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Obamacare: States Want a Delay, Too

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Photo Credit: George Ruhe‘I wish we had one more year:’ States are struggling to launch Obamacare on time

By Sarah Kliff. Facing tight deadlines and daunting workloads, states across the country are scaling back ambitions for implementing the Affordable Care Act.

At a monthly board meeting of Connecticut’s health insurance exchange, members of the standing-room-only crowd got a reminder that they, too, were behind schedule. The insurance marketplace they were working on nights and weekends won’t be completely ready on time.

“It is highly complex, it’s unprecedented and it’s not going to be smooth,” Kevin Counihan, chief executive of the state’s exchange, Access Health CT, told the group.

That’s why Connecticut — like other states across the country — has lowered the bar, doing what it can in the time it has left before the health-care law’s major programs are launched Oct. 1.

Although the states are promising to provide new marketplaces for individuals to compare and buy health insurance plans, the Web portals will be a bare-bones version of what was initially envisioned. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Karen T. BorchersCBO: Obamacare Delay Will Cost Feds Billions

By Tony Pugh. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government will lose $10 billion in employer penalties in 2015 because of the delayed enforcement. Likewise, many expect that federal outlays to help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage will grow with employers no longer required to provide coverage next year.

“At a minimum, the federal revenue from fines is gone. More realistically, the costs of already bloated insurance subsidies will escalate and the red ink will rise,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.

Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who helped design the federal health law, said the decision to forego the $10 billion in penalties was both pragmatic and political.

“Basically, it was their judgment that it was causing too many logistical and political headaches and it wasn’t that essential to the law, so they decided to just delay it a year and live with the revenue loss,” Gruber said Wednesday.

Obama officials said as much on Tuesday, when they announced plans to “revamp and simplify” the process of reporting the status of employee coverage and calculating appropriate penalties. “We will convene employers, insurers and experts to propose a smarter system and, in the interim, suspend reporting for 2014,” said White House special adviser Valerie Jarrett. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/GettyObama Skips Past Congress Again With Health Mandate Delay

By Steven T. Dennis and Matt Fuller. President Barack Obama’s latest legal end run around Congress — delaying enforcement of the employer health mandate — has sparked more questions about whether he’s abusing his executive discretion under the Constitution.

The move announced late Tuesday was the latest in a string of decisions where the president, facing a divided Congress unable to get much done beyond keeping the government running, has taken matters into his own hands.

Where a previous president might have asked for a legislative fix if a mandate was proving too onerous for business, the Obama administration put out a couple of blog posts saying that, in listening to the business community, it decided not to enforce a key part of the 3-year-old health law for another year.

The administration notes that parts of laws are delayed in implementation all the time — including various pieces of the tax code.

A Treasury official said the administration has “longstanding administrative authority to grant transition relief when implementing new legislation like the ACA.” Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Delays Employer Mandate, but Leaves HHS Mandate in Effect for Christian Companies

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President Obama’s decision to delay the implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate gives no relief to Christian business owners who object to providing contraception to employees as required by the Health and Human Services mandate, which remains in effect and on pace to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the midst of the 2014 midterm elections.

The delay of the employer mandate does not affect religious people who oppose the HHS mandate. “They’re going to be subject to a different penalty,” Kyle Duncan of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is challenging the constitutionality of the mandate on behalf of a private company, Hobby Lobby, told the Washington Examiner. “Not the $2,000 per employee penalty that the administration has said it’s going to suspend for the year, but the $100 per employee, per day, IRS excise tax which is in a different section of the IRS code, but the administration has not said they’re going to suspend that.”

Duncan explained that “the reporting requirements that trigger the excise tax, those are different reporting requirements under different Treasury regulations; they predate the Affordable Care Act altogether.”

Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute’s health care policy expert, agreed with Duncan’s assessment. “It’s not that the Obama administration is unwilling to relax onerous mandates on employers,” he noted in an email to the Examiner. “They just don’t think religious freedom is a good enough reason.”

Read more from this story HERE.

“Stunned” GOP Launches Probe into Obamacare Delay While Obama Continues to Grease the Skids (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsRepublicans launch probe into ObamaCare mandate delay

By Fox News. House Republicans are investigating the Obama administration’s move to delay a key part of the health care overhaul, claiming the announcement was “completely at odds” with prior claims that ObamaCare was running on schedule and questioning what provisions might be delayed next.

“It’s clear we have no idea the full scope of delays and disarray that may be coming. The American public deserves answers,” Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement.

Republicans on Upton’s committee fired off a pair of letters on Wednesday to both the Treasury Department and Department of Health and Human Services. They demanded records detailing deliberations regarding the recently announced delay and ongoing talks about other “elements” of the law that some groups want “changed, delayed or repealed.” Read more from this story HERE.


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Republicans “Stunned” Over Delay, Trying to Figure Out What to Do

By Byron York. The move stunned Republicans in Congress, who immediately asked: Whose feedback? What businesses were meeting with the White House? What deals did they make?

“These communications and the decision-making process related to the delay… have not been disclosed publicly,” wrote House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton in a letter to the Treasury Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. Along with 13 other Republican committee members, Upton demanded the administration reveal which businesses and which government officials were involved in the decision.

But the bigger question for Republicans is how to handle the administration’s surprise retreat. Should they focus on secretiveness, as Upton & Co. are doing? Should they push the White House to explain how Obamacare can still work when large employers don’t have to pay fines for not covering workers and, perhaps more importantly, don’t have to report their employees’ health care information to the giant new Obamacare bureaucracy, so the bureaucracy can determine whether those employees are eligible to buy coverage on the exchanges? Or should Republicans just keep pressing for repeal of the whole thing?

“I think we’ll almost certainly be sticking to a full repeal message all the way,” says one GOP Senate aide. “The question here is for the administration – not us – and it’s basically this: At what point will they realize that this law is unworkable?”

Probably never. When key Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett wrote, after the delay announcement, that, “We are full steam ahead for the marketplaces opening on Oct. 1,” she was reflecting the administration’s determination to get the health care exchanges up and running no matter what. Delay the employer mandate? OK. Waive this or that rule? Fine. Just make sure the exchanges get going. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: M.Scott MahaskeyWhite House greases squeaky wheels on Obamacare

By David Nather. The delay of Obamacare’s employer coverage rules is giving the critics plenty of new ammunition — but that doesn’t mean the sudden movement is out of character for the administration at all.

It’s just the latest example of a pattern with the implementation of Obamacare: The Obama administration almost always listens to the squeaky wheel.

First more than 1,200 employers and health plans got waivers from early coverage rules. Next, many states that couldn’t decide whether to build a health insurance exchange or let the feds do it for them were given repeated extensions. And then, when Republican governors were holding out on expanding Medicaid, they were finally told there’s no deadline at all.

So when the Obama administration announced Tuesday that it would delay the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate for employers for a year, it was just one more piece of evidence that the administration is perfectly willing to bend the rules for some powerful interests — a a welcome invitation for other players to raise their hands in the coming months as the law heads into overdrive.

Already, other groups are grumbling at the decision. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Liberals blame GOP, Fox, Drudge in Obamacare fiasco

By Paul Bedard. The pro-Obama media watchdog Media Matters Wednesday, defending the administration’s surprise move to cancel implementation of major elements of Obamacare, said that Republicans were to blame and accused conservative media leaders like Fox News and the Drudge Report for ignoring the GOP’s role.

In a release, the liberal group said that Fox and Drudge instead charged that the one-year delay was political with the goal of pushing off the expected initial implementation disaster until after the 2014 elections.

“Fox News and the Drudge Report are ignoring years of Republicans obstructing the implementation of health care reform to accuse the Obama administration of delaying the law for political gain, in the process dismissing the fact that businesses are praising the administration’s move,” said Media Matters. Read more from this story HERE.

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Realities Force President to Scale Back Vision for Obamacare

By Todd Beamon. Six years ago, presidential candidate Barack Obama stood before Iowa voters and introduced a plan designed to extend healthcare to all Americans.

“We can do this,” he said with confidence. “The time has come for universal, affordable healthcare in America.”

Three years ago, President Obama signed into law a plan designed to extend coverage to more than 30 million uninsured people.

“This is what change looks like,” he exulted.

But it has become clear that Obama’s vision for universal health care is dramatically different than it was that day in Iowa. The president been forced to cut, reshape and compromise on his signature Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because of economic — and political — realities. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APWall Street Journal Apologizes for Not Fighting Hard Enough Against Obamacare

By Wall Street Journal. These columns fought the Affordable Care Act from start to passage, and we’d now like to apologize to our readers. It turns out we weren’t nearly critical enough. The law’s implementation is turning into a fiasco for the ages, and this week’s version is the lawless White House decision to delay the law’s insurance mandate for businesses, though not for individuals.

The employer mandate is central to ObamaCare’s claim of providing universal coverage. Companies with 50 or more “employee equivalents” must pay a $2,000 penalty per full-time employee if they don’t provide government-approved health insurance. The provision was supposed to start in January, and delaying it is like Ford saying its electric car is ready to go, except the electric battery doesn’t work.

But all of a sudden on Tuesday evening Mark Mazur—you know him as the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy—published a blog post canceling the insurance reporting rules and tax enforcement until 2015 as Washington began to evacuate for the long Independence Day weekend. Enjoy the holiday, mate.

White House fixer Valerie Jarrett tried to contain the fallout with a separate blog post promising that ObamaCare is otherwise “staying the course.” That’s true only if she’s referring to the carelessness and improvisation that have defined the law so far. Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare to Punish Healthy Eaters as Insurance Rates Double or Triple for Those who Choose to Take Care of their Health

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Photo Credit: Natural NewsAccording to an analysis just published by the Wall Street Journal, healthy people will pay double or triple their current health insurance rates under Obamacare. Rates for those with chronic disease, however, will be reduced as all the healthy people subsidize their disease lifestyles.

The net effect is that people who choose to follow a healthy lifestyle — eating well, taking nutritional supplements, exercising and avoiding junk foods — will be financially punished by the federal government while those who choose to follow a disease and sickness lifestyle — eating junk foods, taking meds, refusing to exercise, etc. — will be rewarded by government.

This is the essence of socialized medicine: punish responsible citizens while rewarding those who refuse to take care of their health.

Disease is a matter of cause and effect, not luck

Obamacare, like all socialized medicine systems, is based on the false premise that health outcomes are a matter of pure luck. Disease just “randomly strikes people,” the thinking goes, and individuals have nothing to do with their own health. This false belief fits nicely with the financial interests of Big Pharma and doctors, of course, because it puts the power of health in the hands of corporations and medical personnel.

Read more from this story HERE.

White House Violates Law with ObamaCare Delay

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Photo Credit: breitbart

Photo Credit: breitbart

By Ken Klukowski. Obama administration officials are illegally delaying enforcement of a central provision in the president’s namesake legislation in a desperate attempt to manipulate the 2014 midterm elections and swell the ranks of those who look to government for healthcare.

The White House is beginning to sense that when Americans realize the price of “free” healthcare, they’re likely to take swift vengeance on those responsible.

Section 1513 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, better known as Obamacare) requires all large employers to provide health insurance for their employees. “Large employers” are those with at least 50 full-time employees, and “full-time” is defined as averaging 30 or more hours per week…

Yet in a blatantly illegal move, the Obama administration is presuming to rewrite the ACA by choosing not to enforce provisions that are causing visible problems. The IRS—which is tasked with enforcing the Employer Mandate—will simply not enforce it until 2015. Every large employer in the country is under the mandate. If they don’t comply, then they are breaking federal law.

But the IRS not enforcing Section 1513 is like a policeman who patrols a stretch of road who says for the next year, he won’t issue any speeding tickets. He has no authority to suspend the law, but if he chooses to violate his duty by failing to enforce the law, then to all the motorists on the road it’s as if the law does not exist. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama admin delays major requirement of health law

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. In a major concession to business groups, the Obama administration Tuesday unexpectedly announced a one-year delay, until after the 2014 elections, in a central requirement of the new health care law that many companies provide coverage for their workers or face fines.

The move sacrificed timely implementation of President Barack Obama’s signature legislation but may help the administration politically by blunting an election-year line of attack Republicans were planning to use. The employer requirements are among the most complex parts of the health care law, which is designed to expand coverage for uninsured Americans.

“We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively,” Treasury Assistant Secretary Mark Mazur said in a blog post. “We have listened to your feedback and we are taking action.”

Business groups were jubilant. “A pleasant surprise,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There was no inkling in advance of the administration’s action, he said.

“We commend the administration’s wise move,” said Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation. It “will provide employers and businesses more time to update their health care coverage without threat of arbitrary punishment.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare’s employer mandate delayed to 2015

By Tom Howell Jr. Facing an outcry from businesses, the Obama administration Tuesday said it would delay a key part of the new health care law for an additional year, to 2015 — a stunning move that officials said gives them a chance to work out kinks over how to administer the so-called employer mandate.

In statements Tuesday evening, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Mark J. Mazur, assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury, said the goal was to give businesses more time to comply with the rules, though opponents said it was an acknowledgment of a looming disaster.

The delay is to the mandate requiring businesses with more than 50 workers to offer insurance to all full-time employees, or else pay a fine of $2,000 per worker. Business lobbied heavily against it, and now it will not go into effect until after the 2014 midterm elections.

“We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action,” Mr. Mazur said.

The individual mandate, which applies to those who are self-employed or whose companies don’t offer insurance, is still in effect as of 2014, as are the state-by-state insurance markets, or “exchanges,” which are to be operating as of Oct. 1 and will allow small businesses and individuals without employer-based insurance to shop for health coverage with the help of government subsidies. Read more from this story HERE.

School District Receives Grant for Students to Indoctrinate Parents About Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Heartland

Photo Credit: Heartland

The Los Angeles Unified School District will use a state grant to train teens to promote ObamaCare to family members. Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, announced grants of $37 million on May 14 to promote the nationally unpopular law.

LAUSD will receive $990,000. The district listed as a primary outcome for its project, “Teens trained to be messengers to family members.”

Covered California spokeswoman Sarah Soto-Taylor said staff have not questioned this goal.

“We have confidence that the model LA Unified brought to the table will be successful in reaching our target population, which includes family members of students,” she said.

LAUSD will also use tax-paid staff to promote ObamaCare through phone calls to students’ homes, in-class presentations, and meetings with employees eligible for ObamaCare’s taxpayer-covered healthcare, the grant award says.

Read more from this story HERE.

Lipstick on the Obamacare Pig

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Photo Credit: SUZANNAH HOOVER

Photo Credit: SUZANNAH HOOVER

By Stephen F. Hayes. It’s been one year since the Supreme Court decision that allowed Obama administration officials to begin implementing the Affordable Care Act, and the frequency and volume of reports about the challenges facing those reforms—and the difficulties they are visiting on those who were supposed to benefit from them—are increasing dramatically.

Jeff Vernon, an employee of Scrambler Marie’s restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, told a local reporter that the owners were cutting his hours to avoid penalties under Obamacare. Businesses with more than 49 employees have to offer insurance to all “full-time” workers—defined as those who put in 30 hours or more each week. The result, for Vernon: $400 less in take-home pay every month. “That leaves me $27.50 for two weeks to live off of,” he explained. Vernon said the owners tried to avoid the cuts but didn’t have any other recourse. “They were real good about that,” he added. “The last thing they wanted to do was cut people. They don’t want to fire anybody.”

Other business owners haven’t been able to avoid eliminating jobs. A Gallup poll taken in June found that nearly one in five small businesses—19 percent of those surveyed—have cut workers “as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act.” The same poll, first reported by CNBC, found that 41 percent of those interviewed had suspended hiring because of Obamacare. The poll of 603 business owners with less than $20 million in annual sales also found that 55 percent believe Obamacare will lead to higher health care costs, while just 5 percent saw future cost savings.

The steady stream of negative stories in recent months is one reason the Obama administration is preparing a massive public relations campaign to promote the launch of health care exchanges on October 1, 2013—which is fewer than 100 days away. The administration is seeking to enlist high-profile athletes and celebrities to sell Obamacare and its alleged benefits. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, told reporters last week that HHS officials are working with major American sports leagues on the campaign. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare ‘is still unconstitutional’ one year after Supreme Court approval

By Rand Paul. One year ago, the Supreme Court upheld a law that radically transforms our health care system in a way that continues to frighten and beleaguer most Americans.

Friday is the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. The 5-4 decision declared that the federal government could force Americans to buy health insurance — not just any insurance, but insurance covering procedures dictated by the federal government. Obamacare established a labyrinth of red tape and bureaucracy, colossal even by Washington standards, and most important — penalizes the uninsured through the individual mandate.

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declared that the individual mandate could be considered a tax and that the power to tax was also the power to enforce the law. Dissenting Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. vehemently disagreed, writing in their dissent: “[W]e cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not. [W]e have never — never — treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’”

I think that Obamacare is still unconstitutional. I still think that Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito got it right.

One year later, the federal health care law is even more concerning. In addition to potentially causing upward of 20 million Americans to lose their private health insurance policies, it could destroy an estimated 800,000 jobs. Read more from this story HERE.

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NFL says no to promoting Obamacare

By Sandhya Somashekhar and Lenny Bernstein. The National Football League is used to big, bruising battles. But on Friday, it announced that it was likely staying out of one of the roughest fights in Washington: the war over Obamacare.

Earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius disclosed that the administration was in talks with the sports organization to help promote the law, which enters a new phase as advocates prepare to begin enrolling millions of Americans in health insurance this fall.

On Friday, Republican leaders in the Senate issued a stern warning to sports organizations not to partner with the administration on an issue marked by such “divisiveness and persistent unpopularity.”

Asked about the congressional letter, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the league had not made any commitment to the administration. “We have responded to the letters we received from members of Congress to inform them we currently have no plans to engage in this area and have had no substantive contact with the administration about [the health-care law’s] implementation,” he said in an e-mail.

The NFL’s decision is the latest blow to the administration over the health-care law, which faces enormous hurdles as key portions go into effect in the coming months. Chief among the challenges is the political opposition to the law, which has persisted since its passage in 2010 despite hopes on the part of advocates that it would eventually be accepted as the law of the land. Read more from this story HERE.

Hobby Lobby Just Scored a Major Victory Against ObamaCare

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

In a health care decision giving hope to opponents of the federal birth-control coverage mandate, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Hobby Lobby stores won’t have to start paying millions of dollars in fines next week for not complying with the requirement.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver decided the Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain can proceed with its case and won’t be subject to fines in the meantime.

The reprieve gives Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. more time to argue in a lower court that for-profit businesses – not just currently exempted religious groups – should be allowed to seek an exception if the law violates their religious beliefs. The company had sued to overturn the mandate on grounds that it violates the faith of founder and CEO David Green and his family.

The appeals court remanded the case for more argument, but the judges indicated Hobby Lobby had a reasonable chance of success.

“Sincerely religious persons could find a connection between the exercise of religion and the pursuit of profit,” the judges wrote. “Would an incorporated kosher butcher really have no claim to challenge a regulation mandating non-kosher butchering practices?”

Read more from this story HERE.

Hollywood: Hey, This Obamacare Thing is Going to be Pretty Costly and Complicated For Us

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Photo Credit: AtomicPope

Photo Credit: AtomicPope

Not even the kind of cash Hollywood donated to President Obama can protect them from unintended consequences.

Three letters have been giving the payroll-services industry fits for several months now: ACA. That’s the semi-acronym for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, and it’s up to the payroll industry — which cuts checks to production workers and offers related financial services to TV and film studios — to help educate its clients on the rules before a good portion of the law kicks in Jan. 1.

“It’s a morass of regulations and requirements, and everyone’s trying to figure out what their exposure is,” says Eric Belcher, president and CEO of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services. Adds Mark Goldstein, CEO of Entertainment Partners, which has held 16 seminars to help studios understand ACA: “It’s going to be a very big deal.”

Determining the exact nature of the new laws has been difficult, given that many ACA terms have yet to be worked out. Hollywood productions, for instance, might find it irksome simply trying to categorize employees as full- or part-time, seasonal or variable, and it’s important that they get the classifications right lest they face hefty fines. “ACA is thousands of pages, and it wasn’t written with this industry in mind,” says Belcher.

In fairness, who could have possibly guessed that a top-down solution from Washington and thousands of pages of regulations would cause problems for businesses with unorthodox work schedules, scads of part-time, contract, union and non-union employees from different fields, and the need for flexibility?

Read more from this story HERE.

Only 9% of Employers Say Obamacare Will be Good for Their Businesses

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

Photo Credit: Weekly Standard

A new Gallup poll of small-business owners indicates that Obamacare is having a dramatic and deleterious effect on Americans’ employment prospects. More than 40 percent of small-business owners say that Obamacare has caused them to freeze hiring, while nearly a fifth say that it has caused them to cut existing workers. According to the poll, 41 percent of small-business owners have frozen hiring, while 19 percent have “reduced the number of employees [they] have in [their] business as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare]” (italics added).

The Gallup poll was commissioned by Littler Mendelson, a firm specializing in employment law. Steven Friedman, an attorney for the firm, said of the results, “We were startled.” He added that these are “some pretty startling answers.”

Just 9 percent of the 603 employers surveyed by Gallup said Obamacare will be good for their business…

Read more from this story HERE.