Healthcare Reform - The Dirty Words No One Wants To Say Guarantee Failure

I've been watching with interest the back and forth over healthcare reform. My good friend Bookworm has a great article on the subject you should read.

But having taken a look at this, it does seem to me that the Republicans, as usual, are trying to win by avoiding being cast in the media as mean nasty villains robbing people of something. And after all, if you can spend other people's money and look good...

Although of course, they won't look good no matter what they do to the Democrat's trained seal media. You'd think they would have gotten a clue by now!

Far better to concentrate on real policy and do it right, no? And let the results be the judge.

Insurance is what I call a 'projection' industry, where fortune tellers known as actuaries crunch numbers and determine the rates on policies and on investments known as insurance contracts as far in advance as possible. Forced instantaneous hope n' change like ObamaCare hits insurance companies with a sucker punch and costs them a lot of money - which of course, like any other business they pass on to their customers.

What's going on in DC now is ridiculous. If the GOP puts together some kind of bogus ObamaCare lite entitlement and President Trump signs it, it will be the first campaign promise he's broken. I'm pretty sure cooler heads will prevail and there will be significant changes made to what we have now.

This is exactly why I said in an earlier article, that the first thing that needed to be done by President Trump, together with Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was to have have immediately announced the repeal of ObamaCare, especially the individual mandate penalty and named a date in the near future - say, November 10th, 2017 or whatever - when it will no longer be in effect.

Aside from assuring the American people they weren't being screwed again, it would give congress a clearly established a deadline to thrash out the new legislation and it would have allowed insurance companies some badly needed lead in time to plan for ObamaCare's demise.

And a demise, it must be. ObamaCare is so flawed, so thrown together without common sense that trying to build something viable using its parts is a fool's errand.It was garbage to begin with, a tax scam rather than anything to do with healthcare.

But what next? Where should we go with healthcare? Incredibly, there are two dirty words that nobody is mentioning. And there's a really good reason why...

Those dirty words? T O R T... R E F O R M! Say it again, with feeling.:  TO R T... R E F O R M!

Keep this in mind.. when someone is chattering away in wonkspeak about healthcare, mandates, health savings accounts and the like, unless they're mentioning those two dirty words they're simply blowing smoke up your nether regions.

Ask any health professional about what their biggest fear is. I've asked quite a few, and the answer is almost always predatory lawsuits. Have you ever gotten one of those official looking letters -actually calling them advertisements is more appropriate - asking you to sign on to a large class action suit against an HMO or hospital? Sure you have. The result of this trolling is almost always a fortune for the lawyers in fees and a pittance for the rubes who signed up as part of the 'class' if they mange to win and get a judgement. Even if they lose, their target spends big dollars in legal fees, or rather their malpractice insurance company does. After which the insurance company jacks up their premiums.

Picture yourself as a young American doctor. You're already carrying six figures in student loan debt. And on top of that, depending on whether you're a GP or a specialist and depending on where you're practicing the usual rates for malpractice insurance run from just under $30,000 per year to six figures in the pricier areas.

Aside from the ever rising cost of malpractice insurance, this fear of predatory lawyers also pads the price of healthcare by causing repetitive paperwork and staff work and many unnecessary and repetitive activities, even on routine medical procedures.

No doctor or institution should be allowed to get away with malpractice, and the medical profession actually does a fairly decent job of weeding put bad actors. But unless the current barrage of lawsuits is brought under control and some reasonable guidelines established, the cost of medical care is going to continue to increase. There are simply far too many lawyers, and far too many unnecessary lawsuits targeting the medical profession and healthcare institutions.

So why is no one mentioning this? So simple! Ask yourself this...what did most of the members of congress do for a living before they became congressmen? What do many of them do for a living when they leave? Why, they're lawyers of course. And even while they're in congress, a number of them receive an income from law firms they have a partnership interest in. As lawyers, let's just say that many of them are reluctant to cut off a steady stream of income for the profession if not for themselves. And as we all know, law firms also contribute a lot of money to legislators who see things their way. That's why a lot of what Senator Rand Paul has to say on healthcare sounds so sensible. He's a medical doctor,not a lawyer. We'll come back to this point later, but keep it in mind.

Another ongoing problem I haven't heard mentioned in this debate is illegal migrants. Their effect on the cost of healthcare is a lot more insidious. In California and some other states with large illegal migrant populations, many of them are on Medic-Aid, because no one checks too closely about insignificant details like citizenship.In fact, there are actual privacy laws in California that prohibit and cross checking, so the system is almost set up for fraud. Fake social security numbers or EIN's are also used quite a bit.

Another common occurrence is the abuse of ER facilities. If an illegal migrant working as a day laborer hurts himself on a construction site, he'll go to the nearest hospital emergency room for treatment. Since legally and humanely he needs to be treated, he is. And when it comes to payment, a quick discussion between the migrant and the hospital staff makes it very clear that this one is going to be a freebie. So the hospital eats it. King-Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles was bankrupted by this type of patient, and I doubt they're the only ones who were, or who at least suffered major losses financially.

Tort reform and dealing with our huge illegal migrant problem are essential to stopping the spiraling cost of healthcare and repairing the damage ObamaCare caused. So is actual competition across state lines. And actual freedom of choice, dammit!

Keep these simple concepts in the above paragraph in mind.

Apparently a number of Americans like the idea of keeping young adults of 26 and under on their healthcare policies if they're still lucky enough to be able to have one. And they like the idea being able to get insurance with preconditions without paying for them. It's become exactly what Rand Paul said it is, a new entitlement.

Believe it or not, there is one healthcare system I know about that is government mandated, but also embraces all the of the concepts I've mentioned for real reform. After all, if we're going to have ObamaCare Lite courtesy of Paul Ryan, why not?

Israel never really planned government run mandatory healthcare, but they were more or less forced into it by circumstances. After 1948, they had a large segment of their population who were 'graduates' of the concentration camps as well as almost a million Jewish refugees who arrived there penniless after being ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. So a nationwide healthcare system was cobbled together. And it works quite well. Why?

• Israel has a very small illegal migrant problem. And thanks to the border walls, it's even smaller now. They don't have tons of illegal migrants bankrupting the system.

• The ideas of competition and freedom of choice are maintained. While the government oversees and finances part of the system,it doesn't micromanage it itself or insist that everyone have cookie cutter insurance. There are four different carriers (essentially, HMOs), all of whom compete with each other for members and have different plusses,minuses and 'specialties,' by which I mean a reputation for excelling in particular kinds of care or having better rates for certain extras or different copays and levels of coverage. All Israeli citizens get the basic plan the government subsidizes.If you want extras in certain areas, you buy them from your insurance carrier, so you have the ability to shop. On the flip side, you're not paying for something that's of no use for you, like maternal care for an elderly couple past childbearing age. Preconditions aren't an issue because everyone has to have insurance. The National Health Insurance Law guarantees all Israeli citizens access to one of the four carriers, and the right to transfer between the carriers once per year.

• Tort reform is not a problem since not only does Israel lack the litigious climate lawyers have fostered here in America (at least, so far) but lawyers also aren't coming out of the woodwork there as they are in America. And at present, lawyers don't constitute any kind of majority in Israel's Knesset. The ratio of doctors to lawyers in Israel is about the opposite of what it is here.And the level of care, even private care is so high quality and reasonably priced compared to the EU and America that medical tourism is common. Med school is also cheaper, and Israel offers special incentives for medical professionals who want to become olim (Jewish migrants to israel under the Law of the Return).

Does it work? In a survey of 48 countries in 2013, Israel's healthcare system was ranked fourth in the world in terms of efficiency, and in 2014 it ranked seventh out of 51. In 2015, Israel was ranked sixth-healthiest country in the world by Bloomberg rankings and eighth in terms of life expectancy.

So it can be done. But major tort reform,getting rid of a substantial number of illegal migrants and fostering competition and freedom of choice for consumers is what it takes. That, and creating a lot more doctors, medical researchers and personnel as well as a lot less lawyers.

Far easier said then done, but doable.

Getting Rid Of ObamaCare The Common Sense Way

ObamaCare has been a fiscal disaster as well as a healthcare disaster. The lies and misrepresentations of the Obama Administration and the Democrats to shove it through are common knowledge by now, and so is failure of most of the health exchanges. Most of the people who signed up for ObamaCare were people on MedicAid who were getting health care at no cost anyway, while many people who had functional plans saw their premiums skyrocket, their coverage diminished and their co-pays increase to the point where their coverage was essentially meaningless, especially at the Bronze level. Many workers, especially in small businesses actually saw their hours cut below full time simply because complying with ObamaCare and it's arcane rules and requirements was too expensive and/or too time consuming. Many doctors in private practice refused to accept it for the same reasons. A fair amount of ObamaCare's victims simply chose to pay the mandated penalty instead of the high premiums and hope they never got sick.

 

ObamaCare was simply one of the worst scams ever foisted on the American people, and even many of its original proponents now admit that the flimflam about it being a money saver and deficit reducer were 'overstated.'

Repealing ObamaCare was a campaign promise of President Trump's as well as many Republicans now in Congress. Yet it's been delayed.

The reasons are pretty obvious. First of all, there are a couple of provisions many people like, especially if they work in government, which had the staff and other people's money to tailor their plans so that there was compliance with only a modest increase in co-pays and premiums, most of which ere partially paid for by their employer, or rather, the taxpayers. Particularly popular were the provisions allowing people to keep their children on their plans until age 26 and not allowing insurers to deny people with pre-existing conditions.

Second, insurance is a business based on future projections. Rates are figured on the basis of risk and probable future cost in advance, and a change now would create chaos in the industry. There's also the factor that a lot of the people on ObamaCare who aren't paying anything for coverage anyway like the status quo. And they vote.

That's why you're seeing the dithering going on in congress over getting rid of this costly travesty. A lot of republicans are now talking about 'fixing ' ObamaCare rather than repeal, or not doing anything until a legitimate replacement is created.

Both ideas are seriously flawed. Here's why, and how to get rid of ObamaCare in a commonsense way.

Obamacare was poorly designed and badly constructed from the very beginning. Trying to repair it would be like prettying up a house with shoddy basic construction and materials, a lousy foundation and a bad interior design. Not only that, but right now, ObamaCare is a colossal failure owned by President Obama and the Democrat party. Tinkering with it would allow them to saddle the Trump Administration and the Republican congress with that failure...'it was working fine until you fiddled with it.'

The other idea, of doing nothing until a replacement is constructed is going to take a great deal of time. Meanwhile, the American people are getting justifiably restless, especially since they remember how the Republicans in Congress did nothing about this for 8 years. In the meantime,not only is ObamaCare hemorrhaging money, but because of its tax provisions, not repealing ObamaCare delaying the tax cuts and tax reform badly needed to get the economy rolling again.

There's actually a fairly easy solution to this problem.

President Trump, together with Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should immediately announce the repeal of ObamaCare, especially the individual mandate penalty and name a date in the near future when it will no longer be in effect. This would have a number of benefits.

It would allow insurance companies and health providers lead in time to figure cost and actuarial projections for the coming year and tool up, especially if they were given advance notice of the basics of the new plan. They didn't get that when ObamaCare was unloaded on them, and it cost millions...which of course was transferred to the insured in the form of higher premiums.

It would reassure the American people that congress wasn't going to drop the ball again. a mention in the announcement that the new plan would include an assigned risk provision for pre-existing conditions and retain the provision allowing parents to keep children under 26 on their plans would also be helpful.

It would provide congress and staff members constructing the new plan with that essential prod known as a deadline. With President Trump pushing them along, I can almost guarantee it would be finished on time.

The plan itself? If we're going to have universal health care, I recommend President Trump and his advisors look at the way Israel does this, since it's one of the few government mandated healthcare programs that actually works.

In Israel, health insurance is mandatory and there are five healthcare insurance providers who compete with each other for clients, which effects the size of their government subsidies. Not all five are available in every part of the country, but you are usually sure of having at least three to choose from. In addition, every insurance program is boutique, meaning you only pay for what your particular needs require...a retired couple in their sixties, for instance, would probably not be paying for maternity care or a pediatric care. And since healthcare insurance is mandatory, the issues of pre-existing conditions and adult children being retained on their parents plan don't really exist.

One reason this works so well in Israel is that the litigious climate here in America doesn't really exist there yet. The ratio of doctors and medical personnel to lawyers is the opposite of what we have here in the U.S. which also has the effect of keeping medical care affordable. Israel also doesn't have the illegal migration problem America does. As a result,Israel does quite a nice business in medical tourism, with Europeans fed up with the long wait to have procedures performed flying to Israel to take advantage of the state of the art care at lower prices and the reduced wait time.

I'd recommend that any new national health plan America adopts include these factors...competition between providers, boutique plan and serious tort reform to keep the lawyers at arms length. And perhaps some government provisions to cut down on waste and abuse. Addressing the high cost of medical education so we can produce more doctors and medical personnel wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Today's WAPO Poll, Obama's Poor Numbers And What It All Really Means

One thing that was very much in the news today was a WashingtonPostt/ABC News poll showing that the president's approval ratings, that of ObamaCare and of politicians supporting ObamaCare has taken a nasty turn south.

Opposition to the new health-care law also hit a record high in the survey, with 57 percent saying they oppose the president’s most significant domestic initiative. Forty-six percent say they are strongly against it. Just a month ago, as the enrollment period was beginning, the public was almost evenly divided in its assessments of the law.

Disapproval of Obama’s handling of the health-care law’s rollout stands at 63 percent, with a majority saying they strongly disapprove. Last month, 53 percent disapproved.

The findings are the first since Obama’s news conference last week in which he repeatedly acknowledged his and the administration’s mistakes in handling the legislation. He also sought to assuage the anger among millions of Americans whose individual policies were canceled because they did not meet the new requirements.

With all the controversy surrounding the implementation of the law, Americans are evenly divided on whether the Affordable Care Act can be fixed.

Responses to that question differ dramatically depending on party identification, with Democrats overwhelmingly confident that the legislation can be made to work and Republicans overwhelmingly pessimistic about its viability. A majority of independents say it cannot be made to work

The health-care law has become a political burden for elected officials who support it. Almost four in 10 Americans say they are more likely to oppose a politician who backs the legislation, while just over a fifth say they would be more likely to support such a politician. That’s the biggest gap recorded in Post-ABC polling during the entire debate over the law.

[...]
On three measures of leadership and empathy that have been tested repeatedly in Post-ABC polls, Obama now is underwater on all three for the first time. Half or more now say he is not a strong leader, does not understand the problems of “people like you,” and is not honest and trustworthy. Perceptions of the president as a strong leader have dropped 15 points since January, and over the past year the percentage of registered voters who say he is not honest and trustworthy has increased 12 points.

The new survey also asked people whether they consider Obama a good manager. In what appears to be a direct link to the problems of the health-care rollout, 56 percent say no and 41 percent say yes.

The president's job approval rating? On average, 40.6 per cent.

So what does all this mean?

First off, as far as I'm concerned I take most of this poll with a grain of salt.The Washington Post is a very pro-Obama paper,and as we've discussed before, polls depend a great deal on whom you sample,what percentage of your sample they are, and how you phrase the questions you ask.

Back in 2012,before the WAPO stopped publishing their mechanics so you could actually see what they were doing, I used to bust them routinely for ridiculously oversampling Democrats to get a pro-Obama result. 17% was not uncommon. And yes, when it comes to Barack Obama, oversampling black voters also helps queer the numbers:



As Muhammed Ali once told me, the funniest joke is the truth.

The WAPO says that President Obama's overall approval numbers are well over 42%, something that puts him enough above the other polls out there to raise his overall average, but not too much, so it doesn't totally destroy their credibility.

I'd bet my dollar to your dime they had to work pretty hard to skew things to get the president's numbers up even this much.

But then there's the question of what this means.

To me, the most significant parts of the poll are the lowering of Obama's number on the so-called 'three measures of leadership and empathy' and the numbers when it comes to voting against politicians who support ObamaCare.

For years, most of the media have been telling us how smart, how empathetic and how wonderful Our Dear Leader is, and by and large the low information voters bought it, even when this president was stealing them blind and raping their freedoms with impunity. By and large, a lot of them are dependent on government and benefit in some way from the status quo. What the collapse of ObamaCare did was to bring the war home so to speak. It was something they could directly see and feel the pain of in a way that Benghazi, IRS-Gate,NSA-Gate, Fast and Furious and all the other scandals bubbling around the cesspool in Washington didn't. After all, when you personally pay no taxes, what does it matter if somebody else's money is wasted?

Except now, it's personal. The low information voters see that it isn't the Ruling Class whose hours are being cut or whose spouses and children are being tossed off of their health plan. These people notice now that it isn't the Ruling Class screaming in frustration at their computer monitors trying to get health insurance, now that what they were promised by the Prevaricator-in-Chief they could keep has been cancelled.The Ruling class screamed and were heard immediately, and got themselves a waiver.The rest of us are still reeling at what it's going to cost for less coverage with higher deductibles and co-pays.

In fact, ObamaCare's poster girl, the one the White House was pushing as the successful example, one of the few who actually signed up successfully has now informed the world that after getting a look at the price, she's opting for the penalty. She won't be the only one. It's the height of irony that ObamaCare, which is still being sold to us as a device to see to it that more Americans have healthcare is actually going to see to it that a lot more Americans don't.

Oh, and by the way, the White House, which proudly embraced 'ObamaCare' as its own, very special achievement is now running away from that name like the bubonic Plague. The White House is actually issuing talking points to Democrats instructing them to refer to it as the Affordable Care Act.

We have always been at war with East Asia.Just ask Big Brother.

My point here is simple. The pain is going to resonate. But whether that's going to translate into actual numbers at the polls in a year is another question. President Obama, after all, isn't running for anything. And a year is a very long time in politics. Remember, by nature a great many people have trouble concentrating on politics for any length of time. In fact, politics is slowly becoming not a forum to discuss ideas and pick leadership but almost a new form of Roman Circus, with new diversions and spectacles constantly demanded to keep people's interest at the rare times the Ruling Class wants them to pay attention.

The president has already shown that he has no problem breaking the law for the sake of partisan politics, and there's no telling what might be in store. ObamaCare, as toxic as it is won't be going to go away until its repealed, and even if the Republicans take the Senate and retain the House by sufficient numbers to do that in 2014, ObamaCare will not be able to be repealed until January 20th, 2015. A great deal can happen between now and then, and Obama and what Michael Barone, the usually even tempered dean of American political analysts called to my surprise 'that lawless gang' will lie, cheat, manipulate, steal and propagandize to keep it in place, assisted by their ever helpful minions in the media.

Here's a great example of the latter. Politico runs this story with the headline: President Obama to insurers: No bailout. It's subject is the meeting the president had with the CEO's of the major health insurance companies he just screwed over to the tune of millions of dollar. Your immediate impression is that here's our gutsy president standing toe to toe with those bad apple insurers, as he called them. And telling them that they'll take it and like it. No bailouts for you..they don't poll well as they used to.

The whole beginning part of this story is all about that. But a funny thing happens when you hit the bottom part of the story, when most people have stopped reading.

By paragraph 6, after 5 paragraphs about how a bail out isn't going to happen, we get this in paragraph 6:

“As the president emphasized, there is not an unlimited amount of money out there for the government to do that [make up for extra costs],” said Jim Roosevelt, CEO of Tufts Health Plan, one of more than a dozen insurance company leaders who attended the 90-minute meeting.

'amount of money'? Wait a minute, I thought there was no bail out going to happen?

By paragraph 11..well what do you know:

The 2010 health law had several tools aimed at helping insurers through some of the fiscal bumps in the new markets. To address the industry concerns about additional costs if they revive the canceled plans, administration officials said last week they would tweak one of those tools — called “risk corridors” — to give them more help.But Obama made clear that the financial support has a limit, according to the two health executives and several other industry sources who were briefed on the meeting.

Well, well..."risk corridors", AKA increased costs incurred because of ObamaCare, is the euphemism they're using for " bailout due to losses suffered from ObamaCare." And 'financial support' is a bribe using your tax dollars to pay insurance companies to compensate them for the extra costs they're now going to incur from the larger 'risk corridors' of President Obama's bogus fix.

In other words, B-a-i-l-o-u-t.

That's a 180 degrees from the headline saying 'no bailouts'. But our friends at Politico were willing to aid and abet this president's messaging, sticking the information about the offers to bribe the insurance companies at the very end of the article, long after the casual reader has clicked on something else.

I use this fairly egregious example just to show you what we're up against in terms of the PR battle. A lot of this stuff is a lot more subtle.

Of course, the insurers might balk at exposing themselves to criminal liability for writing policies that are against the law, no matter what Barack Obama says.But when you have a president willing to use the IRS as his own personal political goon squad, other things come into play that can influence that decision.

The president and his minions will not let go of this easily. They will continue to try to spin crap into gold, and they'll happily spend your last dime and sacrifice your freedom to do it, if you let them.

The solution, of course is a strategy designed to keep this in front of the low information voters while energizing the anti-Obama base. After all, no one can vote against Barack Obama again, but they can vote against ObamaCare and take revenge on the tools that supported it who are up for re-election.

So the Opposition, if they're smart, will shout "no bail out for ObamaCare" at the top of their lungs early and often. They will remind people again and again of how they were deliberately and knowingly lied to, and warn them against trusting anything this president says. They will take steps to unite their caucus, now that Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have been proven right about what a nightmare ObamaCare is. Apologies are in order. And they will avoid the Democrat's attempt to smear them with the same ordure by attempting to trick them into being part of a 'bi-partisan fix'.

There is no fixing ObamaCare.In fact, any attempt to fix it needs to be avoided at all costs, with the simple mantra that we now know what's in the bill,we don't like it and neither do the American people. The word that needs to be repeated over and over again is 'repeal'.

If the Republicans do that, there's a decent chance they may be able to repeal this monstrosity called ObamaCare come 2015.

But that's what it will take.

Obama Lied, Knew Millions Would Lose Their Health Insurance

By now,most Americans are beginning to understand that when President Obama told Americans that if they liked their doctor, their present health plan, they'd be able to keep it, it simply wasn't true.

However, as we're now finding out, it goes far beyond that. The president deliberately lied, knowingly lied, along with his team.



In another, astonishing random act of journalism, NBC, of all places revealed that ObamaCare was deliberately constructed to destroy the health coverage of millions of Americans and force them on to government exchanges, with much less coverage and far higher premiums. And this president knew it all along:

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.

Actually, Laszewski estimates that as many as 16 million Americans will lose their health insurance because of ObamaCare.

Note the part I emphasized.Any changes made to your existing policy after March 23, 2010 when this tyranny became law disqualified it to be grandfathered, even if they were choices you made yourself, such as eliminating coverage for maternity care if you or your spouse was past childbearing age, eliminating an adult child from your policy because he or she obtained his or her own insurance, or increasing the co-pay for yourself and your employees slightly to keep costs down or to add more employees to your policy. It doesn't matter...even if you are perfectly satisfied with your coverage as it is, your insurance company will be told your policy doesn't meet ObamaCare standards and that cancellation letter will go out informing you that you no longer have health insurance come January 2014.

The Democrats are busily spinning this and trying to blame the insurances companies, since the companies are the ones issuing the cancellation letters. But the truth of the matter is they have little choice in the matter. Unless you are employed by a very large company or government agency (like a city or state bureaucracy) that can afford to absorb the expense of compliance with ObamaCare's arcane requirements because they can spread the cost out among a large group of employees, or unless your employer is politically connected enough to get a waiver or a subsidy like members of the governing class, you are likely to lose your insurance because private companies will be unable to absorb the cost of insuring small groups or families with individualized coverage.

Once you're forced to shop the exchanges, you'll discover what so many Americans already have... the sticker price of ObamaCare's Bronze coverage,the cheapest available with the highest deductible and the lowest sticker price is going to cost a family of five, two adults and three children, in excess of $20,000 per year. And that's a conservative estimate, guaranteed to go up as more and more healthy young adults opt to pay the penalty and the system needs more taxpayer dollars to cover the Medicaid patients whom qualify for the subsidies.The Medicaid patients signing up for ObamaCare in droves, and are the vast majority of those signing up for the exchanges. There's always an unlimited demand for free stuff at someone else's expense.

That also applies if you are fortunate enough to get your insurance through a very large company or government agency. At present, you're able to keep your present insurance,but your time is coming. While you may not lose your insurance outright, at least at first, you can expect vast increases in your co-payments to cover the cost of ObamaCare compliance.

Even worse, since ObamaCare unlike most current insurance policies does not allow any payments to 'out of network' doctors whatsoever, all it's going to take is a heart attack, a car accident or a similar emergency where immediate treatment is required at the closest available facility to put the average American who is forced to buy 'coverage' through ObamaCare into bankruptcy. That alone should blow the White House claims that the cancellations are due to insurance companies declining to meet standards for 'increased coverage' out of the water.

ObamaCare's failure is what was planned from the start, with the resulting misery and chaos ending with millions of desperate Americans being herded in single payer and the Sovietization of America's healthcare.Even the Medicaid patients who are happily signing up for their free coverage have no clue about what is ultimately in store for them.

The president bloviated a great deal about being a 'warrior for the middle class' during the 2012 campaign. Given what he knew about ObamaCare at the time, the term 'rapist' would have been more appropriate. Including the parts about the desire for power, domination and control. We've already seen how the president used the IRS to attack his political enemies. Imagine what will happen when they have access to all your data and can decide who gets a medical procedure and how long they have to wait to receive it based on how you voted or whom you donated to.

No wonder the president lied about it.

Here's another thing to consider. The president has the power to call up the HHS and instruct them to change the regulations and honor the promise he made again and again for two years. He isn't doing this because he was always determined to break that promise.

And that's illustrative of one of the main problems with the current occupant of the Oval Office, something that comes up again and again. He has no moral core, no standards of what most of us would refer to as common decency. It's a common thread running through his stance on infanticide, his use of the IRS as his political goon squad, the misuse of a trillion dollars worth of 'stimulus' to pay off his political allies, his cavalier ignoring of Federal Law, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the myriad of other scandals swirling around the Obama White House. And it runs through ObamaCare as well.

Frightening ObamaCare Diktat - a Huge HHS Data Base For Federally Funded 'Community Organizers

 

President Obama does have plans for one kind of job creation - a huge army of 'community organizers' working for the Department of Health and Human Services who will assist people in enrolling in ObamaCare, applying for a myriad of federal benefits, and of course registering these recipients of government largess as Democrats.

And they'll be assisted by something the president and HHS chief Kathleen Sebelius are also creating, a huge consolidation of personal information known as the Federal Data Hub.

The new Federal Data Hub is designed to give these new “patient navigators” access to mountains of of personal information compiled by federal agencies, including the IRS, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, and the Social Security Administration among others.

When you find out more about these "patient navigators" and how they're being hired and trained, it gets even worse.

In May, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told by HHS that there will be no criminal background checks required for the these new patient navigators. They won’t even be required to have to have high-school diplomas, and at between $20 and $48 per hour, they're going to be some of the best paid dropouts in America.

The fact that convicted felons could be getting their hands on your tax returns, Social Security numbers and every bit of your personal data doesn't concern them.

According to the HHS, all the new navigators will have to do is to take a 20–30 hour online course about how the 1,200-page law works. If you thought things like fraud and identity theft were a problem before, just wait.

Nine U.S. Senators led by Utah's Orrin Hatch wrote to Sebelius, “The standards proposed by your department could result in a convicted felon receiving federal dollars and gaining access to confidential taxpayer information. The same standards allow any individual who has registered with the exchange and completed two days of training to facilitate enrollment, as if the decision to purchase health insurance is similar to the decision of registering to vote.”

Ah, but that's a part of the goal here, to the point that this could almost be called the ACORN employment Act. Just like ACORN, the idea will be to register low information Democrats while discarding Republican registrations, and a number of politicians in Blue States have already begun working to facilitate it. In California, for instance, California’s Democrat Secretary of State Debra Bowen has already designated Covered California, the ObamaCare health exchange as a voter registration agency under the National Voter Registration Act. So Covered California will be incorporating voter registration into every transaction it has with consumers...assisted of course by those helpful "patient navigators" .

The secondary goal of this monstrosity ought to be self-evident by now. This Federal Data Hub will destroy any vestige of privacy for millions of Americans, putting all of your personal details in one place within easy reach of thousands of anonymous federal apparatchniks.

And as we've seen with IRS-Gate, the implications are fairly staggering.Need that kidney transplant? Oh, your tax returns show you donated to the wrong people, so you go to the back of the line. Registered Republican? Big GOP donor??? Let's cross reference and flag this file for an audit by our co-workers over at the IRS. Ex-military, got some counseling after a rough divorce? Let's flag this file so he's not allowed to own or buy a gun. Oh here's a registered Democrat who's never donated yet? Let's hit him with an e-mail barrage.

This is one of the parts of ObamaCare Nancy Pelosi famously told us that"we'd have to pass the bill to see what's in it."

Americans by and large have no clue about this. Congress needs to make this a lot more public than it is, scream bloody murder and get this repealed.

Obamacare's Projected Premium Increases By State

At this point, you may remember with a grim chuckle the promises that were made about how ObamaCare was going to decrease your health insurance premiums and ' “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year”. BAout how if you liked your current health plan, you'd be able to keep it.


As I reported previously, over 7 million Americans are likely to lose their employer provided health care because complying with all the new regulations make it cheaper for many employers to pay the mandated penalty rather than pay the increasing health premiums and administrative costs.

The cost for a family of five, two adults and three children, the lowest level of coverage, the Bronze, is going to cost - wait for it - $20,000.

And if you're middle class and don't qualify for the ObamaCare subsidies your tax dollars are paying for, guess what? Your choices are to either cough up the $20,000 (or more if you need better coverage) per year or pay the IRS mandated penalty, capped at 2.5 percent of taxable income, or a minimum of $2,085.00 per family by 2016.

As the Heritage Foundation reveals, the news gets even grimmer if you manage to retain your employer provided healthcare. The new regulations and rules mandated by ObamaCare mean that your premiums will skyrocket.

According to a study by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, here are the projected increases, by state:

 

But what about the ObamaCare subsidies?

If you earn a middle class income - something like $100-200K in a state like California or New York,a lot less elsewhere - you're 'rich' and won't qualify, You'll be the cash cow for everyone else. Because the money for the subsidies for people whom the government deems deserve it more than you and your family has to come from tax dollars. Or as Democrats like to call them, 'revenues'.

Obamacare’s  subsidies are estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost over $1.2 trillion over 10 years. And considering that the new CBO estimate is much higher than originally anticipated and that the Obama Administration wants to add millions of undocumented aliens to the rolls - all of whom will need to be covered and almost all who will qualify for the subsidy - expect that estimate to skyrocket as well. I've seen projections of up to $5 trillion, especially as more and more people are forced into one size fits all ObamaCare.

It is nothing less than a transfer of wealth and a  rape of America's middle class.

And believe it or not, there are still  people who see President Obama as the 'middle class warrior' he painted himself as during the election, someone  the exit polls showed  these people think 'cares about people like me.'

Over the next few years, these people are going to find out what a horrible mistake in judgment that was.