Muddling through is becoming a kind description for the implementation of Obamacare.
In addition to a multitude of operational problems and cost misfires we recently learned that the employer mandate would be delayed for a year.
On Friday another shoe dropped. The government is delaying for a year verification of who is eligible for subsidies.
A reader in the health care industry sent along this WaPo article, Health insurance marketplaces will not be required to verify consumer claims (emphasis mine):
The Obama administration announced Friday that it would significantly scale back the health law’s requirements that new insurance marketplaces verify consumers’ income and health insurance status.
Instead, the federal government will rely more heavily on consumers’ self-reported information until 2015, when it plans to have stronger verification systems in place….
Still, [Timothy S.] Jost [a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va] said, Friday’s rule shows that the government is in “triage mode. They have tried to figure out what they need to do right now and what they can delay until later. And they are very low on resources.”
Ian Spatz, a senior adviser at Manatt Health Solutions, agreed.
“As crunch time is coming, they’re just muddling through and figuring out short cuts,” he said. “It might not be elegant, but this is how they’re trying to make the law work.”
Yuval Levin is less charitable in his description of the problem (h/t Byron York), Obamacare’s Invitation to Fraud:
Opening the door wide open to fraud could well increase the number of people in the exchanges, but it will also make that number far less meaningful—casting a shadow over whatever is achieved by the enrollment effort set to launch in the fall. It will also, needless to say, increase the cost of the exchange subsidies. The administration is clearly worried enough about enrollment to take that risk and bear that cost. It seems to be operating under the assumption that the way to secure Obamacare’s future is to get as many people as possible into the system and receiving subsidies. Maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong, but they certainly seem increasingly desperate.
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Just another disaster on Obama’s plate. Meanwhile, I will be curious to see how the HOUSE does in 2014. By now, one party should have pulled ahead of the other. But, instead, it’s as if the chariot wheels have locked together. And, the unfortunate horses, running forward, cannot separate the wheels of the two chariots.
Did we condemn ourselves to these problems because doctors were sued, and patients grew rich? As if this was just a lottery ticket?
We “grew” this expensive glob, because now, just to process the paperwork, we are employing a slew of otherwise incompetent help. All on the doctor’s “dime?”
Did you know back in the 1970s, at Kings Country Hospital in Brooklyn, patients came into the emergency room because they wanted to be fed the free lunches? While when a psychiatric patient was discharged … and during their stays their psychosis was brought under control. They’d leave the (“G”) building. And, they’d leave the little lunch bag with their medicines in it, on windowsills of nearby buildings? Nobody charges you extra if you keep coming back.
It’s no wonder to me that the whole system has jumped the track.
They’ve designed an Edsel when what we need is Volkswagen.
Unlike the Edsel, this lemon will not be yanked….Please everyone remember we have the 2014 elections
Looks like it will take about a decade to boil the health fraud frog.
By then, pravda should have enough enough time to convince the low information voters that it really is free.
If not, there should be an overwhelming number of zero information voters by that time, and it won’t matter. Al Sharpton will be president and whatever whistle he blows, the Trayjuans will follow.
If they destroy the private healthcare industry too quickly, they’ll be able to start up where they left off.
That’s not the plan.
The zeal of marxist to “fundamentally change society” is often their undoing, in absence of the “point of a gun”.
Like the Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt after nearly a decade in patient planning, so too were the Obama/Pelosi/Reid marxist regime too eager to play with their new toy.
edit: decade to mean century.
The GOP needs to hold the administration’s feet to the fire on this. As attractive as it is to put off implementation, we are supposedly a nation of laws. Cherry-picking what to enforce is wrong…for the WH and for Congress.
Gov’t is always the muddle man.
I wonder if HHS Sebelius will create a public svc video of the Lemony Snicket sort?
Trust the taxpayers, they’re honest! After all, it’s not like over $46 million in tax refunds would be sent to a single address (of an “honest taxpayer”, no doubt) in Atlanta with no one at the IRS catching on.
There are so many people who have a false sense of entitlement nowadays that any attempt to rely on integrity is badly misplaced. A few weeks back I saw an investigation of the notorious “free Obama phones” by a local TV station; people were going in to get 4, 5 or more of them, lying about their financial status, and *openly* telling the phone distributors that they would resell the phones.
This is the kind of thing from which a nightmare can arise. If enough people become convinced that following the rules is merely punishing them while others benefit by gaming the system, voluntary compliance will rapidly erode. And there’s no way that the IRS can afford to collect taxes by “enforcement”, given the high cost of agents and auditors.
NEWS ITEM: The OBOZO totalitraian police state will allow people “…To Self-Report Their Income With No Verification…” for OBOZOCARE.
…Of course, in addition to self-reporting income with no verification, the OBOZO regime will ALSO ALLOW SELF-REPORTING OF CITIZENSHIP WITH NO VERIFICATION. The d-cRAT socialist extremist “plan” has ALWAYS BEEN to provide OBOZOCARE FREE STUFF to ILLEGALS.
Pigford III (or is it IX)?
Isn’t it clear by now that Obamacare has little to do with health, healthcare or health insurance, but is more of a massive, corrupt income-redistribution and vote-buying scheme?
For example, if you think *proof of eligibility* is the *only* thing the Obama administration will waive, think again.
For example, what it the Obama administration were to waive, not just proof of eligibility, but — get this — proof of *insurance*.
I mean, suppose that millions of future Democratic voters — sorry, I meant “people” — could secure the government *subsidy* to buy the medical insurance, but *without* actually *buying* the insurance, because proof of insurance will have been either waived, or based on trust?
And suppose that the government prosecuted no one for this kind of fraud?
Wouldn’t that kind of encourage people to commit this kind of fraud, and then to vote for Democrats?
Now, of course, I could be wrong. But if you think this would never happen, you haven’t been paying attention.
Yep, and we’re finding out that O’bammyCare was unworkable from the start and now to spice things up, add in a similar debacle called immigration reform.
These people from Chicago have an endless bag of dirty tricks in their tool box…
“ . . . get as many people as possible into the system and receiving subsidies.”
Of course. That’s the idea. Pick an entitlement; welfare, cell phones, food stamps, citizenship, voter registration, unemployment compensation, disability, abortions, contraceptive protection, low interest rate mortgages, student loans, healthcare, unionization of government workers, guaranteed pensions for government employees, and on, and on, and on.
Obama and his minions will enroll as many people as they can in every one of these programs. There will not be a single person anywhere in the country who will not be beholden to at least one of them and ready to howl when their program is cut or they are denied a “right.” Who or what is going to stop them? Congress? The Supreme Court? Someone? Anyone? Ferris?
Only a naïve fool would believe they are desperate.
“Let me tell you something else, David,” NBC News’s Chuck Todd told David Gregory on Meet the Press Sunday, “the White House had been so confident that they were going to sign immigration reform this year. But for the first time I am hearing that there is some doubt seeping in, that they think that maybe the House won’t act … The problem is there’s no trigger at the end of this year. … So I don’t know how this happens by the end of this year and suddenly now the White House doesn’t see a path to how this happens.”
Todd is right. Something did change in the immigration debate last week. But it wasn’t the realization that there is no “trigger” to force the House to act. That has been true since the beginning of the debate. What changed this week is that Republicans lost all trust in President Obama’s ability to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.
Delayed mandates and invitation to fraud
On Tuesday of last week, news broke that the Treasury Department was about to announce it’s intention to delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate for a year. Nothing in the law gives the Obama administration authority to delay the mandate, but he did it anyway.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/morning-examiner-immigration-reform-is-dead-and-obamacare-implementation-killed-it/article/2532768?custom_click=rss