Obamacare Schadenfreude Hits Harvard

Even the country's best and brightest can't avoid the consequence of Dr. Gruber's baby.

Health Care Fixes Backed by Harvard’s Experts Now Roil Its Faculty

WASHINGTON — For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.
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Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”

Remember telling all your less educated friends it would save $2500 a year per family?  Welcome back to the real world, Mary.

Feds Looking for Company to Run 'National Data Warehouse' for Obamacare, Medicare

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is looking for vendors to run its "National Data Warehouse," a database for "capturing, aggregating, and analyzing information" related to beneficiary and customer experiences with Medicare and the federal Obamacare marketplaces. Although the database primarily consists of quality control metrics related to individuals' interactions with customer service, potential contractors are to "[d]emonstrate ... experience with scalability and security in protecting data and information with customer, person-sensitive information including Personal Health Information and Personally Identifiable information (personal health records, etc.)." Vendors are also instructed that one of the requirements of a possible future contract would be "[e]nsuring that all products developed and delivered adhere to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance standards."

Something to occupy NSA excess computer capacity?

Obamacare in 2015

Tevi Troy says that 2015 is shaping up as Obamacare’s worst year. That’s quite a statement, considering how bad a year it had in 2014 — roll-out problems, false claims of 7 million enrollees, and the defeat of congressional supporters of the legislation.
The key challenge to Obamacare in 2015 will come in the Supreme Court. A defeat there would certainly make 2015 a potentially near-fatal year for Obama’s only major domestic accomplishment:

If the states without state exchanges no longer provide subsidies, they would also no longer have an employer mandate. The individual mandate would also not apply in many cases, specifically where the cost of the cheapest qualifying health-insurance policy amounts to more than 8 percent of an individual’s income.

Obamacare will also face new challenges in Congress, now that Republicans control both chambers. Repeal will not make it past the Senate because of the 60-vote requirement.

Go nuclear. Elections have consequences, as do past actions.

However, Tevi identifies three reforms that conceivably could command enough support from Democrats to pass the Senate. They are: (1) repeal of the “medical-device tax,” (2) raising the definition of the full-time work week from 30 hours, so as to end the incentive for employers to cut employee hours below 30 per week, and (3) repeal of the so-called Cadillac tax on high-value employer health-care plans, which encourages employers to reduce the value of their health-care plans, lest they be subjected to the tax.

President Obama would be free, of course, to veto any of these changes, and might do so. But, as Tevi argues, the fact that these matters, and others like them, will be on the legislative agenda will keep Obamacare on the defensive. And the next president, from whichever party, will likely be far more open to significant alterations.

Half of Obamacare subsidy recipients may owe refunds to the IRS

As many as 3.4 million people who received Obamacare subsidies may owe refunds to the federal government, according to an estimate by a tax preparation firm.

H&R Block is estimating that as many as half of the 6.8 million people who received insurance premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act benefited from subsidies that were too large, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

“The ACA is going to result in more confusion for existing clients, and many taxpayers may well be very disappointed by getting less money and possibly even owing money," the president of a tax preparation and education school told the Journal.

Sounds like a hidden tax increase to me.

Millions of Obamacare subsidy recipients may need to pay back-taxes.

the problem for Democrats here is that this is going to happen every year. The system is more or less designed to assume that people would twiddle with their coverage on a regular basis: as plans changed, improved, or degraded the consumer would be obligated to follow suit, in order to keep the subsidy. This sounds perfectly reasonable… if you’re not the one doing it. But out in the real world? Well, I’ve written about this before:

• April, 2014: “The uncertainty is really the killer. And, bizarrely, it’s about the only thing that’s reliable about Obamacare. There’s no way to plan around this monstrosity of a health care rationing system. Nobody is really certain that they’re not going to end up being smacked around by the new rules. And it would be better in a lot of ways if the law was even worse, as long as it was consistently worse. An inconsistent, unpredictable law is more or less guaranteed to become an object of fear.”
• May, 2014: “The administration, in its boundless wisdom, decided to handle [the government's inability to calculate subsidies in real-time] by simply estimating the subsidy in problem cases. If it’s too low, they’ll probably cut the applicant a check or give a tax credit. Eventually. Probably before the end of the decade. But if the subsidy is too high… well, the government is going to need that tax money immediately… This is where you distinguish the wonks from the politicos, by the way. The former won’t understand why the latter are wincing at the situation, and the latter will wonder how on earth the former manage to go through life without a keeper.”
• November, 2014: “Health insurance is scary because being sick is scary, and people do not like to think about scary things. So when they have a policy that they like, they want to keep it because then they can stop thinking about the scary thing. This is, by the way, not a silly or unreasonable desire to have, much to the disgust of Obamacare’s more sociopathic boosters: people should be allowed quiet enjoyment of their lives whenever possible. Unfortunately, nobody told the Democratic party leadership that.”