Super Sunday Obamacare Schadenfreude

You didn't think I was going to stop chewing this bone just because the Superbowl is going to be played later today, did you?

Having not learned their lesson, or perhaps having learned the wrong lesson, IRS has rehired the company that originally bungled the federal Obamacare website:

Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program,” The Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock reported.

GI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into the public’s mind as the company behind the bungled Obamacare main website.
After facing a year of embarrassing failures, federal officials finally pulled the plug on the company and terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014.
Yet on Aug. 11, seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract with CGI to provide “critical functions” and “management support” for its Obamacare tax program, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, a federal government procurement database.

Not only has CGI Federal been contracted to build a new functional platform for the federal government, but it is also back to working on an account linked to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A fiction writer would be hard-pressed to come up with a better metaphor for the federal government’s chronic inefficiencies and cronyism.

Before I comment further, this was conjoined with:  Review confirms administration did not properly vet HealthCare.gov contractors

The federal agency responsible for developing HealthCare.gov did not properly vet the contractors it hired to build the Web site and failed in many other aspects of planning it, according to a government review.

In a report Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general said that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “did not perform thorough reviews of contractor past performance when awarding two key contracts,” among other issues.

The findings confirm problems that The Washington Post first highlighted in a pair of articles more than a year ago. One of the reports showed that CGI Federal, a key contractor in the development of the site, had ties to failed projects, while an earlier story revealed that the company was filled with executives from a troubled IT firm.

The government spent about $800 million to build HealthCare.gov, which was plagued with problems and barely functioned during its botched launch in October 2013. CMS eventually fixed the glitches, but the remedies added millions to the cost of the project.

Of course, it couldn't possibly hurt that one of CGI's senior executives was a college friend and compatriot of Michelle Obama:

Q: Does a college classmate of Michelle Obama work for CGI Federal? Did that company receive a no-bid contract to build the HealthCare.gov website?

A: Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI, and Obama graduated from Princeton University in 1985. However, company and government officials say the contract was awarded through a competitive bidding process.

Of course you take the administration and the contractor denials at face value.

CBO: 10 million will lose employer-based coverage under ObamaCare by 2021

The new CBO projection on ObamaCare’s impact has a couple of counter-narrative epiphanies, and the impact on employer-based insurance is just one of them. When Democrats pushed the ACA through Congress on a party-line vote and with plenty of legislative chicanery — remember “reconciliation”? — they insisted that ObamaCare would do three things:

1. It would not force any changes to individual-market plans already in place, nor to choices of providers.
2. It would not reduce employer-based health insurance at all, and would slightly improve it.
3. It would be deficit neutral for the first decade, starting in 2011.

The first became known as Politifact’s 2013 Lie of the Year. Not only did ObamaCare force millions of people out of their plans in the first year of enrollment, it’s doing the same thing in the second year with its recalculation of subsidies and the premium shocks that creates. Investors Business Daily points out that the CBO demolishes the second argument too:

The latest CBO report is supposed to be a big win for the Obama administration because the projected costs are 20% below what the CBO first projected in 2010.
But the CBO report also shows that ObamaCare will be far more disruptive to the employer-based insurance market, while being far less effective at cutting the ranks of the uninsured, than promised.
Thanks to ObamaCare, the CBO now expects that 10 million workers will lose their employer-based coverage by 2021.
This finding stands in sharp contrast to earlier CBO projections, which at one point suggested ObamaCare would increase the number of people getting coverage through work, at least in its early years.

Sure, you can keep your insurance if you like it, if you can find it in the smoking ruin of the American healthcare system.

Millions to owe Obamacare tax penalty

As millions of Americans sit down in coming weeks to compile their tax returns, they'll have to contend with Obamacare's health insurance mandate for the first time.

Some three-quarters of the nation's 150 million taxpayers have health insurance through their jobs or government programs and will simply have to check a box on the Form 1040.

Another 15 million to 30 million people will request and be granted an exemption to the mandate by filing Form 8965. Those who aren't subject to the insurance requirement include undocumented immigrants, low-income Americans and those for whom insurance premiums were more than 8% of their household income.

Finally, between 4.5 million and 7.5 million taxpayers received subsidies for insurance premiums when they signed up for coverage on Obamacare exchanges. They will have to use Form 8962 to reconcile their actual 2014 income with the amount they estimated when they applied for a policy in late 2013 or early 2014.

Those who underestimated their income either will receive smaller tax refunds or will owe the IRS money.

But wait, the Obama administration is getting ready to make more on-the-fly "revisions" to the law.

White House Seeks to Limit Health Law’s Tax Troubles

Obama administration officials and other supporters of the Affordable Care Act say they worry that the tax-filing season will generate new anger as uninsured consumers learn that they must pay tax penalties and as many people struggle with complex forms needed to justify tax credits they received in 2014 to pay for health insurance.

The White House has already granted some exemptions and is considering more to avoid a political firestorm.
. . .
To claim tax credits, consumers need to fill out I.R.S. Form 8962, which includes a matrix with 12 rows and six columns — a total of 72 boxes, to compute subsidies for each month. Most taxpayers use software to prepare returns, and that will simplify the process, officials said.

Federal officials have authorized more than 30 types of exemptions from the penalty for not having insurance. One is for low-income people who live in states that did not expand Medicaid. Another is available to people who would have to pay premiums amounting to more than 8 percent of their household income. The government will also allow a variety of hardship exemptions and in most cases will require taxpayers to send in documents as evidence of hardship.

What Obama Can Do if SCOTUS Cripples Obamacare

If the Supreme Court tears apart Obamacare this summer, the president won't be able to put it back together all by himself.

Executive action is all the rage in the White House these days, and it's hard to imagine a better candidate for unilateralism than fixing the Affordable Care Act in the wake of a crippling Supreme Court decision. That scenario would check every box: Republican intransigence; a top priority for Obama; and severe disruption in real people's lives.

There's just one problem: A good administrative solution might not exist.

"There are no administrative fixes that are realistic," said Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. "We don't believe there's any administrative fix."
. . .
"The administration won't just be able to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. States will still have to do something to establish an exchange … it's just not clear what that will be," Bagley said.

The logistics of that switch wouldn't be easy, but they're not the hardest part. Several health policy experts said the Health and Human Services Department could probably figure out a way to keep running most of the exchanges' technical systems, most likely as a contractor.
. . .
"It could just become a never-ending series of lawsuits," Jost said.