ObamaCare Enrollment Week 9 and a Closer Look at Reporting

ObamaCare enters its final month of open enrollment coming off a week 9 high note.

After a bit of a roller coaster ride through the first 6 weeks, it was anticipated that the second half of the 2015 open enrollment period would remain relatively flat having gone through the renewal and unpredictable holiday periods.  The last two reported weeks however, has shown an unforeseen climb in enrollment, especially week 9 where HHS reported that 400,253 individuals had selected plans, almost 2 ½ times that of the previous week.

Here is what HHS has reported so far:

Week 1  -  462, 125 plans selected, 51% new enrollments (235,684)
Week 2  -  303,010 plans selected, 49% new enrollments (148,475)
Week 3  -  618,548 plans selected, 48% new enrollments (296,903)
Week 4  -  1,082,879 plans selected, 47% new enrollments (508,953)
Week 5  -  3, 927, 484 plans selected, 17% new enrollments (667,672)
Week 6  -  94,446* plans selected
Week 7  -  102,896* plans selected
Week 8  -  163,050* plans selected
Week 9  -  400,253* plans selected
* No distinction between new enrollment and renewals provided

The first 5 weeks of enrollment was a mixed bag of new and returning customers with the bulk of renewals taking place during week 5.  Beyond week 5, HHS has assumed all plans selected to be new consumers.

How Many “New Consumers” Have Purchased A HealthCare Plan?

 
The toughest question to answer is exactly how many individuals have selected, paid for and maintained health insurance through the state and federal healthcare exchanges.
As it is the goal of ObamaCare to empower 24 million of America’s long term uninsured with a qualified healthcare plan, one would think that the administration would be willing and eager to share the enrollment successes of their new healthcare law.  However, this has never been the case and the exact number of uninsured that have obtained a healthcare plan through one of the state and federal healthcare exchanges remains as elusive as the answer to the question: Where is D. B. Cooper?  And so, we are forced to make a number of educated assumptions in order to derive a “best estimate” as to how many of America’s uninsured have obtained a qualified healthcare plan, through one of the state and federal exchanges during the 2015 open enrollment period.

After nine weeks of open enrollment, HHS reports that 2.62 million new consumers {see new enrollment figures above} have selected a healthcare plan on the federally managed healthcare exchange.  The key word here is “selected”, as many never complete their insurance transaction or cancel their plans in the opening months of the year.  In 2014 the enrollment attrition rate was 17% and many experts predict that it will be much higher for 2015 however, for these estimations, we will stick with numbers we can support and follow suite with 2014.  And after accounting for attrition, the 9 week adjusted enrollment, through the federally managed healthcare exchange, comes in at 2.17 million.

As the states that manage their own marketplaces do not report enrollment to HHS in a timely manner, the next step in understanding how many uninsured have purchased a healthcare plan this open enrollment period is to estimate that enrollment.

Two factors were taken into account in the estimation process, the first being the difference in the percentage of the uninsured in the effected states as compared to the states participating on the federal marketplace {3.5% lower} and the difference in cumulative state population in the federal and state marketplaces {68% and 32% respectively}.  From this we are able to derive that .99 million new consumers are estimated to have enrolled through the 14 states that operate their own marketplaces, over the same period.

This brings the total new consumer enrollment for the first 9 weeks to 3.16 million.  And to take the enrollment estimate one final step, using a simple weekly average of the first 9 weeks, the 13 week long open enrollment period is estimated to yield somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.56 million new consumers obtaining a qualified healthcare plan in 2015, barring any major upsets in enrollment of course.

But don’t get too excited over this promising enrollment figure just yet as there is a major caveat to the “new consumer” enrollment!

What Makes a “New Consumer”

Leave it to HHS to find yet another way to prevent having to disclose how many uninsured individuals actually purchased a qualified healthcare plan through one of the state and federal healthcare insurance exchanges.

For the first 5 weeks of the 2015 open enrollment period, HHS classified those selecting a healthcare plan through the federally managed marketplace as either new consumers or consumers renewing coverage.  HHS’s differentiation between the two was simple; if a consumer’s name was listed on the federal exchange database as having been insured through the federal exchange in 2014 they were recognized and counted as a renewal.  All other consumers selecting plans on the federal exchange, regardless of their origin or their insured or uninsured status, were bundled together as new consumers.

In our quest to determine the reduction in the uninsured during the 2015 open enrollment period, the next logic question to answer is exactly how many of the estimated 4.56 million new consumers were already insured?



Which “New Consumers” Where Already Insured?

In the exercise of determining those new consumes who were already insured, the first step was to brainstorm all the potential sources that would cause an insured individual to transfer to the federally managed marketplace such as insurance policy cancelations, late renewals and relocation from a state which facilitated their own insurance marketplace.  Once that evolution was complete, the task of quantifying the number of the insured each source brought to the federal marketplace took place.  Here are the results of that exercise:

·         Employer HealthCare Cancellations  -  A Health Benefits Survey conducted by the Society for Human Recourse Management reported that 1% of the 96.4 million employer provided healthcare plans will be canceled in 2015.

964,000 employer cancelations (does not include family members)

 

·         Private Policy Cancelations  -  13 states sent out a second round of cancelations notices near the end of last year.  A quick internet search revealed 348,915 cancelations covering insurers in 9 different states.  The actual number of cancelations is likely well in excess of one half million as not all states nor do all insurers publically report cancelations.

348,915 individual cancelations

 

·         State Exchange Closures  -  The states of Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico have all terminated individual enrollments on their state facilitated healthcare exchanges.  The 2014 enrollees from these states, which numbers 70,000; 33,000 and 34,000 respectively, have been directed to and are expected to reenroll through the federal exchange.

137,000 transfers from closed state exchanges

 

·         Late Renewals  - There were an estimated 6.4 million renewals made between the state and federal healthcare exchange during the first 5 weeks of the 2015 open enrollment, the period in which renewals were being reported.  This would indicate a 300,000 shortfall in renewals.  However, there are a number of factors that may account for some or the entire shortfall which will be address in a moment.

Potential shortfall of 300,000
  

·         Off Exchange Transfers  -  Increasing insurance premiums and decreasing wages could drive some individuals to the state and federal healthcare exchanges so as to take advantage of the tax subsidies offered there.  If in fact this is happening it must be at a very small scale as no major studies or reports seem to have been issued that would quantify this phenomenon.

 

·         Relocation Transfers  -  People move from state to state all the time and as long as they do so without changing their insured/uninsured status, doing so has a net zero effect on the nation’s uninsured rate.  Moving from a state that manages its own healthcare exchange to a state which utilized the federally managed exchange does however affect the new consumer statistic.

As shown here, at the very least, 1.4 million and maybe as many as 2 million of the estimated 4.56 million new consumers were insured prior to the start of the 2015 enrollment period.  This brings the estimated number of uninsured that will have purchased a healthcare plan someplace between 2.56 and 3.16 million.

Taking a Look at Renewals

The renewal target for 2015?  6.7 million, the number of individual who purchased, paid for and maintained a qualified healthcare plan in 2014 through one of the state and federal healthcare exchanges.

Prior to the December 15th renewal deadline, just over 4.5 million customers had their healthcare plans auto-renewed or returned to the federally managed healthcare exchange to manually renew their healthcare plan, as reported by HHS.  Add to that the estimated renewals through the states exchanges and the nation’s renewal count is in the vicinity of 6.4 million, approximately 300,000 short of the target.

The estimated 4.5% shortfall in renewals may or may not be significant.  The shortfall could be attributed to estimation error, late renewals, attrition or any combination of each which is most likely the case.

We’re in the Home Stretch

Throughout the open enrollment period, there has been a deafening silence coming from HHS as well as the news media.  Maybe a lesson learned from last year or maybe the administration is simply trying to keep the attention away from the fact that they had to cautiously lower the enrollment goal by two thirds to thwart off the appearance of enrollment failure.

With 9 weeks of federal marketplace enrollment reported, all indications are that the administration will in fact reach that lowered goal of 2 million however, doing so will be a shallow victory and still spells significant trouble for the healthcare law going forward. 

Aside from unsustainably low enrollment, adverse selection still remains a major hurdle to get over.  Without a drastic improvement over the 28% millennial participation that was realized in last year’s enrollment {the target is 38-40%}, it will be impossible for insurers to offset the higher cost of insuring the pool of much older and less healthy individuals. 

For now, insurer’s losses, which are being created by their holding rates down in an effort to attract new customers, are covered through the law’s risk corridor provision.  But this provision expires at the end of 2016 and unless enrollment and adverse selection both improve significantly, insurers will have little choice but to drastically increase insurance rates or end their participation on the healthcare exchanges which of course means sure death of the President’s signature healthcare law.  Nothing short of an enrollment miracle can change this.

So we standby and wait.  The open enrollment period will close on February 15^th and within a month we should learn the final enrollment tally, at which time a massive fight will be re-ignited between proponents and opponents of ObamaCare.

For Democrats the 2016 Campaign Season Starts Tonight

As President Obama steps before a joint session of congress tonight to deliver to them his State of the Union Address, as he looks out from the podium,what he will see is an affirmation of six years of failure serving as the President of the United States of America.

Over the past few days we have heard bits and pieces of what is on the president’s agenda for the coming year, which he plans to announce in tonight’s State of the Union Address.  This, coupled with the recent rise in his job approval ratings has the liberal news media all a buzz with stories of a revitalized president who is going on the offense as he faces off with the new, republican controlled congress.  It’s hard to imagine however, as to how the president could be more successful pushing his progressive agenda forward in a Republican controlled congress when he could not get the job done with a split congress nor when his party held full control.  And the fact of the matter is, he won’t be more successful.  Furthermore, he does not even intend to be.


A Better Campaigner than President

Admittedly, President Obama loves campaigning and as he enters into his final two years as a lame duck president, he will begin doing so starting with tonight’s State of the Union Address in which he will be introducing his new ideas of providing free community college and of course, taxing the wealthy once again.

Neither of these ideas has a chance of gaining any traction in the new congress nor were they intended to.  They do however create an opportunity for democrats to go on the offensive by once again portraying Republicans as the party of rich greedy white guys that would rather see the middle class and students suffer rather than give in to the president’s agenda.

This is not the first time we have seen this tactic used by President Obama and it certainly will not be the last as in his remaining time in office he will serve more as a Campaigner in Chief than a nation builder or leader.  He will instead take on the role of a demagogue of sorts, paying back democrats for all the harm he has caused the party over the past six years. He will do so by introducing one highly progressive idea after another which will quickly be rejected by republicans thus serving as new fuel to be used against them by Democrats.


The Tone Will Change

After losing both the House and the Senate, as a direct result of his own policies and failed leadership, one would think a more humbled man would have emerge, a man more willing to listen to the voice of the people who spoke ever so loudly against the path he was leading them down, a man more accepting of the fact that the majority of American’s do not share his progressive views and most of all, a man capable of looking back at his own failed track record and willing to make the necessary adjustments to lead this country towards a brighter future as he was so chosen to do.  But what emerged instead was an angry president incapable of taking responsibility and wanting nothing more than to punish those he blames for his demise.

We should expect to hear a very non-presidential tone from Obama tonight, a tone of indignation aimed towards Republicans.  Demonizing Republicans has been the only effective campaign tool available to democrats since President Obama has taken office and tonight the president will set the stage for those democrats readying themselves for 2016.  Some of the tone will be campaign rhetoric but the president truly is pissed that his presidential delusions of grandeur have failed to come to fruition and this will show through tonight while he speaks.


Will We Hear Anything New Tonight?

Other than his angry tone, I don’t believe anyone expects to hear anything new come out of the president’s State of the Union address tonight.  President Obama will put a new twist on the same old agenda that has failed to move forward over the previous five years and of course he will be ratcheting up the rhetoric against Republicans as he sets the 2016 presidential campaign season in to motion.  All in all, people might find watching re-runs of 1980’s sitcoms to be more enlightening.  We will know if this is the case in the morning when the viewership numbers come out.

Hillary in 2016 - Really?

The list of presidential hopefuls has begun to grow as both parties look ahead to 2016.

The Republican pool of potential nominees is already running pretty deep, as indicated on Ron Gunzburger’s Politics1 website and some early polls have the top several contenders polling pretty evenly.

Democratic potential nominees currently fill little more than a wading pool with the top runner, Hillary Clinton out polling everyone by a significant margin.  In the most recent Real Clear Politics average, Hillary has her closes polling competitor, Elizabeth Warren, beat by a margin of over 5 to 1.  However, Warren has already declared that she would not seek the presidency in 2016 making Vice President Joe Biden Hillary’s next closest contender whom she is currently beating by a more than 6 to 1 margin in the polls. 

So what will the strategy for either party be to get their guy or gal a shiny new set of keys to the White House in 2016?

For Republicans, so long as Hillary remains the Democratic front runner, the best thing they can do, as a party, is to keep her front and center, morning, noon and night.  They should run weekly, even daily polls to show how Hillary is outpacing all other Democratic challengers by significant margins, making it ever so clear that Democrats are a one trick pony for 2016 and have been so for quite some time.    

Democrats have already ordered the marble name plate for Hillary’s desk yet nobody knows for sure if she is actually going to seek the nomination.  What will democrats do if Hillary declines the opportunity to be their supreme leader?  The fact of the matter is, Hillary may not even be able to run for the democratic nomination much less the presidency and nobody knows this better than she does. 

Publically, both Congressional Democrats and the White House continue to claim that the  investigations regarding the terrorist attack on Benghazi are complete, have failed to uncover any wrong doing and have been nothing more than a partisan witch hunt by Republicans.  Behind closed doors however, there as a great deal more concern over the ongoing investigation being headed up by Trey Gowdy, with nobody being more concerned than Hillary Clinton herself.

As the special committee proceeds with its investigation, at some point Hillary will be called to testify.  This time it will not be a love fest where Democrats on the committee spend their time well-wishing Hillary and apologizing to her for the inconvenience being imposed upon her by their evil Republican counterparts, as was the case when she testified before the Senate Foreign  Relations Committee almost two years ago to the day.  Hillary will this time have to face real questions and will be demanded to be accountable for her activities before, during and after the attack.  Hillary will almost certainly be asked to make available her diary of notes she kept as Secretary of State and if she does not it will likely be subpoenaed out of the white knuckled grip she has around it, assuming this has not been done so already.  Yes, Benghazi will be hanging over Hillary’s head if she takes a run for the presidency, completely impossible for her to avoid as has been the case in the past with the aid of democratic partisans who were part of the oversight process.

If Hillary does manage to survive Benghazi and captures the Democratic Presidential Nomination, she still has a litany of issues that will haunt her through the process.  Her less than stellar tenure as US Secretary of State will be picked apart but of course she can always blame her boss for those failures as she in fact was nothing more than a spokesperson for an undefined and usually misguided foreign policy.  

If she received the nomination, Hillary will also be held accountable for her time served as a US Senator where not a single piece of substantial legislation, with her name on it, ever made it through committee much less was ever passed into law.  Hillary’s morals and ethics of course will once again be called into question including her motive behind how she handled the Monica Lewinsky affair.  Republican will reach as far back to her works as an investigator during the Watergate scandal where, as her former boss more recently put it, “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”  Of course, Republicans will also ask Hillary if she has had to duck and run from any sniper fire lately, a claim she once made about a visit to Bosnia which video proved to be false.

If Hillary Clinton is the best that Democrats have to offer, as the polls overwhelming indicate she is, this does not speak well of any alternative her party would have to rally behind in the event she does not run.  Republicans need to keep this fact front and center as this will completely discredit any other contender they may face if in the end Hillary ends up not throwing her name in the hat.  And if for some reason Hillary chooses not to, it will be difficult for anyone to give a believable endorsement to any of the other candidates after having shown such overwhelming support towards Hillary. 

And let’s not forget Hillary herself and how a 40 plus year politician; former First Lady of Arkansas; former First Lady of the Unite States; US Senator and the 2008 “sure thing” for the Democratic Presidential nomination got her ass handed to her by a relative unknown Jr. Senator with virtually no experience and a blank resume.

As for the Democrat’s strategy to fend off their Republican opponents, it appears that they don’t really think they need one so long as Hillary is in play.  They seem to have already put all their eggs in one basket, claiming victor for Queen Hillary!

HHS Fact Sheet on ObamaCare Not Very Factual

If you were to have visited the Health and Human Services (HHS) website two weeks ago and browsed their “Affordable Care Act is Working” fact sheet, you would have read something quite different than what you will read today.  The footer of the fact sheet reads that the content was last reviewed on January 8, 2015 which is which is fine, sometimes a posting needs a little fine tuning here and there but what HHS has done to their original fact sheet makes it look like an entirely new document in both tone and content.  The revision of the fact sheet was clearly undertaken in an attempt to move focus away from aspects of ObamaCare that are failing.

Fortunately, I had already saved much of the original content, before the original fact sheet was revised.  Being able to look at the before and after content of the fact sheet provides us with a unique opportunity to review just how much ObamaCare has changed, for better or works, in the eyes of the Obama Administration.

The First Sign of Distress

The first sign that HHS is beginning to walk back the claimed successes of ObamaCare comes from the fact sheet’s new opening statement which reads:

{new} “The evidence shows that The Affordable Care Act is Working in terms of the key metrics of Access, Affordability & Quality.  Families, business, and taxpayers are better off as a result.”

This revised opening statement has been tamped down considerably from the original opening statement:

{original}  “A new wave of powerful evidence points to one clear conclusion: The Affordable Care Act is working to make health care more affordable, accessible and of a higher quality, for families, seniors, businesses, and taxpayers alike.  This includes previously uninsured Americans, and Americans who had insurance that didn’t provide them adequate coverage and security.”

Yes, the new opening statement has been watered down quite a bit and not without good reason.  HHS obviously has to make the claim that ObamaCare is working but they pulled back considerably on their grand claims of success.  It is worth noting that the new opening statement is void of the closing sentence included in the original opening statement.  Most certainly this sentence was removed in an effort to move the talking point away from qualifying enrollments through the healthcare exchanges as to include the previously insured. 

The Obama Administration is more than aware of the forthcoming battle with Republicans on the issue regarding the success of enrollment on the healthcare exchanges where the focus of the debate will be on exactly who the law was intended to insure verses who actually ended up purchasing insurance.

Affordability is No Longer Gets Top Billing

Its very name implies the primary objective of the president’s namesake healthcare law, to make healthcare “affordable”.  Affordability has been the number one talking point of Obama’s reform idea dating back long before he was even a presidential candidate as well as during most of his presidency.  It was affordability that was going to drive millions of America’s uninsured to purchase healthcare insurance.  Candidate and then President Obama often claimed that his plan would create such affordability that there would be no need for a mandate, the uninsured would be kicking down the doors to get in and sign up for healthcare insurance! 

But the talking point of affordability has changed and where it once received top billing on the original HHS fact sheet, it now has taken a back seat to “Access”.

Shifting the Focus to Access

ObamaCare did not make good on its promise to deliver lower premiums for the inaugural open enrollment period and the 2015 open enrollment period arrived with across the board rate increases.  As a result, the White House has become desperate to move the focus away from cost.  One way they are doing so is by taking the spotlight off of cost and shifted it over to access.

Access makes a pretty week argument to the measurement of the success of ObamaCare as well however, the Obama Administration is banking on the apathy of the average American who, in general, is not engaged in the mechanics of the law.  As such, HHS can throw “access” numbers around without having to qualify them and receive little of any pushback from the public who assume the administration is being forthcoming.  This makes for a much easier sale than trying to convince the consumer that the latest increase in premiums, deductibles and co-pays that they are feeling in their wallets are somehow a success story for ObamaCare!

The revised fact sheet leads off with these two bullet points on access:

• There has been an historic decrease in the uninsured. In just one year we’ve reduced the number of uninsured by about 10 million people. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have signed up for health coverage on the Health Insurance Marketplace.  And 3 million young adults have gained coverage through a parent’s plan.     
• More Americans have access to Medicaid coverage.  Twenty-seven states plus DC have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As another indicator of progress: Since October 2013, more than 9.7 million more Americans were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP - a 17 percent increase compared to average monthly signups before that time.     

On the surface, the administration’s claims of access look pretty impressive, but not so fast, there is far more to the story than HHS is telling us here.

The big numbers, “about 10 million people” from the first bullet and ”9.7 million more Americans” from the second bullet both refer to Medicaid, they have just worded their claim two different ways in an attempt to move the enrollment story along without having to pin a number on how many have enrolled through the healthcare exchanges, which is the true goal of ObamaCare.

No attempt whatsoever was made by HHS to quantify the number of individuals who purchased and paid for a qualified healthcare plan through the Federally Managed Marketplace (FMM) during the initial enrollment period, the first bullet merely states:  “Meanwhile, millions of Americans have signed up for health coverage on the Health Insurance Marketplace”.

Omitted from the revised fact sheet was the following original bullet:
 

·         {original} Just recently, the New England Journal of Medicine found that 10.3 million uninsured Americans have gotten covered since the start of Open Enrollment.

And understandably so that they {HHS} omitted this bullet as readers could easily make the correlation that the cause to the drop in the number of uninsured was nearly all the result of the number of people enrolling on to Medicaid.  This would portray ObamaCare as a $2 trillion Medicaid expansion which, to some degree, it is actually turning out to be, but the Obama Administration would rather it not been viewed this way.


More on Access - The Sub-26ers
Back to the first bullet point on the revised HHS fact sheet for a moment, the final line reads, “And 3 million young adults have gained coverage through a parent’s plan.”  As often as the president himself speaks of the millions of young adults who now have healthcare coverage as a result of ObamaCare, having to provide this access is actually an admission of failure not success.

Before ObamaCare existed, most or maybe even all of those 3 million stated were insured.  Offspring up to the age of 24, who met the insurer’s student criteria, were already permitted to stay on their parents insurance policies.  Age 24 was the adopted cut-off age where most students had completed collage and would then transition on to the regular workforce where they would then be eligible for their own employer provided healthcare insurance.  Young adults who were not students or did not have a parent’s insurance policy to piggy back on could obtain a very low cost “catastrophic” healthcare plan.  These catastrophic plans were very well suited for the young and healthy.

However, due to the “essential healthcare benefits” package, mandated to be included in all healthcare plans, the low cost catastrophic healthcare plans would no longer be available leaving a large number of young adults without affordable healthcare insurance.  To fill this insurance void created by ObamaCare, a provision in the law was added which required insurers to allow offspring to remain on their parent’s healthcare insurance regardless of student status or living arrangement.  Additionally, due to the high unemployment rate amongst young adults, the new provision in the law extended the age criteria of a young adult from 24 to 26. 

This new provision in the ObamaCare law is nothing more than a band aid and places an undue cost burden on insurers, which of course are passed on to the consumer.  But the administration needed this provision to stop the bleeding caused by bad policy.

One Final Point On Access - the Essential HealthCare Benefits Package

The last bullet point in regards to access, from the revised HHS Fact Sheet reads as follows:

• Millions of Americans who already had insurance have seen their coverage improve because they now have access to preventive services like vaccines, cancer screenings, and yearly wellness visits at no out-of-pocket cost.  In addition, Americans cannot be denied or dropped from coverage because of a pre-existing condition or because they hit an annual or lifetime cap in benefits.

Well wasn’t that considerate of the crafters of ObamaCare to “improve” on the healthcare coverage obtained by millions of American’s who apparently were not capable for deciding what was in their own best interest.  These improvements or “essential healthcare benefits” (EHB), as defined by HHS, are not provided by choice however, they are mandated as part of a new law.  For millions on the left, the EHB package is viewed as a grand gift from their government to which they feel does a better job at making decisions for all of us than we can do for ourselves.  Unfortunately, those that believe their government did them a favor in providing the EHB package has been hornswoggled by the Obama Administration who had a very different objective in mind when they created the EHB package.

Masquerading as a windfall to consumers, the EHB package has far less to do with providing essential benefits than it does to generating a new revenue stream to help fund the costly law.  The argument made by those who created the law was that the EHB package leveled the playing field between the group marketplace and the individual marketplace however, they fail to mention in their argument the extreme disproportionality in cost the EHB package creates between the two. 

Because of the enormity and wide range of coverage offered in healthcare plans on the group marketplace, most of the benefits mandated in the new EHB package already existed and again, because of its enormity, the cost of to provide these extra benefits to the few that require them is shared amongst a massive pool of the insured.

The individual marketplace is quite different from the group marketplace and is not very accommodating to the mandated EHB package.  Prior to ObamaCare, individual plans wear tailored to suit the needs of the individual being insured.  Not filling these policies with unnecessary benefits was the individual marketplace’s only edge that kept them competitively priced to plans offered on the group marketplace.  Now, by mandating that all healthcare plans include the EHB package, that competitive edge has been taken away.  As logic would dictate, the individual marketplace not being able to spread the cost of these mandated benefits across the same massive pool of the group marketplace, rates would obviously skyrocket and they did.
 

Changing the Definition of Affordable

Affordability has been played down in the revised HHS fact sheet not only by taking away its top billing but also by removing claim of any actual consumer approval of the law.  In the area of affordability, the revised fact sheet focuses on subsidies and a number of other items which HHS claims have reduced cost, none of which explain to consumers why more money is still being taken out of their wallets.   

This bullet from the original HHS fact sheet has been removed all together:

 

·         {original}70% of Americans with Marketplace insurance plans feel they can now afford care if they get sick, and a majority say their premiums are easy to afford. (Source: The Commonwealth Fund)**

 

This bullet was removed largely due to the fact that those Americans who do not receive tax subsidies, thus footing the entire burden of their healthcare insurance, find their premiums and deductibles have increased significantly since the rollout of the healthcare exchanges.  This was not what was promised to them by their president!

So what happened, where did that annual $2500 per family savings President Obama repeatedly touted would result from ObamaCare go?  Sadly, the answer to that question is that it never existed.  The claim of savings made by the Obama Administration was a product of bad math, intentional or unintentional we may never know.

Industry experts were skeptical of the claims of savings being made by that administration as they saw a law that did little to reduce the rising cost of healthcare and at the same time, stack a mountain of regulations on insurers including the mandate of the EHB package.  The experts saw no way that insurance cost could possibly be reduced under the set of circumstances created by ObamaCare.  And as experts began to gather cost data from the various insurers, their skepticism was quickly affirmed. 

In the final months leading up to the highly publicized HealthCare.gov website rollout, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) began compiling cost data regarding the premiums that were going to be offered on the FMM as the information became available.  From this the KFF created a comprehensive, state by state map and as the map coalesced, President Obama’s worst nightmare slowly began to emerge before Americas eyes.  The driving force behind the president’s historic healthcare law, “lower premiums”, failed to transpire in literally every state.  The results were dreadful.

This bad news should have come as no surprise to the president, as at the request and funding of HHS, a study was conducted, by the Rand Corp, the results of which were released in September of 2013 and concluded that premiums would in fact go up as much as 43% as a result of ObamaCare.

President Obama, looking for any glimmer of hope he could find in what was rapidly growing into a big pile of despair, found it in the State of New York.   As premium pricing information rolled in, it became more and more apparent that the only state that would truly benefit from the regulations imposed on insurers by ObamaCare was the great State of New York, which looked to realize premium reductions as much as 40 and 50%.  New York was quickly adopted by President Obama as his ObamaCare poster child, speaking of their windfall in premium reductions at every opportunity he could create.

And on the eve of the HealthCare.gov website rollout, not long after the grand media affair at which the Mayor of New York released the good news of the sharp cut in premium costs in his state, President Obama appeared at a nationally televised media event where he took a victory lap on the coat tails of New York’s good news.  This would be the last time we would hear the  president speak of premium reductions without the caveat of subsidies. 

With the new day came President Obama’s change in his definition of affordable healthcare.  As he was painfully aware, across the nation Americans were flocking to the HealthCare.gov website to get their first look at the long awaited affordability in healthcare only to find higher premiums in virtually every place in the nation and in far too many cases, significant increase.  The president’s repeated claim of a $2500 per family reduction in healthcare spending vanished at a click of a mouse.

And from that day forward the president had changed his definition of affordability to include the caveat of a tax credit or subsidy.

Pulling Back on their MLR Claim

In July of 2013 President Obama said this about Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) provision rebates that were being issued by insurers:

"Last year, millions of Americans opened letters from their insurance companies. But instead of the usual dread that comes from getting a bill, they were pleasantly surprised with a check," he said. "Another 8.5 [million] rebates are being sent out this summer, averaging around a hundred bucks each."

The following bullet bullets are from both the original HHS fact sheet as well as the revised fact sheet.  Note the difference in the tone of the two as well as the omission of the final line from the original posting: 

·         {original} American consumers have saved $9 billion dollars since 2011, because the law says that insurance companies have to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar they receive from folks in your state on their care – not on things like marketing or getting a bonus for their CEO.  Families received an average rebate of $80: money that hardworking families can put toward their electric bill or back into their grocery budget.  (Source: CMS)

and

·         {new} Consumers have saved $9 billion since 2011, because the law requires insurance companies to spend at least 80 cents of every dollar on consumers’ health care and empowers states to review and negotiate premium increases.

In both forms, at the very least these bullet points are highly misleading.  As for the line that was omitted from the original bullet point, it was simply untrue as few families ever received such a rebate.  So what happened to all the MLR rebates?   The answer to this question is quite simple actually.

Employers who provided group insurance plans to their employees were the major recipient of the MLR provision rebates and it stands to reason as they are the ones footing the bill.  It is highly unlikely that these employers were dividing up their rebate checks and distributing them to their employees, they are much more inclined to utilize the rebate to offset the growing cost of future employee benefits.

While HHS and the president both made the MLR insurance rebates sound like a grand gift to millions of Americans the reality is that only one third of those rebate checks actually ended up in the hands of an individual.  And as insurers have gained better control of their costs and the MLR provision, the number of rebates being issued is significantly fewer and most for mere dollars and cents.

Helping Small Businesses

Completely omitted from the revised HHS fact sheet where the claims of how ObamaCare was helping small businesses, but fortunately I saved them.  The original fact sheet included these two bullets which in their literal sense do hold some truth however, as has typically been the case when HHS speaks of the benefits and successes of ObamaCare, they are leaving out most of the story.

• {original}The law is making coverage more affordable for small businesses, with tax credits and protection from excessive price increases.
  
  
• {original}Entrepreneurs can start their own businesses without the fear of losing their coverage.

The US Small Business Administration estimates that there are approximately 22 million entrepreneurs “non-employer” businesses.  These are the people that HHS claims to be helping in the two bullet points above.  Reality overrides rhetoric however and the help that is claimed to be provided to these 22 million individuals does not offset the problem that ObamaCare has created for them.  Here is the less told story.

Historically these 22 million individual obtained their healthcare insurance on the private marketplace.  The marketplace provided them with a vast array of choices so individuals could select an insurance plan that best suited both their personal and financial needs.  For a young adult creating new phone applications in his or her apartment, a low cost, high deductible plan was a perfect fit while and older individual that performs high wire acrobatics might elect to secure a much more costly but forgiving healthcare plan.  For entrepreneurs, all was well in the individual marketplace until the passage of ObamaCare.

In the early days and even today, ObamaCare has had little effect on the group insurance marketplace as cost have always been able to be spread across a large spectrum of age groups and health conditions.  The individual marketplace was quite different however, as each plan was priced to their specific offerings and the age/health factors of the insured.  This all changed the day ObamaCare was passed in to law.

Insurers were provided a short grace period but just months after the new healthcare law was passed they were no longer able to deny coverage or factor in the added risk of insuring someone with a pre-existing medical condition.  This created quite the dilemma in the private market place because, well, it was the “private” marketplace.

A stop gap provision in the law, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), provided payment to insurers to offset the cost of insuring high-cost/high-risk individuals as mandated by the new law however, most insurers found the payment insufficient to cover their risk and therefor had to increase premiums to all of their private plan customers.  The result, numerous increases in policy costs over the next few years as insurers gained a handle on the new and highly regulated marketplace.

The result of skyrocketing premiums on the individual marketplace was millions of the insured having to give up their personal choice in affordable healthcare and seek out a new, less cost prohibitive plan which was never as good as what they once had.  Many were driven in to catastrophic plans and once those were no longer offered on the marketplace found themselves joining the ranks of the uninsured, a very scary proposition for a person trying to provide security to his or her family.

Once the federal marketplace opened on January 1, 2014 those of the 22 million who had been forced to compromise their healthcare coverage, were now paying unsustainable insurance premiums or had been driven out of the insurance marketplace all together, could now secure a subsidized plan.  In most cases, the options provided to these individual still cost them more than in the pre-ObamaCare days.

No, ObamaCare has not been a great deal of help to Small Businesses as HHS professes and it is no wonder that HHS removed these bullet points from their fact sheet.

And in Conclusion

The majority of Americans know little more about ObamaCare other than it remains to be a major point of contention between the left and the right.  Most honestly believe that the healthcare law is working and why shouldn’t they when they hear their president claim time and again that millions of Americans now sleep better at night knowing that they now of the security of healthcare.   From this singular perspective ObamaCare certainly is working however, as is in most cases, what is buried under the surface tells a very different story and in the case of ObamaCare, it isn’t a good one.

Obama Supporters Duped - Media Falls Silent on Obama’s Short Lived Positive Approval Rating

As we headed into the New Year, President Obama was given what may be the best New Year gift the struggling president could have been given, a positive approval rating.

News of the president’s job approval rating crawling out of the red spread like wild fire across largely left leaning media outlets.  As well, the news lit up social media with liberals and progressives alike serving the good news as an indictment to their beloved president’s policies and leadership skills being the cause for the recent sign of life in the economy.  But the good news was short lived, in fact it lasted only one day. 

The grand jubilation was spurred by the results of a recent Gallup poll.  Gallup reported that for the polling period of December 27 through 29 the president received and average 48% approval and 48% disapproval, putting him in the black for the first time since September of 2013.   The following day, the Gallup three day rolling average reported that the president’s job approval had fallen back in to the red and has since been on the decline.  Gallup uses a three day rolling average methodology to determine their polling results.

Despite the immediate reversal of the presidents rising job approval, the liberal media persisted and for days following the release of the net neutral job approval poll ran stories attributing the already erased upward trend to such things as the president’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, his executive action to defer the deportation of illegal immigrants and a growing economy, despite 5 ½ years of near stagnation.  Failing to acknowledge that the shift in the presidents negative approval rating lasted only a day and their willingness to push stories based on a false narrative of the president’s rising popularity, the media duped Obama supporters in to thinking just that.  With few exceptions, the media has failed to report on the following day’s downturn and continued falling of President Obama’s job approval rating.

It is understandable that after having just taken a beating in the mid-term election and the president being highly criticized for his recent executive actions, that the liberal media would take advantage of any opportunity they can to paint a picture of positive perception of the president to whom they have given their unconditional support.  President Obama has not provided his party with much for them to brag about over the years and despite the strong economic growth and solid jobs numbers over recent months, the president is still struggling to earn any credit as most feel that we are seeing too little far far too late.

The hype will be short lived however, as folks on the left realize that their president’s popularity in the polls was a mere day in length.  Nothing has changed and the stories of the president gaining steam as he enters the final two years of his presidency will have vanished before the next news cycle starts.  As well, the social media stars will stop with their claims of the president’s rising popularity and revert back to claiming republican obstructionism for all his failures.

And while Obama supporters may for the moment feel that they have been duped by the media, they remain poised and ready, wanting to be the first to spread the next bit of good news regarding their beloved president no matter how over embellished or non-factual the story may be.

It must be noted that in choosing the Gallup poll results to drive their headline, in doing so the liberal media had to ignored all other major polling outlets, everyone one of which were reporting the president’s job approval well in negative territory.  Since May of last year, the Real ClearPolitics average has had the president’s job approval 7 percentage points or greater in the red.  But the liberal media has never seemed too concerned about fair and balanced reporting when it comes to protecting their agenda and this president.

ObamaCare Enrollment Week 7 – The Lowered Goal Has Been Met

Week 7 marked the passage of the halfway point for the ObamaCare 2015 open enrollment period and it came and went without fanfare.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reported that between the dates of December 27, 2014 through January 2, 2015, 102,896 plans were selected, through the federal healthcare exchange.  This should easily push the number of new customers beyond the administration’s revised goal of 2 million as we head into the second half of the open enrollment period. 

The goalposts were lowered in a move by the Obama Administration to thwart off the possibility of repeating the embarrassing 2014 enrollment failure.  Lowering the goal by a full two thirds grossly underestimates enrollment and is working out exactly as the administration had hoped.  


They Have Met Their Goal But Not Really

Just half way through the open enrollment period and HHS looks to have met their round 2 revised enrollment goal of putting a qualified healthcare plan in the hands of 2 million uninsured Americans.  But there is little to celebrate as lowering the goal has no effect on the measurement of success of the law itself.  Insurers are still looking to add in the vicinity of 24 million new customers to their Christmas Card list by 2017, as promised to them, and cannot be all too happy with enrollment as we head into the second year of ObamaCare.

Taking a quick look back on how the law was developed, private insurance companies were enticed to participate in the grand experiment with the promise of millions of new customers.  The goal was to progressively reduce the number of America’s uninsured by 24 million through the purchase of healthcare plans provided by private insurers.  These insurance plans would be offered to customer through a federally managed marketplace (FMM) also referred to as healthcare insurance exchanges. 

Through a complex modeling process, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that for years 2014 through 2017 the number of uninsured nonelderly that would purchase healthcare insurance through the FMM to be 7 million; 6 million; 9 million and 2 million respectively.  These figures were critical in the determination of the rates which insurers would offer on the FMM.

But the CBO projections were speculative and therefore inject uncertainty which created a risk insurers were not willing to take.  The solution, provide insurers a safety net that would protect them from losses due to low enrollment and other unknown factors during the initial years of the new program.  Conversely, if enrollment surpassed projection or profits are excessive, the same safety net would have insurers paying back excessive profits to the federal government.  The safety net for insurers runs through the end of 2016 after which time it is expected that the marketplace would be settled.

Where the problem lies is come 2017, if a sizable shortfall in enrollment exists, insurers will be forced to drastically increase their rates or end their participation on the FMM.  Either way, it spells death for ObamaCare.


How Is Enrollment Stacking Up

HHS has been fairly punctual and somewhat forthcoming in their release of enrollment figures but there still remains a number of caveats that prevent the nailing down of any exact enrollment figure.  Some assumption must be made and of course, whenever we wade into the waters of assumption it inevitably creates a degree of uncertainty and for some, injects enough doubt to discredit the conclusion.  The shortcomings of enrollment are significant enough however, that erring the uncertainties on the side of caution has absolutely no affected on the conclusion so we are safe.

Here is what HHS has reported for enrollment so far:

Week 1  -  462, 125 plans selected, 51% new enrollments (235,684)
Week 2  -  303,010 plans selected, 49% new enrollments (148,475)
Week 3  -  618,548 plans selected, 48% new enrollments (296,903)
Week 4  -  1,082,879 plans selected, 47% new enrollments (508,953)
Week 5  -  3, 927, 484 plans selected, 17% new enrollments (667,672)
Week 6  -  94,446* plans selected
Week 7  -  102,896* plans selected
* No distinction between new enrollment and renewals provided

The first caveat in HHS’s reporting should be pretty obvious.  In weeks 6 and 7 HHS no longer made the distinction between new enrollments and renewals.  The explanation given by HHS is that the auto-renewal deadline passed therefore there was no longer the need to make this distinction.  For all practical purposes this is true, the number of late renewals will be so few from this point forward that they will not influence the conclusions drawn on the success of failure of enrollment.  From week 6 forward we will assume all enrollments to be new.

The total number of new enrollments reported for the first 7 weeks total 2,055,029 which brings us to the second caveat.  The figures reported by HHS represent only those plans selected on the federal healthcare exchange.  As the states not participating on the federal exchange make up for approximately 27% of the nation’s enrollment, increasing the federal figure by that amount brings the number of selected plans to 2,609,887.

Last, a correction for attrition is needed.  As has been used in previous weeks, applying the 2014 attrition rate of 17% arrives us at 2,166,206 plans selected and paid for at the end of week 7.

And the one final caveat, “new” consumers.

 
‘NEW’ Remains a Mystery

A twist to 2015 enrollment is the introduction of the term “new” .

HHS has assigned enrollment to one of two categories, new consumers and consumes renewing coverage.  The latter is simple enough, any consumer who is renewing the coverage they obtained through the FMM last year is considered a renewal.  Being a new consumer is not near as simple however.

In the context of open enrollment, many might interpret the meaning of being a new consumer as an uninsured individual new to the insurance marketplace but this is not the case.  As described by HHS, a new consumer is anyone new to having previously purchased a qualified healthcare plan through the federal exchange.  In a nut shell, new consumer means only that they are new to the federal exchange and has nothing to do with their previous insured or uninsured status.  This is the final enrollment caveat.

A new consumer on the FMM could in fact be a formerly uninsured individual seeking out healthcare coverage for the first time and likely the majority that are defined as such by HHS fall in this catagory.  However, a new consumer could also be an individual who transfers over from the private marketplace so as to take advantage of tax subsidies which are only offered through the state and federal exchanges.  A new consumer could also be an individual who purchased a healthcare plan through their state exchange last year and since has relocated to a state which utilized the federal exchange instead or, as in the case of consumers from the states of Oregon and Nevada, could be one of the 100,000 consumers who have had to transfer over to the federal exchange after their state exchange was abandon.  There are also a number of individuals who have transferred off of employer provided insurance plans and on to the FMM, they too would be considered a new consumer.  And last, a new consumer could be an individual whose income situation improved over the past year and was transferred off of Medicaid and on to the federal exchange.

As you can see, there are a large number of individuals that fall under the classification of a new consumer in the HHS enrollment count that do not affect the reduction in the number of uninsured in this country.  Currently HHS offers no way to differentiate who of its new consumers were previously insured and who were not.  This will without a doubt raise questions and create new controversy over enrollment claims that will be made by the Obama Administration at the end of the open enrollment period.

For the sake of this and previous weeks enrollment evaluations made by My POV, we will again err to the side of caution and assume all new consumers enrollment figures, provided by HHS, to be enrollments by the formerly uninsured.  This will skew the number in favor of the healthcare law and removes any question of bias in the evaluation.


What We Can Expect from Here On Out

It does not appear that we will be seeing great things coming from this latest round of enrollments and after the Obama Administration lower their expectations by two thirds, why would anyone expect there to be.

Enrollment is likely to remain flat for the remaining 6 weeks of the open enrollment period with each week producing enrollment figures similar to what was experienced in week 7.  If this turns out to be the case, there would be another 600,000 to 700,000 new customers added which would push enrollment to just shy of the 3 million mark.  There may also be a number of procrastinators that will flock to the exchanges at the very last moment so as to avoid having to pay the tax penalty.  If this were to happen, enrollment could possibly be pushed over 3 million.  Of course, removing the number of new consumers who were previously insured from the mix will drive the enrollment figure back down but how far nobody knows and there is little optimism in believing that HHS will make this figure public, at least not without coercion.

 One last important factor, which is new to this and all future enrollment periods, is retention.  It will be interesting to learn the retention rate of those who purchased a healthcare insurance plan through one of the state and federal healthcare insurance exchanges last year. 

With the knowledge of last year’s less than stellar enrollment outcome, insurers reassess their plan costs and stood poised to significantly increase premiums for 2015.  Fearing this would create a renewed pushback from Republican and even some disgruntled Democrat lawmakers, President Obama was successful in his plea to the insurers to hold their premium increases down to a minimum.  However, those increases did not vanish in to thin air and instead were shifted to policy deductibles and co-payments which have skyrocketed.   How this will affect returning customers we will not know until HHS releases this information, assuming they ever will. 

There is little to compel HHS to release enrollment retention rate figures, especially if they do not bode well for the troubled healthcare law and failing to do so adds yet another layer to the unknown that surrounds the ever growing ObamaCare enrollment mystery.

How To Go From Junior Senator To President In 6 Easy Steps

It wasn’t really all that hard, all it took was a political party more driven by gimmickry than political prowess, a complaint media and the apathy of voters who were simply not caring enough to take the time to do their homework and learn a little about some guy they never heard of.  Of course, Barack Obama had to do his part too! 

Here is what you need to do to rise from the ranks of a relative unknown Jr. Senator to becoming the POTUS in 6 easy steps.


No. 6  -  Be a Dynamic Speaker

In a mere 17 minutes, an obscure and relative unknown Illinois State Senator wowed a roomful of democrats, many of which likely had little if any idea who he was.

It was from a recorded response to President Bush’s weekly radio address that several democrats got their first earful of Barack Obama the speech giver, one democrat in particular was John Kerry.  The radio response was not of his own writing but the command in which Barack Obama delivered his words was impressive enough to gain him an invitation to deliver the Key Note speech at the coming Democratic National Convention.  For Barack Obama, a 17 minute block of time on July 27, 2004 changed the course of his political career.

Prior to his launch into democratic stardom, Barack Obama had a less than note-worthy professional and political career.  After graduating collage with is Bachelor of Arts degree, he started out as a community organizer and social activist, first in New York and then in some of Chicago’s poorest black neighborhoods.  He also earned his law degree, from Harvard Law, and worked as an associate at a civil rights law firm in addition to his second job of lecturing at Chicago University.

Obama officially entered politics in 1997 where he spent the following 8 years serving as an Illinois State Senator with little fan fair.  A 2000 run for a seat in the US House of Representative ended up in a 2 to 1 defeat for Barack Obama who then later ran for a spot in the US Senate which he won in a surprise landslide.

During his short time in the US Senate, Barack Obama sponsored 137 pieces of legislation only a handful of which were approved by the Senate and only 2 ever became law.

But despite his lack luster political career and extremely limited experience, his dynamic speech giving ability seemed to be all that was necessary to steal the Democratic Presidential Nomination away from Hillary Clinton who was early on believed to be a shoe in for the nomination and likely to win the 2007 US Presidential election.

It certainly does pay to speak well!

  
No. 5  -  Be History Making

If on February 9th, 2007 you would have asked virtually anyone who they thought was going to win the democratic presidential nomination and even the presidency for that matter, they likely would have answered Hillary Rodham Clinton.  But all that changed during a short speech in front of the Old State Capital Building in Springfield, Illinois the following day.

A beloved Clinton, Hillary’s political career dates back to the early 1960’s.  Then a registered republican, in 1964 Hillary campaigned for Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater.  At this same time, the man who would become the 44^th President of the United States was a mere 3 years of age.

Hillary’s political views change significantly over the next few years, as the nation struggled through a difficult social transformation, and by 1968 she had turned in her republican card so that she could campaign for democratic and antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

Shortly after marrying Bill Clinton in 1975, she become Arkansas’s first Lady during Bill’s tenure as governor from 1979 through 1981 and again from 1983 through 1992.  Immediately following her term as the First Lady of Arkansas she began to prepare herself for the role as First Lady of the United States as she worked diligently alongside her husband in what became a successful run at the presidency.  Hillary served as the First Lady to President Bill Clinton from 1993 through 2001.  In both of her rolls as First Lady, Hillary was incredibly active politically and during her White House years her opinion and influence played a pivotal role in President Clintons decision making process, they were a dynamic team.

Immediately following her term as First Lady, she successfully ran for a seat in the US Senate where she served until throwing her name in the hat for the democratic presidential nomination in 2008.   Hillary was the early front runner and it seem as though John Edwards was her only rival.  History was in the making and it began to look as though the United States was likely going to have its first female president.

But a relative unknown Jr. Senator from Illinois, a man with little experience and nary a claim of success in his short political career became the game changer.  As it turned out, democrats found it far more history making to elect America’s first black president than to elect American’s first woman president despite the overwhelming difference in their credentials and Obama's relative obscurity.

No. 4  -  Claim You Will Do Something That Has Already Been Done

Throughout then candidate Obama’s presidential campaign, he repeatedly stated that if elected, he would end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home.  This was a central premise to his presidential campaign which sparked a great deal of voter enthusiasm for the relative unknown candidate.

Rewind to the start of 2008, a full year before Barack Obama was sworn in to office, it was around this time that the wheels were set in motion to construct the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq which would determine the departure time table and number of forces, if any, that would remain in Iraq.  The SOFA was signed during an official ceremony on November 17^th 2008.

As per the SOFA, the new president began to draw down US combat forces in 2009, the last leaving the region just before the end of 2011.

It served Barack Obama well to ride the wave party popularity he created by his campaign claim that he would end the war in Iraq although the deal had already been signed, sealed and delivered before he ever set foot in office.


No. 3  -  Profess To Be a Professor

"I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president {Bush 43} I actually respect the Constitution."

These were the words uttered by then candidate Obama at a fundraiser in March of 2007 but there was one small problem with his claim, that being Barack Obama was not a constitutional law professor, nor any other kind of professor for that matter.

Unlike a tenured professor, whose desire it is to further academia in their particular field of study through research, exploration, the exchange of ideas with fellow academics and of course publishing their discoveries, Barack Obama’s interest in constitutional law was significantly more constrained.  Obama worked as a lecturer at the University of Chicago where he taught and did so for reasons no different than tens of thousands of other individuals who find time to teach at colleges and universities across the nation, a paycheck! 

Obama did not immerse himself into the world of academia as professors do, he do not debate constitutional law with would be fellow professors and he did not publish a single paper on law, much less constitutional law during his 12 years teaching at the University of Chicago.  

But polling must have revealed that his claim of being a constitutional law professor raised his marketability as from that March day forward, Obama regularly referred to himself as such, with little regard as to how disingenuous he was being.


No. 2  -  Don’t Get Attached to Campaign Promises

During the 2008 democratic primary, healthcare reform was a hot button topic with frontrunners Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama, specifically the individual mandate, which at the time was part of Hillary’s and Edward’s plan and highly opposed by Obama.

 During a presidential primary debate in January of 2008, Obama was being pressed by his opponents for not including an individual mandate in his plan to which he replied:

"A mandate means that in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance." Instead of going that route, his plan, he said, "emphasizes lowering costs."

Obama held his position on the individual mandate throughout his campaign and was often vocal of his opposition to Hillary’s plan, once stating:

 “Elect Hillary and the government will compel you to buy health insurance. Elect me, and I'll give you lower costs and let you keep your freedom.”

But all Obama’s talk of the individual mandate causing American’s to lose their freedom by forcing them to buy health insurance turned up to be empty as not more than six months after being sworn in to office he was embracing the individual mandate which was now a part of his forthcoming healthcare bill.

When later question as to why he was including the individual mandate, he simply replied “I changed my mind.” And that answer apparently was good enough for his supporters.


And the No 1 Way to Go From Jr. Senator to President

Be a Liberal, the main stream media just loves liberals!