February, 2016, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: Unsustainable Federal Debt, Unprotected LA Citizens, Obama Plays The Blame Game (Again!) and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

So let’s get started with the latest insanity:

1) This topic is from a few years ago but it is a good example of how today’s politicians are in it for themselves and not for the good of Americans. We have already discussed many instances how politicians ensure they get paid first when it comes to taxpayer wealth. 

Today’s greed comes from the California Political Review website in an article that was published on April 26, 2013 by Katy Grimes. Ms. Grimes wrote that U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband had been awarded a California railroad track contract:

• Her husband, Richard Blum, won the first phase construction contract for California’s high speed rail line.
• The winning bid for the construction was almost a billion dollars which comes out to a mere [sarcasm]  $35 million per mile of track that is to be laid between the not so mega-cities of Madera and Fresno.
• A billion dollar contract that goes to a U.S. Senator’s husband. Just a coincidence? If I had to bet, I would bet that it was not a coincidence, given the widespread corruption that exists within the political class today, corruption we report on every month. 

But there is also a bigger issue. The politicians in California want to build a high speed rail line along the length of most of the state. The first leg between two very small cities is coming in on an initial bid of a whopping $35 million per mile. Since no government infrastructure project has ever come in at or under budget, that $35 million cost per mile is likely to go much higher. 

And what is the cost going to be when they try to build a rail line in much more populated areas like LA? The costs are going to go through the roof. I will predict today that this endeavor will never make enough money to pay back a cost that is starting at $35 million per mile and future California taxpayers are going to be paying for this idiotic idea for generations.

2) We have often discussed the reality that the economic recovery from the last recession, as led by President Obama, has been the weakest economic recovery that the country has seen in a very, very long time. Despite spending (and wasting) over $800 billion on a so-called economic stimulus program, record low fuel costs for consumers and businesses, and trillions of fake dollars that the Federal Reserve pumped into the economy, the Obama recovery has been stained with the following realities:

• 45 million Americans still rely on the Federal government for food assistance every month.
• 14 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed since they still cannot find full time jobs years after the end of the recession.
• Wages and household incomes have flatlined over the years since the recession ended.
• Newly created jobs have tended to be in low paying industries.
• The labor participation rate is at decades long lows, bouncing around at the same levels we suffered through during the Carter administration’s stagflation years.
• The true unemployment rate, the U-6 rate, is still almost 10%.

Not a pretty picture from an economic perspective despite the tailwinds of the stimulus, low energy costs, and trillions of Fed paper dollars. Increased taxes, thousands of new Federal government regulations, politicians’ economic ignorance, and the doubt that all of this injected into the economy has left us with a pathetic economic recovery.

And now for the real insanity: given that the entire recovery was run by and occurred during the Obama administration, a time when the Democrats controlled the entire Congress for the first two years of his administration and controlled the Senate for the first six years of his administration, whose fault is this anemic recovery? According to Obama and his recent comments, it is essentially Bush’s fault that the recovery has been so bad despite the fact that Bush left office in early 2009.

Yes, Obama still cannot admit that he screwed anything up, it is always someone else’s fault that he failed to deliver on his promises and duties. The reason why the latest jobs report was so tepid is that there is a lingering “hangover” from the recession in 2008 (eight years ago), a recession that ended well over six years ago. Thus, the reason that the economic recovery that he oversaw and managed and spent lavishly on has been so pathetic is because of what Bush left him with seven years ago. 

As we have said many times with this President, he fails to be a leader since a leader takes blame when things go bad and hands out credit when things go well. This President has not taken the blame for anything but is quick to jump into the spotlight when things go good. 

Note: for those of you that blame Bush for the recession, please refer to the following post where we explain that the seeds of the last recession were planted way back in the Carter administration (a Democrat) and cultivated by the Clinton administration (a Democrat):

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/05/who-really-caused-great-recession-part.html

3) A recent Washington Examiner article by Anna Giaritelli on February 4, 2016 reported on another Obama administration failure, this one in the area of criminal illegal immigrants. A Senate subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest recently issued a report that estimated the number of fugitive criminal illegal immigrants in this country is larger than the total number of people living in New Hampshire’s largest city.

There are an estimated 170,000 illegal immigrants in this country who have been arrested on various criminal charges but who have been let go into the public domain rather than deported. This number is larger than the population of Manchester, New Hampshire, the state which hosted the second primary event of the Presidential campaign. Only 110,000 people live in Manchester. 

The 170,000 criminal illegal immigrants is also larger than the population of 26 U.S. state capital cities. The 170,000 is also larger than the populations of such well known U.S. cities as Chattanooga, Tennessee, Vancouver,Washington, Salem, Oregon, and Kansas City, Kansas. In other words, the Federal government has released a lot of criminals onto the streets of America, criminals that should not even be in this country to begin with.

But it gets worse. The Obama administration reported that in 2015, its immigration function detained 63,539 criminal illegal immigrants, only about one third of the number of criminal illegal immigrants it released back into society. Thus, for every criminal the administration took off the streets of America last year, it put three more back onto the streets. In no universe can this be considered anything but an insane failure of the political class and the government it operates. 

4) Pete Kasperowicz, writing for the Washington Examiner on February 4, 2016, explained how really bad the national debt situation is, as reported by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in a recent Congressional hearing. This is particularly important seeing how the debt level recently exceeded a devastating $19 TRILLION. This comes ot to about a $160,000 debt burden for every U.S. family in the country, a burden that goes up every moment of every day.

The head of the CBO, Director Keith Hall, told Congress recently that the national debt trajectory cannot be sustained. Even an improving economy could not reverse the dire consequences that will occur unless that trajectory is curtailed by government spending cuts. Testifying in front of the House Budget Committee he said: "[Economic] Growth will help,” but “We're so far behind, it's hard to imagine that just growth is going to fix this deficit and debt problem."

The CBO is estimating that another whopping $9.4 TRILLION in national debt will be incurred in just the next ten years under current trends, about another $80,000 for every U.S. household. So much debt will make it hard for the Federal government to convince other countries and individuals to invest in U.S. bonds to finance the government operations and the debt it has incurred. This will require the Federal government to increase the interest rate it pays, further increasing the debt.

Director Hall went on to say that: "Over [the] next 10 years, we could see debt go from 74 percent of [gross domestic product] to 86 percent, then eventually to 155 percent over 30 years, which is a really high number." Yes, that is a really big number that makes our financial situation look like Greece and other countries that have spent their countries into a huge debt hole.

Hall also went on to explain how the Obama administration’s idiotic position that since the annual deficits are down to “only” about half a trillion dollars a year, life is good. First of all, half a trillion a year is more than any annual deficit incurred by any previous administration and second, the CBO is quick to point out that under the current spending scenarios, the debt will soon start climbing again and quickly get to a trillion dollars a year.

When pressed by Congressional members on what are the big drivers of this unsustainable debt, Hall replied: "The big growth in the deficit is from Social Security and spending on major healthcare programs. Those are the two big-ticket items that are creating this problem going forward." I am assuming that the medical programs he is referring to are Medicare, Medicaid, and Obama Care. 

Obviously, the Obama administration in its first seven years has come up with no effective ways of curtailing the out of control spending in these programs. In fact, I do not believe the adminsitration has come up with any programs at all including ineffective ones. But it certainly did add to the problem with the expensive and almost useless Obama Care legislation.

Great insanity today:

• The Washington political class continues to spend and indebt us to a future of financial insolvency unless radical spending cuts occur.
• The Obama administration releases three illegal immigrant criminals onto the streets of America for each one it apprehends.
• Seven years into this administration the President continues to blame everyone else but himself for his failures.

Funny stuff unless you are an under protected, over taxed, fed up taxpayer. More insanity tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

January, 2016, Part 2, By The Numbers: Clinton's Anemic Senate Record, Gun Control Not Working In D.C.Either and More

This is the next post this month in our continuing theme of “by the numbers.” We do this theme occasionally where we look at the reality of the numbers in the world and not the lies, deceptions, and spin of the American political class. I used to work for a boss whose favorite quote was: “There is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the correct number.” By looking at the statistics, trends, and numbers in our world we can cut through the politicians’ smoke screen to truly understand what is going on and hopefully, remedy the issues of the day.

And there will be a lot of smoke to cut through in the next few posts. Always believe the numbers before you believe our politicians, numbers do not lie but politicians do.

1) Michael Walsh, writing for the New York Post on January 2, 2015, brought some numbers and reality to the myth that cops across the country are going on a minority killing rampage. If you were to listen to the main steam media, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and Black Lives Matter, it is a killing field out there. But is it really, what do the numbers say?

According to Walsh’s reporting:

• Citing a Washington Post study of police shootings in 2015, while 965 people were killed by police officers in 2015, white cops shooting unarmed black men accounted for less than 4% of fatal police shooting incidents.
• In 75% of the shootings, police were either under attack themselves or defending innocent civilians. just doing the job they are trained and paid to do.
• The majority of those killed were either brandishing weapons, suicidal, mentally troubled, or ran when ordered to surrender.
• Of the 965 killed, only 90 were unarmed and the majority of those were white.
• Walsh points out how the Post tried to twist the data to favor the “white cops killing black men” theory when they said that: “Although black men make up only 6% of the US population, they account for 40% of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year.”
• But this twisting ignores the reality, and similar numbers and math, that historically blacks committed murders at a much higher rate than their overall share of the population.
• This ignores the fact that black violent-crime rates are far higher than those of whites. 

Look, no one should die because a white police officer, or any racial type of police officer, exceeds his obligations or acts illegally. They should all be prosecuted to the full extent of current law. But the numbers from the Post do not support the media’s vision that white police officers are gunning down unarmed black men at unprecedented levels, the numbers tell a different story. 

Rather than beat this dead horse any more, Walsh points out some other gun violence that maybe should be the priority since the tragic numbers associated with these realities dwarf the number of white cops gunning down black men: in the worst gang-infested neighborhoods of Chicago, the murder rate (116.7 per 100,000 people) is higher than the murder rate in capitals around the world like the capital of Honduras which has a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000. 

These numbers say to focus on the real problems, like everyone killing everyone regardless of race in Chicago vs. the media induced problem and myth of white police officers gunning down black men for no reason. 

2) While Chicago may have the toughest gun control laws in the country, which has likely resulted in the most violent city in the country, Washington D.C. is not far behind when it comes to gun control laws and efforts. How has that whole gun control thing worked out from a violence perspective?

According to the numbers in a recent Washington Post article, not too good:

• By late 2015, there had been 93 murders in 2015, a 23% increase over 72 in 2014.
• In the Petworth section of D.C, crimes with guns were up 34% in 2015 and up 9% in the Columbia Heights section.

So much for the strong gun control controlling crime arguement.

3) According to a recent Gallup opinion survey, almost half of Americans think that government regulates businesses too much while less than half of that amount, 22%, think government does not regulate businesses enough (click on the graph for a larger load):











In fact, the the number of Americans who think that government over regulates has grown significantly since Obama took office, going from 38% to 49%.

Given that the Obama administration has added untold thousands of new regulations since coming into power, this upward trend should not be a surprise. As the number of regulations has increased, economic vitality and growth has been anemic. As the numbers show, America is getting fed up with government and political meddling in the economy.

4) I am not a big fan of HIllary Clinton. I believe she is and has always been a constant liar (e.g. remember how she falsely claimed she came under sniper fire in Bosnia), was responsible for the disaster and coverup at Benghazi, and her stint as Secretary of State was an unmitigated disaster. 

But what about her Senate career, was she any kind of success while a New York Senator? The numbers are not good, regardless of what source of those numbers you look at. Let’s start with the Clinton Senate track record as compiled by the Politifact organization:

• Number of Senate bills Clinton sponsored: 635
• Number of Senate bills Clinton co-sponsored: 2441
• Number of bills sponsored or co-sponsored by Clinton that became law: 54
• Success rate: 1.8%

Thus, according to Politifact, she was successful in getting sponsored legislation passed less than 2% of the time, hardly a winning track record. 

But according to the Clinton Senate numbers reported in a Washington Examiner article by Jason Russell, that was written on December 29, 2015, her record and numbers are even worse. According to his research, in her eight years in the Senate, only three of the bills she sponsored, not co-sponsored, became law and these three were quite underwhelming:

• One successfully sponsored bill renamed a post office in a New York town with less than 2,000 residents.
• Another successfully sponsored bill renamed a portion of a highway outside of Buffalo, New York for the late Tim Russert.
• The third named an existing brick house in Troy, New York as a national historic site which honored a 19th century female union leader.

Wow, underwhelming numbers. According to the Examiner’s tallies, Clinton sponsored 713 pieces of legislation (in the same ball park of 635 sponsored bills that Politifact came up with). Thus, in their analysis, Clinton’s success rate on sponsored bills was an anemic .4% and considering the content of the three bills she got passed, even more anemic.

So what did the numbers tell us today:

• Clinton had a meager Senate legislative record.
• Americans think that politicians regulate us too much from a business perspective.
• Stringent gun control is not working in D.C., much like it is not working in Chicago.
• White cops are not rampaging through the streets killing young black men.

More numbers tomorrow.


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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

January 2016, Part 1, Political CLass Insanity: The TSA, VA and Medicare Continue to Stink At What They Do

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

• NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
• The stock market is stalling.
• Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
• Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
• The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
• Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
• 45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
• Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
• Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
• Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
• The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
• Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
• Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) We often debate in this blog what is the most inept, ineffective Federal government entity. While a number of different agencies are often incompetent enough to grab this title, it is usually the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that wins out. This is critical since national security is currently a big concern for most Americans. 

Our President keeps telling us that we are safe despite recent terrorist attacks in California and France, the rise of ISIS, and leaky U.S. borders. He keeps asserting that he and his administration are on top of the whole terrorist problem and for us not to worry, led by the TSA and DHS.

However, a recent news story kind of undermines this Presidential viewpoint. American Airlines announced that hundreds of its airport security badges have disappeared at various airports across the country. These badges allow possessors of those badges to bypass airport security checkpoints at airports. Given how wealthy the leading terror organization, ISIS, has become, it does not take a genius to figure out how valuable those missing airport badges would be to a would be terrorist and how much they would be willing and able to pay for them.

Just a little something else to worry about during your travels, is that airport employee real or is he a terrorist with a fake badge, brought to you by the Federal government and the TSA?

2) Prior to the Obama administration, the Secret Service would probably have ranked very high in competence vs. the rest of the Federal government. It had never been involved in any scandals or had royally screwed up in its job functions in any way. It had been fifty years since a President had been assassinated. This looked like one government organization that was efficient and effective and competent.

That illusion has certainly been shattered in the past few years. People have successfully jumped the fence surrounding the White House, with one fence jumper actually getting deep into the White House itself. The White House windows have been shot out be a drive by shooter. Just prior to a Presidential visit to Columbia, Secret Service agents were caught partying with prostitutes that may have been funded by drug cartels.

To this tawdry set of incidents we now can add another tale of Secret Service incompetence. According to CNN, a Secret Service agent recently had his gun, badge, radio, handcuffs, and computer flash drive stolen in the middle of the day from his car that was parked near the Secret Service headquarters in D.C. Not only were they stolen from his car, the agent had left the stolen items in a car that, according to the police report, had a window that had been “unzipped,” making stealing anything from the agent’s vehicle easy and not need to have a window broken.

As always, you cannot make this stuff up when it comes to government incompetence. A Secret Service agent, who works on the Presidential Protection detail, leaves his gun and other important material in a car that has a zip out window and parks it on a busy street in D.C. How lax, how amateurish, how stupid can one be? And this President wants to take control over all of our guns when a trained Secret Service agent cannot even protect his own gun? Insanity.

3) One reason writing this blog is so easy to write is that politicians constantly think that they can make up facts and reality and that we are too stupid to not checkout the validity of their claims, making them appear to be the outright, pathological liars that they mostly are. Our current President is particularly active in asserting things that are just not reality.

And apparently his former Secretary of State has the same problem with truth. In a recent Presidential debate, Hillary proclaimed that Donald Trump is being used as a recruiting tool for the terror group, ISIS. She claimed that ISIS is using videos of Trump to recruit others throughout the world to their cause. 

Bad claim to make without having the proof. Since her accusation, no one has been able to find any videos from any terror group that is using Trump as a recruiting tool. What has been uncovered, though, as a result of her claim, is that her husband, Bill Clinton, is being featured in ISIS video recruiting videos. A four-minute ISIS video released last month, “No Respite,” includes an image of Bill Clinton, who is called a “fornicator,” a probable reference to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, among many others. The video also showed pictures of Bush and Obama.

Note to Hillary and her staff: do not spread lies that can be easily checked out for facts, especially if your own husband is playing the role that you accuse your political opponent of playing. In other words, stay in integrity and don’t be stupid.

4) We have already discussed today another adventure in incompetence from the TSA but the Veterans Administration (VA) almost always gives the TSA a run for its money for ineptness. Recently the VA mistakenly declared that 115 veterans were dead but in reality, they were still alive. Unfortunately, by declaring these living veterans to be dead veterans these vets had their government benefits terminated for no reason.

The VA admitted their mistake in a letter to Congress and promised to do better in the future. But given that the VA has made many promises over the years to improve all aspects of how veterans are treated and has failed on just about every one of them, Lord knows how good this new promise will be, especially since the VA stated that it could not determine the root cause for the false termination alive or dead status. If you do not know what caused a problem in the first place, resolving that problem without the right root causes can be a little challenging.

To show how comical and out of control this problem is, Philip Klein writing for the Washington Examiner, reported that Carl Colamonico was not only prematurely declared dead by the VA but they also had recorded that he been buried in Riverside National Cemetery and that he was incorrectly listed as a World War II vet when he actually was a Vietnam vet. Thus, the VA screwed up everything: he was alive not dead, he was upright, not buried and he was a Vietnam vet, not a World War II vet. Cannot be more wrong than what they did to poor Carl. Insane.

5) Alright, today we have embarrassing failures from the TSA and VA so let’s add another Federal agency into today's disaster mix, the Medicare operation. According to a recent article from the Senior America Association, written by Greg Allen on December 17, 2015:

• Twenty four year old Daniel Suarez ran what appeared to be a successful pharmacy operation, especially since he already owned a Rolls Royce and Bentley at the tender young age of 24.
• However, what he was really doing was running a criminal operation that had up until recently scammed the Medicare program out of an amazing $21 million of dollars.
• Fortunately, he was finally caught running his Medicare scam, was sentenced to nine years in prison and his mother and three other family members were also sentenced to jail.
• But this was not before he had purchased a Rolls Royce Ghost, a Bentley, a Range Rover, a Mercedes-Benz S63 AMG and two unidentified luxury cars with some of the stolen Medicare funds. 
• The Mercedes sells about $160,000 while the Rolls sells for about $300,000, according to Car and Driver.
• This 24 year old also owned two homes, more than a dozen trucks, $100,000 in jewelry, and over $2 million in credit card charges.
• This Cuban immigrant and his relatives were all licensed pharmacy techs and operated eight small pharmacies in the Miami area from which they paid patients and recruiters to gain access to Medicare ID numbers.
• They then billed Medicare for drugs that were never actually dispensed.

Disgusting. This caper raises some very serious questions on how incompetent Medicare is:

1. Why did this obvious fraud go on so long, long enough for this 24 year old to buy cars, trucks, homes, and run up millions of dollars in credit card charges?
2. Doesn’t the Medicare system have some kind of sanity check points in their data systems to help identify these types of outrageous scams from small pharmacies long before they lose millions of taxpayer dollars to these criminals?
3. Given how simple this fraud was to set up, how many other times is this type of fraud going on across the country, how many billions of dollars is it costing the American taxpayer every day of every year, and what steps, if any, is Medicare taking to shut this insanity down?

Again, disgusting. This is why no American, rich or poor, should pay an additional penny in taxes, not when the political class allows such massive and easy-to-get-away with fraud to go on.

First political class insanity report of the month, much more to go. But in early returns, the TSA, the VA and Medicare continue to prove every month that they are some of the most inept and poorly run government organizations to ever exist.

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

November, 2015, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Insurance Companies Balk, Baillout Time?

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 it 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 health care 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 health care 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 health care 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 but with a big exception: 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 health care 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 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 will be the final review for this month of the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Earlier in this series we extensively reported on how the Obama Care co-ops were going out of business on an almost daily basis. These organizations were established to provide Obama Care insurance policies in areas of the country where there was not a lot of regular insurance company competition to hold down insurance costs. 

Unfortunately, most of the co-ops ended enrolling far fewer customers than needed or expected and the customers that did enroll were older and sicker than what was needed to make the co-ops financially viable. As a result, the co-ops are shutting down, over a billion dollars (so far) that they received as Federal loans will likely never be repaid, and tens of thousands of Americans need to hustle to find other sources of health insurance. 

But while the closing of a dozen or so co-ops is a disaster for Obama Care, a much larger disaster is looming, as laid out in a Washington Examiner article by Philip Klein on November 19, 2015:

• UnitedHealthcare Group, which is the largest insurance company in the country, recently announced lower than expected earnings due to policies related to Obama Care.
• And what could be an earth shattering move, the company announced that it may exit out of Obama Care exchanges and not write any more Obama Care policies.
• Stephen J. Hemsley, the CEO of the company stated: "In recent weeks, growth expectations for individual exchange participation have tempered industrywide, co-operatives have failed, and market data has signaled higher risks and more difficulties while our own claims experience has deteriorated."
• In addition, a company press release stated: "UnitedHealthcare has pulled back on its marketing efforts for individual exchange products in 2016. The company is evaluating the viability of the insurance exchange product segment and will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public exchange markets in 2017."
• The company said its “earning pressure” is "driven by projected losses on individual exchange-compliant products [i.e. Obama Care policies] related to the 2015 and 2016 policy years."
• In a conference call with investors, Hemsley said that customers' claims for medical care against their Obama Care policies were getting worse over time and that there was no sign that this trend would reverse any time soon, if ever.
• When asked about whether the UnitedHealthcare could sustain these Obama Care losses past 2016, Hemsley was very clear: "No. We cannot sustain these losses. We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself."
• This is critical since in 2017 the Obama Care programs that were put in place for the first years of the legislation to mitigate insurance company losses on Obama Care policies are scheduled to go away, making any financial cushion that does exist today for insurance company losses a thing of the past in 2017 and beyond.
• This could push other insurance companies to also reconsider their decision to offer Obama Care policies as their financial results possibly deteriorate even faster.

And thus the death spiral picks up speed. As companies like UnitedHealthcare dropout of the Obama Care exchanges, their high risk, high cost customers will migrate over to the remaining Obama Care insurance carriers which will see an increase in their costs from these sicker and costlier customers which will cause them to raise their insurance rates which will cause more people to drop their insurance which will decrease Obama Care insurance company revenues which will cause them to raise rates more……

2) Let’s stay with this mess that is bad financials and Federal subsidies. Another recent article by Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner shows the first hint that the American taxpayer may be on the losing end of another corporate bailout scenario. Klein reported on November 20, 2015 that “The Department of Health and Human Services attempted to reassure private insurers on Thursday that they'll be able to recover losses from participating in Obamacare by claiming it was an "obligation" of the U.S. government to bail them out.”

Yes, America, after bailing out the car companies, the banks, Fannie Mae, AIG, Freddie Mac and who know what other corporations a few years ago, the Obama administration is looking to put together a corporate bailout for the insurance companies that were foolish enough to sell Obama Care policies. The issue revolves around the Obama Care ”risk corridors” program. 

This program was supposed to run from 2014 through 2016. It called for the Federal government to confiscate money from health insurance companies that did better than expected with Obama Care policies and give that money to Obama Care insurance companies that were doing worse than expected. In theory, this was supposed to ease the transition into the Obama Care world and encourage all insurance companies to participate since their losses, if any, would be mitigated by the risk corridor money.

By law, this pool of money can only be replenished by insurance company funds, no taxpayer funds are allowed to be used to help out the insurance companies. Which is where the problem gets tough: as we discussed above, the Obama Care policies are turning out to be from disproportionately sicker and costlier people which is causing more bad financial results than good financial results.

For example, in 2014, Obama Care insurers who lost more than expected ended up asking for $2.87 billion in risk corridor payments. But the Federal government collected only $362 million from insurers performing better than expected from Obama Care policies. Thus, the Feds had only about 13% of the funds needed to fulfill the risk corridor requirements of the law ($363 million in excess earnings divided by $2.87 billion in excess losses).

This is a situation that has ticked off the insurance companies since they are getting back less than what they claim was promised by the Obama administration when they signed up for the Obama Care exchanges. The industry’s lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, is demanding that its members be kept whole: "We've been very clear with the administration about the serious challenges facing consumers and health plans in this Exchange market. Most recently, nearly 800,000 Americans have faced coverage disruptions as a result of the significant and unexpected shortfall with the risk corridors program. When health plans cannot rely on the government to meet its obligations, individuals and families are harmed as a result. The administration must act to ensure this program works as intended and consumers are protected."

In response to this demand and threat, the Obama administration announced that it would use money collected in 2015 and 2016 to make up for the 2014 $2.5 billion shortfall. Which is a ridiculous statement and promise to make because how are the risk corridors going to pay for the 2015 and 2016 insurance company claims if the excess profits in 2015 and 2016 were used to pay for the excess losses in 2014? It is a zero sum game and unless the people in Obama Care policies get a lot healthier in 2015 and 2016, reducing insurance company costs, there will continue to be a shortfall. 

Thus, one of two things have to happen. The first option involves the Obama administration breaking existing law and giving the insurance companies taxpayer money to keep them happy, i.e. another taxpayer bailout of large corporations. 

The second option involves the insurance companies being stuck with less than what they expected which will eventually lead them to go down the same route as UnitedHealthcare and get out of the Obama Care business. This would then cause the whole Obama Care house of cards to implode onto itself and collapse.

But long ago we and others predicted that this would happen. Obama Care never looked at the underlying root causes of our high healthcare costs in this country. The law mistakes a public health problem for an insurance problem and thus, invokes a bad solution for a misdiagnosed problem. The underlying drivers of high costs still exist, as listed above, and risk corridors and such do nothing to fix those problems. 

And now, the Obama administration is faced with two bad options: try to find a way for taxpayers to bailout multi-billion dollar insurance companies or watch the whole house of cards collapse as more and more companies refuse to offer Obama Care policies.

3) One last piece of disgust from Obama Care this month. We mentioned above that the industry lobbying group is demanding that the Federal government, i.e. taxpayers, keep the insurance companies whole relative to the risk corridors. This lobbying group is headed up by a Marilyn Tavenner. 

Ms. Tavenner just happens to be a former Federal government employee who coincidently was in charge of the government implementation of Obama Care when she was the overall boss at the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, she set up the risk corridors and certainly knew the risks involved with them but is now probably a very highly paid consultant trying to tear down those risk corridors at the beckoning of her new employer. 

While probably nothing illegal is going on here, this potential conflict of interest just adds another layer of stench to the whole Obama Care process. A former high government official now using her government knowledge and insights to rip off the American taxpayer and laughing all the way to the bank in the process. Disgusting. 

More Obama Care disasters tomorrow, the legislation that never stops giving….bad news.

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

November, 2015, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Co-ops Die, Insurance Policy Costs Go Up 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 it 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 health care 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 health care 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 health care 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 but with a big exception: 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 health care 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 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.

For the next several days we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) During last month’s review of Obama Care disasters, we had several discussions on how the 23 health insurance co-ops set up by the legislation were starting it implode and go out of business, leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans without health insurance. In the first two years of Obama Care, all but one of the co-ops lost money.

And as time went on, those financial losses grew until the co-ops went out of business from debt or state insurance commissions shut them down. A month later, the carnage has not abated. According to a recent Washington Examiner article by Robert King, Utah’s Obama Care insurance co-op has been shut down by the Utah insurance regulators. Additional details of the shutdown include the following:

• The lack of Federal taxpayer funding from the Obama administration was cited as the cause for the shutdown.
• In total, all of the co-ops asked for $2.9 billion in so-called “risk corridor” funds but received only $356 million, 12% of the total request.
• This is the tenth Obama Care co-op to go out of business.

So now tens of thousands of Utah co-op customers are soon to be without health care insurance, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do. 

2) But wait, it gets worse in the Obama Care co-op world. In another Washington Examiner written shortly after the article about the Utah co-op shutdown, and also written by Robert King, we find out that the Arizona co-op was also going out of business. Details include the following:

• Both Arizona insurance regulators and Federal officials were involved in the decision to shut it down.
• This latest co-op shut down brings the total number of Obama Care co-ops to go down is now up to 11, just short of half of the total number began (23).
• The Arizona co-op got $93 million in Federal taxpayer money to into the health insurance business but has lost more than $78 million in the short time it has existed.
• As with the Utah co-op, all of the Arizona co-op insurance policy holders, all 50,000 of them, now have to go find other sources of health insurance.

Seems that if you blink another co-op goes belly up.

3) But there is more bad co-op news. According to a recent article on the Young Conservatives website, 83,000 people in Colorado are about to lose their health insurance under Obama Care because that state’s co-op recently announced that it too was going out of business. The Colorado state insurance regulators decertified the co-op as an eligible insurance option when the Federal government announced that it would not pay the full amount of money originally promised to the co-ops.

The same article described how the New York Obama Care co-op is also collapsing into insolvency. In an added twist to this specific collapse, not only is the co-op failing financially but investigations of fraud and criminal activity are underway regarding its funds and operations.

4) A recent Heritage Foundation article by Dr. Sreedhar Potarazu called Obama Care a cancer that needed to be removed from our lives. His reasons for this analogy include the following:

- Declining Enrollment Forecasts -

• By 2016, Obama Care was supposed to have provided health insurance to 20 million Americans.
• However, the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid recently announced that the expected number of enrollees after the 2016 enrollment is half of what was promised, about 10 million.
• Even worse, the mix of Obama Care insurance policyholders is expected to be deficient in young and healthy customers, the kind that pay insurance premiums but are unlikely to need medical and health care service. 
• The lack of enough healthy and younger customers makes Obama Care insurance companies more likely to raise rates in order to cover the more expensive medical needs of its older, and less well policyholders.

- Rising Costs

• In the past month or so state insurance regulators have approved all or most of the premium increases filed by the health insurers in their states.
• These increases are necessary since these insurance companies never attained the number and quality mix of customers they originally expected.
• Thus, the customers that they did sign up were less healthy and more expensive than they originally forecasted, costing them more than they anticipated.
• Now they have to dig out of their financial hole by raising rates on those customers.
• So much for the Obama promise that insurance costs for most American families would decrease up toto $2,500 a year.

- Death of Obama Care co-ops

We have already covered the details of this disastrous piece of Obama Care: all but one of them has been a losing proposition from a financial perspective so far, about half of them have already gone out of business or have announced that they will go out of business shortly, hundreds of thousands of customers from these co-ops now have to go out and find different insurance coverage, and over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding that was used to get these failed co-ops established is unlikely to ever be paid back.

Failed co-ops costing the American taxpayer over a billion dollars and disrupting the lives of thousands and thousands of Americans. Inept and corrupt management of those co-ops. Higher and higher insurance costs every year for Obama Care policies resulting in anemic enrollment numbers vs. the promised number of enrollees by 2016. The unfoldiing disaster that is Obama Care never stops unfolding. More disasters tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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