"It"s A Crisis Situation": One Chart Explains Why Obamacare Is Locked In An Inescapable Death Spiral

Ever since it was signed into law in 2010, defenders of Obamacare have dismissed staggering surges in annual premiums by highlighting only the rates paid by those fortunate enough to receive subsidies.  In fact, last year we wrote about Marjorie Connolly"s, from Obama"s Department of Health and Human Services, response to the Tennessee insurance commissioner"s fear that the exchanges in his state were "very near collapse" after a staggering 59% premium surge:

“Consumers in Tennessee will continue to have affordable coverage options in 2017. Last year, the average monthly premium for people with Marketplace coverage getting tax credits increased just $2, from $102 to $104 per month, despite headlines suggesting double digit increases,” said Marjorie Connolly, HHS spokeswoman, in a statement.

We"re unsure whether Connolly"s comment was just propaganda intended to defend a failing piece of legislation or an intentional, blatant admission that the Department of Health and Human Services just doesn"t care about the majority of Americans, the so-called 1%"ers, who are facing debilitating increases in healthcare costs simply because they manage to live above the poverty line.  We"ll let you decide on that one.

Be that as it may, as the Miami Herald points out this morning, roughly half of all Obamacare participants, nearly 9 million people in aggregate, don"t qualify for the subsidies that Connolly praised and have been forced to absorb debilitating premium increases for the past several years.

Meanwhile, the pie chart above from 2017 doesn"t count the 1,000"s of unsubsidized "millionaire, billionaire, private jets owners" making over $50,000 per year who have already been forced to drop their healthcare coverage because it was simply unaffordable...a move which the Reiter family in Florida was forced to consider for 2018 after the premiums on their policy surged 54% to a cost of $40,000 per year.

As open enrollment for Affordable Care Act coverage nears the deadline of Dec. 15, and Florida once again leads all states using the federal exchange at healthcare.gov, Heidi and Richard Reiter sit at the kitchen table at their Davie home and struggle to piece together the family’s health insurance for 2018.

 

The Reiters buy their own coverage, but they earn too much to qualify for financial aid to lower their monthly premiums. For 2017, they bought a plan off the exchange and paid $26,000 in premiums for family coverage, including their two sons, ages 21 and 17.

 

Keeping the same coverage for 2018 would have cost the Reiters $40,000 in premiums, a 54 percent increase. So they selected a lower-priced plan that covers less but costs $29,000 in premiums.

 

“That’s more than a lot of people’s mortgage payments,” Richard Reiter said. “For me, it’s a crisis situation.”

Of course, while the Herald attempts to blame the Trump administration for Obamacare"s continued premium hikes in 2018, we would just remind everyone once again that premiums surged an average of 113% across the United States during Obama"s last term...

But sure, it"s all Trump"s fault.

Financial Tyranny: "We The People" Are The New Permanent Underclass In America

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

Americans can no longer afford to get sick and there’s a reason why.

That’s because a growing number of Americans are struggling to stretch their dollars far enough to pay their bills, get out of debt and ensure that if and when an illness arises, it doesn’t bankrupt them.

This is a reality that no amount of partisan political bickering can deny.

Many Americans can no longer afford health insurance, drug costs or hospital bills. They can’t afford to pay rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket deductibles and prescription drug bills.

They can’t afford to live, and now they can’t afford to get sick or die, either.

It’s a gamble any way you look at it, and the medical community is not helping.

Healthcare costs are rising, driven by a medical, insurance and pharmaceutical industry that are getting rich off the sick and dying.

Appallingly, Americans spend more than any developed country on healthcare and have less to show for it. While Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) may have made health insurance more accessible to greater numbers of individuals, it has failed to make healthcare any more affordable.

Indeed, health care in America has become just another way of making corporations rich at consumer expense.

This is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers under the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

While we’re struggling to get by, the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” The 16-year war in Afghanistan, which now stands as the longest and one of the most expensive wars in U.S. history, is about to get even longer and more costly, thanks to President Trump’s promise to send more troops over.

In this way, the military industrial complex will get even richer, and the American taxpayer will be forced to shell out even more funds for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better. Just take a look at the nation’s failing infrastructure, and you’ll see how little is being spent on programs that advance the common good.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

We’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want to pit us against one another. They want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Trust me, the only “us versus them” that matters anymore is “we the people” against the police state.

We’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”

The message is this: there is power in our numbers.

That remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might). As Patrick Henry declared in the last speech before his death, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

This holds true whether you’re talking about health care, war spending, or the American police state.

2 Out Of 3 Patients Can't Afford Their Hospital Bills Thanks To Obamacare's Soaring Deductibles

We"ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years talking about soaring healthcare premiums brought on by Obamacare. The price increases have been outright crippling for those forced to buy policies on the exchanges, up well over 100% over the past 4 years, on average, with some states up over 200%.

But premiums aren"t the only part of health plans that have soared under Obamacare.  For those people who are lucky enough to actually be able to afford a plan, you simply bought yourself the opportunity to cover even more of your healthcare costs out of pocket as deductibles have also soared.

In fact, a new study from TransUnion Healthcare reveals that 2 out of 3 patients (68%) couldn"t afford to pay their hospital bills in full in 2016, up from 49% in 2014.

A new TransUnion Healthcare analysis revealed a significant rise in the percentage of patients that didn’t pay their hospital bills in full. Approximately 68% of patients with bills of $500 or less did not pay off the full balance during 2016 – up from 53% in 2015 and 49% in 2014.

“There are many reasons why more patients are struggling to make their healthcare payments in full, the most prominent of which are higher deductibles and the increase in patient responsibility from 10% to 30% over the last few years,” said Wiik, author of the book and also principal for healthcare revenue cycle management at TransUnion. “This shift in healthcare payments has been taking place for well over a decade, but we are seeing more pronounced changes in how hospital bills are paid during just the last few years.”

But that"s not even the worst of it, patient responsibility on 14% of hospital bills in 2016 exceeded $3,000, an obligation which only 1% of patients were able to cover on a timely basis.

- 63% of hospital bills were $500 or less; of those hospital bills, 68% were not paid in full in 2016.

- 14% of hospital bills were $3,000 or more; of those hospital bills, 99% were not paid in full in 2016.

- 10% of hospital bills were $500 to $1,000; of those bills 85% were not paid in full in 2016.

Meanwhile, the soaring deductibles are putting even more pressure on razor thin hospital margins and have caused a rash of closures since 2010.  Per CNBC:

The Affordable Care Act has given more people access to health care, but it has driven deductibles up, in some cases, making it harder for patients to pay, said John Yount, TransUnion"s vice president of product for the health-care division. Hospital margins are already between only 2 and 4 percent on average, Yount said, and that margin quickly narrows when more patients can"t pay their bills.

"What it means is as a patient takes on more responsibility, then it is likely that that debt, which is a component of uncompensated care, has a potential to increase for hospitals," Yount said. "It"s likely that as they provide services and their bad debt increases, it could be difficult to continue certain operations."

Since 2010, 79 rural hospitals have closed, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. Yount warned that number will continue to increase if more patients can"t pay their bills.

So fight on, Democrats.  Obamacare is clearly a piece of legislation worth saving.