Obama Admin Picking Winners & Losers By Waiving Flawed ObamaCare Mandates

Repeal ObamaCare

The New York Times reports today, “As Obama administration officials put into place the first major wave of changes under the health care legislation, they have tried to defuse stiffening resistance — from companies like McDonald’s and some insurers — by granting dozens of waivers to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new law’s standards. The waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies. Among those that administration officials hoped to mollify with waivers were some big insurers, some smaller employers and McDonald’s, which went so far as to warn that the regulations could force it to strip workers of existing coverage. . . . To date, the administration has given about 30 insurers, employers and union plans, responsible for covering about one million people, one-year waivers on the new rules that phase out annual limits on coverage for limited-benefit plans, also known as ‘mini-meds.’ Applicants said their premiums would increase significantly, in some cases doubling or more.”

Throughout the health care debate, Republicans pointed to the unavoidable consequences of Democrats’ attempts to insert more government into the health care system. In fact, the very week the unpopular health care bill passed, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned of “all the unintended consequences that will inevitably result from a 2,800-page bill that sets up dozens of federal boards and a thicket of new rules and regulations — regulations that we know won’t withstand their first contact with reality.” He continued, “When the White House was questioned about the glitches in the bill, they said the Secretary of Human Services was on the case. They said she’d issue a new regulation to correct the problem. But this is precisely what Americans are afraid of. This bill hadn’t even been law for 24 hours, and already they’re proposing regulations to cover over mistakes and errors. And we haven’t even seen the last of it.”

And this past week was the latest example. The Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday that “McDonald's Corp. has warned federal regulators that it could drop its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers unless regulators waive a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul.” It was obvious all along that the new mandates, regulations, and additional expenses in Democrats’ health care legislation could result in companies dropping their health coverage. And the WSJ story just confirmed those fears.

But the Obama administration treated the story as a PR challenge, rather than a flaw in the law itself. The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack reported that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, “The McDonald's story is flat out wrong. . . . I’m sorry they weren’t more accurate in their reporting.” McCormack noted, “Sebelius suggested that McDonald's may in fact get a waiver from HHS that would enable the fast-food giant to continue offering limited benefits plans to its employees.” And today, the NYT reports that the Obama administration has now granted these waivers.

The American Spectator’s Philip Klein makes an important point about this. He writes today, “[B]y granting waivers to avert PR nightmares, like the news of McDonald's dropping coverage, it also adds another disturbing element to the ObamaCare regime. Those companies with the best access and lobbyists are in the best position to be granted a waiver. Bureaucrats can choose to apply a different set of rules to different businesses, and in some cases those rules can determine whether a given business survives. Thus, the waivers themselves are another example of the arbitrary nature of government power.”

So not only are the poorly thought out regulations and mandates in Democrats’ bill leading to the prospect of some Americans losing their health care coverage, the increased powers given to the government under this bill are now allowing the Obama administration to respond to play PR games with health coverage, picking winners and losers as it suits them.

Remember when Republicans were called alarmists for saying businesses would dump employees from their insurance plan. Well, we can already see that some of the "nation’s biggest employers are seriously considering cutting employee health care and paying the lower-cost penalties instead."  The result is that the Obama's promise that "if you like the plan you have, you can keep it."  You can't keep a healthcare program that your employer no longer provides!  Speaker Pelosi said we’d have to pass this health care bill for people to find out what was in it, she knew what she was talking about.  We are finding out everyday that this flawed Obamacare legislation needs to be repealed and replaced.

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