The Supreme Court’s pending decision in King v. Burwell could upend the way premium subsidies are distributed through the Federal health insurance exchanges in as many as 37 states. The impacted states are those that declined or failed to establish their own exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Examining the insurance market effects we find that:
If nothing else, the collapse of multi-million dollar state-based exchanges has created a PR problem for health reform, but that’s only part of the issue.
In Massachusetts, there is a stew of simmering revelations about apparent mismanagement of the Health Connector, a once working exchange created in 2006 that upon an update for the Affordable Care Act ceased functioning while consuming $1 billion.
Massachusetts health officials knew the Connector was in trouble for a year before its Oct. 1, 2013, launch date, according to an investigation by the Pioneer Institute, a public policy research organization.
“Instead of raising concerns about the project,” a team of University of Massachusetts Medical School contractors and MassHealth “misled the public by minimizing the shortcomings of the contractor hired to build the website, asked state workers to approve shoddy work and appear to have covered up the project’s abysmal progress in a presentation to federal officials,” said Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at Pioneer Institute and author of the report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — If the Supreme Court rules the way most Republicans want in the latest health overhaul case, GOP lawmakers who now have insurance coverage under President Barack Obama’s law may wind up with some explaining to do.
Members of Congress, staffers and dependents actually get their health insurance under a little-known provision of “Obamacare.” But if the Supreme Court strikes down government health care subsidies for millions of people in more than 30 states, legal and benefits experts say coverage for lawmakers from those states won’t be affected.
It could be a politically painful unintended consequence.
“That won’t look good, will it?” said Walt Francis, author of an annual guide to the federal employee health benefits program.
About 15,000 congressional staffers, lawmakers and dependents in Washington and around the country get their health insurance through the Washington, D.C., small business exchange, an online market created by the District of Columbia government under the federal health care law.
Despite over $205 million in federal taxpayer funding, Hawaii’s Obamacare exchange website will soon shut down. Since its implementation, the exchange has somehow failed to become financially viable because of lower than expected Obamacare enrollment figures. With the state legislature rejecting a $28 million bailout, the website will now be unable to operate past this year.
According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser the Hawaii Health Connector will stop taking new enrollees on Friday and plans to begin migrating to the federally run Healthcare.gov. Outreach services will end by May 31, all technology will be transferred to the state by September 30, and its workforce will be eliminated by February 28.
While the exchange has struggled since its creation, it is not for lack of funding. Since 2011 Hawaii has received a total of $205,342,270 in federal grant money from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In total, HHS provided nearly $4.5 billion to Hawaii and other state exchanges, with little federal oversight and virtually no strings attached.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its decision in King v. Burwell before the end of June. Should the Court reject the Obama Administration’s regulatory interpretation of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) at issue in the case, the Treasury would be barred from paying health insurance subsidies to individuals who obtained coverage thorough Healthcare.gov, the federally run exchange for the 34 states that have not established their own state-based exchanges.
People’s Pundit Daily– Follow the link to the People’s Pundit Daily which calculates up-to-date ObamaCare approval rating averages daily, which also include only reputable public and private polling surveys.
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.