Obamacare Schadenfreude is Like Athletes Foot

It just keeps itching. Treating it makes it go a way for a while but it won't stay away.

Obamacare at Six: A Legacy of Deception

. . . The list of individual lies goes on and on, but perhaps they can be summarized thus: The basic premise of Obamacare is deliberately deceptive. The president and his supporters sold it as a health reform bill meant to control costs, increase access, and improve quality. But virtually none of its provisions really addressed the components of our medical delivery system that affect these things. So, the most important deception was the pretense that it was ever about health care. That was the big lie. Obama and his accomplices called it “health care reform” when it was really just a government power grab

Obamacare Was Going to Lower Health Care Costs. What Actually Happened.

Courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, public spending is outpacing private spending. For 2015, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the federal government spent a total of $936 billion on health programs (for example, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act), a 13 percent increase over the 2014 level.

For 2015, the Congressional Budget Office reports that Medicare spending increased almost 7 percent, the fastest rate of growth since 2007; and, over the period 2013 to 2015. They also report that Medicaid spending alone jumped by 32 percent.

 Who’s up for another round of big ObamaCare rate hikes?. Does it matter? It'g going to happen anyway. New Obamacare enrollees sicker and costlier

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association released the report Wednesday, looking at the impact of healthcare reform on enrollees in 2014 and 2015.

The report compared people who had individual coverage through 36 independent Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers both before and after the introduction of Obamacare in 2014. The individual insurance market is for those who don't have employer-based coverage, and it's now dominated by Obamacare enrollees.

It found that members newly enrolled in Blue Cross plans in 2014 and 2015 "have higher rates of certain diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, depression, coronary artery disease, HIV and hepatitis C than individuals who had [Blue Cross] individual coverage prior to healthcare reform," the assocation said.
. . .
The report also looked at the cost of the new enrollees, saying that they cost on average 19 percent more than people in employer-based group plans in 2014 and 22 percent higher in 2015.

Thonk of how expensive it would be if it had actually gotten anywhere near it's enrollment targets. CBO Misses Its Obamacare Projection by 24 Million People.

based on the CBO's own numbers, it seems possible that Obamacare has actually reduced the number of people with private health insurance. In 2013, the CBO projected that, without Obamacare, 186 million people would be covered by private health insurance in 2016—160 million on employer-based plans, 26 million on individually purchased plans. The CBO now says that, with Obamacare, 177 million people will be covered by private health insurance in 2016—155 million on employer-based plans, 12 million on plans bought through Obamacare's government-run exchanges, and 9 million on other individually purchased plans (plus a rounding error of 1 million).

It was always a stalking horse for single payer. ObamaCare may force employers to pull the plug on millions of health plans, CBO report finds

Sigh. This could have been prevented if someone besides racists and haters could have seen it coming

On the "Little Sisters of the Poor Case" Government admits it really doesn't intend to enforce law:

Michael McConnell, one of the leading experts on the freedom of religion in the country, explains via Eugene Volokh how the federal government has openly admitted how utterly worthless the government's arguments are against the Little Sisters of the Poor and the other religious groups arguing in the case Zubik v. Burwell.

One of the most telling moments of oral argument came during General Verrilli’s final two minutes, when Justice Alito highlighted a key government concession—that because some of the petitioners, including the Little Sisters, have a self-insured church plan, the government actually lacks authority under ERISA to make their third-party administrator provide contraceptive coverage. “In that situation,” Justice Alito asked, “will the Little Sisters still be subject to fines for failing to comply?” General Verrilli’s response was astonishing: “No, we don’t think so.” In other words, the government said it has no plans to actually enforce the mandate against the Little Sisters—and, by extension, any of the roughly 500 other religious organizations that have self-insured church plans. And even if the government coerced these organizations to sign its form, this would not make contraceptives flow.
This raises an obvious question: If the government has no plan to enforce the mandate against the Little Sisters, why has it been resisting their case for the last three years? Apparently, the government knows it would be senseless to fine the Little Sisters $70 million per year when the forced compliance would not make contraception coverage available anyway. Why did it wait until oral argument in the Supreme Court to make this crucial concession?

At a bare minimum, the concession establishes a complete lack of a compelling interest, or any interest at all, in forcing the petitioners with self-insured church plans to sign a form that will have no legal effect. More broadly, if Congress did not vest the agencies with authority to make the mandate work as to roughly 500 religious organizations, how compelling could its interest be with respect to the others?

McConnell concludes,

It is probably too much to hope that the Court will reach anything close to unanimity in a case with the symbolic and cultural valence of this one, but as soon as we get into the weeds of regulatory detail, it becomes obvious that there is no real conflict here. Not a single woman needs to be denied access to contraceptives through a seamless process – and the Little Sisters of the Poor can be left alone to carry on their good works without being required to be the government’s handmaiden for the provision of contraceptives. At a time of rising divisiveness and polarization, it would be greatly calming if the Court could unite in this case to protect the rights of many with absolutely no injury to anyone else, or to the public good.

What I find amazing is that the federal government felt so strongly about imposing the contraceptive mandate on these organizations even though there are plenty of employers that they gave waivers to on the mandate or to allow their employees to access contraceptive plans through government exchanges that they pursued this all the way to the Supreme Court where they acknowledged that they had no ability or intention to penalize the organizations for not obeying the mandate.