Breaking the Obamacare Schadenfreude Logjam

It's been a few days since I did one of these, and I didn't realize how many logs were stuck in the pile.

If Obamacare Stays, Employer Based Insurance Will Go That's what they wanted.


Obamacare Is Dampening The Job Market In 3 Principal Ways

1. Obamacare is one of the largest tax increases in U.S. history - Over the next decade, Obamacare increases taxes by more than $1.2 trillion: one of the largest tax increases in U.S. history, and the largest in nominal dollars. . .

2. Obamacare increases the cost of employing workers - Obamacare increases the cost of labor in two ways. The first is the law’s notorious employer mandate, requiring all businesses with more than 50 full-time-equivalent employees to offer federally-certified health coverage, or pay steep fines. . .

3. Obamacare’s exchange subsidies encourage many workers to drop out - If you pay unemployed people more, it becomes less economically attractive for them to seek work. Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago has done a considerable amount of research on Obamacare’s impact on the disincentive to work, calling it “startling.”

Guess who is paying the Obamacare tax hike?  You are, through state taxes!

When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, it required health insurers, hospitals, device makers and pharmaceutical companies to share in the cost because they would get a windfall of new, paying customers.

But with an $8 billion tax on insurers due Sept. 30 -- the first time the new tax is being collected -- the industry is getting help from an unlikely source: taxpayers.

States and the federal government will spend at least $700 million this year to pay the tax for their Medicaid health plans. The three dozen states that use Medicaid managed care plans will give those insurers more money to cover the new expense. Many of those states – such as Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee – did not expand Medicaid as the law allows, and in the process turned down billions in new federal dollars.

Like the snake eating it's own tail..

Days Before Deadline, Almost 240,000 Still Haven’t Fixed Immigration Status For Obamacare

The Obama administration is days away from rescinding Obamacare coverage from hundreds of thousands of customers, as the vast majority of those with applications problems still haven’t cleared them up.

The Department of Health and Human Services said last month that it would send out notices to 310,000 HealthCare.gov customers notifying them that there’s an inconsistency with their citizenship or immigration status and that the federal government needs more documentation or they’ll be kicked off their plans. Customers need to upload their proof of legal residence to HealthCare.gov by Sept. 5, or the administration will kick them out of their health care plan at the end of the month.

As of Tuesday, HHS says that it’s still sending final notices out to 239,000 of the 300,000, meaning by far most customers with problems still haven’t been able to resolve them, The Associated Press reports.

I expect that somehow the administration will succeed in extending subsidized Obamacare plans to illegals.

H&R Block CEO says Obamacare to add 'significant complexity' to tax season

The top executive for H&R Block, the nation’s largest tax preparer, on Wednesday said he expected President Obama’s health care law to add “significant complexity” to next year’s tax season.

Speaking on H&R Block’s quarterly earnings conference call, CEO William Cobb said that the company was already taking steps to train its tax preparers based on the draft forms that the Internal Revenue Servicehas released to comply with Obamacare.

“As expected, the forms are very detailed and can present significant complexity, depending on a filer’s coverage status during the year, income level, and household composition,” Cobb said. “Depending on their situation, there are instances where filers may need to file multiple new tax forms and complete additional worksheets.”

Taken with an extra grain of salt, since it's clearly in H&R Block's interest to convince  people that filing their own taxes is too difficult. Our one interaction with  H&R Block convinced us to go back to Turbotax. However, it is entirely realistic to expect lots of tax returns with the Obamacare taxes wrong the first couple of times around.

Remember repeated warnings about the potential for hacking the Obamacare website?  Yep, it happened. Hacker breached HealthCare.gov insurance site

A hacker broke into part of the HealthCare.gov insurance enrollment website in July and uploaded malicious software, according to federal officials.

Investigators found no evidence that consumers’ personal data was taken in the breach, federal officials said. The hacker appears only to have accessed a server used to test code for HealthCare.gov. The Department of Health and Human Services discovered the attack last week.

An HHS official said the attack appears to mark the first successful intrusion into the website, where millions of Americans bought insurance starting last year under the Affordable Care Act. It raised concerns among federal officials because of how easily the intruder gained access and how much damage could have occurred.

And I'm sure they'd hurry to tell us if anything important was compromised. Not.

Kay Hagan: Look, I didn’t realize people would lose their health plans ’til a few months ago

Step one: Blame insurers, who were forced to cancel plans that failed to comply with Obamacare, the law for which Kay Hagan furnished the deciding vote. Step two: Claim that those millions of cancellation letters fell from the sky, as if no one had predicted them. Step three: Try to claim credit for a bill that never became law because Harry Reid wouldn’t even permit a vote on it. (Fun fact: Hagan has never been a primary sponsor on any piece of legislation that went on to become law). Instead, betrayed consumers had to rely on a frantic executive rule change that was rejected by a number of state insurance commissioners because the die had already been cast. But here is a short, devastating passage from an October 2013 CNN story that exposes Hagan’s ‘I didn’t realize’ deception:

Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out. In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it…On a party line vote, Democrats killed the resolution, which could come back to haunt vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year. Senate Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan and Mark Begich – all of whom voted against stopping the rule from going into effect and have since supported delaying parts of Obamacare.

Obamacare is about to decide the midterms - again

When the supermajority of Democrats in the Senate passed the ironically named Affordable Care Act in 2009, one of the chief requirements of the bill was to force health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and health care centers to share in the staggering $2 trillion cost over the next decade. But once made law, President Obama pushed off the cost until well, just later — certainly not before the 2012 election.

That later is now, or Sept. 30, to be precise. Remember when the president said the 10-year cost for his health care reform would be $850 billion and that no one would pay an additional penny in taxes? Ha. Insurers will have to pony up some $8 billion on the last day of September, and guess where they’re going to get the cash? Straight from your wallet, your purse.

Here are some numbers, straight from my own checkbook register. In October 2011, before the start of Obamacare, I was paying $386 a month. Yes, fairly reasonable, but less so when you factor in my $10,000 deductible (and two teenage children who keep falling off things). The following October, the premiums rose 23 percent to $474.

In October 2013, my monthly rate rose again, nearly 32 percent, to $623. Same exact coverage, just more money. Then, this year, come Sept. 30, my new premiums will be $1,097. That’s a 76 percent increase from the previous year, and, all told, my premiums have risen 184 percent in just three years.
. . .
Right about now, across the country, Americans are either getting their monthly bills for drastically higher premiums, or they’ve already got them and are beginning to shop for new insurance in preparation for the coming open-enrollment season this fall. But they’re no doubt finding that the new policies mandated by Obamacare are raising costs sky-high — there’s nothing cheaper.

The president’s approval rating Wednesday dropped to 15 points underwater — 39 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, a Pew Research poll found that 54 percent of Americans say Mr. Obama is too weak on foreign policy, while just 36 percent think he is a strong leader in world affairs.

Could the Preznit's numerous foreign policy disasters be a deliberate ploy to distract from Obamacare? Hmmm. . .

Greg Sargent complains about Karl Rove still bashing Obamacare: Karl Rove recycles years-old attacks on Obamacare

When Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor made national news by rolling out a major ad campaign touting his vote for the health law, many Republicans — and some neutral analysts — rushed to declare that there’s no way the politics of Obamacare could be shifting even a little bit.

Now Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is out to prove the point, rolling out a new $2.5 million ad campaign that kicks off with a new anti-Obamacare ad responding to the Pryor spot. The idea is to prove that attacks on Obamacare are every bit as potent as ever. But the ad’s script neatly illustrates the real story when it comes to the politics of the law:

On TV, Mark Pryor talks about the health care law he helped pass. What Pryor doesn’t say is that law was Obamacare. Or that it cuts over $700 billion from our Medicare and will cut benefits seniors rely on. Obamacare meant threatened insurance plans, higher premiums, and broken promises.

The ad relies heavily on old attacks on the law that have either been debunked completely or have been left behind by the forward march of Obamacare implementation and enrollment that is underway in the real world. The claim about Obamacare cutting Medicare goes back literally years and has been getting dismantled by fact-checkers for just as long.

It's true that there is no lack of good material with which to attack Obamacare, of which Rove should avail himself,  but it's also true that the legions of fact checker referred to are largely democrat activist with bylines.

Will Textualism Kill Obamacare?

The Affordable Care Act is heading for another near-death experience in the Supreme Court. In July, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling in Halbig v. Burwell that would greatly limit the number of people who are eligible for subsidized health insurance. The problem has to do with how people are connected with insurance providers, how they learn about subsidies, and how they sign up for plans. As Congress originally conceived it, the A.C.A. called for each state to set up its own exchange with a Web site, which most of the blue states and a few of the red ones did. But two dozen of them did not, so the Obama Administration established a federal counterpart, centered on the Web site healthcare.gov. According to the D.C. Circuit majority, one line in the text of the A.C.A. makes the federal exchange invalid. The law says that subsidies are to be available through exchanges that are “established by a State,” without an explicit authorization of federal exchanges. Thus, according to the judges in the majority, five million or so people who have used the federal exchange to buy health insurance must now lose it.

We should be so lucky. But when we lose, remember that if and when conservatives ever get back into power, the law as written doesn't matter, it's whatever you want it to mean. I'm sure we can find a way to work with that.