Avik Roy, who serves as GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s health care advisor, suspects United may just be the first domino to fall. Other commercial insurers, such as Aetna, Anthem, and Cigna, have raised premiums by double digits and still say they can’t make the numbers work in their favor. Hence, they have withdrawn from counties where their losses were particularly acute.
Proponents of more than doubling the current minimum wage of $7.25 appeared to have overlooked a simple fact. Thanks to government mandates such as Obamacare, today’s minimum wage already effectively amounts to $10.46 an hour. If we more than double the nominal minimum wage to $15, we actually will be requiring employers to pay $18.31 an hour.
Yesterday’s post discussed what we know about Obamacare as its third open enrollment season commences. Here are four major questions about the future of Obamacare that remain unanswered.
Starting in 2017, the Affordable Care Act will allow states to use waivers to pursue virtually any type of proposals for health care reform that they can imagine. It’s a huge opportunity for states interested in expanding or changing how health care is delivered.
But will anyone actually take advantage of it?
Earlier this year the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in King v. Burwell, a case critical to the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or so-called Obamacare). Readers interested in the details of the case should find them elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that the case concerns whether individuals can receive tax credits for buying health insurance on exchanges established by the federal government, though the text of the ACA indicates such subsidies are provided for those buying coverage through an “exchange established by the State.”
The case has the potential to invalidate substantial subsidies now being provided by federal taxpayers to millions of Americans using federal exchanges in 37 different states. Given the uncertainty created by the pending case, legislators on both sides of the aisle are considering how to react to various possible scenarios arising from a court decision. The House and Senate each recently passed budget resolutions allowing budget targets to be revised in the event of subsequent legislation modifying the ACA. The Senate resolution specifies that such legislation must be deficit-neutral.
It’s spring in Washington, and time to resume one of the capital’s favorite sports. No, not baseball, but throwing mud at the Supreme Court. Pending cases include the legal status of same-sex marriage and whether the IRS can provide billions of dollars in Obamacare subsidies without explicit congressional authorization. Partisans have launched a preemptive bid to undermine the legitimacy of the forthcoming decisions by accusing the court of “activism” for involving itself at all.
These increasingly transparent attempts to discredit the court should be rejected.Every case involving plausible abuses of power requires judicial engagement — conscientious, impartial truth-seeking, grounded in evidence — rather than reflexive deference to the political branches.
Take the Obamacare case. At issue in King v. Burwell is a section of the Affordable Care Act concerning tax credits for buying health insurance from government-operated healthcare exchanges. Congress wanted states to set up their own exchanges, but it lacks constitutional authority to force them. So Congress opted for a stick-and-carrot approach, authorizing tax credits for insurance policies purchased “through an Exchange established by the State.” As a backup, the ACA directed federal bureaucrats to set up federally operated exchanges in states that declined to set up their own.
On Monday, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Coons v. Lew, a constitutional challenge to provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) creating the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), an independent federal agency charged with responsibility for controlling the growth of health-care costs by constraining the growth of Medicare.
IPAB is controversial, and potentially unconstitutional (as even fervent ACA advocates admit). Nonetheless, the denial of certiorari was to be expected. IPAB is not yet operational, so (as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded) a challenge of this sort isn’t ripe. If and when the IPAB is up and running — and begins making changes to Medicare that affect providers or beneficiaries — there will be ample time to consider the constitutionality of Congress’s creation.
Alternatively, Congress could repeal or reform IPAB itself, as some have suggested. Given that the text of the ACA expressly limits Congress’s ability to amend these portions of the law, such legislative action could itself prompt litigation and perhaps even High Court review.
The Court’s denial of certiorari in the Coons case does not mean the justices won’t revisit the ACA next term. Another cert petition is pending in Mayhew v. Burwell, Maine’s challenge to the constitutionality of the ACA’s maintenance of eligibility requirements for Medicaid. According to Maine (and supporting amici), the federal government’s threat to withhold all Medicaid funding should Maine restrict Medicaid eligibility below pre-existing levels is unconstitutionally coercive and violates the Medicaid holding of NFIB v. Sebelius.
If, as oral argument in King v. Burwell suggested, some of the justices are interested in revisiting federalism concerns about the ACA, Mayhew is a potential vehicle. Indeed, although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found Maine’s arguments unconvincing, Maine’s position would get a boost should the the federal government prevail in King on federalism grounds.
Obamacare reached age 5 on Monday [1]. As I’ve pointed out earlier, this anemic child is not exactly a picture of health, falling behind the lofty expectations set for it on many dimensions. But the one bright spot for its proud parents relates to how much the law has reduced the number of uninsured. The president’s Council of Economic Advisors ecstatically announced last December: “the drop in the nation’s uninsured rate so far this year is the largest over any period since the early 1970s.” A little perspective is in order.
First, taking the CEA’s figures at face value (which my chart below does), this decline amounts to a 2.8 percentage point net reduction in the rate of being uninsured, that is, above and beyond the decline that would have occurred anyway according to CBO [2]. It may well be the biggest one-year decline since the 1970′s, but CBO’s expectation at the time the law was passed was that uninsured risk would drop by 6 percentage points in 2014 alone. Even as late as May 2013, CBO was expecting the net decline to be 3.5%. In short, in its first year, Obamacare scored 46% if we use CBO’s original projection as the scoring standard and 79% if we used the May 2013 projection. Clearly we would like this child to perform better than that in future years. But that would require the number of newly covered Americans to increase an additional 79% this year compared to last year.
Reality check: that is certainly not going to happen. Charles Gaba at ACASignups estimates that estimated paid sign-ups on the Exchanges are only 10.5 million so far, compared to 7.06 million last April [the original post stated 10 million, see Update #1 for explanation]. That’s only a 49% increase, suggesting Obamacare will fall even further behind CBO expectations for 2015 [the original post stated 42%, see Update #1 for explanation]. Medicaid won’t fill the gap, since Medicaid evidently is growing by about 300,000 persons per month. Even if we assume all of these are uninsured, that would reduce the uninsured rate by only 0.1% monthly, or 1.2% over 2015 as a whole. That provides only about half of what’s needed to keep pace with CBO projections, leaving the Exchanges to fill the gap. But as we’ve seen, the Exchanges are lagging behind.
The landmark 2006 Massachusetts health-care law that inspired the federal overhaul didn’t lead to a reduction in unnecessary and costly hospitalizations, and it didn’t make the health-care system more fair for minority groups, according to a new study that may hold warnings for the Affordable Care Act.
Massachusetts’ uninsured rate was cut by half to 6 percent in the years immediately following the health-care law signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney. Blacks and Hispanics, who have a harder time accessing necessary medical care, experienced the largest gains in insurance coverage under the Massachusetts law, though they still were more likely to be uninsured than whites.
The new study, published in the BMJ policy journal, examined the rates of hospitalizations for 12 medical conditions that health-care researchers say wouldn’t normally require hospitalization if a patient has good access to primary care. These include hospitalizations for minor conditions like a urinary tract infection, or chronic conditions that would require repeat primary care visits over the course of a year.
“It’s thought to be a good measure and one of the few objective ways of looking at access [to health-care provider] in the community,” said Danny McCormick of Harvard Medical School, the study’s lead author.
(Reuters) – Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed a law on Monday that requires doctors to tell women that drug-induced abortions can be reversed and that blocks the purchase of insurance on the Obamacare health exchange that includes abortion coverage.
The requirement that patients be told that the effects of abortion pills may be undone by using high doses of a hormone was the most hotly contested provision during legislative debate.
Supporters said there was ample evidence the reversal was possible if acted upon quickly, although they provided no peer-reviewed studies in support of their position.