Photo Credit: ThinkstockHHS gives up on Obamacare’s anti-fraud measures
By Philip Klein. One of the biggest administrative hurdles facing Obamacare was the ambitious plan to verify the income and insurance status of applicants for federal health coverage subsidies. In theory, on Oct. 1 of this year, a prospective beneficiary of Obamacare was supposed to be able to visit a website like Orbitz, enter basic information, and wait as multiple state and federal government databases communicated with one another to confirm in real time the applicant’s income level, and then display the level of subsidy to which the applicant was entitled, if any. It was a level of technological sophistication unlike anything ever attempted by the government. Now, with less than three months to go before Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges are set to begin enrolling applicants, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services is throwing up its hands. Just as it did with the employer mandate, the administration has announced it would delay the implementation of these anti-fraud procedures due to the administrative difficulty.
In a regulation released Friday and flagged by Washington Post reporters Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar, the administration will now rely on self-reported data. You read that correctly. A man who earns $50,000 per year and gets insurance through his employer could log on to the new government website and say he earns $20,000 and gets no insurance through his employer, and the government would not even attempt to confirm that the information is accurate before forking over generous taxpayer subsidies. It’s a recipe for rampant fraud, which is already widespread in Medicare and Medicaid.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Obamacare was simply bad legislating
By Timothy P. Carney. President Obama’s signature legislative achievement was simply a bad bit of legislating. The administration’s decision to postpone the employer health insurance mandate is just the latest evidence that this law was poorly built.
An analogy: You may think Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings are beautiful or ugly. But that’s a matter of taste, and it’s a different question from whether they are built soundly.
Analogously, you may share Obama’s views of government or reject it, but that’s a separate issue from whether this law was well made. With Obamacare, the architects used nails where screws were needed, and the angles aren’t quite right. This structure can’t bear its own weight.
The employer mandate was always a bad idea, and not only from the perspective of economic liberty. Liberal health-care wonks knew that the employer-based health-insurance system was a big part of our problem. If people get their insurance from work, then they lose their insurance when they switch jobs, exacerbating the problem that insurers typically don’t cover preexisting conditions. Also, when the HR director is doing the insurance shopping for all employees, insurers don’t face real competitive pressure.
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Photo Credit: TownhallWhat the Employer Mandate Delay Says About Obamacare’s Dysfunction
By Kevin Glass. The Obama Administration’s decision to delay implementation of one of Obamacare’s big regulations – the employer mandate – led to some progressives actually cheering. “Delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. “In my view, the Administration should have gone further than delaying the employer mandate. They should have also proposed a bill to remove it entirely,” writes economist Austin Frakt. Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler writes, “I think you can make a decent case that the administration is actually doubling down on the most crucial and politically high-valence part of the law.”
These have come along with typical blame-Republicans condemnations. If the employer mandate is so bad, why wouldn’t Congressional Republicans just team up with Democrats to repeal it entirely, for example?
These critics are largely missing the point.
President Obama promised perfection when it came to the Affordable Care Act. More insurance coverage, better health outcomes, cheaper premiums, and you can keep your health care plan. That last one was particularly key when it came to selling the whole package. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was repeated time and again in the President’s PR campaign for the health legislation. Read more from this story HERE.
