House Republican committee chairmen on Wednesday subpoenaed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for documents related to ObamaCare payments that Republicans say are unlawful.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) issued the subpoena for Lew and three Internal Revenue Service officials to produce documents related to financial help for people under ObamaCare known as “cost sharing reductions.”
The lawmakers are issuing the subpoena after repeatedly requesting the information throughout 2015 but being rebuffed by the administration.
After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government gave Oregon $300 million to build an online health insurance exchange. The state then hired Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, with profits of nearly $10 billion last year, to build the website.
The website never worked. In May 2014, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber, who was running for re-election and getting a lot of heat for Cover Oregon’s failure—asked Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to sue Oracle.
For nearly two years, Oracle has been in a bruising, $5.5 billion legal battle with the state of Oregon over who is at fault for Cover Oregon, the failed $300 million health insurance website.
Last week’s seven-candidate debate hosted by the Fox Business Network once again found much to discuss in terms of national security issues, immigration law enforcement, even a little economic policy, and, of course, the latest round of character attacks and counter-attacks. Still missing in action: at least the first subcutaneous probe of where the respective candidates stand on health policy issues.
Based on recent performance, it’s questionable whether health policy has attracted sufficient interest among the media and Republican primary voters to command more than a few seconds on the debate stage. But it’s not for lack of potential lines of inquiry.
Here are some questions to the candidates from Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute that still await new rounds of oversimplified, evasive, or (one might hope) thoughtful answers.
Moving to single-payer in the U.S. would require massive new taxes that would stifle growth, and consolidating all power over the health system in the federal government would lead, in time, to second-rate health care for many millions of people. Democrats praise Medicare’s simplicity, but giving the Medicare bureaucracy the power to set prices for all medical services in the U.S. would lead to the misallocation of billions of dollars.
The federal government has no good way to know what the proper price should be for the thousands of different services provided to patients, and thus would overpay for many while underpaying for many others. The result of applying this kind of mindless regulation system-wide would be impaired access to many needed services and the slow exodus of the nation’s best and brightest out of medicine and into other pursuits.
A Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman wants the federal government to disclose how much money taxpayers lost because of the rapid-fire financial collapse of 12 Obamacare health insurance co-ops, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
Sen. Ron Johnson demanded in a Jan. 19 letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that federal officials provide full accounting for the losses. A part of the Department of Health and Human Services, CMS oversees the experimental co-op program.
The U.S. government will limit a process that allowed people to sign up for health insurance under ObamaCare outside of the normal enrollment period. Typically, individuals have from about November to January to purchase insurance under ObamaCare. In some cases, though, they’re allowed to sign up outside that period, such as when they have a child.
The government is also tightening an exception that let people sign-up when they moved, by clarifying that people can’t get coverage based on a short-term or temporary relocation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a blog post on Tuesday. It also plans to more tightly enforce other limits on enrollment by making sure people are qualified to sign-up in the remaining special circumstances.
Sen. Sanders claims he can provide free health care for all Americans even while saving $6.3 trillion over the next 10 years. In truth, the actual cost of the Sanders health plan will be at least 40% more than he claims. In the worst case, it will be 49% higher.
Moreover, the increase in federal taxes required to fund his plan will not be the $13.8 trillion claimed by the economics professor who is advising Sanders, nor even the $28 billion estimated by fellow Forbes colleague Avik Roy: the new federal taxes required to fund the Sanders health plan will be $36.3 trillion!
In short, the Sanders health plan would require a 71% increase in federal spending over the next decade.
In their final debate before they face Democratic primary voters, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders traded sharp jabs on health care. Pundits focused on how the barbs would affect the horse race, whether Democrats should be bold and idealistic (Sanders) or shrewd and practical (Clinton), and how Sanders’ “Medicare for All” scheme would raise taxes by a cool $1.4 trillion. (Per. Year.) Almost no one noticed the obvious: the Clinton-Sanders spat shows that not even Democrats like the Affordable Care Act, and that the law remains very much in danger of repeal.
Major insurer UnitedHealth, which caused a stir in the fall by saying it might leave ObamaCare, lost $720 million from the individual health insurance market last year. UnitedHealth said in its financial report released Tuesday that the $720 million comes from losses “related to the individual exchange-compliant insurance business.” About $245 million of that money was for “advance recognition of losses” in 2016 in the individual marketplace.
Judicial Watch today released over 1,000 pages of new documents that show federal health care officials knew that the Obamacare website, when it launched in 2013, did not have the required “authorization to operate” from agency information security officials. These documents, obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, come in two productions of records: a 143-page production and an 886-page production. The email records reveal that HHS officials had significant concerns about the security of the Healthcare.gov site leading up to its October 1, 2013, launch.