Lingering Obamacare Schadenfreude

Like a bad cold, Obamacare Schadenfreude lingers.

House votes to repeal, replace Obamacare

The House voted largely along party lines Tuesday to repeal and replace Obamacare, with Republicans vowing to satisfy midterm voters who demanded a new path forward while Democrats taunted their rivals as oblivious to the plight of the uninsured.

The 239-186 vote marked the Republican-majority Congress’ first swipe at the entire health law, cuing up a likely filibuster from Senate Democrats before President Obama can wield his veto pen.
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While it will not become law, the measure was designed to let new Republicans to record their opposition to Obamacare and make good on the GOP’s campaign promise to go after the law and replace it.

“We are doing it because the American people have said, ‘We are tired of this.’ It is damaging health care,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, said.

Here’s how the GOP would repeal and replace Obamacare

With Obamacare again facing a major threat at the Supreme Court, an influential group of Republican lawmakers is offering a proposal that they see as a replacement to the president's health-care law.
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No more individual mandate - This plan repeals the individual mandate, a mechanism that ACA proponents said was necessary to help end insurer discrimination against people's pre-existing medical conditions. The mandate was included in the law to ensure that enough healthy people bought insurance to help offset the costs of covering sicker patients, who can no longer be denied coverage.

A pre-existing condition ban, with a catch - This GOP plan also prevents insurers from charging sicker patients more, but with an important caveat. Under this plan, the lawmakers envision a one-time enrollment period to get adjusted to this new coverage scheme. After that, as long as you are continuously enrolled in coverage -- and that includes switching insurance if you get a new job, for instance -- insurers can't consider your medical history. But if you let your coverage lapse for a couple of months, insurers are allowed to take this into account.

A cap on tax preference for employer health plans -  . . .The ACA does it with the Cadillac tax, which is a 40 percent excise tax on the cost of coverage that exceeds a certain threshold -- starting in 2018, that threshold is $10,200 for an individual plan and $27,500 for a family plan.

The Burr-Hatch-Upton plan instead caps the tax exclusion at $12,000 for an individual and $30,000 for family coverage, and amounts above that would be taxed as regular income. That's a significant and more generous change from last year's GOP plan, which would have limited the exclusion to 65 percent of the average health plan. . .

The GOP plan also eliminates the ACA's employer mandate requiring businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to offer health insurance or pay a penalty.

Less generous subsidies - The ACA offers exchange subsidies to families of four earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), or about $95,000. This GOP plan instead provides a refundable tax credit to purchase insurance to people earning up to 300 percent FPL. The tax credits are adjusted by age and family status, and unlike the ACA, aren't pegged to the cost of insurance premiums.

The tax credits are also available to anyone under the poverty line, whereas the ACA expanded Medicaid eligibility to this group (in states that opted for the expansion). Under the GOP plan, people enrolled in traditional Medicaid would also have the option of receiving the tax credit instead, and the massive ACA expansion of Medicaid would be undone.

Other ACA features survive - Insurers would no longer be required to cover a set of 10 essential health benefits as they are under the ACA, but some ACA elements are kept in place. Young adults can stay on their parents' health plans until they turn 26, and the ban on lifetime coverage limits remains. Instead of allowing insurers to charge older customers no more than three times the amount what they charge younger customers for the same plan, that ratio is widened to 5:1, which means cheaper premiums for younger enrollees. The GOP plan also keeps the ACA's $700 billion in Medicare cuts, as previous House budgets have done.

There are no official estimates yet of what this would cost or how many people it would cover. But the plan's authors claim it will be "competitive in terms of coverage" when compared to the ACA and cost less.

So a cheaper and less intrusive package. Where's the opportunity for graft?

More on the GOPs proposal from the authors: More C.A.R.E., less Obama

By scrapping dozens of mandates, we estimate premiums would drop, on average, by double digits. We'd also reverse harmful changes that limited consumers' ability to save and manage spending through health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts, and we'd encourage small-business insurance plans to give smaller employers better and more affordable options.

What our plan would not allow is a return to the days before Obamacare when insurance companies turned away patients simply because they were sick.

Under our proposal, no patient could be denied coverage based on a pre-existing condition. We create a new "continuous coverage protection," and if you change your job and buy a plan on your own, we would provide protections so you could not be denied coverage or be forced to pay a higher premium because of a pre-existing condition.

We would also ban insurance companies from imposing lifetime limits on a consumer, and we'd adopt age-rating changes, which lower costs for younger Americans. Individuals could stay on their parents' health plan up to age 26, unless a state chose otherwise.

Obamacare Tax Watch: Obama Notices

 . . . Anyway, here’s my prediction update:

Yes, there will still be stories about pissed-off taxpayers in mainstream media.

Even if open enrollment is extended (and I think it may be extended, but I’m less than 90% on that one.)

Even if extra penalties for oversubsidizing are not there.

Even if the IRS gets the extra funding they want in their budget (which they’re not going to get.)

I still haven’t seen the stories I mean yet — tax preparers and government officials wringing their hands do not count.

But I am not moving from my prediction: no matter how many “fixes” are put forth by the Obama administration, there are going to be loads of really pissed-off people. And the mainstream media is not going to be able to ignore it.

IRS Seeks 9,000 New Employees as It Prepares to Enforce Obamacare

As millions of Americans brace for tax season, the Internal Revenue Service is requesting a $2 billion boost to its budget and 9,000 new employees as it prepares to enforce Obamacare’s tax provisions.

President Obama released his $4 trillion budget proposal for fiscal year 2016 this week, which includes $13.9 billion for the Internal Revenue Service. The agency asked Congress for close to $2 billion more for operations than last year—a 16 percent increase.

The billions of dollars will help the agency bolster its staff by adding more than 9,280 full-time employees. The proposed jump in employment at the IRS is an 11 percent increase from 2015.

To enforce the 46 new tax provisions of the Affordable Care Act specifically, the IRS asked for $67 million. That will cover 483 new employees related to Obamacare’s implementation.

Of course, the IRS has already complained about previous budget "cuts", and threatened slow service. I would remind them of the story of the three men chosen by the dictator to carry his piano upstairs to his mistresses room.

When they complained that it was impossible with only three men, he shot one of them. The two remaining managed to get the piano safely installed.