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Obamacare Tag

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 21, 2015 7 Comments
Think tanks, policy wonks, legislative staffers, and politijunkies are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling on King v. Burwell. As for the rest of the country, most have clue why this case is so crucial. John David Danielson of The Federalist addressed this issue Thursday:
According to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 7 in 10 Americans have heard little or nothing about King v. Burwell, the U.S. Supreme Court case that will, any day now, decide the fate of Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans. Yet 63 percent of those surveyed also say that if the court rules against the government, Congress should act to keep those subsidies in place. Got that? The vast majority of Americans know almost nothing about this case, but 63 percent have an opinion about what Congress should do in response to a ruling that carries certain policy implications.
Thanks for nothing, Media. But what about those enrolled in Obamacare? The Foundation for Government Accountability surveyed voters enrolled in a federal exchange heath care plan. Obamacare customers do think Congress should act to change the law, but not for the same reasons as the general respondents surveyed in the Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 20, 2015 24 Comments
There has been a lot of speculation, including by me, about what the Republican-controlled Congress will do should the Supreme Court rule against Obama in King v. Burwell.  Should the Court strike down federal subsidies, Republicans will need to have a plan in place to address this decision as it impacts those who are currently receiving subsidies for ObamaCare from the federal exchange because their state did not set up a state exchange. Republicans are still talking about a "fix" but are now stressing that it is to be "transitional" rather than permanent.  According to Bloomberg:
[Representative Dennis Ross of Florida] added, “There’s a strong consensus in that room” that the subsidies must be continued in some form “until Republicans can substantively change the law.” Participants at Wednesday’s closed-door meeting said key aspects of a transition plan were presented to lawmakers by Ryan, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia and Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline of Minnesota. Along with immediate repeal of the law’s individual and employer mandates, the plan would give states the option to build their own insurance exchanges and offer subsidies, using federal money. Alternatively, people in states affected by the ruling would receive a subsidy to purchase an insurance plan either from healthcare.gov or on the open market.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 15, 2015 22 Comments
Here at LI, we've covered numerous aspects of ObamaCare from its questionable passage to legal challenges to various executive branch "tweaks" and shady exemptions to the devastating effects the law has had on millions of Americans. Now, apparently, the executive branch is going above and beyond the law in its efforts to keep the unpopular law afloat despite ample evidence that it's a disaster. Obama has repeatedly shown that he doesn't think he needs Congress' approval to change the law, and now he's being accused of funding parts of it without Congressional appropriations.  Funds set aside specifically for tax refunds owed to hard-working Americans are being used to subsidize the Basic Health Program associated with ObamaCare.  According to Paige Winfield Cunningham:
Leading Republicans are charging that the Obama administration is illegally funding yet another part of Obamacare, in addition to the part of the healthcare law over which House Republicans are already suing. Their latest criticism centers on the Affordable Care Act's basic health program, an optional program for states that started this year, in which low-income residents can get subsidized, state-contracted health plans instead of buying them through the new online marketplaces. The administration is funding the program illegally by using a pot of IRS money used for tax refunds, says Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., who leads oversight efforts on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 12, 2015 31 Comments
Electronic medical records were supposed to save doctors' time and improve results by putting your entire medical history in one place. Two major problems. First, it doesn't work. What takes a physician a couple of minutes to write on your chart now can become a burdensome scroll through computer screens:
Government regulators are backing down from many of their toughest requirements for doctors' and hospitals' use of digital medical records, just as Congress is stepping up its oversight of issues with the costly technology. Under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and hospitals are being pushed to switch from paper to electronic records.... The federal government has spent about $28 billion in incentives to help doctors install and use EHRs, also called EMRs. But these digitized records remain the bane of many doctor and patient relationships in the Louisville area and across the nation, as physicians stare at computer screens during consultations.... Electronic health records "have made our lives harder" without improving safety, said Jean Ross, co-president of National Nurses United. Last year, the nurse union called on the FDA "to enact much tougher oversight and public protections" on electronic health records use.

Posted by New Neo on June 11, 2015 20 Comments
Atlantic writer Russell Berman wonders:
...[Obama's] decision to champion his signature achievement in such pointed terms just weeks before the high court’s ruling is due raised the question of whether Obama was trying to jawbone the justices at the 11th hour. ...“It seems so cynical,” he said, “to want to take coverage away from millions of people; to take care away from people who need it the most; to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now been woven into the fabric of America.”... The speech came a day after the president, in response to a reporter’s question, commented directly on the case before the justices..."Under well-established precedent, there is no reason why the existing exchanges should be overturned through a court case," Obama said. "This should be an easy case. Frankly, it probably shouldn't even have been taken up," he added... [In 2012, Obama had] sharply warned the Court not to rule against his healthcare law the first time around. “I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama said then.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 06, 2015 11 Comments
Aleister's grim update on Vermont's Obamacare struggles prompted me to double check the status of Covered California, the supposed poster child of successful state exchanges. As I suspected, the prognosis is not good.
Covered California has lost bragging rights for highest health-insurance exchange enrollment to Florida, new federal figures show. A total 1.36 million Californians were signed up for coverage, had picked a plan and paid premiums due by the end of March, federal health officials announced Tuesday. Almost 1.42 million Floridians had done so by the same date. Texas came in third, with enrollment over 966,400.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that the growth in Cover California enrollment was . . . less than robust. In fact, it was at 1 percent!

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 06, 2015 7 Comments
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Affordable Care Act was going to bring about the golden age of single payer healthcare in the Green Mountain State. Instead, it went there to die. Activists protested during the new governor's inauguration, but it made no difference. Now, things are getting worse. Abby Goodnough of the New York Times:
In Vermont, Frustrations Mount Over Affordable Care Act BURLINGTON, Vt. — Just a few years ago, lawmakers in this left-leaning state viewed President Obama’s Affordable Care Act as little more than a pit stop on the road to a far more ambitious goal: single-payer, universal health care for all residents. Then things unraveled. The online insurance marketplace that Vermont built to enroll people in private coverage under the law had extensive technical failures. The problems soured public and legislative enthusiasm for sweeping health care changes just as Gov. Peter Shumlin needed to build support for his complex single-payer plan. Finally, Mr. Shumlin, a Democrat, shelved the plan in December, citing the high cost to taxpayers. He called the decision “the greatest disappointment of my political life.”...

Posted by New Neo on June 04, 2015 21 Comments
Republicans are in a pickle, and have been since the moment Obamacare was passed. You might think they're in a good position, because the Supreme Court is considering overturning the state Obamacare exchanges and subsidies because of wording in the statute, and this would throw the entire Obamacare system into turmoil. The case in question is King v. Burwell, and it could be decided any day now. But there's one catch, and it's a biggee: if the ruling goes against Obamacare, the press and the left will rail at the Republicans for being the big bad meanies who took away a lot of people's subsidies. That was part of the beauty of Obamacare for the left, and one of the many many reasons they were so extraordinarily eager to pass it and pass it as quickly as possible: they wanted to create a dependence and an expectation, otherwise known as an entitlement, that would be tremendously hard to reverse. But what do the American people actually want if SCOTUS throws out the state exchanges and therefore the state subsidies? A substantial majority appear to want Congress to fix Obamacare rather than re-establish the state exchanges, according to this poll. But what would that actually look like?

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on May 29, 2015 36 Comments
While we await the Supreme Court decision regarding federal vs. state subsidies, Republicans can't decide if they want the subsidies upheld or struck down.  Indeed, some believe that upholding them will be best for Republicans (note, not best for America or Americans).  Sharyl Attkisson reports:
It would theoretically be a victory for Republicans who oppose Obamacare: Americans would likely find the health care law less palatable if tax money isn’t helping pay for their mandatory policies. They would suddenly be exposed to the reality faced by those who aren’t getting subsidies: insurance may cost more, come with higher deductibles, and provide less coverage. But some Congressional Republicans are more worried about winning the Supreme Court case than losing it. “There are Republicans right now scared to death that we’re going to win,” says one Republican leader who did not want to be quoted by name. “They’re in meetings right now planning ways to revive the subsidies if the [Supreme] Court strikes them down.”
They are "scared to death" because they are worried the Democratic and media narratives would place the blame on Republicans for the loss of subsidies by those who've purchased ObamaCare through the federal exchanges.  Attkisson explains:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on April 18, 2015 4 Comments
In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that states have the right to refuse the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion without penalty to other, existing, federal Medicaid funding.  Following is the summary from SCOTUSblog:
The Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion is divided and complicated.  The bottom line is that: (1) Congress acted constitutionally in offering states funds to expand coverage to millions of new individuals; (2) So states can agree to expand coverage in exchange for those new funds; (3) If the state accepts the expansion funds, it must obey by the new rules and expand coverage; (4) but a state can refuse to participate in the expansion without losing all of its Medicaid funds; instead the state will have the option of continue the its current, unexpanded plan as is. [emphasis added]
It is quite surprising, then, that the Obama administration is trying to use federal low-income pool (LIP) funding to, according to Governor Scott, "coerce" Florida into accepting the short-term federal funding of the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion. There are a number of good reasons for refusing the Medicaid expansion: Not only are health outcomes under Medicaid substantially less than those under any other health care or health insurance program, but this federal funding effectively runs out in only three years, leaving states to foot the hugely-expanded Medicaid bill. Governor Scott has said that he is unwilling to pile such crushing debt on the backs of Florida taxpayers:

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 16, 2015 42 Comments
Since we "celebrated" Tax Day with an analysis on the difficulties of cutting down the tax code, now seems like a good time to review the topic that is the only other certainty in life -- death. California's politicians, not content with messing around with our water flow, are looking to OK physician-assisted suicide rules.
A controversial bill to bring physician-assisted death to California passed its first hurdle Wednesday after hundreds of people lined up to voice support and opposition to the legislation. Senators approved the legislation in a packed committee hearing in the state Capitol. “We are pleased to see it pass,” said Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, one of the authors of SB128, which would allow a mentally competent terminally ill adult to receive a lethal prescription to hasten death. The Senate Health Committee voted 6-2 along party lines to pass the legislation, with Sen. Richard Pan, a Democrat from Sacramento who is also a doctor, abstaining from the vote. “This vote reflects the changing sentiment in California,” Monning said.

Posted by Jay Caruso on March 26, 2015 37 Comments
Some families who signed up for Obamacare and have been estimating what their tax returns are going to look like this year are in for a rude awakening. Due to mid-year income levels changing, nearly 50% of people who received an advance payment of the tax credit for Obamacare will have to repay some or all of the tax credit in question. From CNBC:
Half of the households that received federal subsidies to help pay for their health insurance in 2014 will have to repay some money back to the government when they file their tax returns, a new analysis released Tuesday estimates. The average repayment owed by those people will be $794, the Kaiser Family Foundation study found. The repayments will be owed because those households' actual incomes ended up being higher for the year than what they had estimated when they applied for the subsidies.
But it gets worse for some families:
But the Kaiser study also found that a relatively small group of households will owe back a lot more than the average when it comes to refunds, after their actual incomes ended up being too high to qualify for the subsidies they got. That group of people will have an average repayment of between $2,306 and $3,837—and some could owe much more. Unlike people who earn below 400 percent of the federal poverty line, higher earners have no limit on the subsidies they must pay back if they were not entitled to them.
This is one of those nasty secrets of Obamacare that Nancy Pelosi and company must not have read about even after passing it.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 25, 2015 29 Comments
The man who garnered national attention by making himself Obamacare's arch nemesis is enrolling in the dastardly program one day into his presidential campaign. Previously covered by his wife's cadillac Goldman Sach's healthcare plan, Heidi Cruz's departure from the investment behemoth means the Cruz's will be looking to the exchange for their health insurance needs. Evidently, this is a story. "Man who hates Obamacare to enroll in Obamacare!!!!" "Hahahaha, it's sooooo ironic Cruz is like, enrolling in Obamacare!" "Cruz is enrolling in Obamacare?! What a hypocrite!" Who knew abiding by the the law was such a novel accomplishment that it warranted ink from every major news outlet? But that's what happened. Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 2.56.49 AM  

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 24, 2015 38 Comments
Indiana business owner Scott Womack knows firsthand how Obamacare affects the economy and jobs. He just sold 16 of his IHOP restaurants because of the rules imposed by the law. We recently reported that some restaurants in Seattle are having trouble with a new minimum wage policy. Progressives seem to believe that any issue they care about can be solved through legislation and there's no greater example of that than the Affordable Care Act. Rob Bluey of The Daily Signal reported:
This Longtime IHOP Owner Sold His 16 Restaurants Because of Obamacare It was a brisk March morning, nearly a year after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, and I had trekked to the Midwest with a camera crew to meet Scott Womack, owner of about a dozen IHOP restaurants in Indiana and Ohio. Womack’s testimony before Congress earlier in 2011 caught my attention and I wanted to visit him at one of his restaurants to see firsthand how Washington’s policymaking had impacted his work. The IHOP in Terre Haute is located on South 3rd Street, just a few minutes from the Interstate 70 interchange and a short drive from the Holiday Inn where we had stayed the night before. As we sat in the back of the bustling restaurant waiting for Womack to arrive, we ordered french toast, omelettes and other IHOP specialities. At the time, Womack employed about 1,000 people at his 12 restaurants. When the Affordable Care Act became law on March 23, 2010, he had big plans for his franchise. He had purchased a development agreement in 2006 that would expand the company to 14 new IHOP locations in Ohio... Four Years Later Facing the prospect of Obamacare’s employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2015, Womack opted to sell his 16 IHOP restaurants last year to Romulus Restaurant Group.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 09, 2015 3 Comments
Obama's big government health care takeover has taken another hit---albeit a small one---to its provisions mandating the coverage of contraception. Notre Dame v. Burwell seemed dead last year, when the Seventh Circuit threw out a lawsuit laying out the University of Notre Dame's religious objections to Obamacare's contraception mandate. Notre Dame brought their objection in the wake of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allowed religious organizations to opt out of the mandate and pass responsibility for paying the costs of contraception to insurance companies. The institution argued that this still placed a burden on exempt religious institutions, because even when opting out, those institutions still have to authorize the coverage. The last time the Seventh Circuit considered this case, SCOTUS had not yet ruled in the landmark Hobby Lobby case, which authorized closely held corporations to seek religious exemptions from the contraception mandate. The Seventh Circuit ruled that Notre Dame failed to show a sufficient burden against the rights of religious institutions; but SCOTUS has now tossed out that ruling completely, and have ordered the appeals court to review the case in light of the Hobby Lobby ruling. Reuters has more background:

Posted by Mike LaChance on February 25, 2015 25 Comments
Tax season approaches and the Obamacare bill is finally coming due. Sarah Ferris of The Hill has some bad news for people who have been receiving Obamacare subsidies:
H&R Block: Majority of ObamaCare customers paying back subsidy A majority of ObamaCare customers, 52 percent, are being forced to pay back some of their subsidies during this year’s tax season, according to new data from H&R Block. Customers are paying back an average of $530, which has caused a 17 percent drop in the average return so far this spring, according to the analysis by the tax services giant. The Obama administration had warned that people could end up paying back some of their subsidies because many were relying on previous years’ income when applying for the tax breaks. H&R Block has predicted that “most filers” would owe some of their subsidies back to the federal government because they were relying on 2012 income. The new data, which was released Tuesday, only represents about six weeks of tax filings. Still, it could pose a significant challenge for the administration as it faces an already tough tax season.
Remember when Obamacare supporters insisted it wasn't a tax? Good times. Remember when Obama repeatedly claimed Obamacare would save families $2,500 per year?

Posted by Amy Miller on February 16, 2015 35 Comments
Obama Administration officials are feeling the heat from the downward spiral of its figurehead health care legislation, and they're looking for allies in what is arguably the most unlikely place on Earth---the Church. Unlikely indeed, considering religious organizations (and organizations run by religiously-minded entrepreneurs) have been engaged in an all-out war over Obamacare's various mandates since before the thing was signed into law. Officials charged with making sure Americans enroll for coverage have always thought of religious organizations as outlets for promotion, but they've recently stepped up their game and started re-pushing pre-made educational materials to churches. The Weekly Standard explains:
These materials are part of the "Second Sunday & Faith Weekend of Action Toolkit," which is available on the website of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). From the beginning, HHS has sought to develop partnerships with faith-based organizations to promote the Obamacare. This "toolkit" has been available since 2013. However, the details of these partnerships have largely escaped the attention of the national media. The Second Sunday & Faith Weekend of Action program encourages churches to use the second Sunday of each month during open enrollment to hold informational meetings and sign-up events.
They've even provided a bulletin insert---how convenient! unnamed-8_3.preview
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