Train Wreck: Obamacare Nightmares Continue - 'Dizzying Series Of Delays And Changes'

Today in Washington, D.C. - March 13, 2014
The Senate reconvened at 9:30 AM today. The Senate resumed consideration of S. 1086, the Child Care and Development Block Grant Reauthorization bill. Votes on amendments to the bill are expected throughout the day. At 12:15, the Senate began voting on an amendment to the bill offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK).

Yesterday, the Senate agreed to 3 amendments to S. 1086 offered by Sens. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Al Franken (D-MN), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

The House reconvened at 10 AM today. Bills and resolutions being considered today:
S.J. Res. 32 — "Providing for the reappointment of John W. McCarter as a citizen regent of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution."
H.R. 3189 - "To prohibit the conditioning of any permit, lease, or other use agreement on the transfer, relinquishment, or other impairment of any water right to the United States by the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture"
H.R. 4015 - "To amend title XVIII of the Social Security Act to repeal the Medicare sustainable growth rate and improve Medicare payments for physicians and other professionals, and for other purposes; and providing for proceedings during the period from March 17, 2014, through March 21, 2014."
H.R. 3973 — "To amend section 530D of title 28, United States Code."

Yesterday the House passed H.R. 4138 (233-181) — "To protect the separation of powers in the Constitution of the United States by ensuring that the President takes care that the laws be faithfully executed, and for other purposes."

Though other issues have dominated the news recently, the Obamacare disaster rolls on, hurting Americans, creating confusion, and exposing the Obama administration’s failures.

Above all, this unpopular law is hurting Americans, with people all across the country continuing to find that Obamacare is raising premiums and cancelling plans, in some cases putting any health insurance out of reach. Some are being told their doctors and hospitals won’t accept the doctors and hospitals they prefer, once more contradicting explicit promises from Democrats when they passed Obamacare.

Ironically, some unions, who supported President Obama and the Democrats who wrote the law, are now realizing that not only is it a bad deal for most Americans, it’s harmful to their members as well. In an editorial over the weekend, the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted, “The Culinary [Local 226] and its affiliated Bartenders Local 165 have agreed to new contracts with Strip giants MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment, but talks with more than a dozen properties have made little progress. The primary hurdle to new deals at the Stratosphere, the Riviera and several downtown hotels is health benefits. Culinary members have long enjoyed health care that is fully funded by employers, but the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has increased medical costs to the point that many companies can no longer afford to pay full freight. The hotels want workers to pick up some of Obamacare’s new costs, a demand the Culinary won’t agree to. Of course, Obamacare is the law because of the Culinary’s political activism. The Culinary and the rest of organized labor poured untold millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours into the election campaigns of President Barack Obama and the Democrats who wrote and passed Obamacare, and the unions championed the reboot of American health insurance. Then they realized Obamacare’s critics were right. The law is wrecking platinum-plated union health plans, not to mention health insurance for tens of millions of people. ‘The biggest hurdle to reaching settlements in Vegas is the new costs imposed on our health plan by Obamacare,’ D Taylor, president of Culinary parent Unite Here, told BuzzFeed last week. ‘Even though the president and Congress promised we could keep our health plan, the reality is, unless the law is fixed, that won’t be true.’”

Nevada journalist Jon Ralston reported on a letter Taylor’s union sent to Democrat leaders last week. “The paper argues that the Affordable Care Act will transfer a billion dollars in wealth to insurance companies, create an unlevel playing field in the market, force employers to cut back hours and result in pay decreases. It lays it out in detail, with examples of union workers affected by Obamacare.” The letter explains, “the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage.”

And though the Obama administration likes to deflect all this by pointing to the enrollment numbers for Obamacare plans over the last several month, they still can’t say how many people are actually covered, which requires them to pay their premiums. Politico writes today, “The White House insists it doesn’t know how many people are fully enrolled in Obamacare, but insurers say they’ve handed over enough data to show that the sign-up numbers are not as rosy as federal officials say. The latest administration figures show that 4.2 million people have selected health plans in the new insurance markets. Insurance industry officials at four of the big national health plans tell POLITICO that about 15 to 20 percent of people who have signed up have not yet paid their first monthly premium — the final step to get coverage. And they’ve told the White House that, too, insurance industry officials say. ‘They have a lot more information than they’re letting on,’ one industry source said of the Obama administration. ‘They have real hard data about the percent that have paid … If they have not processed those yet and compiled the data, that is a choice they are making. But they have that data now.’ . . . ‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know that,’ Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday when Republicans asked about the number of paying Obamacare customers during a hearing on Capitol Hill. ‘We don’t collect it.’ The dispute emerges as the administration is trying to convey a sense of enthusiasm and momentum ahead of a March 31 deadline to enroll in Affordable Care Act exchanges. But unless the current pace doubles, the administration won’t hit its target of 6 million people — a goal that was already scaled back from 7 million after last October’s messy rollout of HealthCare.gov. But the hill to climb may be even steeper than the White House acknowledges. Once the premium payment rate is factored in, the actual count of people who now have health coverage under the president’s health law could be closer to 3 million than 4 million. The insurance exchanges may still work with fewer people — but the political narrative is that the controversial health law is again falling short.”

Of course, it’s not just the federal health care exchange that can’t give an accurate count of how many people are enrolled, some of the state exchanges can’t either. The San Jose Mercury News reported earlier this week, “Roughly 15 percent of the Californians who had enrolled by Jan. 31 still haven't sent in their first month's payment, according to four major health insurance companies participating in the Covered California exchange. So those lofty enrollment numbers could soon be dropping substantially.”

That’s far from the only problem the state exchanges are struggling with, however. The Oregonian reported on Tuesday, “The Cover Oregon health insurance exchange is one of the worst in the country at attracting younger enrollees, according to a new federal report. Only 18 percent of those who've enrolled through the Oregon exchange fall between the ages of 18-34, a healthier age bracket considered crucial to keeping future premiums down. . . . The Oregon number, which ties with West Virginia as the nation's worst, falls well below the national average of 25 percent. . . . Cover Oregon had gone out of its way to attract the young, spending millions on television and radio ads that featured Oregon musicians such as Laura Gibson and the hip hop band Lifesavas. A Washington Post reporter observed that the ads ‘seriously could have been pulled straight out of Portlandia.’ . . . Meanwhile, as the March 31 enrollment deadline nears, half of those who applied through Oregon's health exchange still haven't selected a plan.”

Meanwhile, the failing health exchanges and the millions of taxpayer dollars spent on them in some states are attracting investigators at the state and federal level. According to The Hill, “Congress’s investigative arm said Wednesday it will audit Oregon’s broken healthcare exchange site, which has yet to enroll even one person despite spending $304 million in federal funds. The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a letter to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) it would look into how the funds were spent, and whether that money could be recovered from third-party contractors, among other things. . . . The GAO probe will be the first federal investigation into the handful of state-run ObamaCare sites, but it likely won’t be the last. The agency said it will ‘undertake this work as part of a broader study planned to examine states’ health exchange websites.’ . . . Lawmakers have set their sites on the exchange in Maryland, where state officials have been debating for months whether to abandon its faltering state-run exchange in favor of HealthCare.gov. Reps. Andy Harris (R-Md.) and Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) sent a letter to Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel Levinson last month asking for an investigation into Maryland’s exchange.”

Through all of this, President Obama continues to order tweaks, changes, and exemptions from the law without authorization from Congress. In an editorial today, The Dallas Morning News sums up the situation: “What’s clear is that this dizzying series of delays and changes has wrought confusion, with its most harrowing deadline dead ahead. On March 31, the tax penalty for failing to purchase health insurance — the individual mandate — kicks in. Yet insurance companies and potential new customers are befuddled by rapid shifts in what the law now demands. The relentless push-back of other deadlines to points conveniently beyond one election or another leads to justified suspicion that politics have long since overridden policy. As it has from the start, Obamacare polls as an albatross to Democrats. . . . And while few would profess to separate health care from its politics, few pretend anymore that Obamacare’s executive changes are anything other than political cover for Democrats. The most recent delays were the most blatant, as the administration pushed back for two years the deadline to buy policies that comport with beefed-up Obamacare requirements. So you can keep your old, substandard plan until the 2016 elections are behind us.”

This leads us to the latest changes that the president has made. The Wall Street Journal editors explained “ObamaCare's Secret Mandate Exemption” yesterday. “ObamaCare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty. This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. . . . [A]mid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you ‘believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy’ or ‘you consider other available policies unaffordable.’”

Can any employer, much less ordinary American health care consumer keep up with, as The Dallas Morning News put it, the “dizzying series of delays and changes”?

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