public health issue: Americans eat too much, American eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans smoke too much, Americans are too drug and opioid addicted, and Americans do not exercise enough. Fix those problems, and the other root causes listed above, and the American health care costs will go down dramatically while still retaining quick and quality access to scans, specialists, and life saving and pain saving treatments without delay. It is that simple, you cannot resolve a public health crisis with an expensive and eventually ineffective and inefficient insurance solution.

Or as we have said many times before: given that people like Bernie Sanders and his 500 peers in Congress cannot operate an efficient and effective postal system or Amtrak line, tiny, tiny minute industries vs. health care, what in the world makes anyone think that they can handle the health care needs of every American? Absurd to even entertain that idea. Fix the root causes and the costs take care of themselves.

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

June, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The UN Tells Us What To Do, The Press Gets wise, and California Democrats Get Stupid

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) Keep in mind as we go through this opening discussion that the United Nations is pretty useless. It failed to stop any number of wars since its founding after World War II. It has not stopped the refugee problem in modern times from the Sudan and Syria. It has not eliminated world hunger. It has not stopped the spread of nuclear weapons. It has been an utter failure in just about everything it does. 

Which makes the news that was reported by John Locke on April 27, 2017 on the American Journal Review that much more comical regarding Obama Care:

• According to the article, the United Nations has contacted the Trump administration and told it that repealing Obama Care is illegal and the UN will not allow it.
• It claims that if Obama Care is repealed and Americans lose health insurance coverage then the U.S. would be in violation of international agreements, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva.
• Really? Since when does the United States have to listen to the rantings of a failed international body on any issue at all, never mind an issue that applies only to U.S. citizens and has no bearing on a citizen from another country?
• And speaking of hypocrisy, this Human Rights Commission is supposed to “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,“ and yet its members include some of the worst, most repressive government regimes in the world including China, Cuba, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, governments that are openly hostile to the health and well being of their own citizens.

Pretty funny stuff if it was not so pathetic. Obama Care has been a failure along every dimension imaginable and yet these foreign, hypocritical snobs think they have the right to determine what is right and proper for our citizens. Insanity.

2) Tea Party Patriots website recently listed a few current articles that show that even the mainstream press, the same press that loved anything Obama did no matter how bad or ineffective it was, may be actually starting to report the truth on Obama Care if the following sampling of headlines is any indication:

• “Obamacare's crushing cost to some families: 49 percent price hike since 2014, premiums of $14,300” - CNBC – 05/11/2017
• “Why So Many Insurers Are Leaving Obamacare” - The Atlantic – 5/11/2017
• “States scramble to prevent Obamacare exodus” - The Hill – 06/04/2017

Sometimes things get so bad that even the mainstream press has to eventually tell the truth even if it means showing Obama Care in its true negative light.

3) Obama Care gave the Federal government a much bigger say in how Americans get and pay for health care but came up short of what many socialists wanted in Congress, a full fledged so-called “single payer insurance market” where the government and the inane bureaucrats that operate it control EVERY aspect of Americans’ health care needs. They want this despite the reality that just about everywhere that the single payer health industry model has been deployed it has been a medical, health, and financial failure.

But according to reporting by Jack Crowe, writing for the Heritage Foundation on May 30, 2017, that is not stopping California state politicians from pushing for their own single payer insurance market in their state despite the failure of such a model everywhere else: 

• The California State government appropriations committee recently passed proposed legislation that create a single payer/universal health care market in the state of California.
• The ANNUAL cost of such a move would be $400 billion according to the those who supported the legislation.
• Unfortunately, although these folks came up for an estimate of such a move they were unable to find a way to get $400 billion EVERY year to pay for it without gutting current health insurance programs and substantial raises in state taxes.
• Despite the impossible cost level, it is a great idea since every state citizen would get free access to acupuncture and chiropractic care, everyone could see any specialist without a referral, and there would be no copays or deductibles, just free unlimited healthcare...that costs $400 BILLION a year.
• The $400 billion annual cost would steal $200 billion from Medicare and Medicaid and raise taxes the equivalent of doubling the payroll tax, taking it from the current $15.3 % to over 30%. 
• However, their analysis left this dire warning: “The state-wide economic impacts of such an overall tax increase on employment is beyond the scope of this analysis.” In other words, we have not idea what unintended and dire consequences could occur because of this plan but we voted for it anyway.

Keep in mind a few realities here:

• These are the same politicians that have run up over $100 billion in unfunded liabilities for the state that will eventually crush its credit rating and ability to function.
• As we have previously reported, these are the same politicians whose policies are causing millions of people and thousands of businesses to flee the state for areas with lower taxes, lower regulations, and more sanity.
• And never in the history of U.S, government has the initial cost estimate from a government entity ever been too high, e.g. the Big Dig in Boston was supposed to cost about $2 billion but cost over $20 billion, Obama Care was supposed to cost less than $900 billion the first ten years but will likely cost almost $2 TRILLION, etc. Thus, you can almost be assured that the $400 billion will be a fraction of the final cost.
• Even if the annual $400 BILLION cost is legit (which it will not be), with 39 million citizens in California, that means that every citizen’s cost burden for this legislation would average over $10,000 per person. Thus, a family of four would theoretically be paying $40,000 a year for health insurance.
• If you are a liberal and reading this and you spout your typical response that only the rich would pay more in taxes to cover the cost, let me assure you that the rich would not pay more in taxes because they would be able to easily move out of California to avoid the crushing cost of at least $400 billion a year, leaving the poor and middle class behind to pick up the slack.
• And not only would the rich be leaving the state, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals would also be leaving because as the revenue shortfall grew because of this inane program, the payments to doctors and others would continue to get squeezed causing them to also flee to better and more profitable work locations in other states.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. And yet, it still passed committee even though they have admitted they no idea what this would mean to employment. Idiocy.

More Obama Care, and other government health industry disasters, 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:

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