A Big Heap of Obamacare Schadenfreude

It just sprung up, probably in anticipation of the announcement of King vs. Burwell.

Don’t cry for Big Insurance if federal Obamacare subsidies go away, folks.

A helpful reminder: “…the dirty secret is that insurers stand to lose the most from King v. Burwell… The giant players — United Healthcare, Cigna, Aetna, Anthem and Humana — have seen stock prices double, triple, even quadruple since the law was passed in 2010. The coming ruling threatens to put an end to their gravy train.” As Betsy [McCaughey] noted elsewhere in that article, the insurance companies were more than happy to sign onto a program where they had a guaranteed – dare we say, mandated? – customer pool; and one where sweet, sweet tax revenue could be used to stitch together any gaps in this Frankenstein’s Monster* of a health care market.

Democrats wanted a plan that would have put all health care under a single payer, them, but they settled for a plan where the insurance companies sat in the middle and collected money from both sides.

States zero in on ObamaCare rescue plan

It may be easier than expected for states to save their ObamaCare subsidies, if the Supreme Court rules against the law this month.

Two states — Pennsylvania and Delaware — said this week they would launch their own exchanges, if needed, to keep millions of healthcare dollars flowing after the decision. Both want to use existing pieces of the federal health insurance exchange, like its website and call center — a path that would be far less costly than the way most other states have created their exchanges.

If those plans win approval, many of the other 36 states that stand to lose their subsidies could then pursue a similarly simple strategy.

“I think that’s a pretty easy workaround,” Thomas Scully, the former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the George W. Bush administration, said about the two states’ plans.

Obama says Supreme Court should never have taken up health law case, in blunt challenge

"This should be an easy case. Frankly, it probably shouldn't even have been taken up," Obama said.

Frankly, sir, we discounted your alleged expertise in constititutional law years ago.

Support for Obamacare as bad as ever:

The survey finds opinion on the health-care law among the worst in Post-ABC polling; 54 percent oppose, up six percentage points from a year ago. Support ties the record low of 39 percent, which was last hit in April 2012.

Found somehow embedded deep in a WAPO article on how the public really wants the subsidies saved. Yeah, "free" money; what's not to like.

Kentucky Hospitals Say They Will Lose $1 Billion Due to State's Obamacare Exchange

Hospitals in Kentucky are hemorrhaging money and laying off staff, all thanks to the KYNECT Affordable Care Act state health care exchange, according to a report from the Kentucky Hospital Association. Those losses will only get worse over the coming years, the hospitals say.

Democratic Governor Steve Beshear established KYNECT as a state-run Obamacare health exchange via executive order in 2013, over the vigorous objections of Republicans in the state legislature.

Last month the Kentucky Hospital Association released a stinging indictment of the financial calamity KYNECT has imposed on them in a report titled “Code Blue,” whichconcluded in bold print: “The bottom line: Kentucky hospitals will have higher losses and lower operating margins due to the ACA [and KYNECT], with a projected net loss of $1 billion from 2014 to 2020.” That finding was based on “an independent analysis of the ACA’s impact on Kentucky hospitals” conducted by the Dobson/DaVanzo consulting firm.

And Kentucky is listed as one of the success stories in this story: How State Exchanges Are Faring Under Obamacare

All eyes are on the federal and state health insurance exchanges in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case King v. Burwell. In anticipation of the ruling, a Daily Signal analysis of the 17 exchanges originally established by states and the District of Columbia found that more than half are struggling after facing technological troubles and low enrollment during their first two years of existence.

The state exchanges collectively received more than $4.2 billion in grants from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to assist with their launch, and those exchanges must be self-sustaining by 2016. To raise money, many of the state exchanges are considering raising fees or partnering with those that have been successful.

The board for Hawaii’s state-run exchange voted Friday to move to the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov. Hawaii became the third state to jump from a state-run exchange to the federal one. It will use the federal exchange for the 2016 open enrollment period.

Here is where the exchanges founded in 16 states and the District of Columbia stand today.

So there are 8 out of 17 listed as functional, and Kentucky is listed as one of those. I guess they don't really know what the word "success" means. Unless bankrupting hospitals was part of the plan.

Can King v. Burwell Revive the Economy?

During the first three months of 2015, Gross Domestic Product contracted at an annual rate of 0.7 percent. And, euphoric “news” stories about the government’s May jobs report notwithstanding, this year’s monthly job gains remain well below last year’s average. It is difficult to prove that Obamacare alone has caused the slowdown, but it tends to confirm the inauspicious findings of several Federal Reserve surveys concerning the law’s economic effects. Even if “reform” isn’t solely to blame, there can be little doubt that removing its mandates from the backs of employers and workers in three-quarters of the states would stimulate the national economy.

And a SCOTUS ruling against the Obama administration would eliminate those job-killing mandates. Media coverage concerning King v. Burwell has focused on the loss of subsidies that some would face if the Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, and a few million people may indeed have to pay the full price of their own Obamacare coverage. But that’s only a small part of the story. Such a ruling would emancipate 11.1 million people from the individual mandate, according to a study recently released by the American Action Forum (AFF), which also estimates that 262,000 businesses would be freed from the law’s employer mandate.

The economic advantages of manumission from Obamacare’s mandates would be numerous. Employers would no longer be incentivized to forego expansion and the creation of new jobs. Nor would they face pressure to replace full-time employees with part-timers or to hold the latter to fewer than 30 hours per week. The study’s authors estimate that these changes could produce 237,000 new jobs, add nearly 1.3 million workers to the labor force, and improve the plight of 3.3 million part-time employees who would no longer face an impediment to getting more hours. They estimate that all this will result in a $13.6 billion increase in total pay.

Probably not, but taking any burden away is likely to improve it some.

Allahpundit at Hotair produced his own Obamacare Schadenfreude post in "Quotes of the Day". There's a lot of overlap with mine, so I'll just give you the link.