ObamaCare 2016 Open Enrollment - Three Data Points Does Form A Trend

Despite poor turnout by the uninsured on the state and federal ObamaCare exchanges, Congressional Republicans have remained largely silent on the issue of the underperforming healthcare exchanges and rightly so.

During the inaugural 2014 open enrollment period only 1.4 million of the 6.7 million individuals who purchased a healthcare plan through one of the state and federal healthcare exchanges came from the nation’s pool of uninsured non-elderly.  By the end of the second open enrollment period an additional 2.3 million joined the ranks of the nation’s insured.  Combined, the result of the two open enrollment periods decreased the nation’s number of uninsured nonelderly by roughly 3.7 million.

(Note:  Since the writing of this blog HHS has released new data which reduces the number of uninsured nonelderly who have purchased and maintained a healthcare plan through the exchanges significantly) 

The Obama Administration has never played up the enrollment through the healthcare exchanges and rightly so as they have been horribly off of projection.  The administration’s target for the 2014 open enrollment period was to insure 7 million of the nation’s long term uninsured and to increase that number to 10 million by the close of the 2015 open enrollment period.  They missed both projection by a significant amount.  It is important to note that these targets were the very same that were used by Democratic lawmakers, and others, during the pitch to get the American public on board with the president’s namesake law.

Republicans have as well remained relatively quiet on the failure of the healthcare exchanges to attract the uninsured although for a different reason. 

Two data points do not form a trend therefore, it would be disastrous for Republican lawmakers to publically call the program, still in its infancy stages, a failure based on such a limited amount of data, despite the healthcare exchanges obvious failure.  The stakes are so high for Democrats that such a challenge would be met with a litany of rebuttals which of course would be difficult to refute on the sole basis of two open enrollment periods.  But all that changes in less than nine months.

The administration is already fearing the worst for the 2016 open enrollment period and have every reason to.  They are at a total loss as for what to do about the poorly performing healthcare exchanges and to be honest, there is nothing short of a miracle that can be done. 

Driven by an even larger penalty for not complying to the federal mandate to obtain healthcare insurance coupled with what was then believed would be lower insurance premiums, the administration originally projected that 12 million of the nations uninsured nonelderly would take advantage of tax subsidies offered through the ObamaCare exchanges during the 2016 open enrollment period.  These projected 12 million individuals, along with the 10 million originally projected to have obtain a qualified healthcare plan during the first two open enrollment periods, would have raised the number of healthcare plans sold to the uninsured nonelderly to an astounding 22 million by the close of the 2016 open enrollment period if the healthcare exchanges were to perform as planned.

But reality speaks far louder than projections and the administration knows that it is all but a mathematical impossibility to achieve its original enrollment goals, it can’t even come close.  And so, Republican lawmakers sit and wait for that 3^rd data point which will establish an irrefutable enrollment trend of failure. 

There will be no excuses that can be made; no claims of inaccurate or unreliable enrollment data; no more saying that the law needs time to work; and most of all, no more spreading the narrative that republicans are targeting ObamaCare simply because they don’t like the president.  If the coming open enrollment period does not produce a significant number of long term uninsured signing up for a qualified healthcare plan, the fate of the law will be signed, sealed and will just be waiting for its finally delivery.  And the time to be delivered will come almost immediately.

If the healthcare exchanges fail to deliver in 2016 it will become one of the major talking points for the 2016 presidential election and with such a large number of republicans having thrown their name in the hat you can be assured that they will come together for the one common cause of staging an all-out assault on ObamaCare and the 2016 Democratic hopefuls who continue to support the law.

It will be impossible for the “party of care” to justify leaving between 10 and 15 million individuals uninsured above the 30 million originally projected by the administration.  As well, it will be impossible for democrats to justify keeping a law on the books that instead of making insurance affordable to all has priced healthcare insurance out of the reach of the average American even with subsidies.

Republican lawmakers have been criticized for not being more aggressive in their attempts to repeal and/or dismantle ObamaCare, waiting for this third data point is the reason why!

Praise for the President appears more like Desperation

As I read through the various news feeds over the weekend I stumble across a number of different articles that seemed to share a common thread, that being that last week was history making for President Obama.  One article I read inferred that the week secured the president’s legacy while another called the week Obama’s best ever.  In each of the articles there was praise given to a president for a number big ticket items that culminated throughout the week.

But is President Obama in fact worthy of the praise that is being doled out to him for the highlights of last week’s news cycle?   When you put in to perspective the impact or influence that the president may have had on any of these events, one would be hard pressed to conclude that he was.

Let’s take for instance the presidents reaction to Friday’s Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage and his history on the subject.  Following the ruling the president tweets:

 "Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else. #LoveWins."

This reaction is in line with the president’s 2012 flip flop which now puts him in support of gay marriage.  Hey, we all grow right and certainly Obama is not the first president to conveniently “evolve” their positions on a hot button issue.   However, this is not the first time that the president has flip flopped on this particular topic. 

Back when Obama was running for the Illinois State Senate he was questioned by a Chicago based gay newspaper as to his position on gay marriage.  Obama answered that he supported gay marriage and that he would fight any effort to prohibit such.  It was just a couple of years later that Obama shifted to an “undecided” position on gay marriage which later then evolved in to the position that he supported civil unions but not gay marriage, a position he held during his 2004 run for the US Senate.  Obama has provided a number or explanations to his constant shifting on the position of gay marriage over the years, none of which holds much water but of course are accepted by his devout supporters.

As for the Supreme Court’s decision in support of gay marriage this past Friday, I don’t think we can honestly consider President Obama’s two decades of flip flopping position on the matter to be credible and certainly not worthy of any praise being given to him by the media and his supporters.  His ever changing position on the matter of gay marriage proves that he is either indecisive or that his actions are politically motivated.  Neither is a very attractive trait in a leader.


And what about Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on King vs Burwell.  The left has claimed this as a major victory that has sealed the president’s legacy.  Someone somehow concluded that this decision ensures that ObamaCare is engraved in stone and safe from repeal yet reality draws a much different conclusion.  The same problems that plagued the controversial healthcare law before Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling were still there after the decision was read and the problems facing ObamaCare continue to mount.  As for the President’s involvement in this decision, there was none.

If however the president must be recognized in some way for his contribution to ObamaCare, he should be chastised instead of praised as had the Supreme Court ruled in favor of King then the tax subsidies for over 6 million individuals would have been toppled by four words contained in a poorly written law which bears his name.

Then there was the President’s recent trade agreement that after an early defeat and fierce debate in congress, was finally passed.  One of only a few check marks on the President’s “to do” list, since he took office in 2009, and hardly one that should foster any praise for him or any democrat for that matter.  How ironic is it that one of the very few key legislative accomplishment of President Obama’s terms in office happened at the will of Republicans while facing heavy opposition by his own party.  If there is any praise to be handed out over this trade agreement, it needs to go to those on the right who made the deal possible for the president.

And this past Friday, President Obama delivered the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor who died in the senseless shooting on June 17^th during a prayer meeting.  It was a moving and memorable moment without question but certainly not a defining one, presidentially speaking, as it was described in many of the articles that gave praise to the president over the weekend.

One article in particular that I read was titled “Barack Obama is officially one of the most consequential presidents inAmerican history”.  This particular article, while inspired by the events of the King vs Burwell ruling, was more a recap of what the author felt were the grand achievements of President Obama.  However, just as the events of last week were overblown as some type of presidential achievements, so were the talking point in this article.  The opening paragraph of this article reads as follows:

After Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, there's no longer any doubt: Barack Obama is one of the most consequential presidents in American history — and he will be a particularly towering figure in the history of American progressivism.

It may in fact be true that Barack Obama will be recognized as a significant figure in the history of American progressivism, however, those expecting favorable recognition for Obama might find disappointment in the forthcoming history books. 

The article provided significant discussion on the history and the failed attempts of past administrations to impose national healthcare upon the states.  In contrast, the article dedicated only a few lines to ObamaCare, mentioning only its success in expanding Medicaid.  No other successes were mentioned and of course there were no mentions of the laws numerous failures.

The article moved on to the president’s early stimulus package without addressing the fact that it ultimately failed to create any shovel ready jobs nor did it simulate the economy in any measureable way.  It author of the article also pointed out the bold yet ineffective use of Executive Actions by the president aimed to curb greenhouse gases and grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, along with a list of others.  Of course there was mention of the president’s historic yet meaningless action to reestablish relations with Cuba and the Iranian nuclear deal which looks as though could be the worst foreign policy move of his presidency, which is saying a great deal.

In all fairness, the article did point out some of Obama’s failures are president although it tamped them down significantly, leaving out the worst policy errors altogether.  The article was predictably void of  mention to the mountain of scandals that surrounds Obama’s Presidency nor was there any mention made that President Obama is responsible for creating the least transparent administration of any in all US history.

While I understand that the left must capitalize on every opportunity that presents itself to bolster their lame duck presidents appearance, they probably should reel in the rhetoric a bit as the weakness of President Obama’s past weeks achievement make their praise come off more as desperation than an affirmation of presidential successes.

The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal Will Put to Test the Morals and Ethics of the Democratic Voter

There is a great deal that we do not nor likely will ever know about the emails Hillary Clinton stored on her private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State however, there are a number of things that we do know for certain about the email scandal.  Let’s review.

We know for certain that, at her own public admission, Hillary Clinton chose to opt out of using a government email account and instead purposely used her own private email server, a Clinton owned domain and a personal email account to which she claims to have conducted all of her email correspondence on while serving as Secretary of State.  We know that this decision was deliberate as she had the email account set up just days before her Secretary of State Confirmation hearing began.  

We also know for certain, and again at her own public admission, that Hillary Clinton consciously and deliberately chose to retain sole custody of the contents on her private email server after her departure from the State Department.

Most troubling, we know for certain that while an endless stream of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and congressional oversight requests for Hillary Clinton’s emails were being made, some even while she was still serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton stood by silently, knowing that she held the full record of what was being requested in her basement yet never released them.  She held her silence even knowing that subpoenas were issued for her emails.

What we don’t know for certain is exactly what it was that finally drove Hillary Clinton to provide the State Department with her emails, two years after the fact.  It is reasonable to assume however, that someone within the State Department who was under pressure to turn over Clinton emails to the various agencies requesting them, compelled Hillary to do so.

And we do know for certain that the emails Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department were handpicked, by herself, and then scrutinized by her team of lawyers before the hard copies were boxed up and delivered to the State Department.  What we don’t, or at least we didn’t know at the time, was if what was turned over to the State Department was a full record of her time served as Secretary of State.

We know for certain that the request from congress for Hillary to turn over her private email server to a third party arbitrator was denied.  At the same time this request was denied it was also disclosed {claimed} that they {the Clinton’s} had the email server’s hard drive “scrubbed” of its contents following the retrieval of the some 50,000 printed pages of emails which were subsequently turned over to the State Department.

And while Hillary Clinton has repeatedly claimed that the hard copy of her emails were the full record of her time served as Secretary of State which existed on her private email server, we know for certain that this is an untruth.  On at least two occasions since the handpicked set of email document were turned over to the State Department, additional email documents, belonging to the former Secretary, have surfaced that were not part of the record she turned over to the State Department.

Now Let’s Summarize!

Hillary Clinton created a personal email system of which she had sole custody of, to be used to conduct the people’s business on while serving as Secretary of State. 

While still in office and during the early stages of the Benghazi investigations Hillary was fully aware of the requests being made to the State Department for her emails yet played ignorant and did not turn them over.

Upon her departure from the State Department Hillary made the conscious decision to withhold all of her email records and for the following two years again played ignorant to the well-publicized news reports {and I’m sure we was being briefed on this matter from the inside} of the State Department failing to turn over documents pertaining to her service as Secretary of State.

Two years after her term ended as Secretary of State and only after coming under pressure from the State Department did Hillary Clinton turn over a handpicked selection of her Secretary of State emails and turn them over to the State Department.

As a result of the Clinton emails being turned over to the State Department, who then were able to respond to at least some of the FOIA requests, it was first discovered that Hillary was using a private email account; that she stored those emails on a private email server of which was under her sole care and custody; and that she had been withholding her emails all this time.

And finally, we have learned that the 50,000 hard copy pages of emails that Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department in fact is not the full record of her time served as Secretary of State, such as she has claimed them to be a numerous occasions.

 

In a nut shell, the former Secretary of State and now 2016 Democratic hopeful has proven that she can willfully and intentionally hide the people’s records from the people and ignore legal subpoenas.  She has also proven that she is willing to lie to the people, as she did when she claimed that she had turned over all of her email records from her service as Secretary of State.  She only did so two years after the fact and only because she was compelled to do so.

The time and money that has been wasted in congressional oversight due to the obstructions created by Hillary Clinton intentionally hiding the people’s emails from the people is shameful, not to mention the division between the parties it has caused.  But aside from all that, what Hillary Clinton has done is created a moral and ethical issue that each Democratic voter must look square in the face and decided which direction their compass points.

A Supreme Court Ruling in Favor of King could save Democrats

We will know as early as Thursday and no later than this coming Monday, how the Supreme Court rules in the case of King vs Burwell. 

So what happens if the Supreme Court rules in favor of King in this case?  Well, if you listen to the rhetoric coming from the Obama Administration, the ruling will be utter chaos and millions of hard working Americans, 6.4 million to be exact, will all find their healthcare unaffordable and consequently they will be without.  And of course, the administration has assured everyone that Republican’s do not have a clue as what they might do if in fact they win this case.

As well, the Obama Administration claims to have no fallback plan of their own and speaks mostly of the doom and gloom that will befall those 6.4 million who will have their healthcare plans snatched from their hands if the Supreme Court does not do what Constitutional Scholars expect them to do.

And as do Republican lawmakers, the Obama Administration certainly does have a plan B, if they don’t then they are without a doubt the most inept administration that has ever served the White House.  The big question is, will either party have to reveal their plan B?  That we will have to wait and see.

But what if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Burwell, would this be a grand victory for the Obama Administration?  Well I guess to at least some Democrats maybe, but such a decision would do nothing to help with the litany of both old and new problems that are certain to doom the already struggling healthcare law, it would only prolong the laws suffering.

While you’ll never get one to admit it publically, there certainly has to be some number of Democrats in congress that would not lose any sleep if in fact the Supreme Court ruled in favor of King.  Politically this would take the pressure off of Democrats who have had to live with this ObamaCare albatross around their neck.  ObamaCare has already cost Democrats the House and the Senate and if the law continues to deteriorate, it could very easily seal their fate in losing the White House.

Granted, repealing the individual mandate, for all intents and purposes, guts the law.  But politically speaking, if a solid fix could be put in place that brought stability to what remained of ObamaCare, it would be difficult for Republicans to gain public support to repeal the entire law even if they were to win the White House.  On the other hand, if the law continues to falter, Democrats might be forced to take a position against ObamaCare.  Having the wheels already set in motion by a Republican action significantly lessens the political backlash as oppose to what Democrats would face if the law simply imploded upon itself while under Democrat’s control.

It will be interesting to see what happens either way and I hope folks on the left are not going to be too disappointed when the world does not come to an end if in fact the ruling is in favor of King.

Apparently ObamaCare is Just for Poor People

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) release their monthly report, dated May 1, 2015, in which it stated that 11.7 million individuals have enrolled for Medicaid/CHIP since the rollout of the Medicaid expansion.  And just a few days later, on May 5th, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report which stated that since several of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage provisions took affect, 16.4 million uninsured people have gained health insurance coverage.  The figure reported by HHS included the 2.3 million young adults who gained healthcare through the provision in the law which allowed them to stay on their parent’s insurance plan until the October 2013 rollout of the healthcare exchanges. 

So what do these figures tell us?  Well, they tell us that over 85% of those who have benefited for ObamaCare are of low income.

And while it is important to assist those that are in need, the intent of ObamaCare was to reduce the number of all uninsured people not just those eligible for FREE Medicaid.  However, using the Obama Administration’s own published figures, it looks like they left the middle class out of their plan.

It is important to note that at the time of the ObamaCare rollout, the number of uninsured people whose income was above that which qualifies for Medicaid was roughly double that of those who qualify for Medicaid.

The Irony of ObamaCare Subsidies

With the Supreme Court expecting to release their decision on the King vs. Burwell case any day now, Democrats, with the aid of the liberal media, have been pushing the narrative that Republicans will be responsible for the 6.4 million Americans that could face the possibility of losing their healthcare if the SCOTUS rules in favor of King.

How ironic is it that the party who solely created and passed a massively complex and purely partisan piece of legislation of which the majority of Americans have never been in favor of, wants to make this a Republican problem.  But there is an even greater irony of which pertains to the subsidies themselves.

Let’s brake this whole subsidies thing down so to see what I am talking about.

Of the 6.4 million individuals the Obama Administration claims could lose their healthcare insurance if in fact the Supreme Court rules in favor of the King, well over 4 million of those individuals were insured and paying a premium they found affordable prior to being mandated to do so by the Federal Government.  Now that's ironic

And of the roughly 2 million in balance, whom we have no idea of what their income status is other than it is above what would qualify them for Medicaid, the narrative Democrats would like people to believe is that every one of these 2 million or so individuals would find healthcare insurance unaffordable without the aid of subsidies.  However, it is just as likely that some percentage of these individuals were capable of affording healthcare insurance at pre-Obamacare rates but simply chose not to.  This too is quite ironic.

Whatever the percentage of these 2 million individuals, whose income is in fact so low that they are relied upon the subsidies in order to afford healthcare insurance, they would be no worse off if they where to lose their insurance than they were before Obamacare existed.  And if in fact these individuals were to lose their healthcare plans, they would have Congressional Democrats and  President Obama to thank for passing in to law such a convoluted, poorly written and massively unpopular partisan healthcare bill that was certain to be riddled with problems and likely to be repealed.

And wouldn’t it be ironic of it took a Supreme Court decision in favor of King to finally get ObamaCare out of the way so that legislators could then sit down and ultimately create a market based healthcare reform plan that actually made healthcare affordable instead of just getting other people to pay for a subsidies Band-Aid?
 

ObamaCare Fails its Primary Objective!

If the Affordable Care Act is as successful as President Obama insists it is then why does his administration still refuse to release an enrollment figure for the number of qualified healthcare plans sold to the long term uninsured through the state and federal healthcare exchanges?

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell is all too eager to boast the number of low income individuals who have taken advantage of FREE Medicaid through the expansion put forth in the ObamaCare law.  However, since their launch back in October of 2013, not once has this administration made available to the public the number of long term uninsured individuals who purchased a healthcare plan through one of state and federal healthcare exchanges.  In fact, the folks over at HHS has taken painstaking measure to ensure that this figure could not be sifted out of other enrollment data that they make public.

At the passage of the president’s namesake healthcare reform law, the size of the pool of the uninsured individuals who were qualified to purchase a healthcare plan through the healthcare exchanges was double the size of those who qualified for the Medicaid expansion.  Yet, due to embarrassingly low enrollment figures, the Obama Administration all but denies that this large group of uninsured individuals even exists.  You will not hear anyone in the Obama Administration speak of this sub-set of the uninsured and the number of long term uninsured individuals who have purchase a healthcare plan  through the state and federal healthcare exchanges is a number the administration will certainly not put in writing.  Insuring this large group of uninsured individuals is the primary objective of the entire healthcare law, making healthcare insurance attractive enough for them to do so has been the laws greatest failure.

At the current rate of enrollment, by the end of the decade the healthcare exchanges will fall no less than 14 million short of their original 24 million enrollment goal.  This will raise the number of individuals left uninsured from the Obama Administrations projection of 30 million to over 44 million.
 
And Democrats dare to call this a success?

With such a massive failure of the key provision in the law, one would think that Democrats would be the ones in the front of the line calling for its repeal and replacement.  It’s there law and it has done significantly more harm than it has done good and has no chance of ever improving.

White House Releases another Bulls**t Fact Sheet on ObamaCare

As the Supreme Court nears its ruling on the King vs Burwell case, the rhetoric form the left is heating up including some digs by the President himself who, for all intents and purposes, stated that the Supreme Court had no place in taking up the case at all.  As well the president expressed that he thinks it is important that they {the Supreme Court} do what legal scholar “expect” them to do.  Those are pretty bold statements coming from one supposed co-equal branch of government aimed at another.

But this is nothing new or unexpected coming from this administration especially in its ongoing attempts to protection the president’s signature healthcare reform law at any cost, even if it means an attempt to bully the Supreme Court Justices {they are unaffected by the President’s comments I assure you} and misleading the public into believing that ObamaCare has been a shining success.  A perfect example of the later is a White House brief released back in March titled: Key Facts and Reports: TheFifth Anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.  The brief, little more than a list of inaccurate and in some cases a complete fabrication of the facts, was written and released in an effort to bolster a highly misleading perception to the public that ObamaCare is working great. 

Let’s take a look at the “key facts” in the report, working from top to bottom, starting with the following paragraph:

Thanks to the ACA, millions of Americans who already had health insurance now have better coverage because women can no longer be charged higher premiums than men for the same plan, people with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage, and young adults won’t age off their parent’s policy when they turn age 19 or graduate from college. 

“Women can no longer be charged higher premiums than men” - Boy oh boy the Obama Administration sucked the feminists into this one and used it to the administrations advantage.  It’s a plain and simple fact that the biological complexities that allow women to conceive, grow and bare children requires greater preventative care to ensure their long term health and wellbeing.  As well, due to these same biological differences women have more wellness challenges.  And yet, feminists demand that insurers not be able to charge women more for healthcare coverage than their male counterparts. 

The Obama Administration took advantage of this demand for equality and appeased the feminist by not allowing insurers to take gender into consideration when price rating plans.  But this did not lower rates for women, it instead increased the rates of men.  In the minds of feminists, this created equality but in reality all it did was used their complaint as a means to create a premium surplus which insurers could now use to offset some of the other cost generated by other mandates imposed on them by ObamaCare. 

The feminist receive a false victory, ObamaCare gets a kudos for creating gender equality and the insurers have a much needed revenue stream to offset other mandates imposed upon the by the new ObamaCare law.  The only loser in this arrangement are men who are now paying additional for healthcare benefits they lack the physical ability to use.

“People with pre-existing condition can no longer be denied coverage” - Yup, that’s’ what the law states and in fact insurers can no longer deny anyone coverage.  However, preventing an insurer from denying coverage does not mean that that coverage is affordable and in the case of ObamaCare it turns out that in far too many cases those that once found them being locked out of healthcare insurance now find it unaffordable.  The fact of the matter is, there may be more people with a pre-existing medical condition that are uninsured now than there was prior to ObamaCare being passed in to law.

“Young adults won’t age off of their parent’s policy” - This is a solution to a problem that was created by the ObamaCare law itself as well as the failure of the Obama Administration to create jobs during the presidents first term. 

Before ObamaCare, full time student were able to say on their parents insurance plans.  The cut off age then, in most cases, was 24 as it was assumed that by this age the student had completed his or her collage studies and would secure a job and thus become responsible for his or own insurance needs.  For those young adults that did not take the college avenue or those whose employers did not offer insurance, very affordable catastrophic healthcare plans, well suited for healthy young adults, were available.  ObamaCare made these catastrophic plans obsolete thus making healthcare insurance unaffordable to those who had them.  Additionally, the Obama Administration quickly recognized the fact that jobs were not being recovered fast enough thus increasing the number of young adults finishing college and unable to find work and therefor going uninsured.

And so, a provision in the ObamaCare law was created that allowed young adults, regardless of student status or living status to remain on their parents insurance.  This provision was nothing more than a Band-Aid used to stop the bleeding created by the ObamaCare law and bad economic recovery policy.

 

On to the next paragraph which reads:

Despite this progress, Republicans in Congress continue to fight for special interests, not middle class families. They have voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA, which would eliminate tough rules, including those that guarantee health coverage even if you have a pre-existing condition.

“Republicans in Congress continue to fight for special interests, not middle class families” – I wonder who/what these “special interests” that Obama often speaks about are?  This is where Obama loses credibility with so many on the right.  It is unpresidential to simply fabricate an argument out of thin air and then pass it on as fact.  As well, I am certain that the increased cost of healthcare insurance has had significantly more negative impact on the middle class than they have positive.  The uninsured middle class are the ones who have found the healthcare plans offered on the ObamaCare exchanges to be unattractive and unaffordable as can be measured by their incredibly low enrollment despite the federal mandate to do so.

“Voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA” - This is one of the most disingenuous statements that is constantly repeated by the Obama Administration.  There have been only a half dozen or so “full repeal” votes take for ObamaCare and each one of them was taken as a matter of record and process. 

When Republicans won back the house they had to put their position to repeal ObamaCare on record.  They knew they didn’t have the votes to repeal the law, that was not the purpose of the vote.  And at budget time, as a matter of process, Republicans voted for a full repeal, again knowing they did not have the needed support of Democrats but it was a vote that must be made for the record as part of the budget process.  And again, when Republicans won back the Senate, another procedural vote for the record.  There have also been numerous votes to repeal or fix parts of the law, nearly a dozen of which were passed with bipartisan support and signed by the president but they’ll be no mention of that as it does not suit the narrative.

Moving on to where the brief touches on how the Affordable Care Act is Working!

The first bullet point labeled “Improving Coverage” states that after five years, more than 16 million Americans have gained health coverage.  Sadly, and is always the case, the White House fails to qualify that figure nor do they ever compare where we are today to where they expected to be.

First let’s clear the air on the “more than 16 million” figure.  This is not a hard number, this is from a study conducted by the Rand Corporation which did their magic and ascertained that some 22 million more Americans are now insured however, over 5 million lost their healthcare insurance.  Rand’s number is closer to 17 million.  Now, if we pull out the over 12 million who have taken advantage of the FREE Medicaid expansion, as reported by HHS, we are down to less than 5 million formerly uninsured individuals who purchased and paid for a qualified healthcare plan either through one of the ObamaCare exchanges or on the private marketplace. 

This is where information gets sketchy but only because the Obama Administration refuses to release hard enrollment numbers.  Instead, they have passed the buck and keep feeding us with these independent studies.  Worst yet, which study they site at any given moment depends largely in which study puts ObamaCare enrollment in the best light.  From the top four most respected industry experts, the number of formerly uninsured that have gained coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges range between 2 million and 4 million, depending on which report you choose to believe.  But a much more reliable source to this figure has been provided by Charles Gaba.  Gaba has become the most respected ObamaCare enrollment information gatherer and number cruncher, having received both recognition and the endorsement of HHS.  In Gaba’s own work he finds that only about 2 million individuals total have signed up for a qualified healthcare plan through the ObamaCare exchanges at the completion of the second open enrollment period.

So while the 16 million figure that the administration throws out looks pretty impressive, when you consider that 12 million of those are FREE Medicaid expansion recipients and somewhere around 2 million have purchased a healthcare plan through the exchanges {10 million were projected to have done so by 2015} then things really don’t look too hot for ObamaCare.  

As for the 4 million balance, first we must acknowledge that the number could be considerably lower if a less favorable study were adopted.  Second, while we do not know the number, we do know that healthcare plans were purchased off exchange, directly from private insurance providers.  And last, over 4 million new jobs have been created since the rollout of the ObamaCare exchanges some percentage of which provide their employees with healthcare insurance.

What this all means as, putting aside giving away FREE Medicaid, ObamaCare has done a pretty horrible job in increasing insurance coverage for the uninsured.


The next bullet reads:  Improving Affordability and states that since ObamaCare was enacted, health care prices have risen at the slowest rate in nearly 50 years. 

What is not stated in this bullet is that the slowdown in healthcare prices began in 2009, prior to ObamaCare bill being written, much less the law being enacted.  This has been one of the most repeated falsehoods perpetuated by the Obama Administration of all.  Other than those on the White House payroll, economist and industry experts both agree that the slowdown in healthcare prices is due to the recession and they expect that the rate of increase will return to pre-recession levels once the economy reaches a full recovery.


The final bullet reads: Improving Quality and goes on to suggest that improvements in quality of care, promoted buy ObamaCare, contributed to 50,000 fewer deaths. 

The source of this claim is a study that looks at the reduction in the hospital death rate over a period of time however, the study makes no claim nor correlation to the cause of the reduction and certainly does not link the cause to ObamaCare in any way.  That is not to say that ObamaCare did not play some part in the reduction in the hospital death rate, as various programs were implemented just prior to the noted death rate reductions however, as previously stated, there is no direct correlation that can be made nor are any other mitigating factors considered.

But let’s assume for a moment that certain provisions of the ObamaCare law did in fact have a hand in preventing 50,000 hospital deaths.  Like the Medicaid expansion, which would be in jeopardy if the law were to be overturned, so could the provisions that prevent these deaths.  This is the danger of a comprehensive law, especially one that is overwhelmingly unpopular, purely partisan and failing to even come close to meeting its primary objective of placing a qualified healthcare plan in the hands of some 24 million uninsured American’s by 2017 {they are at fewer than 3 million currently}.

So there you have it, seven out of eight ObamaCare facts, boasted as a success by the administration, turn out to be at very best highly misleading and a couple a complete fabrication of the truth.  How the president and his administration can continue to tell these tall tales to the American people with a straight face is beyond comprehension.  And they do so for the purpose of protecting the president’s only agenda item with a check mark next to it as well as to protect the image of the Democratic Party which has been all in with ObamaCare from the get go.  

It’s a shameful act that speaks volumes of what the Democratic Party has become under this president.

Could a $15 Minimum Wage Spur High School Students to Dropout?

Think about this for a moment!  There are oh so many high school students that, for any number of reasons, have little incentive to go to school each day.  These are not the collage driven set, they are the future labor and technical trade kids.  Many of them see little reason to get up and go to school each day other than it being a condition set by their parents in order to receive three meals a day and a dry place to sleep at night.

So what if that part time, crap burger joint job they are working at nearly doubles their pay?  That 17 year old semi-lost child now has money to spare and sees little reason to go to school each day when he or she could dropout and work a 40 hour week making $15 per hour working a minimal effort job.

There are such kids in every high school that are doing this now, at today’s minimum wage, so it would be crazy to pretend that the High School dropout rate would not jump considerably when you start waving lots of minimum wage dollar bills in their face.

The ObamaCare Exchanges!

 

The Original Plan

To insure 13 million of America’s long term uninsured nonelderly by 2015 and 24 million by 2017.

Source:  CBO’s May 2013 Estimate of the Effects of the ACA

Where We Stand Today

Fewer than 3 million of America’s long term uninsured nonelderly have purchased a qualified healthcare plan through the ObamaCare exchanges putting enrollment on a trajectory of fewer than 10 million likely to purchase a healthcare plan through the exchanges by 2017.  This would increase the administrations projection of the number of Americans who would remain uninsured from 30 million to more than 44 million by the end of the decade.


And Democrats call this success?


On a positive note, the Medicaid expansion has not presented itself as too much of a challenge for the Obama Administration.  In fact, giving away FREE Medicaid has gone so well that a growing number of states, where Medicaid expansion enrollment has exceeded projection, are finding themselves in a financial pinch.  These states will have to come up with some other means to cover the unexpected cost of the expansion, such as raising taxes or cutting spending on education and other services.