The Next Big Lie About ObamaCare

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 5/11/2017 | Staff

[IBD editorial writer]

Health Reform: Insurers are starting to announce their ObamaCare premiums for next year and they're at high double-digit rates. For journalists and Democratic activists (is there any difference these days?), this is the direct result of Republicans' threat to repeal ObamaCare. But that's not what insurance companies are telling state regulators.

Here's how the Democrats' story goes. After a rough start, ObamaCare was finally on the mend. Those massive rate hikes and insurance defections of last year were a thing of the past, and there was no truth to claims that ObamaCare was in a "death spiral."

"The market is stabilizing," Karen Pollitz of the Kaiser Family Foundation told one news outlet recently. "I think insurers are getting the hang of it."

But all the talk of repealing and replacing ObamaCare, the story continues, now has insurers rattled. "The debate has created one thing insurers hate above everything else: uncertainty," claims NBC News.

[Yosemitest]

ANYTHING OBAMA SAYS is worthless.
Watch what he does, and not what he says.
The ILLEGAL ALIEN IN CHIEF wants ~ and DIRECTED the policies that regulate ALL health care plans
in the United States ~ TO FAIL !
NEVER FORGET THAT !

Many of us have said for many years that Obama DONE this INTENTIONALLY.
He was using the old Soviet Plan from 1934 or earlier.



They've lied to us, constantly, and really are "Collapsing the System".
And now, these "Useful IDIOTS" who voted for them, bought the lies that "Obamacare was designed to work." ?
It was designed to fail from the start.
THEN ... THEY GO TO THE "SINGLE-PAYER SYSTEM".

Flashback: Obama's Campaign to Transition to Single Payer Health Care (VIDEO)


obama master plan on health careover the years in his own words--SINGLE PAYER!!! ( 3:38 )

They've been sucking our wallets dry for over four years now on the "Obamacare" LIE.
AND NOW THEY WANT MORE TAXES ?
Our Founding Fathers would have hung them already!

Lets review:

Who was it that cut future funding for Medicare by $575 billion?

...the president and the Democratic Party successfully bamboozle voters... The 2012 election could turn on this falsehood.
The truth is that the Obama health law reduces future funding for Medicare by $575 billion over the next 10 years ...

Mr. Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius frequently make that false claim.
Indeed, even Medicare's mailings to seniors repeat the claim
that reducing spending on Medicare will make it more financially secure for future years.
The fact is that Mr. Obama's law raids Medicare.

"In early 1968 President Lyndon Johnson [DEMOCRAT] made a change in the budget presentation by including Social Security and all other trust funds in a"unified budget." "

Who was it that expanded Medicare and Medicaid to cover many, many more people than it was originally designed to cover?

The History of Medicare

In 1965, the Social Security Act established both Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare was a responsibility of the Social Security Administration (SSA), while Federal assistance to the State Medicaid programs was administered by the Social and Rehabilitation Service (SRS). SSA and SRS were agencies in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). In 1977, the Health Care Financing Administration was created under HEW to effectively coordinate Medicare and Medicaid. In 1980 HEW was divided into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The first U.S. President to propose a prepaid health insurance plan was Harry S. Truman [DEMOCRAT]. On November 19, 1945, in a special message to Congress, President Truman outlined a comprehensive, prepaid medical insurance plan for all people through the Social Security system. The plan included doctors and hospitals, and nursing, laboratory, and dental services; it was dubbed "National Health Insurance." Furthermore, medical insurance benefits for needy people were to be financed from Federal revenues.

Over the years, lawmakers narrowed the field of health insurance recipients largely to social security beneficiaries. A national survey found that only 56 percent of those 65 years of age or older had health insurance. President John F. Kennedy [DEMOCRAT] pressed legislators for health insurance for the aged. However, it wasn't until 1965 that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed H.R. 6675 (The Social Security Act of 1965; PL 89-97) to provide health insurance for the elderly and the poor.

On July 30, 1965, President Johnson signed the Medicare and Medicaid Bill (Title XVIII and Title XIX of the Social Security Act) in Independence, Missouri in the presence of former President Truman, who received the first Medicare card at the ceremony; Lady Bird Johnson, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, and Mrs. Truman also were present. President Johnson remarked: "We marvel not simply at the passage of this Bill but that it took so many years to pass it."

Medicare extended health coverage to almost all Americans aged 65 or older. About 19 million beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare in the first year of the program. Medicaid provided access to health care services for certain low-income persons and expanded the existing Federal-State welfare structure that assisted the poor.

The 1972 Social Security Amendments expanded Medicare to provide coverage to two additional high risk groups disabled persons receiving cash benefits for 24 months under the social security program and persons suffering from end-stage renal disease.

...(continued at link)

So Democrats,

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE
FOR INSURING THE FAILURE
OF THE MEDICARE/MEDICAID PROGRAM,
and now YOU DEMOCRATS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INTENTIONAL DESTRUCTION OF THE U.S.A. ECONOMY!!!

So DEMOCRATS ... SHUT UP!!!

You have no integrity!!!

Sen Mark Kirk's statement Thursday, Dec 1, 2011 ...

"There are 55 million Social Security beneficiaries that will see little or no extra cash from this 2012 tax holiday;
instead, the dedicated payroll contributions meant to pay for future benefits are being diverted from the Trust Fund
and replaced with Treasury debt that does not even have a AAA credit rating.
Social Security was designed to be independent and free from the danger of Congressional manipulation,
and maintaining the firewall between the Social Security Trust Fund and general government funding is the best way to maintain the solvency of this important program.
Neither bill protects the Social Security Trust Fund
so I voted no. "

It's not our fault that DEMOCRATS raided the Social Security Trust Fund.
Let's remember ...

Not ALL are to blame for the empty lock box.

It's the Democrats Communists.

Let's take a deeper look.

Obama: "I Don't Want the Folks who Created the Mess to do a lot of Talking" "

Okay, then the DEMOCRATS need to shut up!!!

[Liz]

MIT economics prof Jonathan Gruber, argued that perceived rising premium costs are really a one-time increase in 2016 to cover “massively underpriced” policies for the first two years of the 2010 law. He also said the increase “fixed” the problem because insurance companies were seeking signs of profitability and talking optimistically about continued participation in the program.

I guess Obama didn't let Gruber in on the "billion dollar secret." Probably Obama was depending on Gruber's stupidity (smirk).

"Now, I don't want you insurers to worry; when you start
losing money, we are going to jump in and bail you all out."

Obama Siphoned off GSE Dividends To Prop Up OBAMACARE

ZeroHedge ^ | April 2, 2017 / FR Posted on by Zakeet

Earlier this month, Harvard Ph.D. Jerome Corsi of InfoWars (@jerome_corsi) and a CPA "who worked for two years for a major U.S. accounting firm as an outside auditor for Freddie Mac," confirmed a 2012 scheme hatched by the Obama administration.

The audacious looting involved funnelling hundreds of billions in dividends from Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop up the failing Obamacare program - by paying subsidies to insurers to remain in the system. [Snip]

The conclusion reached by Corsi and others is that this was probably illegal. In fact, House Republicans actually sued the Obama Administration in 2014 over the fact that the subsidies to insurers weren't appropriated by congress and won, which the Obama administration appealed.

Zerohedge and the Atlanta Journal Constitution pointed out last week, the Trump administration has until May 22nd to decide whether or not to pursue the appeal: (Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...

[spintreebob]

Far too much attention is paid to the payment side of health. Who will pay? How will they pay? Who will collect and distribute the payments?

Far too little attention is spent on the cost of health. How much does each part of the process cost? How much of a doctor’s bill is for malpractice insurance? How much of a bill is for defensive medicine to avoid law suits? How much of a bill is for compliance with irrelevant government regulations? How much of a bill is for data entry in mandated EHR/EMR systems?

How much of the cost is insurance company overhead?
How much of the cost is due to government Corporatism picking insurance companies as “winners” over medishare and direct pay models?
How much of the cost is due to government Corporatism driving small medical providers out of business and picking big Corporations as winners in medical delivery?

Ask the wrong questions and get irrelevant answers.

[newfreep]

The Blog Pimper (IBD editorial writer) NEVER posts his entire article - he selfishly seeks only blog hits.

HERE IS THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

Health Reform: Insurers are starting to announce their ObamaCare premiums for next year and they’re at high double-digit rates. For journalists and Democratic activists (is there any difference these days?), this is the direct result of Republicans’ threat to repeal ObamaCare. But that’s not what insurance companies are telling state regulators.

Here’s how the Democrats’ story goes. After a rough start, ObamaCare was finally on the mend. Those massive rate hikes and insurance defections of last year were a thing of the past, and there was no truth to claims that ObamaCare was in a “death spiral.”

“The market is stabilizing,” Karen Pollitz of the Kaiser Family Foundation told one news outlet recently. “I think insurers are getting the hang of it.”

But all the talk of repealing and replacing ObamaCare, the story continues, now has insurers rattled. “The debate has created one thing insurers hate above everything else: uncertainty,” claims NBC News.

Aetna (AET) is pulling out of its remaining ObamaCare markets, Anthem (ANTM) is threatening to do the same. Iowa could have no insurers in the ObamaCare exchange. And now insurers in Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia announced massive rate hikes for next year that top 58%. The average hike in Virginia will be nearly 31%, according to one estimate.

Even by ObamaCare standards, the proposed increases were shockingly high. And most likely these three states — which have early deadlines for rate filings — are just a harbinger of more bad ObamaCare news across the country.

And, as night follows day, Republicans will be blamed for it all.

There’s just one problem with this story.

It is not true.

Last year, insurers announced massive rate hikes, as they did the year before, and the year before that. Yet that was when nobody had a reason to think ObamaCare’s future was in doubt. So why, defenders of ObamaCare should be asked, are the double-digit rate hikes this year suddenly the result of “uncertainty”?

More important, however, is the fact that insurers aren’t citing this supposed “uncertainty” in their rate requests.

We dug out the filings that insurance companies have made in Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia.

What insurers are saying is that the ObamaCare markets are continuing to deteriorate, as they have for years, with mostly older and sicker people signing up, while the young and healthy avoid ObamaCare’s overpriced coverage. The result is a sicker insurance pool that requires higher premiums to cover, which then drives out more young and healthy people, setting off another round of rate hikes.

Here’s what Anthem said in its Virginia filing to explain why it wants premium hikes averaging 38% there: “We have continued to experience increased benefit costs for individual ACA-compliant products, and this reality is reflected in our filed rate adjustment.”

It goes on to say that “we are also forecasting an acceleration of the current trend where individuals with greater health care needs are more likely to keep their coverage in a guaranteed issue market with rating constraints and an individual mandate penalty that is far smaller than the cost of coverage for most individuals.”

In Connecticut, where Anthem wants a 34% increase, it said that costs in the ObamaCare market have “continued to outpace premium increases.”

To justify its 37% rate hike to Maryland regulators, Cigna said the main drivers are “underlying claim costs (that) are expected to increase,” and the fact that the risk pool in Maryland “was more adverse than assumed in the current rates.”

Kaiser told Maryland that its 18% rate hike is “primarily driven by the claims experience, ... medical inflation, taxes and fees imposed on the issuer.”

ConnectiCare said it was basing its 15.2% rate hike on “increasing medical costs and greater demand for medical services.” It also noted that nothing about the ObamaCare law would change for next year.

The CEO of CareFirst told the Washington Post that his company is jacking up premiums 52% in Maryland because “the pool of beneficiaries is becoming sicker, in part because healthier people are not coming in at the same level we hoped.” He said its proposed rate increase assumed that Congress doesn’t change anything about ObamaCare’s cost-sharing subsidies.

There’s one other factor driving premiums up in 2018 that Democrats and their friends in the media are ignoring. That’s the return of the Health Insurance Tax, a $14 billion nondeductible sales tax charged to insurers.

Congress suspended the tax for 2017 in hopes that it would keep premium hikes low that year. That didn’t work, of course, but now the tax is coming back for 2018, and every insurance filing we examined cites it as an important contributor to their proposed hikes.

Notice what’s missing here. While some mention regulatory uncertainty, they are not blaming it for the magnitude of the rate hikes they’re proposing.

The rate filings all assume, for example, that ObamaCare’s “cost reduction subsidies” are paid in full next year. Trump had threatened at one point not to cover those costs.

In fact, in some ways Trump has worked to stabilize the ObamaCare markets, which Anthem notes in its Virginia filing, citing “helpful regulatory improvements” as a mitigating factor. Nevertheless, Anthem says, these improvements aren’t enough to overcome the fact that costs “continue to outpace premiums on a large scale.”

The inconvenient truth for Democrats is that ObamaCare is failing, and will continue to fail no matter what the GOP does. It is unsustainable and must be replaced. If Democrats wanted to act like mature adults, instead of petty partisans, they’d be as eager to find a replacement for ObamaCare as the GOP is.

[Chickensoup]

I have been here almost 19 years.

Daily.

We have had incredible talent and well-known people post here.

We have given a number of people their start by providing a showcase and forum for their good work.

And they post links. So what?

We drive more people away by our pettiness on this forum.

It is frustrating to see.

The way you incubate and grow conservative talent is to support it and promote it, not insult or degrade it.

chickensoup