Trying to force Obamacare expansion onto Florida by cutting funding for an existing Medicaid program has backfired on President Obama.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, is suing Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services over plans to stop funding the state’s Low Income Pool program, which compensates hospitals for seeing uninsured patients.
Almost immediately, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback announced they would join the suit against HHS.
Christie Herrera, senior fellow at Florida’s free-market Foundation for Government Accountability, told Watchdog.org the Obama administration has “awakened a sleeping giant.”
“They’ve raised the ire of all these other states that are in Florida’s exact position, and that’s why you’ve seen Kansas and Texas filing amicus briefs in the lawsuit,” Herrera said during a phone interview.
A report scheduled for release Monday by a conservative-leaning think tank accuses state officials of misleading the federal government and the public about the Massachusetts Health Connector’s readiness to launch its new website in October 2013.
The report from the Pioneer Institute draws on public audit reports and interviews with anonymous people described as “whistle-blowers” to detail what they characterize as a bungled effort by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, software developer CGI, and the Connector to upgrade the Connector’s software in 2012 and 2013.
The Connector — designed to link people with health insurance when they don’t have another source — eventually ended its relationships with UMass and CGI.
Real Clear Politics: 42% Approve, 52.3% Disapprove of the health care law.
The IRS cannot be sure that Americans who lacked health insurance last year have complied with Obamacare’s “individual mandate” penalty this tax season, according to an inspector general report Friday that pointed to a decision to delay proof-of-coverage forms from insurers and employers until 2016.
Agency managers told the Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration that a “business decision was made to not develop processes and procedures” to ensure compliance after it decided in 2013 to delay the pair of forms. The documents are sent to both filers and the IRS, allowing the federal government to cross-check what filers say on their returns.
“The transition relief was intended to give the insurer time to adapt its health coverage and reporting systems to comply with the [Affordable Care Act],” the IG report said. The same was true for employers.
Obamacare’s health exchanges did report 2014 insurance details for its customers on a form known as the 1095-A, although more than 800,000 customers on the federal HealthCare.gov portal received ones with errors.
Republicans are being ridiculed by the right and the left for weighing ideas that would rescue ObamaCare health insurance policies for people in 37 states if the petitioners prevail in King v Burwell.
“Republicans Are Now Trying To Pass Obamacare Extension To Save Their Own Asses,” writes Allen Clifton in Forward Progressives. “GOP Gets Ready to Save the Day If the Court Strikes Down Obamacare Subsidies,” says Rush Limbaugh.
If the Supreme Court decides against the Obama administration in the case, leaders in Congress are indeed determined to pass legislation to protect coverage for an estimated six million people. ObamaCare has so distorted the market for individually-purchased and small group health insurance that Congress has little choice but to throw them a safety net.
If you like your coverage, you can keep your coverage. That’s the pledge leading members of Congress are making to 6 million Americans at risk of losing their health insurance this year because of Obama administration actions.
At issue is a case before the Supreme Court challenging an IRS rule that allowed health insurance subsidies to be paid through exchanges created by the federal government – the infamous healthcare.gov website.
The Affordable Care Act says at least nine times that subsidies are available to citizens only if their state creates an exchange. In the end, 37 states either declined or failed to do so.
Supporters of the ACA are using scare tactics, saying millions of people would lose their subsidies and likely their health insurance if the court decides the IRS rule is illegal. They say Congress won’t act and states either can’t or won’t set up their own exchanges.
But they ignore commitments by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other congressional leaders to give states another option.
Congress is making plans now to pass legislation after the Supreme Court issues its decision, likely in June. The proposed legislation would create a safety net so people wouldn’t lose their current coverage and also would allow them to use their subsidies to select any policy approved by a state.
Millions of people could escape Obamacare’s onerous mandates and choose more flexible, affordable policies.
Many have dismissed Rick Scott’s lawsuit against the Obama administration over Medicaid funding as meritless, but the Florida governor might actually be doing everybody a favor. The case could help answer a huge constitutional question left over from the 2012 Supreme Court decision on Obamacare.
That’s right—there’s still more of the landmark ruling that upheld President Obama’s signature domestic policy to pick over.
Scott alleges that the administration is illegally trying to force Florida to expand Medicaid under the health care law by threatening to cut off about $1 billion from a separate federal funding stream which helps hospitals that provide uncompensated care to uninsured people.
The court ruled in 2012 that the federal government couldn’t threaten to cut off all of a state’s existing Medicaid funding, which would wreck any state budget, to compel states to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. It was unconstitutionally coercive; Chief Justice John Roberts called it “a gun to the head” in his decision.
“The Supreme Court said it’s illegal to be coercing a state to expand Obamacare,” Scott said Wednesday after a meeting in Washington with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell (they did not resolve the impasse). “That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
But what Roberts didn’t say in his ruling was where exactly the line is that separates the federal government’s lawful discretion to persuade states to participate in a program from such illegal intimidation. He explicitly avoided creating a definitive test for it.
“We have no need to fix a line either,” Roberts wrote after referencing a prior case in which the Court declined to delineate between persuasion and coercion. “It is enough for today that wherever that line may be, this statute is surely beyond it.”