Party Pooper Podcast

How Obama Destroyed Healthcare.

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How Obama Destroyed Healthcare.

But a few insurance giants made out great!

Matt Jordan

Mar 12, 2025

Transcript

Recommend you follow in the text at 1.25 speed.

A 2-minute appeal. The show starts at the 2 minute mark.

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Let’s get to the house keeping right out of the gate. I was talking with a fellow podcaster this morning. She was talking about the frustration at monetizing her work here on Substack. I could not agree more with her frustration. We bust our asses. We research, write, record, edit, post and schedule, and promote. Then do it again. We post on social media and get likes. I gotta tell ya, I appreciate the likes. I really do, but all the busting of ass is done in search of growth. We need shares! Please don’t keep the P4B and Free Zone a secret. Comments are good to so I know you still have a pulse…and a point of view.

As for monetization, we in a market now where everybody is hawking subscriptions. While $6 or $8 per month doesn’t seem like a lot of money, how many times can a viewer commit to that? That is why I am trying very hard to resist a paywall. I have about 90k users who come and go and 2000 subscribers. I’d love to have more. And I try to support the work with voluntary donations, a sponsor here and there and the Po River online shop.

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Preface

Before we get to the main event, let me preface what you are about to hear with this: JAMA says we are headed for a shortage of hospital beds in this country. This didn’t happen in the last 30 days, but the Left will inevitably blame DJT for the damage THEY have done to our medical industry for a 2 generations.

This show is about how Obamacare made permanent the industry’s inability to be in any way agile in there response to market needs. Government mandates made the industry cumbersome. Obamacare sealed our fate.

Compare

Did you ever consider why college is so expensive? It’s because the government is now elbow deep in the system. They’ve taken over the college loan program, guaranteeing payment to colleges. Costs were climbing every year since the guaranteed loan program started late last century. They climb because the schools knew no matter what they charge, kids and parents will borrow, and the socialist nanny state will pay.

Similarly, when Obama unconstitutionally took over the medial insurance industry in this country, and congress and Chief Justice John Roberts conspired to support the crime, they had the exact same effect on our medial care. The indoctrination of our kids is inexcusable, the destruction of health care in this nation is criminal.

Closing hospitals while demand increases - dangerously.

I don’t know what the situation is in your neighborhood, but Delaware County, PA has lost several hospitals. And it’s not as if the population has shrunk significantly. In fact, the need for MORE medial care is increasing rapidly as the population ages. So as demand increases at least four area hospitals can’t keep their doors open. Why?

Well, first their is the byzantine systems of payment. Hospitals wildly over charge for treatment because they know getting paid is a crap shoot at best. Can you see the circle of irony already forming? Insurance companies are constantly cutting corners. There are several reasons for this.

One is that the insurance customer base has shrunk over the years. With the birth of the abomination known as Obamacare or ACA, millions of people were enrolled in Medicaid. More on that in a bit.

So the few companies that Obamacare picked as winners, including the companies that wrote the law, have a smaller customer base and are hemmed in by FEDERAL regulation from expanding or merging to increase their markets.

They still have shareholders to pay, and like all businesses they MUST grow or die. So, they are becoming almost as unethical as Medicaid and Medicare in how they compensate for treatment. They are further hampered by all the mandated coverage Obamacare brought under one roof.

You’ve heard me speak of mandated coverage over the years, so I will try to truncate the reality here.

When wealthy executives started demanding benefits packages over cash (The tax rate was nearly 90% at the time), unions thought their people should get the same consideration. At the time, your typical union worker carried his own insurance. It was a hassle, especially if an individual wasn’t thrifty, but if you were employed, you could handle the coverage.

Also, way back then, insurance was NOT for colds and fevers or stitches or checkups - minor issues. It was for major medical expenses. I remember as a child, when the doc would make a house call, my mom took out her purse (or she’d take out her checkbook and sometimes tell the doc not to cash the check until next week). Like ALL insurance systems, if you didn’t draw from it too often, you were rewarded with lower rates. This was more than enough to offset the cash spent on minor stuff.

But the Karens of the day didn’t think it was fair that they had insurance but had to budget for the small stuff. There ought to be a law! Those rich doctors are taking advantage! And so it would be. For the next few decades we’d see the headlines. Insurance must now cover this and that. Finally, it was insurance companies must cover EVERYTHING.

To finance this, they raised their rates. And the Karens howled again. So the political whores started regulating rates. That, of course, screwed up the entire market.

With costs skyrocketing, and simultaneous with the growing mandates, not because of greedy companies, but an overbearing government, insurance companies got the idea to offer pooled coverage, facilitated by employers, to groups of people - volume business. Now almost every full time employee could get insurance as a benefit.

And the nanny state was on their heels the entire time. What started out as an idea to save on the cost of insurance was turned into bureaucratic cluster fuck. Compliance was a nightmare. It wasn’t a case of I pay X and my employer pays Y and a list of coverages were paid when needed. There were forms and reports and weird exceptions to everything. How things were paid was crazy. And very quickly, your “benefit” at work was as costly or more so than anything that came before it.

And all the while the mandates were piled on. The politicians could say they did something and the insurance companies took their cut. They had to. They were not in the charity business. And they had to keep their doors open and so much cash on hand.

The first irony from all of this was huge new pools of money chasing the same amount of services. That causes inflation in the market in question. So as more people signed on to have every single thing covered, doctors and hospitals charged more. They didn’t have to work for you dollar anymore. They had all the walk-in traffic they could possibly handle.

Hospitals like Fitzgerald and Delaware County Hospital, in Delco, for example no longer had to compete to get business. But they too had to add a shit ton of bureaucracy on to what administration they already had. In 11 years none of that would matter. One would be gone, thanks to the “help” provided by Obamacare.

The costs of just running the payment system and keeping compliant with the federal and state monsters became so complex that entire industries grew up around just those functions. What used to be done by an office in the hospital or by a secretary in a doctor’s office, had to be done by medical billing and compliance specialists. The average hospital (161 beds) pays $7.5 million per year for this nightmare.

Think about that. If hospitals and doctors were left to handle customers as they used to, but with today’s technology, an administrator and two assistants could serve the business of a large hospital. Tracking money and sniffing out fraud would be child’s play.

But no! We had to combine ceremonial Chinese and ancient Sanskrit into one Tower of Babel. All this, so you can pay way too much to have your blisters lanced.

Then in 2010, recognizing that the system was utterly untenable and that some people didn’t have insurance (not everyone needed it or wanted it) B. Hussein Obama, peace be upon him, decided to fix the system with a government takeover, and 27,000 pages of federal code was piled onto the existing pig. Christ knows how many pages of regulation have been added by unelected bureaucrats since.

The idea was not to help poor people. It was another means by which the federal beast could tap into our money for revenue. AND to help the cronies who wrote the bill, and would be actually providing the now-mandatory policies. That’s socialized medicine through the back door, folks. Don’t let any Lefty jack wagon tell you otherwise.

Insurance rates for private insurance rose quickly, in several states tripled almost immediately. Co-pays and deductibles rendered even having insurance nearly pointless. That is in part because crony insurance companies were awarded closed markets and told to make what they could from those markets. So now you know why the insurers balk at paying. Delay, Deny, Depose. It’s now baked into the system thanks to Obamacare.

Medicare is no better. When billed, Medicare usually balks, then after weeks and months of wasted time and money OVER EACH CASE, they still don’t pay full boat.

Every year hospitals raise rates to cover slow or light compensation. Every year, insurance companies raise rates to cover that. Every year the system gets more complex. And every year the pain required to unfuck this mess, if we ever do, looms larger. There would have been an adjustment if we fixed it all in the 1980’s. There would be real difficulty and confusion if we did it now - and we should. But if we don’t fix all this now, the inevitable collapse of Medicare and Medicaid, along with Social Security, will be catastrophic and will pull down the entire economy.

But how could that be? I mean, there’s lots of little accounts in a big fund with your name on them, right? There’s the Matt Jordan Medicare account, and the Ron Cori Social Security account just waiting for us to claim them in a few years, right? Wrong. There IS NO MONEY. That’s because Uncle Stinky got his greasy meat hooks on your money and spent or wasted every last dime.

To pay you, the government must now print and/or borrow every nickle. The treasury can’t even pay for the all the things they budgeted for two months ago! There’s no fund to pay you back for all the money that was taken from you. There’s only Uncle Stinky competing AGAINST YOU for every dime of cash, and every penny of credit, to try to keep these Ponzi schemes afloat for another year.

So, instead of fixing the healthcare system (that’s what they told you Obamacare was for), Barry O and Democrats codified the worst of our insurance industries problems and added them to the already doomed Medicare and Medicaid programs. In the process they added all the regulatory bullshit to our already wildly over bloated federal registry. And before 2014, they couldn’t execute their existing obligations with any competence.

The irony of fraud

In this unforgivably complex balloon knot we’ve created, finding fraud requires forensic data skill sets. And just in the case of Medicare, fraud is in the tens of billions of dollars.

And the system itself provides fertile ground for fraud. The supposed income cutoff for eligibility is 138% over the poverty line. But as we watched early on, the government played pretty fast and loose with that figure, especially with families. Someone making significantly more than that can use “spenddown” and all kinds of other maneuvers to get on Medicaid. At the time Obamacare first hit the streets, Barry and company were actively recruiting as many people into Medicaid as they possibly could.

Add to this the number of people who actually live with a girlfriend/boyfriend but keep their mother’s house as their home address. They earn under the table or by criminal means and show no apparent income. And YES, this is as common, in our welfare state, as the leaves on the trees.

So what do we do to fix all this?

Here’s what I laid out on 2017. It would have been better if we had done it then. It would have been better still if Nancy Pelosi hadn’t “deemed to have voted the [Obamacare] bill out of conference”, thereby passing a bill taking over 1/6 of our economy ILLEGALLY! (NO SUCH REQUIRED VOTE EVER TOOK PLACE. She didn’t have the votes.) It was a scam, as was passing this trillion dollar pig under the provisions of “reconciliation”. It was all a lie. But that is the pig we are left with.

7 January 2017. This was written not only as a critique of Obamacare but in response to the GOP’s idea of “replacing” it. Their idea was every bit as stupid as Obamacare without the proper funding.

“If you enact laws that says this is how you will insure people, you are already screwing the pooch. Insurance people, who are taking all the risk, know how to do that better than ANY government social engineer. And when you introduce your clever new insurance laws and don’t separate out pre-existing conditions and 26 year-olds on their parents plans (WTF?), you are simply creating Obamacare-lite. In other words, you haven’t fixed the problem. You’ve only delayed the collapse for a bit.

Here is the alternative that will work. You:

Set a timetable for ending all the government mandates on medical insurance for all those above the poverty line and not on Medicare or treatment through the military.
Repeal laws that prevent competition in the industry.
End all subsidies and tax breaks for employment-related medical insurance. That’s just an extra impediment to the efficient bet between the customer and the insurance company. The money the employer saves in medical set-asides and compliance can be put into the employee’s paycheck. With that kind of money, an individual can create a serious health savings account and/or pay for premiums.
End all subsidies for wellness programs. They have been proven not to work. They are used as sops for doctors and others to suck up extra insurance money.
Thwart jackpot justice in the form of egregious damage awards. The U.S. courts were not set up to ruin doctors.
Along that same line, move first to eliminate those mandates that encourage doctors to practice defensive medicine. Then eliminate all mandates. It is not up to the government to decide how much you pay, and for what coverage. It is up to you and the insurance company.
Encourage people to seek minor, non-emergency treatment (no longer covered under our adult approach) from facilities that post their rates. Educate them to shop their medical dollar. You’ll be AMAZED at how inexpensive routine treatment will become.

This list is not exhaustive by any means. But by doing these things we take the billions of dollars sloshing around a bloated and mismanaged system and let it move much more effectively between patient, insurer and doctor. By extracting the government money from the system, the incentive to bilk the system as government systems are always bilked, is eliminated.”

When people read all that, the first I usually get is how do we fund this? WE DON’T. We buy it. Asking the question shows how the default position of the average person is that everything must be done by the nanny state.

The two-step solution.

First, we make health insurance exactly what is was designed to be the first time a company bet on the health of an individual. We make it for catastrophic care - the kind of care YOU cannot afford to pay out-of-pocket.

Insurance companies can provide a broad scale of coverage based on your acceptance of risk and their assessment of your health (their risk). You basically place a bet that you will get sick. They bet that you won’t - as defined by the policy you choose.

The only thing the government needs to do is make the insurance fraud guidelines so simple and straight-forward that no amount of cronyism will save an offender.

This will reduce the cost of insurance significantly.

Then second, general practitioners offer their service PRIVATELY to patients on a retainer. It could easily be as low as $100 per month for a patient, $200 for a family. When you need minor treatment it is covered by the retainer. If you need treatment that truly is more expensive than the retainer covers (we’ll detail that next) you are billed for the overage or your retainer is adjusted slightly.

So how do we watch all that?

Hospitals and doctors list all the treatments they offer and the price of each. GP’s list what retainers don’t cover and the burden of such treatments place on the patient. This requirement also applies to emergency care.

This provides two benefits for a patient. 1. The patient can more efficiently shop for a GP. 2. If going to a hospital for non-emergency treatment, they can shop the best price for that treatment. This will minimize the impact on future premiums to their insurer.

Strip the onerous regulation from the system. Most of that is busy work to pay the administrative monster created by government.

The result

By doing all this we do change the landscape for doctors. By living in a world where their customers will be paying based on informed budgeting, the average specialists may have to forgo the second BMW for a while. Some may have to golf on weekends like the rest of us. But the medical field will still be lucrative, as the demand suggests it should be.

GP’s will have a much more vibrant practice. Being a family doctor will become much more appealing. Building a successful and growing family practice would draw more GP’s into the system, especially when their compliance costs plummet.

With all the above, we BRING BACK REAL COMPETITION!!! No phony boundaries and no regulations designed to keep out upstarts. Anyone with a medical background, AI and some financial backers will be able to create a smart and efficient insurance company. Play it straight and make a killing. Jack up your policy holders…and do hard time.

We are talking about re-privatizing the health and insurance industry. For the TRULY needy, we can still have a REAL Medicaid program. We don’t have to kick grandma off Medicare. As we’ll see with Social Security in a future post, the system will grandfather in those vested in the system.

One more point about Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), a bigger bullshit term than the Inflation Reduction Act, has NOTHING to do with healthcare. It doesn’t improve the care of a single patient. It was ENTIRELY about the government taking control of the medial insurance industry. And, because it is now a government program, the system is shot through with holes and unintended consequences.

A couple of the hospitals I mentioned earlier were taken over by hedge funds. I’m reminded of how money people took over Boeing. It went from one the the safest, most efficient companies in the world to a lumbering and UNSAFE monster. It had previously been run by aviation men.

Because the Democratic party, and more specifically Obama and his ilk, are tied so tightly to Wall Street and big money, allowances were made for money people to take over hospitals and run them like money guys would - disastrously. You don’t spend $20k turn a screwdriver and fix humans. It’s more complicated than that. And no government program or hedge fund guy will ever be able to cope with the working end of a hospital; or for that matter, the dedicated efforts of insurance professionals.

Failing to make things work correctly, these hedge fund managers, it seems, treated the hospital like a piggy bank. They treated them the way a mob boss treats a bar it takes over by force or blackmail. The end is the same in both scenarios. And the money guys DO NOT give a shit.

As this post insists, the players should be you, your insurer and your doctor/hospital. Any more fingers in the mix and you have disaster. Government fingers absolutely CAUSE corruption and ruin industries.

Finally

Make no mistake, the reason Obamacare came into being was to facilitate the ultimate collapse of the health insurance industry, long an ambition of Alinskyites like Barry O and BJ Bill’s wife. They see a weak and dependent populace as a goal - and a tribute to their greatness.

Imagine the poorest and grayest of Soviet hell holes. That is where we are headed if we let Medicare and the last of private medicine collapse. Fix it now! And instead of closing hospitals, we’ll be building them.