Posted on 08/14/2013 6:55:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The White House plans to delay yet another provision of Obamacare, the New York Times revealed on Monday, in what was described as “another setback for President Obama’s health-care initiative.” Indeed, it seems that every week the administration offers up a new example of the implementation “train wreck” of which Obamacare architect Max Baucus (D., Mont.), among others, has warned.
Here are nine examples of how Obamacare implementation hasn’t gone according to plan:
1. Caps on Out-of-Pocket Insurance Costs
The Obama administration plans to delay until 2015 a provision that limits out-of-pocket health-care costs, including deductibles and co-payments, for individuals ($6,350) and families ($12,700). In the meantime, many insurers will be able to set higher limits on out-of-pocket costs, or no limit at all.
The obscure ruling, which received attention this week despite being published on the Labor Department’s website back in February, has drawn complaints from advocacy groups representing individuals with chronic illnesses, who argue that patients requiring expensive drug treatments will face exorbitant out-of-pocket costs in the absence of caps. “The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main reasons we supported health-care reform,” Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, told the New York Times.
President Obama repeatedly touted the limits on out-of-pocket expenses in his effort to win support for the law. “No one should go broke because they get sick,” Obama told a joint session of Congress in September 2009. In explaining the decision to delay the requirement, a senior administration official told the Times, “We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health-plan sponsors and carriers” who “asked for more time to comply.”
2. The Employer Mandate
Last month, the White House decided to delay the Obamacare provision requiring all businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance to full-time workers or pay a fine ($2,000 per worker). Senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett said the unilateral delay, which will cost around $12 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, was evidence that the administration was “listening” to the business community.
Although some have questioned the legality of the administration’s unilateral action, the president has dismissed such criticism, telling the New York Times: “Where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.”
In fact, the House of Representatives recently voted to enshrine the employer-mandate delay into law; Obama threatened to veto the legislation, calling it “unnecessary.” Republicans have seized on the president’s decision; arguing that big businesses shouldn’t receive special treatment, they are pushing for a delay of the even more controversial individual mandate, which is set to take effect in 2014. The House also passed a bill to delay the individual mandate for one year — with the help of 35 Democrats.
3. Anti-Fraud Measures
Days after announcing the employer-mandate delay, the Obama administration decided to delay another significant provision in the law that requires the government to verify the income and insurance status of applicants for federal health-care subsidies. The White House has put off implementation of the provision until 2015. In the meantime, according to the Washington Post, the government health-care exchanges can simply accept “the applicant’s attestation” regarding his or her eligibility and household income “without further verification” in determining the allotment of taxpayer subsidies.
4. CLASS Act
The “fiscal cliff” deal enacted earlier this year repealed a provision of the health-care law known as the CLASS Act, a long-term-care insurance plan championed by the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), after the administration was forced to acknowledge that the program was fiscally unsustainable. The CLASS Act was inserted into the law despite repeated warnings from Medicare’s chief actuary that the program “doesn’t look workable.” Even former Senator Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) described it as “a Ponzi scheme of the first order.” Additionally, the CLASS Act — which was designed to collect five years’ worth of premiums before paying out any benefits, and therefore was scored as reducing the deficit by $70 billion — was critical in lowering the projected fiscal impact of Obamacare, at least on paper.
5. Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)
The 15-member board of health-care experts and professionals, which will have sweeping authority to make cuts and reforms to Medicare reimbursements to doctors, is supposed to begin work in 2014. However, the administration is having a difficult time finding anyone who is willing to serve on the controversial panel. A number of Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and former representative Barney Frank (D., Mass.), have called for repealing IPAB; 22 Democrats have co-sponsored House legislation to do just that.
6. Cuts to Medicare Advantage
Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage funding (about $500 billion in total) were initially scheduled to take effect in 2012. However, those cuts would probably have caused many seniors to lose their preferred health-care plans — right before a consequential election. Accordingly, the administration decided to postpone the impact of the cuts for a year by spending $8 billion on a “demonstration project” ostensibly intended to shore up Medicare Advantage funding and “study” the results. The nonpartisan GAO complained about the highly political nature of the study, which was slated to be more expensive than “all other Medicare demonstrations conducted since 1995 combined,” and recommended that the cuts proceed as planned, advice the administration promptly ignored.
7. 1099 Tax-Reporting Mandate for Businesses
Obamacare initially required small businesses to file an additional 1099 tax form each year for every business with which they had conducted more than $600 in transactions. The provision, which businesses obviously hated, was intended to raise about $17 billion in revenue, by both imposing new taxes and making it harder for people to avoid business taxes. But after both parties realized that the burden placed on small businesses would be too onerous, Congress passed a law in 2011 that repealed the requirement. The lost revenue was offset by reducing certain health-insurance tax credits in the law. The 1099 repeal was the first of several pieces of legislation that have rolled back major provisions of Obamacare.
8. Democratic Defections
As Obamacare’s implementation has proved increasingly problematic, and as public support for the law continues to wane, Democrats have become more willing to oppose the law and many of its key provisions. A growing number of Democrats support the repeal of IPAB, and last month 35 House Democrats voted with Republicans to delay the individual mandate for one year. Almost all of them represent competitive House districts and will face tough reelection fights in 2014. Two of those Democrats, Representatives Bruce Braley (Iowa) and Gary Peters (Mich.), are running for Senate next year and are generally considered favorites to win — an indication that opposition to Obamacare makes for good politics, and that some Democrats are catching on.
9. Waivers and Missed Deadlines
All of this is in addition to myriad missed deadlines (for example, the federal government is likely to miss the upcoming October 1 deadline for setting up insurance exchanges in more than 30 states) as well as more than a thousand waivers, many of them handed out to political cronies, which have plagued the administration’s rollout of Obamacare.
Given these many recent complications, perhaps it’s no wonder Democrats are once again pining for a single-payer health-care system. Of course, if you believe Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), that’s been the ultimate goal all along.
— Andrew Stiles is a political reporter for National Review Online.
Partial Government control of the National Medical Economy is Socialism.
There is partial Liberty with Socialism.
Total Government control of the National Medical Economy is Communism.
There is no Liberty with Communism.
Conservatives are dedicated to conserving Liberty.
The RINOs who support whole or partial Government Control of the Medical Economy are either Socialists or Communists.
Conservatives should not donate money to these RINO Socialists or Communists.
The thing about the caps on out of pocket costs—that’s the only part of this that is true catastrophe insurance, and that’s the part that is now screwed up!
(WWW.DONTFUNDOBAMACARE.COM) Sign it...Today!!!
ObamaCare is a means test (”MT”) with one major purpose: determine your ability to pay for any political agenda on the leftists/fascists list [of things to mess up in the world].
The MT is a data mining expedition by the command economy fascists, to get to more of the details in your life.
All the maneuvering that you see by members of the Congress, members of government, the unions and there will be more ... the waivers (in some form) that they seek ... is about their taking steps to NOT BE TRANSPARENT and protecting THEIR privacy. They do NOT want to reveal their financial situations.
YOU, on the other hand, will be forced to reveal a complete accounting of your financial status, if you apply for ObamaCare and/or you apply for a supplemental premium payment.
The government has been accumulating information about you -— already data mining, thanks to Google, the NSA, and the many Also Ran Agencies of Big Government (identified by their own LEO/SWAT brigades) -— and that information WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU to challenge you with MORE QUESTIONS in response to your answers to the previous questions (of the applications-and-appended-questionaires).
Possibly as bad, but certainly potentially worse, is that YOU ARE LEFT WITH THE BURDEN TO PROVE YOUR INNOCENCE WHEN THE GOVERNMENT INFORMATION IS NOT CORRECT.
THERE IS NOTHING TO PREVENT THE GOVERNMENT FROM ALTERING YOUR ELECTRONIC INFORMATION, IN ORDER TO ‘MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF YOU’ BY WHICH TO STRIKE FEAR INTO OTHERS ... not to mention, the government fouling up things re your information.
WHEN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES GAVE THE OK FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO COLLECT ALL YOUR ELECTRONIC INFORMATION, YOU WAIVED YOUR RIGHT TO PROTEST AGAINST THE DATA MINING IN RE SO-CALLED ‘HEALTH CARE’ INFORMATION NEE TAX DATA FOR THE PURPOSE OF PERFORMANCE OF THE TAX CODE AKA ‘OBAMACARE.’
Tragically: Health care providers will be forced to NOT provide medical care, unless you are in compliance.
Premiums are being forced up, because that is expected to force you seek the supplemental benefits from ObamaCare, thereby forcing you to reveal “the data” that the leftists seek to use as proof that they can spend more on their agenda.
IMHO
It was never about health care. Engineered for failure from the start, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, we'll all be forced onto the “single payer” plan. It also has nothing to do with health care.
It's always been about extending state power and authority and transferring wealth from those who've earned it to the state. Incidentally, the so-called "Affordable Health Care Act" will reduce medical care to a benefit the state can use to reward and punish commoners at will.
We seem determined to repeat the most brutal and stupid mistakes of the old Soviet Union.
IMHO, this was the stupidest move on the part of the Republicans. Left unrepealed, this was the pain in the saddle that the repubs could have used, and still use, against the statists.
An auto accident or even a small heart attack can run up a $100K hospital bill, no cap means the difference between a $6K bill versus a $30K bill to the insured. This would make Obamacare really bad insurance as far as catastrophic coverage goes.
I agree about Obamacare probably being a wounded, if not, dead duck. But states with their own exchanges might live on. "Single payer" is the next battle especially if Hillary is elected (she will run on it).
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