Former Florida governor Jeb Bush released his 2016 health plan on Tuesday, including a 10-page background paper that fleshed out a shorter summary outline. The good news is that it’s more serious and detailed than the handful of plans offered by his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. The better news is that it tries to suggest several steps beyond the standard “repeal and replace” orthodoxy regarding Obamacare.
The math is harsh: The federal penalty for having no health insurance is set to jump to $695, and the Obama administration is being urged to highlight that cold fact in its new pitch for health law sign-ups.
That means the 2016 sign-up season starting Nov. 1 could see penalties become a bigger focus for millions of people who have remained eligible for coverage, but uninsured. They’re said to be squeezed for money, and skeptical about spending what they have on health insurance.
Just about every presidential campaign’s policy plans leave a lot of blanks and rhetorical placeholders, to be filled in later. They also straddle conflicting pressure points and dodge inevitable tradeoffs. The preference is to point in a general, and seemingly more popular, direction, without offering too many instructions for how to traverse the complicated path from here to there. On top of that, the limited attention spans of most voters, let alone candidates, cannot be taxed too much (unlike their incomes).
No good deeds go unpunished in national politics, so let’s look a little closer under the hood of the Jeb Bush health plan unveiled earlier this week.
Attracting the most rubbernecking attention is the former Florida governor’s endorsement of a cap on the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance, as an alternative to Obamacare’s Cadillac tax on high-cost employer plans.
Public opposition to ObamaCare has lasted far longer than its authors imagined. Unsubsidized consumers avoid ObamaCare coverage. Twenty states have rejected its Medicaid expansion. Congress wants to repeal it. President Obama and the Supreme Court have repeatedly amended and expanded it, transforming the statute Congress enacted into an illegitimate law that no Congress ever had the votes to pass, and making repeal not just an economic imperative but necessary to restore the Constitution’s system of checks and balances.
Many people who get their health insurance through companies with more than 100 full-time employees can expect rate increases of about 15 to 20 percent next year.
Rates vary from company to company with some receiving no increase, some seeing rates drop, and some receiving increases of more than 30 percent.
Some employees may also pay more for out-of-pocket expenses in the form of higher deductibles, copays and coinsurance.
Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned.
Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to nine barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.
Health cooperatives are collapsing at such a rapid clip that some co-ops and small insurers are forming a coalition to consider legal action to try to change health-law provisions they blame for their financial distress.
Colorado’s co-op and one in Oregon announced Friday that they were folding, joining six others that have already collapsed or said they will unwind operations. The eight co-ops have received nearly $900 million in federal funds that may not be paid back.
Risk corridor data released on October 1 by the administration shows that insurers lost a lot of money on Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans in 2014. The ACA established a three-year risk corridor program to transfer funds from insurers with lower-than-expected medical claims on ACA plans, i.e., profitable insurers, to insurers with higher-than-expected claims, i.e., insurers with losses. Despite administration claims that incoming payments from profitable insurers would cover losses from unprofitable ones, the risk corridor program shortfall exceeded $2.5 billion in 2014. Insurers with lower-than-anticipated claims owed about $360 million, and insurers with higher-than-anticipated claims requested about $2.9 billion from the program.