One Angry American Rages: "Obama Lied, My 4th Health Plan Just Died"

Authored by Michelle Malkin via Townhall.com,

Cue the funeral bagpipes. My fourth health insurance plan is dead.

Two weeks ago, my husband and I received yet another cancellation notice for our private, individual health insurance coverage. It"s our fourth Obamacare-induced obituary in four years.

Our first death notice, from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, arrived in the fall of 2013.

The insurer informed us that because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)," our plan no longer met the federal government"s requirements.

Never mind our needs and desires as consumers who were quite satisfied with a high-deductible PPO that included a wide network of doctors for ourselves and our two children.

Our second death knell, from Rocky Mountain Health Plans, tolled in August 2015.

 That notice signaled the end of a plan we didn"t want in the first place that didn"t cover our kids" dental care and wasn"t accepted at our local urgent care clinic. The insurer pulled out of the individual market in all but one county in Colorado, following the complete withdrawal from that sector by Humana and UnitedHealthcare.

Our third "notice of plan discontinuation," again from Anthem, informed us that the insurer would "no longer offer your current health plan in the State of Colorado" in August 2016.

With fewer and fewer choices as know-it-all Obamacare bureaucrats decimated the individual market here and across the country, we enrolled in a high-deductible Bronze HSA EPO (Health Savings Account Exclusive Provider Organization) offered by Minneapolis-based startup, Bright Health.

Now, here we are barely a year later: Deja screwed times four. Our current plan will be discontinued on Jan. 1, 2018.

"But don"t worry," Bright Health"s eulogy writer chirped, "we have similar plans to address your needs."

Riiiiight. Where have I heard those pie-in-the-sky promises before? Oh, yeah. Straight out of the socialized medicine Trojan horse"s mouth. "If you like your doctor," President Obama promised, "you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you"ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."

Is pathological lying covered under the Affordable Care Act?

Speaking of Affordable Care Act whoppers, so much for "affordable." Our current deductible is $6,550 per person; $13,100 for our family of four. Assuming we can find a new plan at the bottom of the individual market barrel, our current monthly premium, $944.86, will rise to more than $1,300 a month.

"What"s taking place is a market correction; the free market is at work," says Colorado"s state insurance commissioner, Marguerite Salazar. "(T)his could be an indication that there were too many options for the market to support."

This presumptuous central planner called federal intervention to eliminate "too many" options for consumers the free market at work. Yes, friends, the Rocky Mountain High is real.

This isn"t a "market correction." It"s a government catastrophe. Premiums for individual health plans in Virginia are set to skyrocket nearly 60 percent in 2018. In New Hampshire, those rates will rise 52 percent. In South Carolina, individual market consumers will face an average 31.3 percent hike. In Tennessee, they"ll see rates jump between 20-40 percent.

Private, flexible PPOs for self-sufficient, self-employed people are vanishing by design. The social-engineered future -- healthy, full-paying consumers being herded into government-run Obamacare exchanges and severely regulated regional HMOs -- is a bipartisan big government health bureaucracy"s dream come true.

These choice-wreckers had the arrogant audacity to denigrate our pre-Obamacare plans as "substandard" (Obama), "crappy" (MSNBC big mouth Ed Schultz) and "junk policies" (Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa). When I first called attention to the cancellation notice tsunami in 2013, liberal Mother Jones magazine sneered that the phenomenon was "phony." And they"re still denying the Obamacare death spiral. Liberal Vox Media recently called the crisis "a lie."

I don"t have enough four-letter words for these propagandists. There are an estimated 450,000 consumers like us in Colorado and 17 million of us nationwide -- small-business owners, independent contractors and others who don"t get their plans through group coverage, big companies or government employers. The costs, headaches and disruption in our lives caused by Obamacare"s meddling meddlers are real and massive.

But we"re puzzles to corporate media journalists who"ve never had to meet a payroll and don"t even know what is the individual market.

We"re invisible to late-night TV clowns who get their Obamacare-at-all-costs talking points from Chuck Schumer.

We"re pariahs to social justice health care activists and Democrats who want us to just shut up and subsidize everyone else"s insurance.

And we"re expendables to establishment Republicans who hoovered up campaign donations on the empty promise to repeal Obamacare -- and now consider amnesty for immigrants here illegally and gun control higher legislative priorities than keeping their damned word.

We"re the canaries in the Obamacare coal mine. Ignore us at your peril, America. You"re next.

New Study Finds U.S. Healthcare System Ranks Dead Last Compared To Other Developed Nations

As Republicans sit on the precipice of fumbling what will likely be their one opportunity to repeal and replace America"s failed Obamacare experiment, a new study just released by The Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S., despite spending more money per capita than any other country on the planet, has the worst healthcare system in the developed world.

The Commonwealth Fund focused on evaluating five main areas of the healthcare system, including care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes and analyzed 72 indicators within those fields.  Of the 11 countries included in the study, the U.S. ranked dead last by a fairly staggering margin.

The United States spends far more on health care than other high-income countries, with spending levels that rose continuously over the past three decades (Exhibit 1). Yet the U.S. population has poorer health than other countries.

Timely and accessible health care could mitigate many of these challenges, but the U.S. health care system falls short, failing to deliver indicated services reliably to all who could benefit. In particular, poor access to primary care has contributed to inadequate prevention and management of chronic diseases, delayed diagnoses, incomplete adherence to treatments, wasteful overuse of drugs and technologies, and coordination and safety problems.

Even worse, aside from "care process," which tracks metrics related to preventative care and consistent engagement with the same family doctor over long periods of time, the U.S. scored last (or thereabouts) in every single category of the study.

Adding insult to injury, these poor results come despite the fact that America spends roughly 60% more on healthcare, as a percentage of GDP, than the other countries in the study...

...a metric that will only get worse when the study is updated again in 3 years as we"ve recently shown that healthcare premiums have surge roughly 100% since 2013 (note that the cost portion of this latest study ended with data collected in 2014).

Can anyone spot the outlier?

But sure, we should probably just leave everything as is...Obamacare seems to be working just fine.

Pelosi Slams 'TrumpCare': "Couldn't Be Worse... Biggest Wealth Transfer Ever"

Following Chuck Schumer"s denigration of "Trumpcare" overnight, Nancy Pelosi has come out swinging this morning to press the same narrative to the American people: It "couldn"t be worse" she exclaimed on ABC"s "This Morning"

Here is what Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had to say about the Republican"s plan for "TrumpCare" last night...

"Trumpcare doesn"t replace the Affordable Care Act, it forces millions of Americans to pay more for less care. This plan would cut and cap Medicaid, defund Planned Parenthood, and force Americans, particularly older Americans, to pay more out of pocket for their medical care all so insurance companies can pad their bottom line.

It cuts taxes on the rich to make middle class families pay more. To make matters worse, this sham of a replacement would rip treatment away from hundreds of thousands of Americans dealing with opioid addiction, breaking the President"s word that he would expand treatment, not cut it.

This bill is a giveaway to the wealthy and insurance companies at the expense of American families, and Senate Democrats will work hard to see that it is defeated."

And now, Nancy Pelosi is trotted out to the mainstream to explain how Obamacare was awesome and Trumpcare "couldn"t be worse."

"This will make millions of people — it"s a question of 10, 15, 20 million people — off of having health insurance," she said during an interview on CBS"s "This Morning."

"It will be the biggest transfer of wealth from low and middle income people to wealthy people in our country."

"Show us the numbers as to how many people will be thrown off. It couldn"t be worse."

"Couldn’t be worse." -- @NancyPelosi reacts to new GOP health care plan

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/a3FAa4lRwl

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) March 7, 2017

As The Hill notes, the legislation would scrap the healthcare law"s individual mandate and repeal most of its taxes and regulations. People would be given a tax credit, based on their age, to help them afford insurance. The GOP"s plan would also phase out ObamaCare"s Medicaid expansion, which now covers more than 10 million people. Pelosi argued that the measure would disproportionately harm all but the wealthiest Americans. The newly unveiled measure makes good on a long-time promise from GOP lawmakers to repeal and replace former President Obama"s signature healthcare reform law. Committees in the House are scheduled to mark up the legislation on Wednesday.

Judging by Schumer and Pelosi, millions will die and the "rich" will be laughing as they do. We suspect that will not happen, but when all you have left is lies, scaremongery appears to be the new Democrat platform - "We"re not Trump."