Tag: regulation

Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance premiums in 2016 will rise more than 20%, three times more than predicted by Obama officials.

The discrepancy is because the government excluded price data for three of the four Obamacare health insurance plans when the officials issued their recent forecast claiming enrollees would face only a 7.5 percent average rate increase in 2016. When data for all four plans are included, premium costs will actually rise on average 20.3 percent next year.

In other words, Obama administration officials purposely manipulated the numbers to hide the actual rate increase. Then, not surprisingly, “The mainstream media was quick to embrace the 7.5 percent number, claiming it reflected the real-world experience of most Obamacare customers,” when it truth the number was a lie.

Finding out what’s in it: For the second time the GAO has been able to sign up fake enrollees to Obamacare.

The Government Accountability Office sent 10 auditors with fictitious enrollment information to the federal healthcare.gov site as well as two state-run ObamaCare exchanges, to sign up for subsidized insurance. While eight didn’t make it through the initial identity-checking process, all 10 eventually obtained coverage, even though four obviously had made up Social Security numbers that started with “000.” They all were able to keep their coverage despite filing fake follow-up documentation.

In addition, the GAO tried to sign eight more up for Medicaid coverage. Three made it through the process, and four ended up getting subsidized private coverage instead. The only one that failed was in California, which refused to sign the person up without a Social Security number.

The GAO did this also last year. Apparently, despite having a year to fix the problem, our crack government officials couldn’t do it. Not that I am surprised. Government operations are never very efficient or successful. There is no incentive to do well, as it is impossible to get fired, there is no competition, and the funds are coerced tax dollars rather than freely given by voluntary customers.

Finding out what’s in it: A Tennessee school district has been forced to shutter classrooms, putting more than a thousand students out of school, because of the cost of Obamacare.

It is important to repeatedly note the disaster that is Obamacare, because many of the same people who wrote and imposed Obamacare on the nation, the Democratic Party, are still in office and are running for office again. Do we want these people writing additional laws?

Or are we so stupid that we are willing to ignore their failure and give them an opportunity to screw us again?

Finding out what’s in it: Eleven more Obamacare state health insurance co-ops are on the verge of bankruptcy, according to an assessment that the Obama administration is keeping secret.

The key to this story is this quote:

Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to nine barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act. All 24 received 15-year loans in varying amounts to offer health insurance to poor and low income customers and provide publicly funded competition to private, for-profit insurers. Among the co-ops to announce closings were those in Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont, New York and Colorado.

Nearly half a million failing co-op customers will have to find new coverage in 2016. More than $900 million of the original $2 billion in loans has been lost. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this part of Obamacare was really nothing more than a way to funnel a lot of cash to Democratic activists and supporters. That the co-ops are going bankrupt really doesn’t matter, because the money will remain in those Democratic hands regardless.

Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance deductibles have gone up seven times faster than the rate of inflation since Obamacare became law.

According to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, the increase brings the average deductible that workers must pay for their health insurance plans to $1,077; more than triple what it was a decade ago. As reported in the L.A. Times, “That is seven times faster than wages have risen in the same period.”

Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman said, “It’s a quiet revolution. When deductibles are rising seven times faster than wages … it means that people can’t pay their rent. … They can’t buy their gas. They can’t eat.” As a comparison, “workers’ wages increased 1.9% between April 2014 and April 2015, according to federal data analyzed by the report’s authors.” The news is also bad for family plans as, the “average family plan cost workers $4,955, up 3% from last year.”.

Obviously this is the fault of the Republicans campaigning for president. Their opposition to Obama and the Democrats is certainly the reason why Obamacare continues to be such a unmitigated disaster for Americans.

Finding out what’s not in it: New census data has now confirmed that Obamacare has consistently failed to enroll the predicted numbers of the uninsured.

The population-wide uninsured rate fell from 14.5% in calendar year 2013 to 11.7% in 2014. The total number of uninsured dropped from 45.2 million in 2013 to 36.7 million in 2014–a net of 8.5 million who gained coverage.

While some, including President Obama, have bragged about these numbers, when we compare them with the predictions we find that Obamacare is significantly failing to insure the numbers it promised. Leftwing think tanks had generally predicted numbers 50% to 100% higher. The Obama administration however was even more optimistic.

For example, around the time Congress passed the bill, the Medicare actuary (at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or CMS) had predicted that the number of uninsured would decline by 23.8 million just in its first year! The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had been somewhat more cautious, but nevertheless expected Obamacare to reduce the number of uninsured by 19 million in 2014 alone.

What these facts teach us is that the utopian dreams of ideologues rarely come close to reality. Often, they not only fall short, they often worsen the situation, which in the case of Obamacare is certainly true. Though more people now have health insurance, that coverage is generally far more expensive and covers far less than plans did prior to the law.

Finding out what’s in it: An Obamacare provision to Medicare is instead penalizing hospitals that care for poorer and sicker patients.

The provision penalizes hospitals that have a high readmission rate. What it doesn’t consider is that some hospitals focus on poorer and sicker patients, who also have a higher readmission rate. Obamacare then punishes them for doing so.

But remember! The Democrats and Obama care! What matter if the policies and laws they pass cause harm to the most helpless citizens. What really matters is that we vote for Democrats over and over and over again, no matter how many times they prove to us that their ideas are incredibly foolish.

Finding out what’s in it: State insurance regulatory agencies have been routinely granting the gigantic rate increases requested by health insurance companies due to the costs imposed on them by Obamacare.

It’s the third year in a row for huge rate hikes, all due to the uncertainties built into the mandate-driven system of ObamaCare. The White House explained the hikes after the first year as an artifact of sudden access to care, but by year three that explanation has worn thin. The cost curve isn’t bending downward in any phase of health care, and it’s not even bending upward any longer. It’s skyrocketing, and insurers are reflecting that in their premium hikes.

At the same time that premiums have escalated, of course, deductibles have expanded almost exponentially for some families. Consumers are paying outrageously high premiums for insurance they will almost certainly never access, thanks to the need to spend thousands more out of pocket on top of these premiums before insurers have to cover anything but wellness checks.

Obviously this is the fault of Bush-Reagan and the evil Republicans in Congress, none of whom wrote or voted for Obamacare and in fact opposed it vehemently. Obama and the Democrats, who wrote the law and then forced it through Congress, are obviously innocent of any blame for that law’s disasters. Let’s vote for them again!