The ACA Is in a Total PR Free-fall

[Valin]

Second Court Strikes Down Obamacare Subsidies In Federal Exchanges

 

http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/30/second-court-strikes-down-obamacare-subsidies-in-federal-exchanges/

 

 

More Here at Power Line

[Draggingtree]

October 1, 2014

New poll: 60% want ObamaCare repealed

By Thomas Lifson

According to the “experts” who direct Republican campaign efforts, ObamaCare is yesterday’s issue. But for the voting public who have to pay for health insurance and endure the process of finding physicians who are participating in their ObamaCare plans, the plan is worth getting rid of.

 

Jeffrey H. Anderson writes in The Weekly Standard:

http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/new_poll_60_want_obamacare_repealed.html

[Valin]

How Much Did HealthCare.gov Really Cost? More Than the Administration Tells Us
Veronique de Rugy
October 1, 2014

 

As you may remember, back in May we were told by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Sylvia M. Burwell that the cost of building HealthCare.gov totaled $834 million, glitches and all. HHS’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) provided its own estimate of $800 million. However, that $800 million price tag is roughly 40 percent of the actual cost of the defective website. According to a new report produced by Bloomberg Government (BGOV), the cost of HealthCare.gov is closer to $2,142 million than $834 million.

 

The difference is mostly due to the fact that, according to BGOV, the administration’s estimates omit some pretty significant costs such as the budgetary cost of the IRS (which among other things is doling out subsidies through HealthCare.gov) and other agencies. That discrepancy accounts for $387 million.

 

(Snip)

 

So far the cost of HealthCare.gov has been $2.1 billion. That’s a lot, but it is nothing compared with the overall cost of the “reform,” which BGOV estimates to be $73.4 billion to this date. Note that this figure doesn’t include the cost of ACA’s expansion of Medicaid “because reliable data on actual spending, as opposed to forecasts, isn’t publicly available.”

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Obamacare's First Year: How'd It Go?

John Ydstie
October 01, 2014 5:43 PM ET

 

Exactly one year ago, the Obamacare insurance exchanges stumbled into existence. Consumers struggled to sign up for its online marketplace — and the Obama administration was pummeled. Eventually, HealthCare.gov's problems were mostly fixed, and two weeks ago, the administration announced 7.3 million people have bought insurance through it so far this year.

 

So, was the health exchanges' first year a success — or something less?

 

(Snip)

 

But, Gruber, who helped design Obamacare, argues it's not the total number of people in the exchanges that matters but whether premiums are affordable. His only worries are political and judicial.

 

"If the law is left alone, there is zero chance it won't work at this point," Gruber says.

 

Gruber does worry about Congress and the courts. For instance, if the Supreme Court were to uphold lower court rulings that premium subsidies received by millions of policyholders through HealthCare.gov are illegal, that would shake the very foundation of the Affordable Care Act.

 

 

 

NPR Podcast

 

 

[Valin]

This is getting ridiculous!

Another Round of Obamacare Cancellations
John Hinderaker
October 2, 2014

A year ago, a panicked Obama administration sent letters to the state insurance commissioners urging them to allow individual health care plans that were illegal under Obamacare to be extended for another year. We wrote about the ploy, which was intended to defuse the outrage that was then building against the “Affordable” Care Act, here and elsewhere.

A year has come and gone, and the Washington Post reports that cancellation notices are going out across the country:

Thousands of consumers who were granted a reprieve to keep insurance plans that do not meet the federal health law’s standards are now learning those plans will be discontinued at year’s end and they’ll have to choose a new, possibly more costly policy.

Obamacare only makes health insurance more expensive. It does nothing to make health insurance cheaper, except for those who get subsidies–in which case the insurance is even more expensive for someone else, who derives no benefit from it.

(Snip)

[Valin]

One Year Out, No Consensus on Fixing the ACA
October 2, 2014

Fifteen wonks walk into a room to fix Obamacare. That’s not a set-up to a joke, but an experiment Politico ran as the first installment of its new venture “The Agenda,” a series about important policy questions driving legislation and public debate. It convened former bureaucrats, current politicians, and health care experts to assess how the law is doing and what policymakers should do next.

 

As Politico points out, the 15 participants agreed “that health-care costs in the United States are too high.” They disagree widely, however, about the degree to which the ACA has helped with that problem, and strategies for addressing it going forward. Liberals generally support malpractice reform, and conservatives call for loosening the restrictions on catastrophic plans. Some wanted to tweak or replace the norm that employers provide insurance, which seems like a necessary and important step.

 

But none were as straightforward as we would like about the real need here: a functioning marketplace that encourages reforms in how health care is delivered. Two came closest. Here’s former HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala:

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

[Draggingtree]

After One Year, Obamacare’s Biggest Achievement: Hiding Its Cost

A dark cloud looms behind the silver linings Obamacare’s remaining supporters continue to tout.

By John Daniel Davidson OCTOBER 3, 2014

In a speech yesterday at Northwestern University, President Obama declared that the Affordable Care Act is “working pretty well in the real world”—a claim he couldn’t have made this time last year. Now, armed with surveys of the uninsured rate and CBO reports, his administration can take credit for “good, affordable healthcare”—but only by citing choice data and dwelling on those parts of the law that disguise its defects as virtues.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/03/after-one-year-obamacares-biggest-achievement-hiding-its-cost/

[Draggingtree]

New debate over health care subsidies

By Lyle Denniston on Oct 4, 2014 at 12:07 am

NOTE TO READERS: The following post was written before the federal government, on Friday evening, filed a brief in the Supreme Court urging the Justices not to get involved in this controversy at this point, and to let the dispute work its way first through the federal appeals court in Washington. Thenew federal brief is discussed at the end of this post.

———–

Arguing that minimizing the federal government’s role in providing health care coverage was crucial to getting the new federal law passed, a group of businesses and individuals on Friday urged a federal appeals court in Washington to bar tax subsidies for anyone who gets insurance at a federal marketplace — now numbering nearly five million people.

The arguments came in the opening brief before the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is reconsidering a basic challenge to a key part of the Affordable Care Act. That challenge had succeeded before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit, but that ruling was wiped out by the full court’s decision to rehear the case of Halbig v. Burwell (Circuit docket 14-5018).

 

“There is no legitimate way” to read the ACA to allow subsidies in the federal marketplaces, the brief contended.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/10/new-debates-over-health-care-subsidies/

[Geee]

Is Obamacare A Real-World Success In Year One?

 

Progressives are nothing if not relentless. From President Obama to pundits like Vox’s Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, the Left has been busy marking the first anniversary of the disastrous Obamacare rollout with claims the program has been a real-world success. Indeed, Klein (perhaps in a bid for traffic) tweaked conservative media outlets from focusing on bad news and missing the forest for the trees. At HotAir (one of Klein’s targets), Guy Benson quickly filed a link-heavy rebuttal addressing many of Klein’s claims and raising other problems with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Here at The Federalist, John Davidson wrote a response that focused on the degree to which Obamacare is not particularly increasing the quality of care, while hiding the program’s future costs. However, it may yet be useful to take a targeted look at the claims of success Klein and Cohn have made for Obamacare’s success.

 

The Budgetary ‘Success’ of Obamacare

Klein claims “the law’s costs are lower-than-expected ($104 billion lower, as of April 2014).” Cohn claims the net effect of Obamacare on the budget has been to reduce the deficit. These claims are based on various ten-year projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). I hope it is not too wonky to note that projections are not actual costs. On the day Klein’s piece was published, Bloomberg Government published a study of the actual costs of Obamacare to date, based on government contracts, estimating the cost through the end of 2014. The degree of uncertainty in such a study is far less than the CBO’s longer-term macro-economic projections. The study found Obamacare will conservatively cost $73.48 billion through 2014, a figure 20 percent larger than the initial CBO estimate of $61.2 billion.

 

But what about the CBO’s estimated “savings”? Interestingly, prior to the April 2014 report Klein cites, the trend had been for the CBO to project with each subsequent report that Obamacare would spend more, tax more, and reduce the deficit less than previously thought. Klein has previously addressed the CBO’s sudden optimism:

 

The Congressional Budget Office explains that Obamacare’s premiums are cheaper-than-expected because its insurance features ‘lower payment rates for providers, narrower networks of providers, and tighter management of their subscribers’ use of health care than employment-based plans do.’

http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/07/is-obamacare-a-real-world-success-in-year-one/

[Geee]

Wal-Mart Eliminating Health Insurance For Part-Timers

 

Wal-Mart, the country’s largest private employer, is now cutting its health insurance coverage for most part-time U.S. employees as a result of ballooning health-care costs.

The company will no longer offer health insurance to employees working less than 30 hours a week, the new standard for full-time work as defined by the Affordable Care Act, according to The Associated Press. It’s joining a long list of large companies — Target, Home Depot, Trader Joe’s — that have cut their health insurance plans for part-time workers in the wake of the health-care law.

“We had to make some tough decisions,” Sally Wellborn, senior vice president of benefits, told the AP. ”We are trying to balance the needs of [workers] as well as the costs of [workers] as well as the cost to Wal-Mart.”

http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/07/wal-mart-eliminating-health-insurance-for-part-timers/

[Geee]

Liberals: Fine, Obamacare is Forcing People Off of Their Plans, and That's Great News

 

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/10/08/gallup-yup-more-americans-have-been-hurt-than-helped-by-obamacare-n1902443

[Geee]

Senate Republicans Urge House to Stop Taxpayer Bailout of Obamacare Insurance Companies

More than a dozen Senate Republicans today asked House Speaker John Boehner to stop the Obama administration from bailing out health insurance companies that participate in Obamacare.

In a letter to the top House Republican, 13 fellow Republicans joined Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to preempt unlawful spending by the administration using a provision of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

“We write to you out of concern the administration is planning to spend appropriated and unauthorized funds through Obamacare’s risk corridor program,” wrote the senators –who include Pat Roberts of Kansas, facing a tough challenge Nov. 4 from independent candidate Greg Orman.

14 Republican senators are calling on @SpeakerBoehner to prohibit the Obama administration from bailing out health insurance companies.

Because spending bills originate in the House, funds for a bailout of insurance companies would fall under the lower chamber’s jurisdiction. In December, Boehner will have the House consider another continuing resolution to fund the government.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/08/senate-republicans-urge-house-stop-taxpayer-bailout-obamacare-insurance-companies/

[clearvision]

More than a dozen states plan to cancel health care policies not in compliance with ObamaCare

 

Millions to get notices right before election day...

[Geee]

28,476 Pages Relating to Obamacare in the Federal Register So Far

 

Since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, 28,476 pages of notices, proposed rules, and finalized rules containing the phrase, “Affordable Care Act” have been written in the Federal Register. This includes 843 notices, 222 proposed rules, and 234 final rules.

 

Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had it right when she famously said, “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

 

And unfortunately, there is still more to come.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/10/28476-pages-relating-obamacare-federal-register-far/

[Valin]

Where in the World is Jonathan Gruber?
Sam Kazman

October 9, 2014

 

he Obamacare insurance exchange rule is being challenged in four cases, and each one of them has been active over the last two weeks. The IRS rule puts the Obamacare insurance subsidies, and their attendant penalties, into effect nationwide. CEI is involved in two of these cases: King v. Burwell, which we lost in the Fourth Circuit, and Halbig v. Burwell, which we won in a 2-1 D.C. Circuit panel ruling. We argue that this is contrary to the underlying statute, which provides for such subsidies only in states that have chosen to set up their own exchanges—a choice that 34 states have declined.

 

(Snip)

 

So getting back to the government’s opposition to Supreme Court review of King—the one filed last Friday. It made the expected no-need-to-rush arguments about why the Court should wait until the D.C. Circuit finished its en banc review of Halbig; the issue itself supposedly didn’t require a quick resolution, and the en banc circuit might reverse the panel and thus eliminate the split with the Fourth Circuit.

 

But what stands out is what the brief did not do. It did not mention Jonathan Gruber at all. Gruber has been cited in every single previous government brief in King, and in the government’s major filings in Halbig. But in this latest document Gruber is gone. The same is true for the “three-legged stool” metaphor that he coined and the Economic Scholars amicus that he signed and that featured his work (and that the Halbig dissent heavily relied on). All of them are absent from the brief. Vanished. Verschwunden.

 

The D.C. Circuit may or may not eliminate the circuit split, but it won’t eliminate the Jonathan Gruber split.

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

FYI Cause I had to look it up Google: Jonathan Gruber

[Draggingtree]

The New ObamaMart

 

Posted on 12 October 2014 by eehines

 

…has been out for a couple of days.

However.

 

The Obama administration unveiled a new version of HealthCare.gov on Wednesday…

.

Officials also said that HealthCare.gov won’t display premiums for 2015 until the second week of November.

 

Of course not.

http://aplebessite.com/2014/10/12/the-new-obamamart/

[Valin]

A Blast From The Past

So What Was The Point of Obamacare Again?
Bonah 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:

 

(Snip)

 

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]

Covered California issues $184M in no-bid contracts
Jazz Shaw
October 13, 2014

It’s good work if you can get it. There may be plenty of problems related to the state exchanges under Obamacare, but if you’re in the business of working on the web sites, opportunities abound. This is particularly true if you happen to have ties to health insurance exchange Executive Director Peter Lee.

California’s health insurance exchange has awarded $184 million in contracts without the competitive bidding and oversight that is standard practice across state government, including deals that sent millions of dollars to a firm whose employees have long-standing ties to the agency’s executive director…

Several of those contracts worth a total of $4.2 million went to a consulting firm, The Tori Group, whose founder has strong professional ties to agency Executive Director Peter Lee, while others were awarded to a subsidiary of a health care company he once headed.

 

There was, initially, a theoretical reason for Covered California to issue some no-bid contracts. They were under the gun to meet a deadline imposed by the federal government which was fast approaching and the work involved some highly specialized, niche skills. But the system has been up and “running” (to be generous) for some time now. States are supposed to eschew no-bid contracts to avoid exactly what appears to be going on here. Open bidding not only gives the taxpayer at least the hope of getting a better deal for their dollar, but also leaves the process open for public inspection ahead of time. This can, when handled properly, reduce the chances of insider deals and impropriety.

 

Covered California, however, seems to be staying in emergency response mode and Peter Lee’s cronies look to be benefiting from it in spades.

 

(Snip)

 

[Geee]

Thanks to Obamacare, Health Costs Soared This Year

 

On November 15, open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges begins again. Before the second act of our national healthcare drama commences, let’s review what we’ve learned in Act I.

 

For starters, everyone now knows that federal officials are challenged when it comes to setting up a website. But they’ve demonstrated the ability to dole out a huge amount of taxpayers’ money for millions of people signing up for Medicaid, a welfare program. And they’ve proved they can send hundreds of millions of federal taxpayers’ dollars to their bureaucratic counterparts in states, like Maryland and Oregon, that can’t manage their own exchanges. But there are many other lessons to be gleaned from Year One of Obamacare. Here are three of the most important ones.

 

1. Health costs jumped—big time. Huge increases in deductibles in policies sold through the exchanges were a big story in Florida, Illinois and elsewhere. While the average annual deductible for employer-based coverage was a little over $1,000, the exchange deductibles nationwide normally topped $2,000.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/13/thanks-to-obamacare-health-costs-soared-this-year/

[Valin]

[Geee]

President Touts Lower Insurance Premiums, with Little Evidence

 

Insurance affordability was the great promise of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) when the law was signed in 2010. On the campaign trail in 2008 President Obama promised his plan would “lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.”

 

Four years later, Obama still touts the savings for Americans from his law, claiming his signature legislation is making health care premiums more affordable.

 

"If we hadn’t taken this on, and premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are," Obama told an audience at Northwestern University on October 2. "That’s like an $1,800 tax cut."

 

Rising premiums for most

 

There’s little support for the President’s claims, however. Rather than reducing health care costs as promised, health insurance premiums have gone up under ObamaCare.

 

Among recent studies, a June 2014 Morgan Stanley report found increases are largely due to changes under the ACA, with women facing premium increases ranging from 23 percent to 237 percent. Another new study, by PricewaterhouseCoopers , reviewed 2015 individual market health insurance premiums and found they had increased an average of 15.4 percent.

 

And in Alaska, the Division of Insurance announced in September “…as a direct result of the ACA, insurers offering health plans in the individual market require historic rate increases, as high as 37 percent in 2015.”

 

No worse than before?

 

According to Merrill Matthews, resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, a free market think tank, health insurance costs will be going up because ObamaCare creates incentives for more people to use more care.

 

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/10/16/president-touts-lower-insurance-premiums-little-evidence

[Valin]

Sorry, pundits: Obamacare is still a major midterm issue
Noah Rothman
October 16, 2014

 

Depending on the source, the Affordable Care Act’s fading from the front burner of American political discourse with just weeks to go before the midterm elections is either a lamentable condition or one to celebrate. Analysts on both the left and the right, however, agree that Obamacare is not the pressing issue that the pundits predicted it would be just a few short months ago.

 

“[T]here is as much ‘good’ news about the PPACA out there for Democrats to point to as there is ‘bad’ news for Republicans to point to so, in some sense, it ends up becoming a wash and neither party can really benefit from the issue,” Christian Science Monitor contributor Doug Mataconis submitted in September in an effort to explain why Obamacare has not proven to be the motivating force many assumed it would be.

 

Mataconis and others are right: the pundits and the press are no longer banging endlessly on the Obamacare drum, and the issue has faded from the headlines. It has not, however, faded from the minds of voters.

 

An AP-GfK survey of likely voters released in October showed that the Affordable Care Act was among the top four issues on the minds of those who will head to the polls in November. The Democratic firm Democracy corps found similar results when they polled voters who are already committed to voting for either Republican or Democratic candidates this fall.

 

(Snip)

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Apparently the great unwashed have not gotten the memo, that the more they know about the ACA the more they will love.

[Valin]

This Election Is Tied, & GOP May Try to Steal It

Rachel Maddow, MSNBC

 

The first part is IMO very interesting, then Smirks Maddow starts spinning.

[Draggingtree]

Obama Care Update

By Mark Thornton

Monday, October 20th, 2014

 

I have previously reported about a friend of mine and her experience with Obama Care. Earlier this year her catastrophic health insurance was canceled as insufficient under Obama Care regulations. Her monthly premiums would have increased by several hundred percent to get the cheapest available qualifying coverage. Instead she was given a “better” plan that cut her premiums by more than 90% of what she was paying for her catastrophic coverage.

 

Update: My friend has not been able to use her “better” health insurance coverage over the last 6 months. All the health related providers have turned her insurance down and she has had to pay cash for everything. She inquired about a BCBS plan that she had been previously offered and was told that it had increased by over 100%. She was told that they were no longer able to qualify people by risk factors and that several new coverages were made mandatory under Obama Care. The silver lining for her is that she will probably qualify for a 50% subsidy under Obama Care, leaving tax payers to pick up the other half.

 

There is more to health care insurance than affordability.