Less Than One-Third Of Obamacare Exchange Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured

[Valin]

Forbes:

Avik Roy

1/18/14

 

At the end of the day, for all of the rhetoric and promises about what Obamacare would achieve, the health law’s most ardent supporters have stuck to their guns because of one thing: coverage expansion. But new data suggests that Obamacare may fail even to achieve this goal. Instead of expanding coverage to those without it, Obamacare is replacing the pre-existing market for private insurance. Surveys from insurers and other industry players indicate that as few as 11 percent of those on Obamacare’s exchanges were previously uninsured. If these trends continue, the probability increases that Obamacare will eventually get repealed.

 

65-89% of Obamacare exchanges enrollees were previously insured

 

The latest reporting on this topic comes from Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal. They cite several industry surveys on the coverage history of those signing up for insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. The first, from McKinsey & Co., indicates that “only 11 percent of consumers who bought new coverage under the law were previously uninsured.” McKinsey surveyed 4,563 individuals “thought to be eligible for the health-law marketplaces,” of which 389 had enrolled in exchange-based plans.

 

Of those that didn’t sign up for Obamacare-based coverage, 52 percent stated that “affordability” was their biggest complaint with the exchanges’ plan offerings. Only 30 percent cited “technical challenges in buying the plans.”

 

[Valin]

Report: Another O-Care provision delayed
Justin Sink
1/19/14

The Obama administration is delaying enforcement of a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have fined employers that provided top executives better heath coverage than is offered to other employees, according to a report from The New York Times.

 

According to the paper, the Internal Revenue Service has not yet been able to issue regulations clarifying a portion of the ObamaCare law that prohibits discrimination of eligibility or benefits “in favor of highly compensated individuals.”

 

Since the agency has not yet determined how to measure health benefits — or which well-paid employees would be considered “highly compensated” — they plan to hold off on penalties, which are set at $100 per day for each employee negatively impacted.

 

(Snip)

 

 

[clearvision]

 

Report: Another O-Care provision delayed

Justin Sink

1/19/14

 

The Obama administration is delaying enforcement of a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have fined employers that provided top executives better heath coverage than is offered to other employees, according to a report from The New York Times.

 

According to the paper, the Internal Revenue Service has not yet been able to issue regulations clarifying a portion of the ObamaCare law that prohibits discrimination of eligibility or benefits “in favor of highly compensated individuals.”

 

Since the agency has not yet determined how to measure health benefits — or which well-paid employees would be considered “highly compensated” — they plan to hold off on penalties, which are set at $100 per day for each employee negatively impacted.

 

(Snip)

 

 

Knowing the IRS, they will go and fine companies retroactively because they should have known what the law meant.

[Valin]

Knowing the IRS, they will go and fine companies retroactively because they should have known what the law meant.

 

Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

[Casino67]

It will probably depend on what political donations were made and to whom.

[Draggingtree]

Rules for Equal Coverage by Employers Remain Elusive Under Health Law

By ROBERT PEAR

JAN. 18, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is delaying enforcement of another provision of the new health care law,

Tax officials said they would not enforce the provision this year because they had yet to issue regulations for employers to follow.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/us/rules-for-equal-coverage-by-employers-remain-elusive-under-health-law.html

[SrWoodchuck]

 

Via TheoSpark

[clearvision]

Austin Community College Cuts Adjunct Hours to Avoid Paying for Health Benefits

 

As the new year began, so did many provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Among these was the new rule that employers are now required to provide all employees working over 30 hours a week with health coverage. We've heard of some employers cutting hours to avoid paying for health insurance, but most of the stories thus far have been of private companies, like Home Depot and Forever 21.

 

There's one employer closer to home who has followed the same tactic--Austin Community College. On January 1, a new rule came into effect that forbade adjunct professors from working more than 28 hours a week, so that they would no longer be eligible for health coverage.

[Valin]

Austin Community College Cuts Adjunct Hours to Avoid Paying for Health Benefits

 

As the new year began, so did many provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Among these was the new rule that employers are now required to provide all employees working over 30 hours a week with health coverage. We've heard of some employers cutting hours to avoid paying for health insurance, but most of the stories thus far have been of private companies, like Home Depot and Forever 21.

 

There's one employer closer to home who has followed the same tactic--Austin Community College. On January 1, a new rule came into effect that forbade adjunct professors from working more than 28 hours a week, so that they would no longer be eligible for health coverage.

 

 

I'd like to say I am shocked amazed and surprised...I'd really like to, but.....

[Valin]

The Young and the ObamaCare-less

HHS is already rewriting rules to deal with adverse selection.

Jan. 20, 2014 6:31 p.m. ET

 

ObamaCare's defenders say its troubles are over as more people sign up and, by the way, stop griping because the law is here to stay. Much evidence says otherwise, to the extent that the embroidered information the White House is willing to release counts as evidence.

 

Lifting the veil of secrecy last week, the feds revealed that 2.2 million people nationwide had selected a plan through December. That is a major improvement, especially for the 36 federally run exchanges, which gathered 1.19 million total enrollees. Traffic increased sevenfold over October and November.

 

The Health and Human Services Department still won't say how many people have enrolled in a plan by paying the premium. But even assuming an implausible 100% success rate, the exchanges are still well behind the original target of seven million, much less the 20 million or so necessary to ensure a viable insurance market.

 

(Snip)

[SrWoodchuck]

From a friends e-mail:

 

Barack Obama discovers a leak under his sink, so he calls Joe the Plumber to come and fix it.

Joe drives to Obama's house, which is located in a very nice neighborhood and where it's clear that all the residents make more than $250,000 per year.

 

Joe arrives and takes his tools into the house. Joe is led to the room that contains the leaky pipe under a sink. Joe assesses the problem and tells Obama, who is standing near the door, that it's an easy repair that will take less than 10 minutes.

Obama asks Joe how much it will cost. Joe immediately says, "$9,500."

"$9,500?" Obama asks, stunned, "But you said it's an easy repair!"

"Yes, but what I do is charge a lot more to my clients who make more than $250,000 per year so I can fix the plumbing of everybody who makes less than that for free," explains Joe. "It's always been my philosophy. As a matter of fact, I lobbied government to pass this philosophy as law, and it did pass earlier this year, so now all plumbers have to do business this way. It's known as 'Joe's Affordable Plumbing Act of 2013.' Surprised you haven't heard of it."

In spite of that, Obama tells Joe there's no way he's paying that much for a small plumbing repair, so Joe leaves. Obama spends the next hour flipping through the phone book looking for another plumber, but he finds that all other plumbing businesses listed have gone out of business. Not wanting to pay Joe's price, Obama does nothing. The leak under Obama's sink goes unrepaired for the next several days.

 

A week later the leak is so bad that Obama has had to put a bucket under the sink. The bucket fills up quickly and has to be emptied every hour, and there's a risk that the room will flood, so Obama calls Joe and pleads with him to return. Joe goes back to Obama's house, looks at the leaky pipe, and says, “Let's see - this will cost you about $21,000."

"A few days ago you told me it would cost $9,500!" Obama quickly fires back.

 

Joe explains the reason for the dramatic increase. "Well, because of the 'Joe's Affordable Plumbing Act,' a lot of rich people are learning how to fix their own plumbing, so there are fewer of you paying for all the free plumbing I'm doing for the people who make less than $250,000. As a result, the rate I have to charge my wealthy paying customers rises every day.

"Not only that, but for some reason the demand for plumbing work from the group of people who get it for free has skyrocketed, and there's a long waiting list of those who need repairs. This has put a lot of my fellow plumbers out of business, and they're not being replaced - nobody is going into the plumbing business because they know they won't make any money. I'm hurting now too - all thanks to greedy rich people like you who won't pay their fair share."

Obama tries to straighten out the plumber: "Of course you're hurting, Joe! Don't you get it? If all the rich people learn how to fix their own plumbing and you refuse to charge the poorer people for your services, you'll be broke, and then what will you do?"

 

 

Joe immediately replies, "Run for president, apparently."

[Valin]

Obamacare: no internet sensation
Paul Mirengoff
1/21/14

The Obama administration is boasting that 44.5 million people have called or visited state and federal websites to explore their Obamacare options. That sounds impressive, if true.

 

But how many of them were sufficiently impressed by what they saw to actually purchase the product? Not many, it turns out. So far, according to Scott Gottlieb, only 2.2 million people have signed up for Obamacare.

 

This means that the number of people who signed up (but didn’t necessarily pay) for an Obamacare health plan amounts to a “conversion rate” of less than 5% of the Obamacare web traffic. In other words, as Gottlieb puts it, “eligible consumers, who take the time to kick the tires on Obamacare, don’t like the products that they’re finding in the exchanges. They’re browsing, but not buying.”

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Part-Time Target Employees Can’t Keep Their Health Care Plans
Katrina Trinko
January 22, 2014 at 8:12 am

Another group of Americans is discovering that President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” simply wasn’t true.

 

(Snip)

“The launch of Health Insurance Marketplaces provides new options for health care coverage that we believe our part-time team members may prefer,” Target declared in a post on the company blog. “In fact, by offering them insurance, we could actually disqualify many of them from being eligible for newly available subsidies that could reduce their overall health insurance expense.”

(Snip)

Target isn’t the only company to change its benefits policy thanks to Obamacare: Trader Joe’s and Home Depot have also stopped offering their part-time employees health insurance.

[Valin]

HHS fires back at Issa's perjury threat

Jonathan Easley

1/22/14

 

The Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday returned fire at House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) over his threat to investigate HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for false and misleading testimony to Congress.

 

In a letter obtained exclusively by The Hill, HHS assistant secretary for legislation Jim Esquea wrote a measured and clinical point-by-point rebuke of Issas charges that the secretary sought to mislead Congress about testing and security issues surrounding HealthCare.gov.

 

You made the very serious charge that the Secretarys testimony was false and misleading, Esquea wrote. We have reviewed your claims carefully. As explained below, they are not supported by the record and are incorrect.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Hey everyone Minnesota is in the news! That means we're really really important!

 

Outside review finds deep flaws in MNsure website

PATRICK CONDON

01/23/2014

 

ST. PAUL, Minn.The troubled website for Minnesota's health insurance exchange cannot be completely fixed in time for the March 31 deadline by which all Americans are supposed to have coverage under the new federal law, according to an independent review released Wednesday.

 

MNsure released findings of the review by UnitedHealth Group division Optum. It described a deeply flawed website that won't be able to meet enrollment expectations without manual workarounds and other improvised fixes. People who don't have insurance coverage by March 31 face federal tax penalties.

 

The review lays out several options for fixing the website that it said could take between 12 and 24 months. Among the options laid out are abandoning major aspects of the current website and essentially rebuilding it from scratch. MNsure officials commissioned the Optum review, and members of MNsure's board of directors said at a meeting Wednesday they would immediately begin considering how to proceed from the options it laid out.

 

The review identifies a number of fundamental problems with MNsure.org, including:

 

(Snip)

 

 

[Valin]

Craig’s List Ad Offers $50 for Obamacare Referrals
Jim Hoft
Thursday, January 23, 2014

It’s that bad.
A company in Overland, Kansas outside of Kansas City is offering $50 referral fee for anyone they enroll in Obamacare.
Via Craig’s List:

[Valin]

 

 

H/T The Gay Patriot

[clearvision]

H/T The Gay Patriot

WTH?

[Valin]

So What Was The Point of Obamacare Again?
Jonah Goldberg
January 23, 2014

As Rich noted the other day, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that the uninsured haven’t been rushing to sign up for insurance under Obamacare. From the WSJ:

 

 

Early signals suggest the majority of the 2.2 million people who sought to enroll in private insurance through new marketplaces through Dec. 28 were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about how swiftly this part of the health overhaul will be able to make a significant dent in the number of uninsured.

Insurers, brokers and consultants estimate at least two-thirds of those consumers previously bought their own coverage or were enrolled in employer-backed plans.

 

 

Note, this is after decades of liberals insisting that the uninsured were desperate to get insurance and years of Obama officials and defenders swearing that this law would make it happen. Indeed, in order to make it happen the Democrats blew up the entire health-care industry casting millions of people off their existing insurance plans. When those people went to exchanges to sign up for new ones, the Obama administration took credit for it, as if they were doing something for the uninsured. But barely 1 in 10 of new Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

 

H/T The Gay Patriot

WTH?

 

 

 

How to lie workshop.

[cudjo]

 

 

H/T The Gay Patriot

WTH?

 

 

 

How to lie workshop.

 

Surely this isn't real.

[Valin]

@cudjo

 

Twitchy

[Draggingtree]

Obamacare’s Threats to Religious Freedom

Andrew Napolitano, Reason Magazine

 

When the Framers were putting together the Constitution in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they knew the states would not adopt it without written guarantees that the new central government would respect natural rights. The supporters of the Constitution promised political leaders in the states that the written guarantees would soon be added as amendments, and they were. By late 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified and added to the new Constitution.

 

The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to assure all in America that their natural rights--areas of human choices for which a permission slip from the government cannot be required and in which the government cannot coerce compliance with its wishes --would not be impaired by the federal government. Since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the natural rights protected in the Bill of Rights generally have been insulated from interference by the states, as well.

 

All natural rights are of paramount importance to all persons. They are individualized personal gifts from the Creator and have been recognized as such in American law since Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed with them by Him.

 

One of those rights guarantees the free exercise of religion. Indeed, the Free Exercise Clause in the First Amendment was written to ensure that the new government could not coerce persons to behave differently than their religious views informed their consciences or punish them for not conforming to a government-mandated religious orthodoxy. Generally, for almost 230 years, the federal government left us alone to choose freely our religious practices and to worship as we believe. Until now.

 

Today, the free exercise of religion is under attack by the government. When Congress enacted the Affordable Health Care Act--I prefer to call it Obamacare because it is President Obama's brainchild, his signature legislation, and because there is nothing affordable about it-- snip

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/11357

[Valin]

Moodys downgrades outlook for health insurers over Obamacare concerns

Mandy Nagy

Thursday, January 23, 2014 at 7:17pm

 

Many have addressed the issue of uncertainty created by the implementation of Obamacare and noted the impact that may have on a variety of areas, including for the health insurance industry.

On Thursday, Moodys Investors Service downgraded its outlook for health insurers, citing such uncertainty.

From Moodys:

 

 

Moodys changed the outlook for US health insurers to negative from stable, as implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)continues to create uncertainty for the industry, says Moodys Investors Service in its new industry outlook US Healthcare Insurers: Outlook Changed to Negative from Stable.

 

The ACAsigned into law in March 2010seeks to increase affordability of health insurance and expand both public and private insurance coverage through a number of mechanisms including exchanges, mandates and subsidies.

 

While weve had industry risks from regulatory changes on our radar for a while, the ongoing unstable and evolving environment is a key factor for our outlook change, said Stephen Zaharuk, a Moodys Senior Vice President and author of the report. The past few months have seen new regulations and announcements that impose operational changes well after product and pricing decisions were finalized.

 

Uncertainty over the demographics of those enrolling in individual products through the exchanges is a key factor in Moodys outlook change, says the rating agency. Enrollment statistics show that only 24% of enrollees so far are aged 18-34, a critical group in ensuring that lower claim costs subsidize the higher claim costs of less healthy, older individuals. This is well short of the original 40% target based on the proportion of eligible people in this cohort, says Moodys.

(Snip)

[Valin]

Obamacare’s Threats to Religious Freedom

Andrew Napolitano, Reason Magazine

 

When the Framers were putting together the Constitution in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they knew the states would not adopt it without written guarantees that the new central government would respect natural rights. The supporters of the Constitution promised political leaders in the states that the written guarantees would soon be added as amendments, and they were. By late 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified and added to the new Constitution.

 

The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to assure all in America that their natural rights--areas of human choices for which a permission slip from the government cannot be required and in which the government cannot coerce compliance with its wishes --would not be impaired by the federal government. Since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the natural rights protected in the Bill of Rights generally have been insulated from interference by the states, as well.

 

All natural rights are of paramount importance to all persons. They are individualized personal gifts from the Creator and have been recognized as such in American law since Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed with them by Him.

 

One of those rights guarantees the free exercise of religion. Indeed, the Free Exercise Clause in the First Amendment was written to ensure that the new government could not coerce persons to behave differently than their religious views informed their consciences or punish them for not conforming to a government-mandated religious orthodoxy. Generally, for almost 230 years, the federal government left us alone to choose freely our religious practices and to worship as we believe. Until now.

 

Today, the free exercise of religion is under attack by the government. When Congress enacted the Affordable Health Care Act--I prefer to call it Obamacare because it is President Obama's brainchild, his signature legislation, and because there is nothing affordable about it-- snip

 

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/11357

Bring It On!