My Own Teeth and Obamacare

Photo: Wikipedia

Every time I travel to my hometown for a visit, relatives take turns asking me if my pearly-whites are the original ones. They even break the personal space barrier for a close-up inspection. The first time the question shocked me but then I understood that it was unusual to be as old as I am and still have my own teeth. Most people have badly made dentures, gaping holes, or teeth so far gone that they should have been extracted years ago.

If you chip a tooth, a private dentist will charge 800 euros to repair the damage.  Apparently nobody wants to go to a state-run dentist because the workmanship is not guaranteed and materials hard to find. This explains why so many people have ugly dentures, cavities, yellow-brown, or missing teeth. I concede that some may have fear of dentists or lack good brushing habits.

Medical care does not include much dental care and certainly few people clean their teeth professionally or wear braces. Dental hygiene is a subject seldom broached in public although there has been a concerted effort to teach people proper brushing and flossing.

Socialized medicine is unable to provide so much advertised free medical care; it sounds too good in theory; but in practice, once the money runs out, the meds are in short supply and access to doctors and hospitals becomes sporadic and difficult.

Do the promise of free medical care and a shiny plastic card get you the best doctors and hospitals? It is a great concept if you have the sniffles -- care is immediate and free. It is not such a good idea if you have something more complex that requires better drugs, more medical skills and training, extended hospital stays, and better hospitals with private or semi-private beds instead of shoddy and dirty wards, or worse yet, gurneys in an ER hallway.

Americans are beginning to find out with Obamacare just how bad socialized medicine truly is. With an insurance card issued by one of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) state exchanges, people cannot get their meds refilled in another state. It’s bad enough that the premiums are much higher than the previous private insurance and the deductibles in the thousands per year. The advice from the medical staff that has no idea how to help such patients is to call their Congressman. Since the law has been in effect since 2010, the chance of reversing this government bureaucratic nightmare is zero.

Certain drugs that are expensive are no longer dispensed by government insurance to all patients; they must have other underlying issues before even a pricey topical cream is paid for. The patient must use cheap drugs instead that could potentially kill their livers. It saves the insurance money, who cares about your life? Do you need expensive chemical mixtures to treat on-going cancer or other serious problems? Too bad, your insurance no longer pays for them.  

There was a reason why foreigners flocked to the United States for medical care because treatment was available quickly and rates of cancer remissions or cures were the highest in the world. Surgical expertise was also the best in the world.

How high are the premiums? It depends how you purchase your insurance and if you are eligible for a subsidy on which, of course, you will have to pay taxes because it is considered income. If you are on Medicare Part B, premiums are $104.90-$335.70 per month, per person. Medicare announced that premiums will have to go up 52 percent in 2016 in order to keep the system afloat. Medicare was stripped of billions of dollars in funding in order to use those billions to fund Obamacare. http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/unhealthy-not-wealthy-and-far-from-wise

People living on fixed incomes such as Social Security are finding out that they are not going to get a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for 2016 because inflation is low. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is reported at 2 percent. Anybody who shops in this economy knows it’s a manufactured number.

Employees stayed in lower paying jobs because they had good insurance. People who previously had good and affordable private insurance coverage, even half-timers, are finding themselves now dumped into the exchanges and having to pick bronze, silver, or gold plans with much higher rates and much higher per person annual deductibles. Chances are, most people, will be hard-pressed to meet the deductibles of thousands of dollars per year before the insurance pays anything at all.

Rates vary based on income, type of coverage chosen, where one lives, and quality of options and service may or may not be adequate. “Now they can at least get overpriced and underwhelming Obamacare policies,” said John Mauldin. He continued, “The worker’s share of premiums for a family policy went from $1,543 in 1999 to $4,955 in 2015, a 321% increase. The employer’s share went up almost as much, from $4,247 to $12,591 (+296%).”

The winners are Americans with pre-existing conditions; before ACA they could not buy insurance at any price. Illegal aliens, who allegedly were not supposed to be covered by Obamacare, are also beneficiaries of ACA.

According to Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2014 32 million non-elderly Americans were uninsured. About 10 million people have enrolled in state and federal Obamacare exchanges and approximately 14 million have enrolled in Medicaid. This means that the uninsured rate changed from 16.2% to 10.7% by first quarter of 2015. For less than 6 percent gain in insurability, ACA has disrupted or destroyed the insurance and quality of medical care for a very large majority of Americans. http://kff.org/uninsured/fact-sheet/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/

The Heritage Foundation warned us in 2009 why Obamacare was wrong for America. Knowing what was wrong and that there was nothing we could do about it then nor now, provides no comfort to those who are sick or will become sick and in need of medical care. http://www.heritage.org/research/factsheets/obamacare-top-10-reasons-its-wrong-for-america

1.       Millions of employer-sponsored insurance holders will lose their insurance (88.1 million was the prediction)

2.       Individual mandate translated into less freedom and more taxes

3.       Private health care plans changed in order to conform with ACA standards

4.       The federal government will push any private competitors out of business; as Heritage put it, “the umpire is also the first baseman”

5.       Your health care decision will be made by the fed

6.       Higher taxes will hurt small businesses

7.       Medical decisions will be made by bureaucrats

8.       The Affordable Care Act is not funded

9.       Taxpayers will pay for abortions against their religious beliefs

10.   The ACA was deceptive that is why it was rushed through and not read carefully

Most Americans are going to have to accept inferior medical care because their better plans are no longer approved by the government and do not meet their standards. Garth Kant listed in 2013, “52 reasons Obamacare can’t work.” http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/52-shocking-reasons-obamacare-cant-work/#37SYTKHYUSDfktY6.99

Perhaps people are now paying attention as they are beginning to lose their doctors, their health plans, paying higher Medicare costs, higher private insurance premiums, higher deductibles, experiencing denial or worsening of medical care, paying higher taxes, accepting less working hours, unemployment is growing as employers kill existing and new jobs, and doctors and specialists who accept Obamacare insurance are harder and harder to find.

ObamaCare and a Bundle of Cash

Photo: Wikipedia

I’ve watched Americans cheering in mass hysteria for the Affordable Care Act of March 23, 2010 that would provide health insurance for 15 percent of Americans who either could not afford health care premiums, were denied insurance based on pre-existing conditions, or chose not to purchase insurance, gambling on their good health and immortal youth.

They believed the promised moon and the stars and Nancy Pelosi who refused to give details when asked - they had to “pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” Four years and a trillion wasted dollars later there are more American citizens without insurance, and with substandard and more expensive insurance that does not meet their needs.

Americans young and old found out what’s in Obamacare and did not like it. Elderly were kicked out of their Medicare plans and moved into Humana. Patients lost their doctors, lost their insurance plans they liked and were forced into exchanges. Premiums were much higher, deductibles through the roof, and reimbursement varied from 60, 70, to 80 percent, depending on whether they had bought bronze, silver, or gold plans.
Congressmen and their staff were in a separate category, a “platinum and diamonds” plan for elitist lawmakers who promptly complained they could not afford the premiums and voted themselves a subsidy.
I suppose those who were uninsured thought Obamacare to be free since they touted health insurance as a right, not a service. Why reward and pay the “greedy” doctors for their expertise and years of expensive schooling and hard training? Everyone should be equally paid in the new, “fundamentally transformed” socialist America.

Things did not work so well when it came time to fund this bonanza of good health. Young people preferred to pay the lower penalty instead of enrolling. Medicare was stripped of $719 billion over ten years to fund Obamacare at the expense of rationed care for the elderly.

It is sad when a patient over 70 becomes a “unit” whose worth to society is being calculated and then services are curtailed based on their “utility.”

Who said there are no death panels when patients in need of physical therapy or expensive chemo are being told, sorry, we’ve done all we can for you, you are just too old and you are never going to get better. A far away bureaucrat makes life-altering decisions for patients they have never met who paid taxes and premiums for years so that their golden years would be protected.

On the other hand, if you are an illegal immigrant, fresh off the train or airplane, Obamacare is free and readily available the very same day, no questions asked.

Scandal after scandal revealed how badly veterans were treated in VA hospitals – many died waiting to be seen by a physician. These were our heroes who put their lives on the line for America and were promised first class care for the rest of their lives and received the worst. Their worth to the new socialist bureaucracy is less than that of illegal aliens. Veterans and military families experienced first the ill-effects of socialized medicine.

You may not like your premiums, you may not like your deductibles, you may not like the loss of your doctor who is not “a preferred physician” under Obamacare and perhaps practices “concierge” medicine or has retired, but socialized medicine is here to stay.

You may have to accept the care of a nurse practitioner or of someone trained in a third world country who was hurriedly licensed in order to fill the void of doctors. No bureaucracy, once ensconced with deep roots in Washington, can be uprooted and nullified no matter how ill-conceived it was.

You may think, how bad can socialized medicine and a single payer system be? Not bad if you have the sniffles, pretty bad if you take into account what happened to Maureen in Ireland and hundreds of thousands of patients just like her who are subjected to nationalized health care in Western Europe, the model for the Affordable Care Act.

Trying to recover from surgery for a broken femur caused by multiple myeloma and blood clots in her lungs, she had to share a room, a bathroom, and a shower with six other co-ed patients. Her femur broke while waiting for a CT scan at one hospital and was then transported to another hospital for surgery.

After a three day wait, she was prepped for surgery but the ambulance did not arrive to pick her up until the following morning. Kept in a semi-coma to alleviate the pain, when she got to the other hospital, the surgery was postponed twice. If that was not enough pain and suffering, Maureen was infected with the dreaded MRSA staph bacterial infection in her nose.

What caused her blood clots? After a 15 minute infusion to strengthen her bones, she was told to wait for her surgeon who wanted to see her and give her biopsy results and discuss treatment. She sat in the waiting room all day, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. By nightfall she was short of breath and very weak and had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance in order to save her life.

On discharge day, she had to wait 12 hours until a fourth person was found to sign off the release papers. Treatment can be good, but the patient can die waiting for it, and the nurses, although very kind and well-trained, are grossly overworked and underpaid, just like doctors.

Maureen had the option to buy a private room for the price of 1,000 euros per day. Single payer insurance in Ireland does not prevent patients from buying additional private insurance if they can afford it. Unfortunately that may not be the case in this country eventually, as more insurers would be unable to underwrite policies profitably and in line with the Affordable Care Act’s dictates.

As Jonathan Gruber said, the American voters were too stupid to understand the ramifications of the passage of the so-unaffordable Affordable Care Act and did not comprehend how their health care will be fundamentally and irreversibly altered.

Do we really want socialized medical care for our American patients? Unfortunately, what happened to Maureen is inevitably coming to the U.S. There will come a time when doctors, proper medical care, treatment, surgery, and drugs will be so scarce that patients will walk around with envelopes stuffed with cash in order to be treated in a timely manner and will look to the black market to find the drugs they need.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014

My radio chat with Silvio Canto on ObamaCare December 2, 2014

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cantotalk/2014/12/02/a-look-at-obama-cares-impact-in-the-us-economy

Cost of Obamacare for Virginians on Bronze Plan

The Affordable Care Act specifies in Section 1401 of its voluminous content that subsidies cannot be paid to people residing in states that do not have a State Exchange. The decision was upheld in the D.C. Federal Circuit Court and the Supreme Court will make a decision in June 2015.

In the Commonwealth of Virginia, no subsidy will thus be paid on the 80 percent of subscribers’ premiums who enrolled in Obamacare and are eligible for subsidies. And the 2015 costs of these premiums have not been made public until November 15, 2014, conveniently after the November election.

Using the calculator on the Obamacare website for the Bronze Plan (a plan with a 60 percent reimbursement rate after deductibles have been met) for a Preferred Provider, Thomas L. Cranmer, Vice President of Fairfax County Taxpayers’ Alliance, determined that a northern Virginia family of four would pay “at any income a deductible out of pocket of $12,600 and a premium of $7,224 per year. The total $19,824 represents 40 percent of $50,000 and 20 percent of $100,000 gross income.” http://fairfaxfreecitizen.com/2014/11/25/obamacare-cost-impact-2/

If doctors are not “preferred,” Obamacare labels them “out of network,” in which case the costs can be limitless. The website calculator, which is now operational (HHS had taken it down temporarily before the elections), can be used anonymously to calculate the cost for any individual or family. https://www.healthcare.gov/see-plans/

People, who have lost their plans due to the increased demands of Obamacare on private insurance companies, and have been forced to sign for Obamacare, report two and half times higher costs.

Many insured by Medicare have lost their supplemental insurance and those with Medicare/Medicaid have been moved into Humana. Humana is now busy rationing care to the elderly in order to meet the President’s plan to take billions from Medicare in order to fund Obamacare. Many retirees are thus forced to find other plans with higher premiums and deductibles.

Illegal aliens, who were not “supposed” to be covered by Obamacare as falsely reported, are getting their premiums for free or $2.71. A lady I met recently in a doctor’s waiting room was excited that her premium was $24 a month. She had never bought insurance before, betting on her good health, but was now experiencing declining health in her mid-thirties and was glad for Obamacare’s low premium.

With the three plans, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, the reimbursement rates for doctors are 60 percent, 70 percent, and 80 percent respectively. If doctors accept Obamacare, can they cover their expenses?  Do they ask for payments in advance, considering that the out-of-pocket deductible for patients is $12,600, and they may not be able to pay for the visit?

Tom Cranmer asked his physician in a very direct letter if the “concierge fee” of $1,650 he paid him covers his expenses. Additionally, if the “doc fix reimbursement schedule for Medicare does not pass Congress (it comes up for renewal in December 2014), and doctors’ compensation is lowered,“  how would it affect their medical practice in terms of doing what is best for their patients?

Because many doctors and hospitals have been dropped from Obamacare, their services are not eligible for Obamacare payments. What would happen to their patients who are now suddenly forced into Obamacare? Where would they find new doctors, especially since many are retiring or pursuing other careers? Did the President not promise, “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?” Would these patients be forced to accept nurse practitioner care instead?

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014