ObamaCare’s “Millennial mandate,” the requirement that employers who offer health coverage for employees’ dependents continue to offer such coverage until the dependents turn 26 years old, is one of those supposed free lunches.
This mandate’s benefits unquestionably come at a cost. Expanding health insurance coverage among adults age 19-26 leads them to consume more medical care. When those people file insurance claims, health-insurance premiums rise. Yet ObamaCare does an amazing job of hiding those costs from voters.
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Obamacare was a badly designed law. We could have achieved gains in insurance coverage without Obamacare’s regulation-heavy approach; we could have addressed the health-care system’s discrete problems without trying to overhaul it from Washington, D.C. Those without access to employer health plans could have been given enough money to buy a policy that protected them against catastrophic expenses — and that offered more protection if they put some of their own income into the policy.
More Americans think the law has hurt them than think it has helped them. And as flawed as the law already appears, worse days may be ahead for it.
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Americans have found that health-care expenses for many individuals and families are higher, their insurance costs are higher, their choice of doctors and insurance is diminished, and the total costs of the program are burdening a weak economy. Had members of Congress known then what they know now, they would never have passed Obamacare.
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Obama’s claim that the ACA has reduced the number of uninsured by 20 million, implies that state and local governments have $650 million in additional resources to spend on illegal immigrants, whether it be for health care, education or anything else. The ACA has increased the amount of resources dedicated to health care of illegal immigrants–the explicit legal prohibition against this notwithstanding.
This is just one of many reasons why Conover believes a nation of 320 million people is much better off letting such resource allocation decisions be made at the state and local level rather than by federal taxpayers. That way people can vote with their feet if they don’t like the idea of their tax dollars being used to pay for people who have come to this nation illegally.
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The Bureau of Insurance hoped to stem Community Health Options’ losses, partly by ending as many as 17,000 policies, but CMS rejected the temporary plan.
Eric Cioppa, the state’s insurance regulator, wrote in the letter to CMS, his bureau “would have acted to reduce membership, increase capital and thereby better protect the remaining (co-op) members and their health care providers from the risk presented by the type of losses experienced in 2015. Because CMS’s decision has precluded my ability to act as proposed, CMS now must share responsibility for the risk of an outcome we all very much hope to avoid.”
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A government report revealed that CMS has failed to protect healthcare.gov. The site that millions use to purchase health insurance under the ACA logged 316 cybersecurity incidents during an 18-month period.
The CMS has also failed to adequately monitor security controls at state-based insurance marketplaces, according to the watchdog. In a previous report, the GAO found three states with “significant weaknesses,” including insufficient encryption and inadequately configured firewalls.
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President Obama and the Supreme Court have effectively replaced the ACA with something we now call “ObamaCare.”
Unfortunately, ObamaCare doesn’t work much better than the ACA. ObamaCare is still causing Americans to lose their health plans, still driving premiums higher, and still causing their coverage to erode.
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Obamacare turns six and Americans are left with broken promises. Millions have lost their healthcare plans, and, for those faced with narrowing provider networks, their choice of doctors is also shrinking.
The president’s broken promises have multiplied over the past six years and now we’re faced with rising costs, bigger middle class tax bills, design flaws and unworkable provisions. In 2017, we can, and must, do better.
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The challengers, Zubik v. Burwell, argue the Obama administration is unjustifiably forcing religious groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor to cover birth control, despite an arrangement in which insurers provide contraception directly.
The administration counters that the challengers are threatening contraceptive access for women and say the court risks setting a dangerous precedent if it finds in their
favor.
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With the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the transformation of the nation’s health care system, HHS has gone from a minor regulatory player to the second most-burdensome regulator, measured by the amount of paperwork they pile on Americans, behind only the IRS.
In 2008, HHS imposed roughly 412 million hours of paperwork, up sharply from 152 million hours in 1995. By 2016, however, with the help of hundreds of new ACA regulations, HHS’s paperwork burden has increased to roughly 700 million hours, an increase of more than 300 million hours since President Obama took office.