“About a dozen Congressional Republicans gathered Wednesday morning to pressure Democrats to repeal the president’s health care law and to receive 1.6 million hand-signed petitions demanding that Congress overturn the law before it can be fully implemented.”
“The Obama health-care plan passed 18 months ago, and its cynicism still manages to astonish. Witness the spectacle surrounding one of its flagship new entitlements, which is eliciting some remarkable concessions from its drafters. The Health and Human Services Department recently shut down a government insurance program for long-term care, known by the acronym Class. HHS also released a statement claiming that reports that HHS is shutting down Class are ‘not accurate.’ All HHS did was suspend Class policy planning, told Senate Democrats to zero out Class funding for 2012, reassigned Class’s career staffers to other projects and pink-slipped the program’s chief actuary. Other than that, it’s full-speed ahead.”
“Overall, PPACA is anticipated to increase costs by an average of 1.5% in 2011 across the surveyed health plans. Other surveys have offered similar cost estimates. However, it is important to understand that these averages cannot be easily extrapolated to any particular health insurance policy or across different lines of business… Overall, for 2011 health plans reported estimated increases due to PPACA of 4.7% for individual policies, 1.5% for small group plans, and 0.8% for large group plans on a weighted average basis. These impacts are additive to the other trend components discussed previously.”
“Staffing firms urged Congress Thursday to repeal the healthcare law’s requirement that employers provide insurance for their workers — even as they continue working with federal regulators to tweak the law.”
“Prudent insurers, employers and benefits advisors should take the same ‘better safe than sorry approach to planning for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that they’d take to planning for computer problems, or a major hurricane.”