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The Individual Mandate Goes Poof

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Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

By Abby Mccloskey and Tom Miller.

One by one, the myths of the Affordable Care Act have been revealed. When the curtain on open enrollment falls on March 31, the last remaining big myth of ObamaCare will be fully exposed: The individual mandate has failed.

After a last-ditch effort with President Obama himself encouraging “young invincibles” to sign up before the deadline, the administration is scrambling to boost enrollment. On Tuesday, the White House announced that people who applied for coverage on the federal health-insurance exchange will have until mid-April to finish the paperwork.

The mandate was supposed to be the administration’s magical elixir for the assorted shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act. Disappointing early enrollment numbers? More people will sign up eventually to avoid mandate penalties. Potential premium spikes for government-approved coverage that must ignore cost differences in the age- and health-related risks of enrollees? Forcing young and healthy individuals to buy coverage will spread out the costs.

But the individual mandate was never strong enough to force millions of Americans to buy insurance they did not want or could not afford. Last week, the Obama administration estimated that five million Americans had signed up thus far for insurance on the exchanges, falling short of original projections by the administration and the Congressional Budget Office that there would be seven million first-year enrollees. Yet even the five million figure needs to be discounted by at least another 20% to account for people who fail to pay for their first month’s premium, according to insurers’ estimates of early enrollees.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Human Events

Photo Credit: Human Events

Obamacare: The Mistake America Could Not Afford

By John Hayward.

Journalistic icon Bob Woodward has been in hot water with the Obama Administration and its more enthusiastic apologists for a while now. He’s not going to get any more popular with that crowd after his appearance on “Fox News Sunday” last weekend, in which he related a conversation with a doctor he described as a “very knowledgeable, very involved supporter of ObamaCare” who nevertheless described it as similar to “a car stuck in first gear.”

When Woodward asked this ObamaCare-supporting doctor when he thought second gear might kick in, the response was, “Honestly, years!” because, to continue the clunker car analogy, “the transmission is in the shop for repairs.”

This led to a remarkable burst of blubbering from one of our dwindling supply of ObamaCare apologists, Juan Williams, who sobbed that nobody was trying to count up enrollment numbers or calculate sustainability when Mitt Romney rolled out his health care plan in Massachusetts, and those mean old green-eyeshade-wearing Republicans should just put their evil accounting witchery on hold and give ObamaCare a few years to creak and shudder into second gear.

Which nicely illustrates one of the core idiocies animating ObamaCare apologists: they’ve arrogantly insisted on refusing to accept the very obvious point that Massachusetts is not equivalent to the entire United States of America. A program that more-or-less works in one state (and there have always been plenty of critics, both locally and nationally, who think “less” is a better description of how well RomneyCare works) can prove both Constitutionally offensive and unsustainable on the national level. It’s such an obvious point that it seems ludicrous to have to explain it to adult citizens of the United States, over and over again. Mitt Romney tried to do so on the campaign trail, but frankly he didn’t make the point nearly as well as he should have, and the fact that he had to make it at all was a burden upon his campaign. Like ObamaCare, Romney’s campaign ended up stuck in first gear, trying to explain a high-information concept to low-information voters, while the Idiocracy ran around telling people that Mitt Romney gave a steel worker’s wife cancer just by looking at her.

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Begich, Other Senate Dems Join Call to Delay ObamaCare Mandate Amid Website Failures

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Photo Credit: APSeveral Democratic senators are calling on the Obama administration to delay enforcement of the health care law’s individual mandate, joining their Republican colleagues in saying it would be unfair to penalize Americans for failing to buy insurance when the primary sign-up website doesn’t work.

The Democratic dominoes began to fall quickly Wednesday, after Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., circulated a letter urging President Obama to extend enrollment beyond March 31, 2014.

Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., in a statement released late Wednesday, said: “I believe, given the technical issues, it makes sense to extend the time for people to sign up.”…

The White House, while defending the health care law and vowing to fix the problems with the website, has not explicitly ruled out the possibility of delaying the individual mandate. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, also backed Shaheen’s call in a written statement Wednesday.

“I have repeatedly said this law is not perfect and have proposed changes to make it work for Alaska families and small businesses,” he said. “Given the recent website issues, I also support extending open enrollment season. I want to work with the administration to ensure that individuals are not unfairly penalized if technical issues with the website continue.”

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CBO: Obamacare Individual Mandate Delay Would Save $35 Billion

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

The House bill to delay Obamacare’s individual mandate would save $35 billion dollars, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis.

After the Obama administration revealed it would not enforce the employer mandate — a requirement that large companies provide their employees health insurance — until January 2015, the House quickly passed a measure that would not only codify that delay, but put off the individual mandate by one year as well.

The CBO found that just a one-year delay of the individual mandate would save $35 billion over ten years. But the basic cost structure of the Affordable Care Act would remain intact.

“I never thought I’d see the day when the White House, this president, came down on the side of big business, but left the American people out in the cold as far as this health care mandate is concerned,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.

Cantor’s message carried over even to some in the President’s own party. The “Fairness for American Families Act” is one of many Republican-dominated efforts to delay certain aspects of Obamacare, but this time it received bipartisan support: 22 House Democrats bucked their own party and voted for the bill, which President Obama vowed to veto.

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Seven Million Will Lose Insurance Under Obama Health Law

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Photo Credit: Carolyn KasterPresident Obama’s health care law will push 7 million people out of their job-based insurance coverage — nearly twice the previous estimate, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.

CBO said that this year’s tax cuts have changed the incentives for businesses and made it less attractive to pay for insurance, meaning fewer will decide to do so. Instead, they’ll choose to pay a penalty to the government, totaling $13 billion in higher fees over the next decade . . .

Overall, the new health provisions are expected to cost the government $1.165 trillion over the next decade — the same as last year’s projection

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Doctors to Obama: You’ve Failed Again

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Photo Credit: WNDMembers of the Christian Medical Association had harsh words for Barack Obama after his latest attempt to mandate abortion coverage in Obamacare: You have failed.

“This latest version of the contraceptives and sterilization mandate remains unacceptable,” said Dr. David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical Association. “Since when does the government get to pick and choose which groups will get to enjoy First Amendment protections?

Our founders intended the First Amendment to protect every American’s freedom to act according to one’s conscience,” he said. “They didn’t specify that only groups deemed religious will be afforded this protection; freedom of conscience applies equally to all Americans.”

Dr. Gene Rudd, CMA executive vice president, joined Stevens.

“The administration fails to understand that many employers and individual Americans, regardless of a religious label or not, maintain strong conscience objections to participating in any, way, shape or form in a plan that promotes pills that the FDA says can cause the demise of a living human embryo – a developing baby in her earliest stage,” Rudd said.

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Cardinal Dolan: Catholics Won’t ‘Give In’ on HHS Mandate

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Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said that the Catholic Church will continue to move ahead with challenges to the Obama administration’s HHS mandate.

Dolan asserted that the Church will not comply with the mandate that requires most employers, even those affiliated with religious organizations, to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients through health insurance plans.

“The only thing we’re certainly not prepared to do is give in,” Dolan said at a news conference. “Not violate our consciences, and not obey what we consider to be something immoral. That we’re committed on.”

Dozens of Catholic dioceses and other Catholic organizations have filed lawsuits in federal courts over the mandate, which is included in ObamaCare.

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Bible Publisher Beats Obama Abortion-HHS Mandate in Court

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photo credit: dctim1A federal court today stopped enforcement of the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate against a Bible publisher which filed a lawsuit against it.

The mandate has generated massive opposition from pro-life groups because it forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties.

The Obama administration opposed the order, arguing that Tyndale House Publishers isn’t religious enough for an exemption from the mandate, a component of ObamaCare that forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties.

The decision only applies to the company and does not stop the Obama HHS mandate nationwide against other religious groups, businesses, hospitals, or educational institutions.

Represented by attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom, Tyndale House Publishers, based in Illinois, is the world’s largest privately held Christian publisher of books, Bibles, and digital media and directs 96.5 percent of its profits to religious non-profit causes worldwide. The publisher specifically objects to covering abortifacients under the mandate.

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On Election Eve, Catholics Unite to Protect Religious Freedom

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[The] last Sunday before Election Day [found] Catholics across the nation, and beyond, uniting in both prayer and advocacy to protect freedom of religion as provided in the Constitution. Interestingly, the emphasis on Catholic values and teachings, as a result of the recent defense of freedom of religion, may also end up strengthening religious faith among Catholics in general.

Since the announcement of what is now familiarly termed, “the HHS mandate,” Catholics and Christians of other denominations have denounced the ObamaCare provision that demands that most employers, including those associated with churches, grant free contraception, sterilization procedures, and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees through their health insurance plans.

This coercion to violate faith beliefs in order to satisfy government requirements has led to a veritable onslaught of litigation by Catholic dioceses and institutions, the institutions of other Christian denominations, and individual business owners. As Barack Obama attempts to be elected to a second term, he is faced with 38 lawsuits and over 110 individuals from around the country who represent those whose religious liberty is being challenged by the mandate.

In the swing state of Colorado, a group of lay Catholics has placed a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of the Denver Post to drive home the significance of religious liberty in Tuesday’s election. Regarding the ad, J.D. Flynn, chancellor of the Denver archdiocese, said, “I think the folks who organized getting the ad together want to ensure everybody understands what’s at stake not only for the Church, but for the country, when religious liberty is compromised.”

The ad features the full text of a letter written by Denver Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila about religious freedom and the election. “I just think it speaks to the quality and commitment of the lay people in the Archdiocese of Denver that they want to support the archbishop in this way,” Flynn commented. “Our country is the product of religious liberty. When we undermine that for something as short-sighted as free contraception, everybody is in serious trouble.”

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