The Subtle Slavery of Obamacare: The
Cattle Chute of Coerced Cooperation in the Collective
Corruption
By
Cognitive Dissonance
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“
The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only
to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.”—Leo
Tolstoy
Like millions of other individuals and families in the USA, Mrs.
Cog and I have reached a point this year where we must make
decisions regarding
HealthSick Care
Insurance for 2015. Before I begin I would like to point out we are
attempting to take back control of our health by eating better,
exercising more, mostly by way of regularly working on the
homestead, while practicing preventative/proactive care using such
things as natural herbs and supplements, organic teas and honey and
so on.
Our point of view is simple: other than possibly needing
emergency medical assistance for major accidents and injuries or
catastrophic illness such as heart attack, stroke etc., we don’t
use the
healthsick care
industry nor do we wish too. Our preference would be to have access
to a catastrophic
emergency
careinsurance
policy with a large deductible (say $15-25,000) to keep the
insurance premium manageable. We will handle our day to day health
issues as well as preventive care on our own.
We do understand, and generally agree with, the need for
catastrophic
healthinjury/illness insurance to meet our responsibility of
limiting our, and society’s, liability and expenses. We do not wish
to be a burden to others or to ourselves. We have in the past, and
continue today, to express our willingness and desire to
participate in a common insurance risk pool to mitigate that
possibility. Mrs. Cog and I do not wish to receive a free ride,
where others pay for our medical expenses, nor do we expect to just
show up at the local emergency room and demand treatment without
the ability to pay either out of pocket or via insurance for
services rendered. That said, let me begin.
This is
not
the way to exit the sick care racket.
Dammed if we do, dammed if we don’t doesn’t even begin to
describe the situation we find ourselves in this December of 2014.
Aside from the ‘
normal’ annual increases, our present
healthsick care
insurance provider jacked up our premium rates in April and again
in August of this year to (they claim) bring our present policy
into compliance with the Obamacare ‘
mandate’. The total increase over the last eight months
was 65% with the majority coming in August. Worse, we just received
notice of another 10% increase set for January 1, 2015. So much for
the flat out fraudulent and horrifically misleading declared ‘
inflation’ rate of 2%.
While I will not discuss specific details, our present coverage
is far removed from what the medical system describes as a ‘
Cadillac’ plan. The per-person deductible is several
thousand dollars each and the total family deductible is well north
of six thousand dollars, a figure which doesn’t include co-pays and
out-of-network surcharges. The maximum out-of-pocket potential is
more than ten thousand dollars a year.
Making matter worse, up here on the mountain there is no doctor
network to speak of, further driving up first dollar costs for Mrs.
Cog and me. While we take
someresponsibility for this because it was our decision to
move to this rural mountain area in the first place, why all
doctors cannot participate in several different national insurance
networks is beyond me. It is so much more than just reimbursement
rates that determine which doctors are in what network.
The latest correspondence from the
healthsick care
insurance company helpfully informs us we may visit their website
before Jan 1, 2015 and select from a variety of ‘
affordable’
healthsick
plans, thus clearly admitting our present day policy is no longer
affordable……though it never was for the services desired or
received. It is almost as if the system is set up to bolster
insurance company profits first, drug and medical services company
profits second, doctor and clinic profits third and patient care
last. Of course we are told otherwise by all of the above.
The letter ran several pages long and was laid out in a question
and answer format obviously intended for those with a sixth grade
education or below. Several questions followed along the lines of “
Where’s my health care subsidy/premium tax credit”
followed by a simple answer; ‘W
e the (little) People’ were out of luck unless we visited
the official ‘
Health Insurance Marketplace’. You mean the rabbit hole
goes deeper?
What Rabbit Hole?
For nearly two decades I was a licensed life and health
insurance agent and sold both individual and group health insurance
policies during that time. In addition, from 2001 until 2008 I
helped select and structure a midsized employer group health
insurance program for my employer as well as the day to day
administration of the plan. But even with that large experience
base I am far from an expert on the ins and outs of the animal
called Obamacare. And I seriously doubt there are more than a few
in this entire country who are expert other than the insurance
companies who actually wrote the law in the first place.
My blind spot is the nuanced intricacies of the Affordable Care
Act (ACA). Even
afterthey passed it I was still not able to read
and fully understand it. But mama didn’t raise no fool. Speaking as
one of millions of semi(un)informed ‘
consumers’ of
healthsick care
insurance in America, when I say the game is rigged and ‘
We the People’ are the bait, the prey and the patsy, it is
more than just me smelling a skunk in the woodpile. The rabid skunk
not only sprayed me, but bit me as well and for the life of me I
can’t find medical care at a reasonable cost. Welcome to a brave
new world.
Nurse -
"Doctor, the patient has died."
Doctor -
"It's OK nurse, we extracted the wallet in time."
As many of you know Mrs. Cog and I moved to the mountain in June
of 2013 and have followed a path of asset divestiture and debt pay
down, done primarily to extinguish debt and to greatly simplify our
lives. Anyone who has followed this path understands the way to
play the financial ‘
game’ is
NOTto do as we are doing, but to hold on to the
assets in order to keep leveraging up while avoiding the tax man’s
ugly wrath.
The net effect of our financial insanity is that the Federal and
State tax (wo)men have been richly rewarded for our self proclaimed
liberation, though some would definitely call us foolish. We are
deliberately working ourselves into the poor house, with gross and
net incomes that now land us squarely among the lower middle of the
middle class.
The good news is while our income has dropped dramatically, so
has our outgo to an even greater extent. The net result is while
others in our income class are really struggling to make ends meet,
we are not in a dire situation because our housing and
transportation costs, other than insurance, utilities, gasoline,
upkeep and taxes, are nil compared to many others.
Still, considering our unsubsidized
healthsick care
insurance premiums now represent almost 25% of our
grossincome, this is no laughing matter. In just
four short years, beginning shortly after Obamacare (aka the
Orwellian named Affordable Care Act or ACA) was passed under the
cover of deliberate ignorance and confusion,
healthsick care
insurance premiums have more than doubled in price and in some
cases tripled, quadrupled or more.
Something has gone horribly wrong for the average Joe and Jane
Doe and this was not an accident or a product of unintended
consequences by any stretch of the imagination. How is it that
among all first world countries the USA charges on average 50% more
for
healthsick care
services with results/outcomes no better than, and often much worse
than, the rest of the first world nations and many second world
nations?
While I have watched
healthsick care
insurance premiums rise at triple or quadruple the officially
declared inflation rate for more than two decades, what has
transpired over the last four years is nothing short of criminal.
Even though insurance companies claim the expanded ‘
mandate’ of the ACA is directly responsible for the
significant premium increases, two things stand out as glaringly
obvious even to a blind man.
A modern day treatment plan in
practice.
One, the first dollar deductibles and co-pays have risen even
faster than the premiums, indicating to me that any greater risks
absorbed by the insurance companies from the ACA has been at least
partially offset by more money out of the public’s pocket even
before the insurance company collects its first greatly increased
premium or pays its first dime in benefits.
Two, one look at the huge increase in health insurance company
profits since the ACA was ushered in, not to mention their stock
price, is a sure sign these companies are not suffering, but rather
profiting handsomely simply from the process of
preparingfor the full implementation of the ACA.
They understood quite well a simple ‘
bidness’ (a la Tony Soprano) concept. When change is
imminent the key to making (more) money is to complain like hell
about the threatened legislation while quietly lobbying behind
closed doors for the ability to write said legislation. And that is
precisely what they did, and continue to do, with the (re)writing
of the fine print by the administering government agencies.
Insurance companies brought out the
big gun lobby for the ACA
"Watch out for that kick (back)."
Similar to automobiles, housing and higher education, ultimately
the price of any expensive product (in this case
healthsick care
insurance) is based upon who is paying (in part or in full) and how
easily it can be financed and/or subsidized. When expensive items
are easily financed at favorable terms or subsidized/fully paid for
by others, there is little incentive to hold prices down because ‘
price’ is no longer a critical barrier to entry for the
purchaser. As well, if you distort and distribute the price paid
among several parties and no one feels responsible to hold the
line, another incentive to keep prices manageable is lost or
ignored.
The majority of medium/large employer group
healthsick care
insurance premiums are paid by the employer, though as those costs
continue to rise the burden is beginning to shift towards the
employee through various cost sharing arrangements. While the ACA
changed and accelerated that dynamic somewhat, with even more to
come over the next few years, for the most part the employer
sponsored and heavily subsidized group
healthsick care
insurance policy remains alive and well for now.
What is important to remember here is the lack of a real and
significant incentive by the employer, employee and the insurance
company to restrain premium increases since no one party bears the
brunt of the entire increase. The employer doesn’t wish to upset
their employees with sudden and significant premium increases when
real wages have been stagnant for years. And after several rounds
of layoffs, or at the very least the ever present threat of
downsizing/relocation/merger, many employers wish to keep their
remaining productive and profitable employees working. It is
usually cheaper to keep a (slightly) more expensive employee than
to go through the significant expense of replacing him or her, then
training a new one who at least initially is less productive.
The employee will likely complain, then grin and bear it because
they are concerned about keeping a job in a world increasing
populated by part time work with no ‘
fringe’ benefits at all. And the insurance companies just
want to make hay while the sun shines. As long as someone pays the
increased premium, what incentive does the insurance company have
to mitigate increases other than to increase company profits? Death
by falling drops of water is slower than a rushing tsunami, but the
end result is just the same.
The individual or family without access to a (subsidized) group
policy, but still able to ‘
afford’ to purchase
healthsick care
insurance
beforethe recent
changes, will most likely continue to buy the insurance despite the
premium increase. They might try to lower the financial impact by
going with higher deductibles and co-pays rather than go without
insurance so long as they are (self) employed and bringing in an
income.
But with the implementation of the ACA and the accompanying
penalties…..err……‘
taxes’, one is limited in how high they can raise their
deductibles in order to save money without triggering the
penalty……tax. Meaning if they try to purchase a low cost high
deductible catastrophic sick care insurance policy they will still
be forced to pay the penalty tax in addition to the insurance
premiums. Talk about a cattle chute.
What could possibly go wrong?
What was missing from the general insurance risk pool before the
ACA (along with the higher insurance premiums) were the chronically
uninsured aka the poor, the unemployed, chronically ill, injured,
disabled and so on. Make no mistake about it; this wasn’t a case of
the insurance companies not wanting those higher risk individuals
and families in the risk pool. There just wasn’t anyone available
who would, or could, pay the higher premiums associated with the
risk. Essentially an entire class of people, a whole new line of
(profitable) business if you will, was missing from the insurance
company’s portfolio because no one was willing or able to pay.
Until now that is.
With the passage, and now ongoing implementation of the ACA,
this ‘
oversight’ has been rectified. However, the high premiums
charged are essentially meaningless or of little consequence to
some of the people in this pool because many of the poorest will
pay little or nothing after the government subsidy is applied
in advance on a monthly basis. It just doesn’t get
any better than this for the insurance company(s). The crony nanny
state has now firmly inserted itself into another aspect of daily
life in America, bringing an already vulnerable class of poorer
Americans that much closer to the nourishing teat of total
governmental dependency and control.
But it is not just the poor or lower middle class who were, and
are, affected by the ACA. While I just said employer sponsored
group policies are still going strong, it appears their time in the
sun will be limited. Especially after employer ‘
mandates’ kick in next year (2015), more and more
employers will throw in the towel and cease to resist the impulse
to let go and let government totally control the
healthsick care
insurance arena.
If a study of world history (altered and propagandized as it may
be) is any indicator, a despotic tyrannical governmental force will
eventually be bound and determined to spread its corruption and
control as far and wide as possible. It makes perfect sense for
this to be promoted since the more citizen slaves nourished from
the government teat, the more the newly corrupted converts will
fight to remain at the fiat bloated breast.
Once firmly attached and dependent, the suckled will fight any ‘
enemies’ the government claims will threaten their
government milk supply. This is
not
to imply everyone, or even anyone, who takes a government
subsidy in order to afford their grossly overpriced and underserved
healthsick care
insurance, is a bloated freeloader who doesn’t wish to earn their
keep. Far from it in fact. It is a tightly sprung trap not even
Forrest Gump could outrun even with his damn box of chocolates.
Run Forrest Run!
The socioeconomic system in general, and the ACA in particular,
was specifically designed to corral nearly everyone into the cattle
chute of coerced cooperation in the collective corruption of the
nanny police state. But for those who claim this frightening trend
is new are in our opinion way off base. This is the direction this
country has been moving for decades and it was only when the
acceleration reached liftoff velocity on its exponential curve to
outright oppressive slavery did people begin to notice they had
fallen down and couldn’t get back up.
While I fully agree corruption starts at the top and filters
down, in so many ways it has now permeated the general public by
presenting nearly impossible situations which, while they may be
wearing the façade of several ‘
choices’, only one choice presents itself as practical,
the one which was originally designed to be the ‘
only’ choice from the beginning.
The secret to administering the modern day ‘
democratic’ nanny police state is to subsidize the
illusion of freedom which when you boil it all down is expressed as
freedom of choice. The key is to manage those choices in such a way
that no ‘
good’ choices (defined as fair and beneficial to “
We the People”) are presented and the worst best choice
further ensnares the public in the corruption nets like an
encircled school of sardines. To do this, the government and its
joined-at-the-hip special interests most often employ the carrot
and stick approach.
Let the games begin.
With Obamacare the process works like this. Currently
mandatory
healthsick care
insurance policies are so expensive even the reasonably well off
income wise will swallow hard at the price tag. To mitigate the
mandatory pain the public is informed they can always opt out if
they don’t like the choices.
Butif they do so they must visit the penalty tax
box each year to ‘
pay’ for their
freedom to choose none of the above. As planned we
are given several bad choices to choose from.
Next we are introduced to the carrot after a firm shaking of the
stick. Offer to subsidize all those bad choices on a sliding (and
generous) scale so individuals whose income is well above ‘
poverty’ level, itself a fictitious number pulled out of
thin air which is supposed to represent abject suffering but in
reality is so much worse, as bait to entice them into the spring
loaded
mousepeasant
trap. Anyone with an adjusted gross income between 100% and 400% of
the ‘
poverty’ rate is eligible for a (government
printedpaid)
subsidy on a sliding scale. See, that anal probe doesn’t hurt so
bad now does it?
You may ‘
choose’ to purchase the exact same policy directly from
the insurance company and receive no subsidy at all, either on a
monthly basis or when tax preparation time rolls around. Or you can
use a Federal or State government sponsored and created internet
information gathering portal, spill your guts on line and expose
all your financial and personal information to the government (and
any competent hacker or NSA operative) to receive a subsidy for the
exact same policy. Some ‘choice’, huh?
And all this is presented with the straightest of straight
faces, as if not only is this perfectly normal but it has always
been this way. Besides, it’s for your own good. While not exactly a
Hobson’s choice, it’s too damn close to tell the difference.
Annual insurance company executive
conference.
Essentially the insurance companies get to author the law and
then raise premiums for four years in anticipation of the law’s
enactment. Upon implementation (and after further premium
increases) the insurance companies are paid some or all of the high
risk ‘
pool’ insurance premiums directly by the government on a
monthly basis. Best of all, if the subsidy was incorrectly applied
or calculated and the
taxpayerinsured
received too much, the IRS is the bill collector, not the insurance
company. It just doesn’t get any better than this.
The Affordable Care Act is a prime example of the ‘
legal’ process by which an increasingly despotic and
fascist government joins hands with other powerful and moneyed
entities in opposition to the very people who supposedly ‘
support’ the government in order to maintain power over a
system that is rapidly collapsing primarily because of the corrupt
influences of the government and its cronies. The crony nanny state
isn’t here to protect you, but to protect itself and its cronies
from you.
It takes very little imagination to recognize similar behavior
in the higher education/student loan juggernaut, the
military/industrial/political/false flag war machine, the
banking/Wall Street/Federal Reserve/IRS parasitic fiat organism,
the oil/petrodollar/puppet dictator/empire collective, the nanny
state/militarized police/fake terrorism/freedom of speech area/bash
and gas the protestors/left-right illusion of freedom game, the
Hollywood/NFL/NCAA/MLB/NBA public financing of private assets/bread
and circuses distraction, the 1984/FCC/MSM/ISP/DOD/ATT/NSA et al
spying on citizens in the name of terrorism/blackmail of anyone
useful dirty underwear program
andthe Corporate Welfare/State Tax
Concession/phantom jobs added/Congressional donations, kickbacks
and bribery crony capitalism scam to name just a few of the more
obvious.
Wait......I think there's more blood
left in this turnip.
The one party left out of this
you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-fill-your-pocket game is the citizen in
whose name all this is justified and done. As The Powers That Be
(TPTB) leeches of the slave plantation system bleed ever more life
sustaining financial fluids from the population, the natural
tendency of said population is either to flee the system or to
cutoff and burn the leeches. The leeches, being quite smart and
enterprising sociopaths, understand their hosts might actually
revolt if something isn’t done and have begun to turn the vise ever
tighter to seriously clamp down on dissent and ‘
disorder’.
The solution, at least for the leeches, is to dig their suckers
in even deeper while injecting ever more anticoagulants and
painkillers in the form of more bad choices, narrower cattle chutes
and a lot more extra judicial killings by the elite status quo
enforcers aka the militarized police. Whom, I might add, are
increasingly protected by a corrupt and co-opted judicial system
endorsed and enforced by executive order and new Congressional
Critter ‘
laws’ making it all nice and legal.
All it needs to make it complete is a pretty red bow on top and
NSA/FBI operatives conducting sneak and peak investigations (also
known as a ‘
legal’ breaking and entering) to examine our person and
papers while planting drugs, child porn and/or incriminating
documents on our computers and in our paper files while harassing
any remaining dissidents brave enough to stand up and just say
no.
Plenty of room at the inn for
dissidents.
The system itself is completely corrupt and thoroughly rigged
folks. There is no way out and no possibility of making changes
from within because, similar to the methods employed by organized
crime, the system will protect itself from those it claims to be
protecting while shielding those who most benefit from this
arrangement in order to feed itself. What started as the
totalitarian tiptoe has now turned into an extremely dangerous
crony capitalist state. The nanny police state no longer needs to
sneak about since its only remaining purpose from here to
perpetuity is to grind our bones to make its bread.
Sadly the more average Jane and Joe becomes aware of the trap,
the more dangerous the police state becomes as each citizen/slave
is recognized less as a food source to the leaches and more like an
enemy combatant come to destroy. Our ignorance is the police
state’s bliss and the gearing up for battle by the police state is
rapidly extinguishing the public’s ignorance in an all consuming
positive feedback loop of shocked awareness. We ain’t in Kansas
anymore Toto.
Those of us who now recognize we are sleeping with the enemy,
and worse the enemy is rapidly becoming you and me as we are
consumed by the engorged system, have some stark and disquieting
choices to make, all of them bad with none of them leading to a
satisfactory solution. As the nanny police state continues to
destroy its host in order to feed itself those choices will not
remain static, but instead will move hand in hand with the
political wind and the continuing dollar debasement.
Mrs. Cog and I do not have answers to all of our own questions
regarding how to protect ourselves, along with those we love and
care for, from the encroaching, and suffocating crony nanny state.
What we do know is profound in its overwhelming simplicity. When
you find yourself in a deep hole with a shovel, the first course of
action is to stop digging and begin the process of climbing
out.
Or in this case when you find yourself face to face with the
crony nanny state, the first course of action is to withdraw to the
best of your ability, take stock of the situation and your
resources, then begin to forge a path towards more sustainable
living and less dependency upon the nanny state. Since everyone’s
situation is different, there is no ironclad advice to give you
other than just to begin the process. Essentially do everything you
can to buffer yourself from the state while bolstering your own
position.
Now get to work.
12-23-2014
Cognitive Dissonance
Hard at work calculating next year's
premium increase.