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Obamacare Catastrophe in the Making: Exchange Cost to Double, Number of Insured to Fall

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Obamacare critics warned that President Barack Obama’s rosy $2 billion cost estimate for the government’s so-called “insurance exchanges” would likely rise. On Wednesday, they more than doubled.

Health and Human Services Department (HHS) budget documents state that the federal government now expects to spend $4.4 billion this year on state grants to erect the government exchanges for the less than half of the U.S. states who are participating. In 2014, HHS says the cost will jump to $5.7 billion.

In addition to the cost spike, the number of uninsured Americans who will now be covered under Obamacare has fallen once again:

The result is that the number of Americans projected to gain insurance from the law has already eroded, by at least 5 million people, to 27 million by 2017, the CBO said in February. In addition, as many as 8 million people will lose health-care plans now offered through their employers, almost three times more than the CBO initially projected.

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More Obamacare Stupidity: Insurances Exchanges Can't Charge More for Smokers

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Photo Credit: Fried Dough

The board charged with implementing federal health care reforms in the District has voted to prohibit insurance companies from charging higher premiums to cigarette smokers, adding the city to a handful of states rejecting such surcharges because of the effect they have on poor families who are more likely to smoke.

The D.C. Health Benefit Exchange executive board voted Monday to join Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts in eliminating smoking premiums in their health care exchanges.

Dr. Mohammad N. Akhter, chairman of the city’s health exchange board, said the costs of the surcharge could be prohibitive for poor families. The Affordable Care Act allows states to impose up to a 50 percent surcharge for people who have used tobacco at least four times a week over the last six months.

A June 2012 study by the Institute for Health Policy Solutions estimated that the largest effect would be on older couples whose earnings were at 150 percent of the federal poverty line. If subjected to the maximum surcharge, a couple older than 60 years old who both smoke would face a premium equaling 48 percent of their total income and 143 percent of their income above the poverty level.

“That’s basically unaffordable,” Dr. Akhter said.

An estimated 20.8 percent of D.C. adults smoke regularly, compared to a national median of 21.2 percent, according to 2011 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But smoking rates among black residents in the District were much higher, at 30.8 percent.

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Democrats Now Hate Obamacare, Too

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

President Obama is eager to build public support for his health care overhaul in the few months remaining before its implementation, but waning enthusiasm from Democrats threatens his effort right out of the gate.

Two-thirds of Democrats now believe Obama’s health care reforms will either hurt them personally or have no effect on their daily lives, a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday shows. In comparison, just 27 percent of Democratic respondents said the reforms would help them.

The president has long struggled to convince independent and Republican-leaning voters that his health care blueprint would lower premiums and expand insurance coverage.

However, an inability to convince his own party that the reforms have merit suggests an even bigger problem for the president ahead of the 2014 implementation.

“Obama is trying to make the next election a referendum on Republicans,” said Democratic strategist Doug Schoen. “But Obamacare will still be a drag on the Democratic ticket. Democrats supported it because Obama was attached to it, but they still have great skepticism about the real impact of the law.”

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It’s Easier to Apply for Green Card than Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Keith Williamson

If you thought nothing could be more tedious than filling out your tax forms, just wait until you try to apply for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges.

The draft of the paper application is 15 to 21 pages, depending on whether someone is applying individually or for their family. See the Application for Health Insurance

And the instructions for the application run no less than 61 pages. That’s nearly six times longer than the instructions for a green-card application. (There are also videos of the process.)

“If you like IRS forms, you’re going to love this one,” says Ken Hoagland, chairman of Restore America’s Voice, a conservative organization that advocates for the repeal of the health-care law. “These are the kinds of things that are going to drive people crazy.”

Adding to the confusion from this new bureaucracy is that experts say most Americans are still largely in the dark about what the health-insurance exchanges — the new marketplaces for individual insurance stipulated by the health-reform law — even are. Though government officials are hurrying to set them up before open enrollment for 2014 begins this fall, a survey released today by InsuranceQuotes.com found that 90% of U.S. consumers don’t know that the exchanges open Oct. 1, and 22% said they thought the exchanges were already open now.

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Groups Led by Inside Trader, Child Abuser got Obamacare Co-op Loans

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Photo Credit: AP

Federal officials approved Obamacare loans totaling $127 million last year to groups led by individuals whose backgrounds included an insider trading conviction and another with a long history of child sexual abuse, The Washington Examiner has learned.

The loans — which must be repaid at a future date — are to fund health insurance co-operative startups in Louisiana and Maine. They will compete with private sector health insurance providers under a $2 billion Obamacare initiative to fund 24 co-op startups nationwide.

Both the Maine and Louisiana co-ops are among 13 under investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

In the Maine case, federal officials approved a $62 million loan to Maine Community Health Options even though its president had recently committed suicide after state police accused the co-op’s president of molesting teenage boys for decades.

Despite extensive media coverage of the scandal, federal officials approved the loan five months before Maine State Police made public a 104-page report detailing the abuse allegations over a 36-year period.

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Tens of Thousands Obamacare 'Navigators' to be Hired

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Tens of thousands of health care professionals, union workers and community activists hired as “navigators” to help Americans choose Obamacare options starting Oct. 1 could earn $20 an hour or more, according to new regulations issued Wednesday.

The 63-page rule covering navigators, drawn up by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, also said the government will provide free translators for those not fluent in English — no matter what their native language is.

“The proposed requirements would also include that such entities and individuals provide consumers with information and assistance in the consumer’s preferred language, at no cost to the consumer, which would include oral interpretation of non-English languages and the translation of written documents in non-English languages when necessary to ensure meaningful access,” said the regulations.

The rules also addressed conflict of interest and other potential issues that navigators could face as the public’s first stop on the Obamacare trail.

It is still not clear how many navigators will be required. California, however, provides a hint. It wants 21,000.

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Lawsuit Over Health Care Tax Could Kill ‘Obamacare’

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Photo Credit: The Washington Times

“Obamacare” looks increasingly inevitable, but one lawsuit making its way through the court system could pull the plug on the sweeping federal health care law.

A challenge filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation contends that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because the bill originated in the Senate, not the House. Under the Origination Clause of the Constitution, all bills raising revenue must begin in the House.

The Supreme Court upheld most provisions of the act in June, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took pains in the majority opinion to define Obamacare as a federal tax, not a mandate. That was when the Sacramento, Calif.-based foundation’s attorneys had their “aha” moment.

“The court there quite explicitly says, ‘This is not a law passed under the Commerce Clause; this is just a tax,’” foundation attorney Timothy Sandefur said at a Cato Institute forum on legal challenges to the health care act. “Well, then the Origination Clause ought to apply. The courts should not be out there carving in new exceptions to the Origination Clause.”

The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the challenge in November, arguing that the high court has considered only eight Origination Clause cases in its history and “has never invalidated an act of Congress on that basis.”

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Madness: Medicare to Now Pay For Sex-Change Operations

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For the first time since 1981, when it dubbed sex-change operations “experimental,” Medicare has opened the door to covering transexual operations, adding to the growing list of operations that would be allowed under Obamacare.

Acting on a new request, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it is starting a new analysis that could lift the spending ban for sex-change operations with a goal of making a decision two days after Christmas and on the eve of Obamacare kicking in Jan. 1.

A 30-day public comment period just opened on the proposed “National Coverage Determination.”

“Surgical Treatment for Gender Identity Disorder, formerly referred to as transsexual surgery in 140.3, is currently noncovered under the Medicare Part A and Part B programs. The existing policy, which became effective in 1981, states that transsexual surgery is considered experimental,” said the notice just posted on the CMS.gov site.

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Federal Agency To Enforce Obamacare In Four States Refusing Implementation

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At least four states won’t enforce new sweeping insurance market reforms rolling out next year with the health law — leaving federal health officials in Washington to pick up the slack, yet another wrinkle in Obamacare implementation.

Insurance regulation is a huge responsibility that’s been closely guarded by the states. That’s why the Obama administration and those closely watching the rollout of Obamacare believe that even states that have sworn off the law’s coverage expansions will still enforce its new measures — including new benefit mandates, cost-sharing guidelines and rules on how insurers rate customers — to retain control over their health insurance markets.

But the feds will be overseeing the health care law in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming after those states told HHS they couldn’t or wouldn’t implement the new rules.

“We are enforcing because Oklahoma notified … that it has not enacted legislation to enforce or that it is otherwise not enforcing the Affordable Care Act market reform provisions,” Gary Cohen, director of the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, wrote to the Oklahoma Insurance Department on Friday. Officials in Missouri, Texas and Wyoming received similar letters, an agency spokeswoman said.

The enforcement letters come a little more than a month after a Commonwealth Fund report found just 11 states and Washington had started to adjust state laws to prepare for seven major ACA insurance reforms taking effect in 2014.

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Obamacare: the Last Stake in the Coffin of Individual Liberty and American Prosperity

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Photo Credit: RedState

Although there were many warnings that Obamacare would be a disaster of epic proportions before it became law, today, less than a year from its true implementation, we are seeing the actual consequences begin to materialize.

Millions of jobs will be lost, one small company at a time. People will have a difficult time finding a full time job.Healthcare premiums will be going up. There will be a doctor shortage. Obamacare will become a regulatory anvil around the neck of American prosperity. Luckily though the Obama administration is on the job seeking to ensure that it doesn’t become a “third world experience“. Which, it’s looking like it just might become. And to put a cherry on top, with our practically no existent GDP growth, apparently we can look forward to China overtaking the United States by 2016.

As bad as those things are, it actually gets worse. Your individual liberty is simply going to disappear. Many employees are now going to have to begin reveling to employers their weight, body fat measures, cholesterol levels and more. Pharmacy giant CVS states that all its employees will now have to either quit smoking or enroll in an addiction program by 2014. That is of course because smokers generally have higher healthcare costs than do nonsmokers, and since CVS is paying for that healthcare, they get to make the rules. Don’t like it? Then quit.

But then it’s not only smokers who cost more. Fat people generally cost more than thin people. Does that mean that a company can dictate that employees must be Oreo or Doritos or Coke free by the end of the year or enroll in an addiction program? How about motorcycle riders? They are 5 times more likely to be involved in a traffic accident than are car drivers. Does that mean that companies can tell you what you what kind of vehicle you can drive? How about unmarried women having sex out of wedlock, particularly minority women, where 77% of black births and 53% of Hispanic births are to unwed mothers? Given that sick children inflict an increased financial & healthcare burden on unwed mothers than they do on married mothers, can a company demand that unmarried female employees purchase and utilize birth control? (If so, how would they ensure compliance with usage?) Sure, all of this sounds farfetched, but so too once did the idea of schools telling moms what they can put in their children’s lunchboxes, cities banning Happy Meals and soft drinks and companies actually firing employees for being smokers.

At the end of the day, Obamacare may very well be the last stake in the coffin of individual liberty and American prosperity.

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