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I guarantee this will be the FINAL Obama Care unfolding disaster review for this month. It seems that as we get closer and closer to the rollout of major Obama Care components, the bad news, dreadful implications, and idiocy are spewing forth ever more quickly. As soon as we get a few blog posts completed, more bad news shows up.
Our first entry into this month’s Obama Care review can be accessed at:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/08/part-1-august-2013-obama-care-update.html
The final disasters can be read below:
1) According to a website for Federal employees called FedSmith.com, a survey that the website managers recently conducted found that less than 3% of U.S. Federal workers want to give up their current health plans and join Obamacare. 92.3% of Federal workers think that they should continue with their current health insurance program, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). Just 2.8% think they should be required to join Obama Care exchanges and 4.9% are not sure.
“There is apparently little debate among the Federal workforce. Federal employees do not want to be part of the new system… Employees who are already retired have a much stronger negative reaction to being moved to a new system,” FedSmith.com noted.
Wow, I thought Obama Care was supposed to be this great health care insurance program that every American would want to be a part of. Apparently not, when a whopping 92.3 % of Federal workers say “no thanks.”
And given that a Congressman, Dave Camp, has proposed legislation that would force ALL Federal employees off of their current health care insurance program and onto Obama Care, serious petition writing is going on within the Federal bureaucracy with Federal employees to oppose such a move. You cannot say Obama Care is a good thing for American when over 90% of those working in the government itself say it is not a good thing for them.
2) The Personal Liberty Digest website did a nice job of summarizing what Obama Care really is in a posting to its website on August 14, 2013:
- Obama Care puts you into a system of medicine that treats symptoms rather than providing cures.
- Obama Care doses you down in pharmaceuticals that often do more harm than good and cause more symptoms that must be treated by more pharmaceuticals.
- Obama Care limits your treatment options and takes decisions that should be made between you and your trusted doctors and puts them in the hands of a massive new Federal bureaucracy.
- Obama Care was written by the medical-industrial complex to ensure a steady stream of new customers and guaranteed payment from government coffers— is fraught with little nuggets showing that the whole system as designed is a huge fiasco.
- And Obama Care is probably is the biggest fraud perpetrated on the American people since Social Security:
- The IRS, which was recently uncovered to be sharing private data of Tea Party group members and conservative political donors, is in charge of compiling and securing data on all Americans and ensuring compliance.
- Security testing for the Obamacare database, entrusted to the aforementioned and obviously criminal IRS, is months behind schedule and won’t be completed before Obamacare kicks in this fall.
- IRS employees, tasked with overseeing Obamacare, have asked to be exempted.
- That promise “If you like your current health plan, you can keep it,” was a lie.
- Congress and Congressional staff have been exempted, meaning what’s good enough for you isn’t good enough for them.
- Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is shaking down companies the HHS might regulate.
- Despite the delay in implementation of the employer mandate (an unConstitutional action by Obama fiat), employer fines will continue to grow at rates far greater than inflation.
- Employers are increasingly resorting to part-time workers to avoid Obamacare fines.
- Young people, considered the linchpin of the Obamacare Ponzi scheme because they will be paying into the system but using few of the benefits, are learning what it’s going to cost them and are saying they want no part of it.
- It is causing insurance premiums to rise exponentially.
- The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates employers will pay around $106 billion in penalties between 2014 and 2022 for not meeting the law’s insurance requirements. That’s $106 billion employers won’t have for growing their businesses and creating more job opportunities.
- The “Cadillac tax” provision included in the bill is going to send more cities, already struggling with high-cost pension plans and insurance coverage for its employees, into bankruptcy.
- A rule establishing a maximum limit in the out-of-pocket expenses people may have to spend on their own health care will be delayed until 2015. This means those with chronic illnesses like cancer and severe disabilities may incur thousands of dollars a year in out-of-pocket expenses.
- More Americans than ever—a significant majority–oppose it.
- And hundreds of favored businesses and unions have received exemptions that aren’t available to everyone.
We have covered most of these fiascos already but it is nice to have them so nicely summarized in one place. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Three years after this disaster was enacted, this is where we are less than 50 days before a major piece of it is supposed to go live. Pathetic.
3) This latest disgrace from Obama Care is just now getting some news attention so I do not know where it is going but it is a very troubling story. A South Carolina state legislative bill recently passed the house in the state government of South Carolina but failed to be passed in the state Senate.
The bill is supposedly in response to a piece of the Obama Care legislation that will violate the Fourth Amendment rights of every American family by allowing a government authorized representative to enter and inspect a family’s home based on a very shaky and non-specific set of circumstances, circumstances that do not have to be justified prior to the home inspection, i.e. no due process.
According to the Health and Human Services’ website, your family will be “targeted” if you fall under the “high-risk” categories below, even if there is no evidence, suspicion, or justified cause to do so:
- Families where mom is not yet 21.
- Families where someone is a tobacco user.
- Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities.
- Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.
If this was the only thing wrong with Obama Care it is enough to shut it down. Where in our heritage, history, or mindset is it alright for government agents to force an inspection on a family’s home without just cause and without due process?
You are no longer living in a free country when this kind of garbage is legal. Obama Care in this situation just shreds the Constitution. The potential for abuse and misuse is unbelievable when the sanctity of one’s home no longer exists.
4) The Society of Actuaries released a detailed report in March relative to Obama Care. The report itself can be accessed at:
http://cdn-files.soa.org/web/research-cost-aca-report.pdf
Bottom line of their professional analysis: the cost of health care for individual policies will rise about 32% on average across the country with some states seeing health care insurance costs going up over 60% in some states and over 80% in two states, Ohio and Wisconsin.
So much for health care costs going down 2,500% as a certain President once claimed.
5) And finally, consider this insightful observation by the Against Cronyism website. They nail the whole issue squarely on the head. Obama Care is not about helping a minority of Americans with their health care costs. As the website points out, there are ways to do that at a much lower cost than the disaster that is Obama care.
This effort by the Federal government is about power and control and that is why the simple, less expensive approach was not used. It does not give the political class and the their business cronies enough control and power over what should be our private health care decisions and fates (my bold faced emphasis added):
There isn’t really an argument to be made anymore (though many will continue to make it anyway) that the ACA is going to be beneficial for most people. Will it benefit many insurers? Yes. Will it benefit the pharmaceutical industry? Absolutely. And some people will have coverage who did not before. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of coverage.
We should be focusing on catastrophic coverage and on those who cannot find health insurance due to a pre-existing condition. These 2 issues can be dealt with within the market at likely a much lower cost than the looming train wreck (as Max Baucus the Democratic head of the Senate Finance Committee said he feared the implementation of Obamacare likely would be).
But this is simply not good enough for those who have long dreamed of nationalized healthcare. There must be wellness visits, and birth control, and who knows what else. It is about tying the individual more tightly to the state. If the government controls healthcare, it ultimately controls you. That is what this whole effort is fundamentally about, not insuring the uninsured. At least not primarily. (Though many well meaning people continue to think that this is what Obamacare is about.)
If it was about keeping people out of bankruptcy after a cancer diagnosis, or helping people get the insulin they need to survive, this could be done at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare. But that’s not the big orange. The real prize is government control of a huge piece of the American economy. And that is why this very flawed and huge law was rammed through.
Well said. Freedom is at stake in this issue, not just health care. “If the government controls healthcare, it ultimately controls you.” And thus, the death of liberty and the death of democracy.
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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
Okay, apologies up front. Over the past six days we have been examining and reviewing the many disasters and fiascoes that were spawned as a result of Obama Care. One would have thought six days would have been enough.
We reviewed the long list of root causes underlying our high health care costs and how Obama Care addresses almost none of them.
We reviewed how Obama Care is causing American workers to lose salary hours, reducing their take home pay.
We reviewed how Obama Care is causing business owners to pull back on hiring and business expansion, stunting overall economic growth in the country.
We reviewed how the underlying systems to support the rollout of some major components of Obama Care are far behind schedule and are likely to not be ready when scheduled.
We reviewed how the inadequate training of Obama Care “navigators” and the inadequate data systems security protocols will turn Obama Care’s processes into an identity thief’s paradise.
We reviewed how seven million Americans, per the Congressional Budget Office, are likely to lose access to their current health care insurance programs, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do.
We reviewed how Americans are likely to experience severe sticker price shock when they see how substantially higher their health care premiums are going to be under Obama Care.
We reviewed how smaller hospitals are likely to see severe economic days as Obama Care raped the Medicaid and Medicare budgets to fund its own processes.
We reviewed how every reputable opinion poll over the past few weeks has shown that the majority or at least plurality of Americans see Obama Care as a bad thing, respondents think that they will end paying more for health insurance, and are scared about losing their current health insurance options.
We reviewed how Obama and other politicians are illegally changing aspects of the legislation without going back through the proper legislative Congressional approval of those changes.
And after all of this review, we still have not covered all of the problems, given the new problems that have arisen just in the past week or so. Rather than wait until next month when we do another set of reviews, we thought it was important to get the following insanity out there for your review and depression:
1) The family of NBC news outlets have always been the most biased in their reporting when it comes to Barack Obama. They often come off as just another arm of the President’s public relations department. Thus, when someone like NBC News airs a news segment that is critical of Obama Care you know that it must be a bad piece of legislation. Consider the following quotes taken directly from the broadcast of such a piece on August 13, 2013:
- The NBC Nightly News segment concluded that there would be adverse impacts of Obama Care on the people it intends to help, leaving some “with no insurance and a pay cut.”
- Lisa Myers, a reporter involved in the segment, stated that NBC News “spoke to almost 20 small businesses and other entities around the country. Almost all said because of the new law, they’d be cutting back hours for some employees.”
- Additionally, a top union head told NBC News:”Wait a year, and you’ll see a tremendous impact as workers have their hours reduced and their incomes reduced.”
So, NBC News has found that Americans, small businesses, and unions do not like and fear Obama Care. These are the entities that are most likely to be impacted by the legislation so someone in Washington should be heeding their opinions before this disaster hit’s the proverbial fan.
2) Unfortunately, it appears that many people in the Obama administration are NOT heeding these opinions. In the same NBC News segment, Jason Furman, who is a top economic adviser to President Obama, said that he “sees no systematic evidence” that the health-care law is “having an adverse impact on the number of hours people are working.
No disrespect to Mr. Fruman, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this administration made him deny the reality that has been in the news, and reported in this blog, for at least the past two years. We have discussed the many businesses and government entities that have issued press releases or held news conferences announcing how they were cutting workers hours and cutting the number of jobs they could be filling all because of Obama Care.
To not be aware of these realities is very scary. It shows an administration that is either very out of touch with reality, does not want to know about reality, thinks that they can lie about reality, or really does not care what is happening to American workers. In any case, their actions are irresponsible and despicable.
3) Previously, we had discussed the fact that legal cases against Obama Care were moving forward and that many of them, according to experts, had merit and a real chance of succeeding. One of the suits, filed by the Oklahoma attorney general, made it through a major milestone this week when that attorney general, Scott Pruitt announced: “The court rejected the federal government’s argument that Oklahoma lacked standing to challenge the law, allowing us to proceed with this pivotal case. We’re optimistic the court will recognize what states have known for months that the IRS disregarded the law by making the large employer mandate effective in Oklahoma or in any of the 33 other states without a state health care exchange.”
Apparently, the legislation, as written and enacted, does not allow the Federal government to force itself, its tenets, and the IRS onto the 34 states that have rejected setting up their own Obama Care health insurance exchanges. The Supreme Court decision that said Obama care was legal also gave the states the right to opt out of the exchange process. Obama knows that if 34 states are not included in the overall Obama Care effort, the financials and momentum of the legislation collapses, which would be good news for America, bad news for Obama. The first step towards the potentially good outcome is in the books.
4) The American Action Forum website recently published a pictorial representation of what has to be done in the next 50 days to make Obama Care operational. Remember, these people have had three years to get ready for this major October 1, 2013 rollout.
According to the website, fifty major tasks have to miraculously come together in just 50 days for this monstrosity to have any chance of working. Take a look for yourself of what still has to be done and ask honestly yourself if this is not truly a “train wreck” (Senator Max Baucus’s words) ready to implode (double click picture for a larger view):

5) Consider the following articles that major news outlets have written over the past year or so and then decide if this fiasco has any chance of reducing costs, expanding coverage, or actually working, three years after they started working on its rollout:
- U.S. schools face tough decisions on Obamacare benefits - Reuters, August 14
- A Limit on Consumer Costs Is Delayed in Health Care Law - New York Times, August 12
- Congress wins relief on Obamacare health plan subsidies - Reuters, August 7
- In the Affordable Care Act, Some Children Left Behind - New York Times, August 7
- Obamacare months behind in testing IT data security: government - Reuters, August 6
- Obamacare's Challenge: a Skeptical Public - Wall Street Journal, August 5
- Concord: Half of Affordable Care Act call center jobs will be part-time - Contra Costa Times, July 25
- Marketing ‘Obamacare’ Shaping Up As Big Challenge - Associated Press, July 24
- Shutdown looms over ObamaCare - The Hill, July 23
- Obama asks Hollywood celebrities to help pitch ObamaCare enrollment - The Hill, July 23
- Doctors are skeptical and confused about ObamaCare, survey Finds - CNBC, July 22
- Obama extols health care law amid public doubts - July 18, Associated Press
- More Restaurants Replace Full-Timers, Concerned About Insurance - The Wall Street Journal, July 14
- Union Letter: Obamacare Will ‘Destroy The Very Health and Wellbeing’ of Workers - The Wall Street Journal, July 12
- White House Has Known For Months ObamaCare Implementation Wouldn't Work - National Journal, July 9
- Health insurance marketplaces will not be required to verify consumer claims - Washington Post, July 5
- Delay Stirs Broader Worries About Obama Health Law Associated Press, July 3
- U.S. to delay key health-reform provision to 2015 - Reuters, July 2
- A big Medicaid gap looms in Obama health care law - Associated Press, July 1
- NFL says no to promoting ObamaCare - Washington Post, June 28
- White House recruiting Hollywood stars for ObamaCare rollout - The Hill, June 25
- Newly insured to deepen primary care doctor gap - Associated Press, June 22
- Coverage may be unaffordable for low-wage workers - Associated Press, June 13
- Like your health care? You May Be Losing It - Associated Press, May 29
- Some unions now angry about health care overhaul - Associated Press, May 24
- UnitedHealth, Aetna and Cigna opt out of California insurance exchange - Los Angeles Times, May 22
- Employers Eye Bare-Bones Health Plans Under New Law - The Wall Street Journal, May 19
- Half of U.S. Small Businesses Think Health Law Bad for Them - Gallup, May 10
- Part-timers to lose pay amid health act's new math - Los Angeles Times, May 2
- Obama's Legacy: A Health Care Law That Hurts His Party - National Journal, May 2
- Reid: More funding needed to prevent ObamaCare from becoming 'train wreck' - The Hill, May 1
- Botched ObamaCare rollout tops Democratic fears for 2014 election - The Hill, May 1
- Democrats fret over ObamaCare as 2014 looms - Politico, April 30
- Lawmakers, aides may get ObamaCare exemption - Politico, April 24
- Baucus warns of 'huge train wreck' enacting ObamaCare provisions - The Hill, April 17
- ObamaCare Incompetence - Time Magazine, April 2
- Small Firms’ Offer of Plan Choices Under Health Law Delayed - The New York Times, April 1
- Kathleen Sebelius: ObamaCare Implementation May Cause Some Health Care Costs To Rise -Reuters, March 26
- Study: Health overhaul to raise claims cost 32 pct - Associated Press, March 26
- Senate backs symbolic repeal of medical device tax - Reuters, March 22
- Beige Book Says ObamaCare Is Costing Jobs and Sales - CNBC, March 6
Consider some of the words that the mainstream press are using to describe what is happening: train wreck, costing jobs, delays, costs to rise, fret, fears, angry, unaffordable, destroy, skeptical, confused, etc. Even if you do not believe me, check out some of these articles to find others’ pessimistic outlooks on how bad this legislation is going to be. Apparently everyone sees the train wreck coming but those that work in the White House and this administration.
That’s enough for today. But tomorrow is another day where I promise it will be the end of the bad news from Obama Care… for this month.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My
Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The
American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes
and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and
family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book,
and respect freedom for both yourselves and others
everyday.
Please visit the following sites for
freedom:
Term Limits Now:
http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
Over the previous four posts we have reviewed the latest disasters and fiascos that have continued to develop as a result of Obama Care. American workers seeing their work hours getting cut, Americans’ opinions of the legislation continuing to get more and more negative, and the infrastructure for implementing the law looking more and more that it will be an epic disaster and an identity thief’s paradise.
But possibly the biggest insult to all Americans is that the President, in cahoots with every politician in Congress, has recently arranged for members of Congress and their staffs to avoid the legal and financial requirements laid out in the law. This is a blatant violation of explicit language in the law that really should be an impeachable offense.
In a nation that thinks it is run by the rule of law and representative government, no politician, even the President, has the power to overturn an existing law that was properly enacted. This is nothing more than selfish politicians taking care of themselves and their friends and work colleagues.
This just another example of the “Hunger Games” mentality that exists within the political class in this country, where they get to do what they want for their own personal enrichment. Meanwhile, they stick us with the tab, whether it is an oppressive tax burden or oppressive laws like Obama Care that will negatively effect just about every American.
But rather than have me try to explain why this action is so despicable, let me step aside and let a gentleman named Michael G. Cannon explain how bad and insulting this action is. This article originally appeared in the online version of the National Review and was reprinted by the Cato Institute on its website.
******************************
Congress’s Obamacare Waiver
By Michael F. Cannon
This article appeared in National Review (Online) on August 6, 2013.
America has a two-party system. But it’s not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the ruling class — Republicans and Democrats — against everyone else. Consider how President Obama just gave Congress its very own Obamacare waiver.
Obamacare includes a provision that should cost each member of Congress and each staffer $5,000 to $11,000 per year. Needless to say, the ruling class was not pleased.
Congress wasn’t about to try to exempt itself from this provision explicitly, though. If John Q. Congressman voted to give himself an Obamacare waiver that his constituents don’t get, he wouldn’t be John Q. Congressman much longer. What’s an aristocrat to do?
“President Obama is buying votes from members of Congress — with stolen money.”
On July 30, I predicted that, even though he had no authority to do so, President Obama would waive that provision at taxpayers’ expense. On August 1, he ignobly obliged the aristocracy by decreeing we peasants give each member and staffer $5,000 or $11,000, depending on whether they want self-only or family coverage. It’s good to be king.
The president’s supporters, like courtiers of old, are trying to quell a peasant uprising by denying there were any special favors. The denials ring hollow.
Obamacare imposes two costs on members of Congress and their staff. First, it kicks them out of their current health plans, leaving them to buy coverage on Obamacare’s health-insurance “exchanges.” Second, it makes no provision for the federal government to keep paying $5,000 or $11,000 toward the cost of their insurance as the Treasury does today.
The second cost is by far the larger one; it amounts to a pay cut of $5,000 or $11,000. Many staffers were threatening to quit or retire early.
When the president’s supporters claim that Congress isn’t being exempted, they mean that Obama didn’t exempt them from Cost No. 1. Which is true. But he did exempt them from Cost No. 2.
Rescinding that pay cut may or may not have been the right thing to do.
But it’s still a break that ordinary Americans like Kevin Pace don’t get. Pace is an adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College. To avoid penalties under Obamacare, his employer cut his hours — sticking Pace with an $8,000 pay cut.
Supporters say President Obama merely held Congress harmless. Exactly. Kevin Pace and countless others like him aren’t being held harmless, because they’re not members of Congress. As Kevin Pace put it, “This isn’t right on any level.”
Things would be unseemly enough if Congress’s Obamacare waiver were legal. But experts say the president had no authority to grant it.
That didn’t stop even Republicans from praising him, however. Tin-eared Representative Chris Stewart (R., Utah) gushed:
“There’s no question it was the right thing to do. Not just for me, but for my staff. Heavens, I have staff who don’t make much money. This would be a really big bite for them.”
Congressman, you also have constituents who don’t make much money, and who can’t make it appear out of thin air. Enjoy your waiver.
How was I able to predict the president would grant illegal subsidies to members of Congress? He’s a repeat offender.
Obamacare actually kicked members of Congress out of their current health plans and imposed that $5,000 to $11,000 pay cut immediately upon enactment in 2010. But President Obama just ignored that part of the law. He let members and staff stay in their current health plans and kept the taxpayer money flowing in their direction.
I predicted President Obama would give illegal health-insurance subsidies to members of Congress because he is already in his fourth year of doing it.
Pretty much all Americans can point to some part of Obamacare that they hate. Seniors hate the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which even Howard Dean calls “a health-care rationing body.”
Unions, teacher assistants, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and other school employees hate how the law is cutting their pay. Private-sector unions despise the “Cadillac tax” that forces them to fund subsidies their members don’t receive. Young adults hate the penalties for not buying health insurance. Okay, everybody hates those. In fact, a majority of Americans oppose the entire law.
But only Congress gets relief. Why?
Simple. President Obama doesn’t want Congress to reopen Obamacare. A significant share of congressional Democrats just voted to delay the individual mandate. With once-loyal Democrats now upset over how the law hurts them personally, who knows what else Congress would discard?
President Obama circumvented a potential legislative defeat by giving each member and staffer thousands of taxpayer dollars he had no authority to touch. He’s buying votes from members of Congress — with stolen money, no less.
******************************************
Very well said and just another insult thrown into our faces from a political class more worried about their own well being than the burdens they impose on us and the major issues of our times that they never resolve.
Given that the “rule of law” seems to be lost on the current set of low performing politicians in Washington, may we encourage you and your families and friends to join our grass roots movement to impose term limits on all Federal politicians, a movement that would rid us of these types of insults to our intelligence and our wallets:
www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
This is the fourth and final post in this series that is looking at the current facts, figures, impacts, and disasters that are occurring as a result of Obama Care. The results so far have not been pretty. Untrained implementers, processes open to severe abuse by identity thieves, Americans losing their jobs or work hours, more and more people finally learning that this is indeed the worst piece of legislation ever written, and a whole slew of other problems.
It is really sad that every month we find enough data, experiences, and realities to write about this unfolding disaster for days at a time. And as we get closer and closer to more major rollout dates of Obama Care processes and regulation, I am sure that the information will continue to get worse and worse.
Wouldn’t it have been much better if the Washington political class had taken the time up front to understand what the root causes are of our escalating health care costs are and THEN developed plans to address those root causes? Instead, the failed to do that preliminary analysis work and in its place constructed a complex Rube Goldberg-like insurance monstrosity that will do nothing to address these root causes and will likely make a bad situation worse.
Consider the root causes of our high health care costs and how no one has been able to convince America that there are serious components of Obama care that will address these underlying drivers of high health care costs:
- Americans smoke too much.
- Americans eat too much.
- American eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
- The Federal government spends taxpayer wealth to support tobacco farmers who grow smoking products and farmers who grow unneeded corn that ends up as obesity inducing corn fructose in our food chain.
- Americans do not get enough exercise.
- The health care industry needs substantial tort reform, reform that has worked well at the state level in reducing health care costs.
- The health care insurance industry needs to be able to more readily compete across state lines, increasing competition for health care insurance and reducing prices.
- Americans are getting older but there is no national effort to remedy the effects of aging diseases such as dementia and certain cancers.
- The Federal government loses tens of billions of dollars every year via its Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs to criminal activity, tens of billions of dollars that could have been used to provide low cost insurance to the uninsured in America without Obama Care’s costly bureaucracy.
Instead of this coherent, problem solving-oriented approach, we get stuck with inane and expensive processes via Obama Care like the following examples illustrate:
1) Investor's Business Daily examined a recent Government Accountability Office report and its detailed information on insurance plans today in all 50 states, from the least expensive health insurance plans offered to a 30-year-old nonsmoker to the most expensive plans 55-year-old couples can buy. It then looked at the Obama Care insurance plans that were compiled by the state of Maryland for eight states that are putting together their state based health insurance exchanges and compared the cost of insurance today and the likely cost of insurance under Obama Care.
The results were not pretty relative to the claim that Obama care will reduce health insurance costs for Americans:
- In Ohio, the least expensive Obama Care "bronze" plan for a 25-year-old will cost $1,956 a year, a price that's almost three times higher than the cheapest plan in Ohio today.
- In Virginia, the lowest priced Obama Care "bronze" premium is $1,608, 252% higher than the cheapest policy available today.
- Maryland's least expensive Obama Care plan will be 83% higher than the lowest-cost plan sold in that state this year.
- Critics of these types of analysis, and thus, supporters of Obama Care, correctly point out that some of these plans will actually cost less because some people will get Federal subsidies to purchase Obama Care plans.
- However, not everyone will be entitled to Obama Care subsidies, based on their income level, and will be stuck with these higher costs.
- Other people who live in the 34 states that are not implementing Obama Care health insurance exchanges and by the law’s explicit language, they will not be eligible for any Federal subsidies.
- Other counter points to the supporters’ point is that even with the subsidies, the cost could also be higher. For example, Investor's Business Daily found that a young worker making $20,000 in Maryland, for example, would pay about $1,000 for the cheapest Obama Care plan, after the subsidy. That's still $278 more than the least expensive plan offered in the state today.
- It is difficult to believe that any subsidy will be enough to offset cost increases of like the 252% increase in Virginia or the 825 increase in Maryland.
So much for Obama Care resulting in significant cost savings for Americans when the buy health care insurance. Best, best case is that costs do not go up too much. Seems like a lot of energy and effort to get us no better and likely much worse than where we were prior to Obama Care’s attack on logic and sanity.
2) The biggest losers in the Obama Care legislation is likely to be younger Americans. Obama Care needs them to buy insurance plans so that the Federal government can take the wealth from these younger, healthier Americans and use it to subsidize health care insurance for generally older and less healthy Americans. It will be the biggest inter-generational transfer of wealth from younger Americans to older Americans in the history of the country.
As an example of what is actually underway as a result of this lousy legislation, consider an analysis and resulting graphic from the same Investor’s Business Daily article we discussed above (double click on the graph for a larger view):

The red bars in this graph are the least expensive Obama Care “bronze” insurance plans across eight states. The blue bars are the least expensive plan available to a young person on the market today. Not a pretty picture, with today’s plans substantially less expensive than anything Obama Care is spitting out. There is no way that cost health insurance goes down under Obama Care in at least these eight states even with subsidies.
The conclusion is obvious. If you are a young American, Obama Care is after your wealth in order to leverage your probable good health to fund health care for other, general older Americans.
3) Yesterday, we talked a little about how the infrastructure of Obama Care is really under the gun and behind schedule. The discussion focus of that problem was that the so-called Obama Care “navigators” are likely to be put in place without criminal background checks being completed (enhancing the hence of identity theft) and without adequate training.
Today’s infrastructure horror story comes from a recent article from Reuters:
- The government is months behind in testing data security for the main component of Obama Care: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1
- The missed data systems deadlines have pushed the government’s decision on whether information technology security is ready and secure to exactly ONE DAY BEFORE that crucial October 1st date, according to the the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general.
- Thus, data systems experts say the Obama Care exchanges might open with serious security holes or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.
- “They’ve removed their margin for error,” said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. “There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.”
- The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance because the government’s Obama Care systems have serious security holes.
- The Inspector General‘s report found that “Several critical tasks remain to be completed in a short period of time.”
- Any additional delays beyond one day would mean the government entity operating the Obama Care exchanges would not have the security testing information it needs to authorize know if they were entitled to subsidy support.
- One day leeway to have this thing working by October 1. No way the Federal government gets this right within the next 60 days. Take that to the bank.
- Since a 2002 law requires that government systems obtain a “security authorization package,” essentially the roadmap for keeping out hackers and preventing security breaches, implementing Obama Care without this common sense authorization would mean the government is in violation of its own law.
If the systems are not online and deemed secure by October 1, people could still apply for Obama Care exchanges but they would not know if the qualified for subsidies and how much they might get, probably delaying them for choosing and signing up for an exchange health care program, leaving them in health insurance limbo.
But enough bad news. We will do another update next month, a time that will be a mere weeks from the onset of a major component of Obama Care. How scary do we think that update will be?
That will do it for our own analysis and roundup of the unfolding disaster from Obama Care. Tomorrow we will step aside and present an analysis of Obama Care presented by the Cato Institute.
Cato's analysis and commentary is about how Congress and the President are breaking the law and allowing Congressional members and their staffs to side step the law’s financial burdens. It is a despicable act that 1) is clearly illegal under the law’s tenets, 2) is a slap in the face of the rest of America who will not get the same financial relief from Obama Care, and 3) reinforces the feeling that we are truly living in a “Hunger Games” world where the rulers in Washington get the best of everything and the rest of us are stuck with the remnants and the dregs of their decisions.
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