Thread: The Future of Obamacare

Obamanomics Failing Illinois

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Dave Jolly

A couple months ago, I wrote about the economic policies of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker are working to reduce the state deficit and increase the overall economic and job growth in his state. Scott, limited union bargaining powers, cut state spending and reduced taxes, all of which have led to a positive turnaround from the failed economics of former Democratic Governor Jim Doyle.
You would think that other states would learn and follow the successful policies of Gov. Walker, but no, the Democrats insist that their way is better. Take Wisconsin’s neighbor to the south, Illinois for example. Illinois is the political home to Barack Obama and is a prime example of just how unsuccessful Obamanomics really is.

Democrats in Illinois believe the way to fix the state’s economy is to tax the people even more. Initially, the tax hike was only going to be a temporary fix to help the state avoid bankruptcy. That’s like telling a creditor the check is in the mail when you haven’t written it nor have the money to write it. This happened back when Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator. In fact, with Obama’s help they increased taxes on personal income by 66% over what it has been. Sound familiar?
That temporary tax has now been made permanent. Gee, no big surprise there is there!
So how have the increased taxes helped Illinois’s economy?

Illinois has gone from having the 9^th best unemployment rate to be tied with Nevada for the second worse unemployment rate in the nation. The state has 376,000 fewer non-farming jobs now than they did when their beloved Barack Obama took office in January 2008.
Illinois is also spending $14,000 per student in public school. For just one classroom of 25-30 students, they are spending $350,000-$420,000 a year. In comparison, some private college preparatory schools graduate college ready students for a lesser cost per student.
Another contributing factor to Illinois’s financial woes is the fact that they have nearly 7,000 local government units, each with their own union contract and there has been no limiting their bargaining powers like what happened in Wisconsin. The more unions the more expense a state has.
There has been little to no effort to reduce spending in the state either as Gov. Walker did in Wisconsin. While Wisconsin sees their economy and jobs growing and prospering, Illinois sees their economy and jobs going down the same pathway to disaster as that of the federal government. But would you expect any different between Obama’s home political state and how he runs the federal government?
I just wonder when the American people will wake up and realize the difference between the economic policies of someone like Gov. Scott Walker and those of Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and President Barack Obama?

Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/15064/o...cZI6jA7mBYl.99

A New Study Says Obamacare May Be Working — But Not In The Way Anyone Expected

Brett LoGiurato

Apr. 8, 2014, 6:38 PM


AP

A new, highly anticipated study on the effects of the Affordable Care Act suggests the number of Americans without insurance has plummeted since September, lending more evidence to the notion Obamacare is having its primary desired effect.

And according to the study, the uninsured rate dropped due to a development no one saw coming, that had nothing to do with the controversial health care exchanges established by the law.

According to the RAND Corp. survey, which was released Tuesday, a net 9.3 million people have gained coverage since September — something that helped plunge the uninsured rate in the U.S. from 20.5 percent to 15.8 percent.

The RAND study comes with a big caveat, however. The topline number of 9.3 million contains a margin of error of 3.5 million people. That means as few as 5.8 million people could have gained coverage, or as many as 12.8 million.

Either way, it's still a big deal, said Christine Eibner, a senior economist at RAND and one of the study's two authors.

"All surveys are going to have this margin of error," Eibner told Business Insider in a phone interview Tuesday. "That's to be expected, because we're extrapolating results from a very small sample of the full population of the U.S., but nevertheless, the margin of error is telling us that we can have a high degree of confidence in the direction of our results, in that we've seen an increase in insurance. Because 9.3 minus 3.5 is still a significant increase."

In spite of these eye-popping topline numbers, the most interesting finding from the study might be the reason for the decrease in the uninsured rate. RAND projects it was due to growing enrollment in employer-sponsored insurance — programs that exist outside of the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. Enrollment in these ESIs grew by more than 8 million from September through mid-March. This includes a large swath of individuals — 7.2 million — who were previously uninsured.

These numbers seem surprising on their face, but, Eibner said, they make sense.

"One thing that got lost in the discussion — the Affordable Care Act really wasn't just about covering people on the marketplaces," she said. "The law was intended to expand insurance coverage using a whole bunch of different programs, including the existing system, which is heavily based on employer-based coverage."

Eibner also added "any change" in the regulations governing ESI would be the primary factor behind movement in the overall insurance rate since, even with the new "Obamacare" exchanges, ESI remains "the major source of coverage" for most people in the country.

The apparent increase in the number of people insured with ESI identified in this study could be statistical noise that doesn't completely reflect reality. Indeed, few experts predicted the Affordable Care Act would lead to a surge in employer-based coverage. In May 2013, for example, the Congressional Budget Office projected the ranks of the insured through employers would rise by only 1 million. Furthermore, RAND doesn't have any data on possible reasons for the huge surge in employer-sponsored insurance.

However, Eibner offered several ways the Affordable Care Act could actually have led to a surge in the number of people insured with ESI:

• Obamacare's individual mandate and its potential penalty could be providing an incentive for individuals who had foregone coverage to sign up under their employers.
• Some firms could now be offering coverage due to the ACA. However, Eibner also noted the law has created very mixed incentives for employers to do that thus far.
• The slow-but-steady economic recovery could also be a contributing factor. The unemployment rate dropped a half a percentage point from September to March. With more jobs comes the potential for more people covered.

Additionally, another survey released by Gallup Monday came up with a similar number to RAND's 15.8 percent uninsured rate. In fact, Gallup put the uninsured rate even lower at 15.6 percent, its lowest level since 2008. However, while the Gallup survey would seem to support the RAND study's conclusion that the overall uninsured rate had dropped, it did not distinguish between types of coverage and doesn't make clear whether the decrease is due to more people being insured with ESI.

The RAND study was completed through rather unusual methods. The results in the survey are based on a representative sample of 2,425 adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who responded to the survey in both March 2014 and September 2013.

The Obama administration said last week enrollment through the healthcare exchanges had surpassed an original goal of 7 million. RAND's study only takes into account data from September through mid-March, which means subsequent studies should reflect the late surge in exchange enrollment in addition to any growth in the number of people insured with ESI.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama...#ixzz2yU1CWBvU

The Charts Obama Doesn't Want You to See


Amy Payne

April 11, 2014 at 6:30 am

Talking about Obamacare’s effects is one thing; seeing hard data is another.
Heritage’s newly updated Obamacare in Pictures has 15 charts that show the law’s effects on Americans—from canceled insurance policies to new taxes, Medicare cuts, reduced choice for plans, and more.

Here’s a quick look at just three of these charts and how Obamacare is hitting three groups.
YOUNG PEOPLE

Obamacare says you can stay on your parents’ health insurance until you turn 26. This chart looks at what happens after that—if you don’t have employer-sponsored insurance and you have to get insured through Obamacare. If you’re trying to save for a car or house—or just paying rent to have your own place—seeing your premiums double is quite a blow.
SENIORS

You may recall Heritage experts’ warning that Obamacare would cut $716 billion from Medicare. That’s still happening.
Despite the Obama administration’s recent walking back of Medicare Advantage cuts for this year, Obamacare’s planned cuts to Medicare are moving forward. This chart shows which parts of Medicare are affected.
Heritage expert Alyene Senger has explained that, instead of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicare program, Obamacare targets the amounts Medicare service providers are paid. These cuts have ripple effects on seniors. Doctors, nursing homes, and other providers who can’t afford to be part of Medicare any more will cut back or stop participating—and that means fewer options and less access to care for seniors.
ALL AMERICANS

This chart looks a lot like a heartbeat—and it tracks one of Obamacare’s vital signs: public opinion. There has been a 10-point gap between support for and opposition to the law for some time now. That spike in opposition/sharp decline in support? It coincides with the flood of cancellation notices that landed in Americans’ mailboxes last year.
Obamacare remains unpopular because it’s raising taxes, killing jobs, and cutting Americans’ health care choices. We need health reform that reverses these trends.
>>> See the rest of Obamacare in Pictures
Read the Morning Bell and more en español every day at Heritage Libertad.

Quick Hits:

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http://blog.heritage.org/2014/04/11/obamacare-charts-obama-doesnt-want-see/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social


Obamacare is a total absolute fiasco for America. It is all smoke and mirrors, nothing what so ever to do with Healthcare it is all about control of you and yours. What did any one expect from something that you had to pass to read it!! Wake Up America, time is running out.

Latest Obamacare Cancelation

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Census Survey Revisions Will Hide Effects of Obamacare


BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
April 15, 2014 1:32 pm
The Census Bureau is changing the way it conducts its annual survey on health coverage in a way that will make it nearly impossible to measure the impact of Obamacare.
Hotair.com explains:

As it turns out, the change the Bureau is making all but guarantees that the number of uninsured next year, post-ObamaCare, will be lower than than the number last year, pre-ObamaCare. This drug will work, even if the feds have to tweak how success is measured to ensure it. […]
They’ve been asking people whether they’ve had any health insurance over the past year. Supposedly, that produces a lot of false negatives from lower-income people who’ve forgotten that they were on Medicaid for a time before leaving the rolls. By changing the questions and following up later, they’re going to try to help people remember better by reconstructing a timeline with them for the past 12 months. All of which is fine—but why do it now? Logically, in the interest of preserving a clear comparison of America before and after a massive overhaul of the health-insurance industry, you’d want to hold all variables in a survey like this constant between 2013 and 2014. Unless, that is, the goal here is producing rosier numbers by any means necessary.

An internal Census Bureau paper said that “it is coincidental and unfortunate timing” that the survey was overhauled just as Obamacare took effect.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/census-...-of-obamacare/

Obamacare Beaten by Employers in Covering the Uninsured

Sarah Hurtubise 2 hours ag

Employer-sponsored coverage has accounted for the bulk of a recent drop in the uninsured population, according to a RAND Corporation study released Tuesday, not Obamacare.

When it comes to the previously uninsured, 7.2 million gained employer-sponsored coverage, 3.6 million gained Medicaid and just 1.4 million signed up through Obamacare exchanges through the survey’s conclusion on March 28.

With employer-based coverage providing most of the bump in coverage, it will be difficult to attribute the gains to the health care law, given the two-year delay of the employer mandate.

The in-depth survey’s finding was previewed by the Los Angeles Times, which reported last week that just one-third of exchange sign ups were previously uninsured. The full results of the study are now public and through mid-March, 3.9 million people were enrolled in marketplace plans. Just 1.4 million of those did not have prior health coverage.

The authors collected data through March 28 and acknowledged that the survey didn’t include the surge of so-called enrollments in the final days of the month, which brought the Obama administration’s total to 7.1 million, or the ongoing enrollment that’s available through April 15. But the bulk of the uninsured that highly anticipated purchasing subsidized health insurance on the exchanges would have been more likely to purchase coverage right away. The study did not determine how many enrollees had paid for their health plans.

While the health survey determined that 1.4 million people were newly insured by the Obamacare exchanges , it simultaneously found that 5.2 million people had their health insurance cancelled due to Obamacare and “less than one million” remained uninsured, bringing the net coverage gain for Obamacare’s private plans uncomfortably close.

The study’s net totals found that 14.5 million people gained coverage over the past six months while 5.2 million lost it, for a net gain of 9.3 million people. But the exchange’s came in last place when RAND looked into the reason for the shift. The private insurance market had by far the largest effect, followed by Medicaid.

Fully 7.2 million, or 59 percent of the newly insured, got new coverage through their employer.

Another 30 percent received Medicaid coverage, a welfare program which boosts emergency room visits for non-emergent reasons, such as colds and flus, and which has repeatedly been found not to improve health outcomes. It’s probable that a good chunk of these new Medicaid enrollments are from Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

Obamacare exchanges through March 28 accounted for just 11 percent of the newly insured over the past six months.
The study didn’t examine the last several days of March, when Obamacare exchanges saw consumers select another million plans. Enrollment is still open for another week thanks to an extension.

Source
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Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/04/ob...W9Ch1LfPf1O.99

Remember you had to pass it so you could read it!! What part of "stupid is as stupid does" do we not get yet! Are you exempted! How many deadlines have we had so far???! Remember who voted for this fiasco. Let all get together and thank them shall we???

Court Blocks Obama Admin From Enforcing HHS Mandate Against James Dobson

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/18/14 3:32 PM


Pro-life leader James Dobson is the latest to win a victory against the Obama HHS mandate, that forces companies and organizations to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs for their employees.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the pro-life legal group, helped Dobson and hailed the federal court’s order blocking enforcement of the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate against Dr. James Dobson and his “Family Talk” radio show and ministry in Dobson v. Sebelius.
Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot told LifeNews: “In America, we don’t try to separate what people do from what they believe. Faith-based organizations should be free to operate according to the faith they teach and live out every day. If the government can fine Christian ministries out of existence because they want to uphold their faith, there is no limit to what other freedoms it can take away. The court was right to block enforcement of this unconstitutional mandate against Family Talk.”
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit last year against the Obama administration on behalf of Dr. James Dobson and his “Family Talk” radio show and ministry, a Christian non-profit organization that is currently subject to Obamacare’s abortion pill mandate.
The lawsuit challenges the legality and constitutionality of the mandate, which requires religious employers to provide insurance coverage for abortifacients, sterilization, and contraception to employees regardless of religious or moral objections. Dobson and Family Talk object specifically to providing coverage for abortion drugs and devices.
“The government shouldn’t be able to punish Americans for exercising their fundamental freedoms,” said Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “Any government willing to force a family-run Christian ministry to participate in immoral acts under the threat of crippling fines is a government everyone should fear.”
“Our ministry believes in living out the religious convictions we hold to and talk about on the air,” added Dobson, Family Talk’s founder and president. “As Americans, we should all be free to live according to our faith and to honor God in our work. The Constitution protects that freedom so that the government cannot force anyone to act against his or her sincerely held religious beliefs. But the mandate ignores that and leaves us with a choice no American should have to make: comply and abandon your religious freedom, or resist and be fined for your faith.”
The lawsuit, Dobson v. Sebelius, filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, argues that the mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as well as the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys and allied attorneys are also litigating numerous other lawsuits against the mandate. The lawsuits represent a large cross-section of Protestants and Catholics who object to the mandate.
Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom released the results of a commissioned national survey showing that 59 percent of likely voters “oppose the mandate requiring the coverage of preventive care services for women which includes all FDA approved contraceptives, including drugs that can destroy a human embryo, and sterilization services without a direct cost to the patient.”
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 38% of Likely U.S. Voters still believe businesses should be required by law to provide health insurance that covers all government-approved contraceptives for women without co-payments or other charges to the patient. Fifty-one percent (51%) disagree and say employers should not be required to provide health insurance with this type of coverage. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/04/18/c...-james-dobson/

Half of GA's Obamacare Enrollees Have Not Paid http://ow.ly/2FSvhR



Half of GA's Obamacare Enrollees Have Not Paid

ow.ly
Paid Yet. This seems rather important: Georgia insurers received more than 220,000 applications for health coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange a ...

http://joeforamerica.com/2014/04/hal...nrollees-paid/

The article below

Whoops! Half of Georgia’s Insurance Enrollees Haven’t Paid Yet.

By Jim Geraghty
April 21, 2014 6:26 AM


From the first Morning Jolt of the week:

Whoops: Half of Georgia’s Insurance Enrollees Haven’t Paid Yet.
This seems rather important:
Georgia insurers received more than 220,000 applications for health coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange as of the official federal deadline of March 31, state officials said Wednesday.
Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, though, said premiums have been received for only 107,581 of those policies, which cover 149,465 people.
“Many Georgians completed the application process by the deadline, but have yet to pay for the coverage,” Hudgens said in a statement Wednesday.
Half? Half? Sure, the nonpayment rates will be a lot lower in other places. But this indicates how much skepticism is warranted for the administration’s much-touted enrollment figures.
When Progressives insist that we’re wrong and Obamacare is more popular than it seems, they’ll point to the enrollment numbers. They dismiss the national surveys, but there’s some indication that Obamacare’s meager support in the polls is actually worse than we think, because it’s being artificially boosted by respondents that are eager to declare the whole thing a success, no matter how their state exchange is actually performing.
A couple of lessons from this bit of polling research by Jonathan Easley at the Morning Consult: Healthcare.gov is uniquely and perhaps disproportionately disliked by survey respondents, and some people just tell pollsters what they want to be true, not what is actually true:
In a testament to how political affiliation potentially colors an individual’s view of the law, Morning Consult polling from November through April found that people reported more positive experiences in states with largely broken exchanges versus people who used the federal exchanges. And that includes states where the exchanges never were fully operational…
We separated states into three different groups to do this analysis. The “broken” state exchange group included Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Vermont. (While it is an inexact measurement, we put states where healthcare officials struggled throughout the enrollment period to fully launch their exchanges into the “broken” category.) The second group of states—those with relatively well running exchanges—included Washington, Rhode Island, New York, Kentucky, Colorado, Connecticut, California and the District of Columbia. All other states where included in our third group, as they used the federal exchange website to enroll customers.
Among these groups, you might expect the states with barely (or not-at-all) functioning exchanges to rank last when it comes to users’ experiences. But the federal exchanges took that spot in almost every measure. The poll has a margin of error of two percentage points, and approximately 2,000 interviews were conducted in each poll from November through April.
The analysis notes, “In the 2012 election, President Obama won all of our “broken” exchange states. That perhaps explains the rosier view voters in those states have of the law, even though the exchanges in many cases barely worked.” In other words, there’s a strong possibility some Obama voters declared their state health insurance exchanges to be success even when they personally experienced its failure.

http://www.nationalreview.com/campai...t-jim-geraghty

Roadblock to Health Care Reform


Analysis: 2009 GOP health care proposal illustrates the challenges in unifying Republicans




AP



BY: Andrew Evans
April 19, 2014 5:00 am

Despite the Obama administration’s declaration of victory in the Obamacare Wars, Republicans still vehemently oppose the law. House Republicans have voted to repeal the law scores of times, top Republican leaders are calling the law a “disaster” and a “catastrophic failure,” and Republicans are expected to campaign heavily on the law’s flaws in this fall’s midterm elections.


However, the GOP has yet to unify behind a replacement to the law, despite calls from Republican lawmakers for the party to put forward a viable alternative.

An analysis of the last significant proposal by Republicans to be endorsed by the Republican leadership and receive a vote from the full House of Representatives shows why the party is having such trouble formulating an alternative.

Then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) introduced an alternative to the Democratic proposal in November 2009, titled the “Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act.” The bill represents what kind of alternative Republicans could unify behind at that time.

The Boehner plan allowed people to buy insurance from other states and medical malpractice lawsuit reform. It also included money to bolster high-risk pools in the states to cover people with pre-existing conditions, financial incentives for states to drive down insurance premiums and decrease the number of uninsured, and rules increasing the flexibility of tax-advantaged Health Savings Accounts, or HSA’s.

The 2009 proposal was a modest plan that made incremental improvements to the health care system in America at that time, said Merrill Matthews, a health policy expert at the Institute for Policy Innovation. He thought that, while flawed, the proposal could form the foundation for a new proposal now.

Lanhee Chen, a health policy expert at the Hoover Institution and the policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, agreed with that suggestion.

“I do think there is a lot in that proposal that is a useful guide as Republicans think about how to replace Obamacare,” he said.

The plan makes small changes that would drive down the price of insurance for some people, especially in the small group and individual markets. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the program projected that it would lower insurance premiums by 7 to 10 percent for the small group market and 5 to 8 percent for the individual market.

The plan would not decrease the number of people without insurance by much, the CBO said. It projected only three million more people would get insurance under the plan, leaving 52 million uninsured.

Chen contended that Republicans were right to focus on driving down costs in 2009 instead of the number of uninsured—and they should do the same now.

Basing a reform around the goal of reducing the number of uninsured is using the wrong metric of success, Chen said. Instead, Republicans should focus on driving down cost so more people can purchase insurance with their current means.

The media’s focus on the number of uninsured creates a messaging challenge for this kind of approach, though. “Republicans have to be careful as they’re proposing these alternatives to try to reframe the debate a little bit,” Chen said.

Other experts contended that the 2009 plan is inadequate given the new insurance environment created by Obamacare.

“For both substantive and political reasons, Republicans ought to aim their sights higher,” said Ramesh Ponnuru, a domestic policy expert and senior editor at National Review. Repealing Obamacare and implementing the 2009 reform today would result in millions of people losing insurance coverage—making the plan an untenable option, he said.

The 2009 plan left out two areas that many conservative experts argue should be incorporated into any reform today: the tax code and Medicare. Republicans have largely coalesced around Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R., Wis.) Medicare reform plan, Chen said.

However, the tax code remains, and reforming it should be at the heart of any Republican proposal today, Ponnuru and others said.

“I think it is impossible to have a credible conservative reform of healthcare that does not tackle tax reform,” Ponnuru said. The tax code right now is biased toward people who receive insurance through their employers, making it more expensive for people who do not receive their insurance through their employer to purchase insurance. However, changing this tax structure could disrupt people’s employer-provided insurance.

This challenge is likely one reason why tax code changes were not included in the 2009 plan, Ponnuru said.

Thomas Miller, a healthcare expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the tax code is “no longer an untouchable area.”
“We’re in a different environment in 2014,” Miller said. “We need to do more and we need to do different.

Both Ponnuru and Miller described the Republican Party as divided into two rough camps: one that wants to dramatically overhaul the health care system in America along free-market lines, and another that does not want to alter it too much, if at all.

A good plan has to involve a tax-credit system that both gives people the opportunity to buy insurance if they do not get it through work and does not disrupt the existing coverage, said Jim Capretta, a health policy expert at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

This approach, while politically necessary, has the potential to fracture the Republican conference, Capretta said.

“Many, many Republicans support that proposal, but some Republicans have a hard time accepting it,” Capretta said.

The 2009 proposal was simply a “lowest common denominator” plan that was designed to unify the conference at that time, Miller said. As a result, it did not contain anything too controversial that could split the party.

But that approach will not work today. To be successful, any Republican plan will have to promise to broaden insurance coverage, Capretta said.

“I don’t think the 2009 plan does enough in that regard, so I don’t think it will be very relevant going forward,” Capretta said.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/roadblo...h-care-reform/

They oppose but they voted for it, they were for it before they were against it!!!! Make sense to me they don't work for America and the American people, they work for corporate interests over the American people...Corporate America wanted out of the yoke of 1. Pensions, and 2. Healthcare!!! Tell me again who do they work for America????