The ACA Is in a Total PR Free-fall

[Geee]

IRS releases O-Care employer mandate guidance after long wait

The Obama administration released guidance for businesses that must comply with the employer mandate Thursday after a long wait that raised questions about a possible third delay in the policy.

The Internal Revenue Service posted draft instructions on its website related to the mandate's reporting requirements, a final step before businesses can construct the databases they need in order to comply.

 

 

The materials had been expected prior to July 4, and frustration rose among businesses when the IRS released several outstanding forms last month without the necessary technical guidance made available on Thursday.

 

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/216196-irs-releases-employer-mandate-guidance-after-long-wait

[Geee]

Kevin, what do you want to be when you grow up?

 

 

I want to be a faceless unelected bureaucrat with the power of life and death of the American people....or a fireman.

Putting out fires either way.

[Geee]

Did Obamacare Raise or Lower Wages?

 

Before many of the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect earlier this year, pundits and economists on both sides lined up their predictions of how the new health insurance law would affect wages. While it is still early, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that wages fell in 2014 despite an otherwise growing economy. Correlation does not prove causation, but the unexpected drop in wages scores a point for those who said that the ACA would lower wages.

 

So who said what?

 

Predictably, fans of the ACA claimed it would raise wages. David Cutler, Karen Davis and Kristof Stremikis projected that health care costs would fall and the savings would be passed on to workers in the form of higher wages. Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Polly Cleveland, and Donald Marron all argued that because the ACA lowers labor supply, it must raise wages.

 

In response, Greg Mankiw pointed out that this conclusion can be drawn only if all else remains equal, which is surely not the case under the ACA.

 

Skeptics and opponents of the ACA argued either that increasing labor costs would specifically lead to lower take-home pay for affected workers or more generally that the ACA would decrease efficiency in the economy. Michael Cannon and Paul Howard argued that in order to keep their existing health insurance plans, some employers would have to cut real wages. Henry Aaron and Gary Burtless wrote that higher costs for health insurance would lower non-health insurance compensation.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/31/did-obamacare-raise-or-lower-wages/

[Valin]

Did Obamacare Raise or Lower Wages?

 

Before many of the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect earlier this year, pundits and economists on both sides lined up their predictions of how the new health insurance law would affect wages. While it is still early, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that wages fell in 2014 despite an otherwise growing economy. Correlation does not prove causation, but the unexpected drop in wages scores a point for those who said that the ACA would lower wages.

ACA Doomed to fail. The top down one size fits all model is fine for the XXth century...the problem is we are now well into the XXIst century.

[Draggingtree]

Delay on health care subsidies case

 

By Lyle Denniston on Sep 2, 2014 at 5:16 pm

 

The Obama administration on Tuesday received an additional thirty days to file its answer in the Supreme Court to a new challenge to the subsidies so far given to nearly five million individuals to help them afford health insurance. The Court’s clerk, acting on an administration request, set a new filing deadline on that document for October 3.

 

Ordinarily, most requests for an extension of time to respond to a petition for certiorari are routinely granted, but the challengers to the subsidies system in the new Affordable Care Act had urged the Court not to allow any delays in a case that they say needs early action by the Justices. Millions of dollars in what the challengers consider to be legally questionable tax subsidies are being paid out each month, they have said.

Continue reading »

[Geee]

What You Need to Know About Obamacare’s 18 Taxes

 

Obamacare created a new entitlement through its exchange subsidies and vastly expanded another one, Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office expects these two pieces of the law to cost over $1.8 trillion over the next decade.

 

To offset some of this new spending, the law includes 18 new or increased taxes and fees that are estimated to bring in nearly $800 billion in new revenue from 2013-2022. Many of Obamacare’s taxes fall directly on the middle class, breaking the president’s promise to the contrary, while others will affect taxpayers indirectly through increased costs for goods, higher insurance premiums or lost wages.

 

http://dailysignal.com/2014/09/03/need-know-obamacares-18-taxes/

[Geee]

Appeals court vacates ruling that tossed ObamaCare subsidies

 

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to revisit a ruling that struck down the ObamaCare subsidies issued through the federal exchange.

 

The announcement of the second hearing is a victory for the Obama administration, which suffered a defeat in late July, when a three-judge panel threw out the subsidies, ruling they were not legitimate under the Affordable Care Act.

 

The en banc order issued Thursday vacates the judges' July decision, eliminating, at least temporarily, a circuit split in the matter that could have led the Supreme Court to take up the case.

A decision by the full D.C. appellate court, in which Democratic appointees outnumber Republicans, could favor the administration. Arguments are scheduled for Dec. 17.

 

If the full D.C. court decides for the government, experts say it is unlikely that the high court will intervene.

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/216623-appeals-court-to-revisit-obamacare-ruling

[Valin]

Kay Hagan: Look, I didn’t realize people would lose their health plans ’til a few months ago
Guy Benson
September 4, 2014

 

During last night’s North Carolina Senate Debate, incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan responded to criticism over her obliterated ‘keep your plan‘ Obamacare pledge by claiming she didn’t hear about cancellations until “last fall:”

 

 

Step one: Blame insurers, who were forced to cancel plans that failed to comply with Obamacare, the law for which Kay Hagan furnished the deciding vote. Step two: Claim that those millions of cancellation letters fell from the sky, as if no one had predicted them. Step three: Try to claim credit for a bill that never became law because Harry Reid wouldn’t even permit a vote on it. (Fun fact: Hagan has never been a primary sponsor on any piece of legislation that went on to become law). Instead, betrayed consumers had to rely on a frantic executive rule change that was rejected by a number of state insurance commissioners because the die had already been cast. But here is a short, devastating passage from an October 2013 CNN story that exposes Hagan’s ‘I didn’t realize’ deception:

 

(Snip)

 

 

[Geee]

@Valin

 

"Kay Hagan: Look, I didn’t realize people would lose their health plans ’til a few months ago"

 

Well, she had to pass it to know what was in it, don't ya' know

[Valin]

@Valin

 

"Kay Hagan: Look, I didn’t realize people would lose their health plans ’til a few months ago"

 

Well, she had to pass it to know what was in it, don't ya' know

 

Oh if only someone had warned us!

[Geee]

[Valin]

Trainwreck, Continued: Eight New Pieces of Bad Obamacare News

Guy Benson

Sept. 04, 2014

 

Who's up for the latest batch of bad Obamacare-related news?

 

 

(Snip)

[clearvision]

Trainwreck, Continued: Eight New Pieces of Bad Obamacare News

Guy Benson

Sept. 04, 2014

 

Who's up for the latest batch of bad Obamacare-related news?

 

 

(Snip)

 

Well we do have another Friday coming up and lots of things going on the world.... so expect some new change out of the WH tomorrow.

[Valin]

 

Trainwreck, Continued: Eight New Pieces of Bad Obamacare News

Guy Benson

Sept. 04, 2014

 

Who's up for the latest batch of bad Obamacare-related news?

 

 

(Snip)

 

Well we do have another Friday coming up and lots of things going on the world.... so expect some new change out of the WH tomorrow.

 

 

 

Oh I feel so much better.

[Valin]

Breaking: DC Circuit Vacates Obamacare Decision
Steven Hayward
September 4, 2014

 

Call this the first fruits of the Obama-Reid plan to pack the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The DC Circuit has just vacated its July 22 decision in Halbig v. Burwell that struck down the federal subsidies for Obamacare in states that did not set up exchanges as the clear language of the statute said. The DC Circuit will now hear the case en banc, which likely favors a reversal since Obama has made a project of packing it with new left-leaning judges. The sagacious Roger Pilon of Cato comments:

[Valin]

Hackers Break Into Server for Obamacare Website

Sharon Begley

September 5, 2014

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) An unknown hacker or hackers broke into a computer server supporting the HealthCare.gov website through which consumers enroll in Obamacare health insurance, a government cybersecurity team discovered last week, apparently uploading malicious files.

 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the lead Obamacare agency, briefed key congressional staff on Thursday about the intrusions, the first of which occurred on July 8, CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said.

 

The malware uploaded to the server was designed to launch a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack against other websites, not to steal personal information, Albright said.

 

(Snip)

[clearvision]

A major deadline for Central Texans at risk of losing their health insurance is Friday. This affects Texans who purchased their insurance on the marketplace and had to show proof of their immigration status. Today is the deadline to re-upload those documents.

“They will lose their insurance, they will have to potentially pay back penalties, they will have to pay back the subsidies they receive as well for the insurance,” explained he Executive Director of the Latino Healthcare Forum. One of the reasons so many did not reupload these documents is because when the federal government sent out their notice back in August about this issue – it only sent the letter in English so many just threw it out.

LINK

[Geee]

Health Care's Big Spender: It's The Government At 46%

 

Federal, state and local governments will spend a total of $1.4 trillion on health care this year, which will account for a record-high 46% of the nation's total health care tab, according to spending data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

 

That's up from the government's 39% share just a decade ago, and the share is expected to hit 48% by 2023, as government programs continue to grow faster than the overall health care economy, the report found.

 

If this trend continues, government will pay for more than half of the nation's health costs by 2028.

 

ObamaCare is fueling some of this spending surge. This year, federal spending on health care is expected to climb an eye-opening 14.7%. And its growth rate will exceed that of private spending for at least the next 10 years, the data show.

 

CMS also expects Medicaid spending to shoot up 18.4% this year, thanks largely to 28 states' expansion of the Medicaid program under ObamaCare.

 

http://news.investors.com/economy/090514-716347-medical-cost-payments-coming-more-from-government.htm

[Draggingtree]

HAPPY YET, DRONES? Early Preview of Obamacare Premiums Show a 40% Spike in 2015

 

It is my sincere hope that one day conservatives will kick teachers' unions to the curb and retake the nation's educational system. One of the first orders of business then would be to teach not only the genius of the American founding but also the utter, repeated and unbroken failures of collectivism.

 

Which brings me to Obamacare, a socialistic plan sold on a panoply of lies and doomed from the outset to failure. Failure that even the Obama administration acknowledges, with its serial and unlawful rewrites of the statute, along with delays and modifications to shield a complicit Democrat Party from enraged electorates.

As for what collectivism applied to health care will do to insurance premiums? It's just as we predicted.

On Thursday, the Alaska Division of Insurance announced hefty insurance rate increases in 2015

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2014/09/happy-yet-drones-many-obamacare.html

[Draggingtree]

Obamacare’s Part-Time Nation

Whether or not we’re done with Obamacare, it’s certainly not done with us.

 

SEPTEMBER 9, 2014 By John Daniel Davidson

As summer slides into autumn, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t seem to be weighing as heavily on our elected leaders as it was this time last year, before the botched rollout of the health insurance exchanges and the battles over Medicaid expansion in state legislatures. Even Congressional Republicans appear to be losing interest. Lawmakers in Washington last summer churned out nearly four times as many press releases that referenced Obamacare than they did this summer, and GOP candidates on the campaign trail have begun shying away from direct calls for repeal. As Aaron Blake noted last week in The Washington Post, “as electoral wedge issues go, it’s certainly lost its luster.”

 

But whether or not we’re done with Obamacare, it’s certainly not done with us. The jobs report last week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics brought news that the economy added just 142,000 jobs in August, far short of the 230,000 forecast, while numbers for June and July were revised downward by 28,000 combined.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/09/obamacares-part-time-nation/

[Valin]

Health Care Takes Bigger Bite out of Americans’ Shrinking Budgets

September 10, 2014

 

Health care took a bigger bite out of Americans’ budgets in 2013 than in 2012, even though Americans spent less overall as their incomes decreased. A new report from the Department of Labor found that, in 2013, overall U.S. consumer spending declined .7 percent, after a 3.5 percent rise in 2012. Many constituent areas saw big drops (for example: clothes, 7.6 percent and entertainment, 4.7 percent), but spending in two areas rose despite the overall decline. The WSJ:

 

(Snip)

 

Policy makers must make choices that will make health care cheaper, and some tools for lowering costs already exist. Clinics are cheaper places to receive care than emergency rooms and nurse practitioners provide care at a lower cost than doctors do. Laws that restrict the scope of NPs’ practice could, therefore, be relaxed. Price transparency all on its own can lower spending; state governments can be much, much more proactive in collecting and disseminating that information. Hospitals could do a better job adopting technologies that lower costs instead of technologies that increase costs.

 

Meanwhile, as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes in the forthcoming issue of our print magazine, Americans could learn a great deal from studying successful health care systems in other countries. As the new Labor Department report illustrates, the economic security of the American middle class depends on finding ways to improve our own.

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

OK..who's surprised?

[Geee]

Even The Uninsured Are Growing Sour On ObamaCare

 

Unhealthy Reform: ObamaCare defenders keep insisting that the law is a huge success while public approval continues to deteriorate, even among Democrats and especially among the uninsured.

 

It's supposed to be the GOP's worst nightmare — President Obama's health care takeover turns out to be a success, proving once and for all that small-government conservatives are delusional.

 

ObamaCare has, we're told, signed up more than expected while avoiding terminal rate shocks. In fact, a new report suggests premiums for "benchmark" Silver plans will actually be lower in many states next year.

 

Erstwhile ObamaCare booster Jonathan Chait calls this news "almost unfathomably positive," while Ezra Klein brags that "Obama's signature accomplishment is succeeding beyond all reasonable expectation."

 

So how do Chait, Klein and company explain the fact that ObamaCare's ratings keep dropping?

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/091014-716872-even-the-uninsured-now-hate-obamacare.htm

[clearvision]

Health Care Takes Bigger Bite out of Americans’ Shrinking Budgets

September 10, 2014

 

Health care took a bigger bite out of Americans’ budgets in 2013 than in 2012, even though Americans spent less overall as their incomes decreased. A new report from the Department of Labor found that, in 2013, overall U.S. consumer spending declined .7 percent, after a 3.5 percent rise in 2012. Many constituent areas saw big drops (for example: clothes, 7.6 percent and entertainment, 4.7 percent), but spending in two areas rose despite the overall decline. The WSJ:

 

(Snip)

 

Policy makers must make choices that will make health care cheaper, and some tools for lowering costs already exist. Clinics are cheaper places to receive care than emergency rooms and nurse practitioners provide care at a lower cost than doctors do. Laws that restrict the scope of NPs’ practice could, therefore, be relaxed. Price transparency all on its own can lower spending; state governments can be much, much more proactive in collecting and disseminating that information. Hospitals could do a better job adopting technologies that lower costs instead of technologies that increase costs.

 

Meanwhile, as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes in the forthcoming issue of our print magazine, Americans could learn a great deal from studying successful health care systems in other countries. As the new Labor Department report illustrates, the economic security of the American middle class depends on finding ways to improve our own.

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

OK..who's surprised?

[Draggingtree]

Obamacare and Health Coverage Cost Growth

Posted on

 

11 September 2014

by eehines

 

President Barack Obama promised us, all those years ago, that if only Obamacare were enacted, a family’s health plan premium would drop by $2,500 per year, and no one would lose their employer-provided health plan. Period.

These two graphs from The Wall Street Journal draw a different…picture.

 

http://aplebessite.com/2014/09/11/obamacare-and-health-coverage-cost-growth/

[Geee]

HHS awards $30M to health centers to expand primary care services

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will spend nearly $300 million to help thousands of health centers that have struggled to meet rising demand for primary care under ObamaCare.

Nearly 1,300 facilities nationwide will receive the grants, allowing them to hire about 4,700 primary care doctors full time, according to an HHS release Friday.

Those doctors will be able to treat about 1.5 million patients nationwide — and help others sign up for coverage. Health centers have been responsible for 6 million new signups over the last year, according to HHS.

“Health centers are a key part of how the Affordable Care Act is working to improve access to care for millions of Americans,” HHS chief Sylvia Burwell said in a release, adding that many of the patients who benefit could be receiving primary care for the first time.

 

Primary care physicians nationwide have experienced a surge under the Affordable Care Act, with at least 13 million people newly insured.

 

The federal government has already spent heavily to train more primary care doctors, adding about 2,300 new practitioners by 2016.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/11/editorial-charity-by-government/