“Democrats generally are not campaigning on the Affordable Care Act, but in a new campaign ad Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor does just that.
Some have commented on the fact that Mr. Pryor does not mention the ACA by name in the ad, referring to it as “a law he helped pass.” Just as interesting is the part of the law the ad features: its protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions. With all of the focus on the ACA’s rollout problems last fall and the ACA’s coverage expansion, we have not heard much about “pre-x” in some time, but in many respects it’s the mega benefit in the law.”
“The Affordable Care Act (ACA) presents employers and potential employees with a variety of new rewards and penalties. These are, in part, exactly what the law intended: by penalizing potential employees for not purchasing health insurance, and employers for not providing it, the law aims to increase the fraction of the population with health insurance.
Yet these same rewards and penalties have additional effects, including on the incentive to work; Mulligan
(2014), for example, suggests that the ACA may reduce employment by 3 percent on average and have a range of
positive and negative effects on average hours worked.
In the work summarized here, I quantify the number of people who will have essentially no short-term financial reward from working more than 29 hours, since this would either render them ineligible for the ACA’s assistance or increase
the penalties that may be owed by their employer.
This is the first paper to show that the ACA will put millions of workers in the economically extreme situation of having
zero short-term financial reward (or less) to working full-time rather than part-time.”
“Insurance expansion under healthcare reform is starting to yield patient volume for hospitals, but the costs of staffing up for more patients are eclipsing the additional revenue.
Earnings reports for not-for-profit systems in the first half of the year show that many providers are seeing rising salary and benefit expenses cut into revenue gains, leading to smaller operating surpluses.
“As the pieces of the Affordable Care Act are coming together, it’s changing the demand for care,” said Jeff Jones, managing director at Huron Consulting Group. “It’s shifting the way that providers are thinking about their labor pools.”
A report from Standard & Poor’s similarly found that in 2013, expenses increased 7%, outpacing revenue growth of 5%. The rating agency attributed the rising costs to preparations that systems were making to prepare for healthcare reform, including staffing needs.”
“Obamacare puts employers in a bind, two New York Federal Reserve surveys show. Employers’ health care costs continue to rise, and the health care law is driving them to hire more part-time labor, CNBC reports:
The median respondent to the N.Y. Fed surveys expects health coverage costs to jump by 10 percent next year, after seeing a similar percentage increase last year.
Not all firms surveyed said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to blame for those cost increases to date. But a majority did, and the percentage of businesses that predicted the ACA will hike such costs next year is even higher than those that said it did this year.
Obamacare’s higher costs will cascade down to consumers. The surveys found that “36 percent of manufacturers and 25 percent of service firms said they were hiking prices in response” to Obamacare’s effects.
The Empire State Manufacturing Survey polls New York State manufacturers, and the Business Leaders Survey polls service firms in the New York Federal Reserve District.
A June Gallup poll found that four in ten Americans are spending more on health care in 2014 than in 2013.”
“A new poll shows 69% of California voters back Proposition 45, a November ballot measure giving the insurance commissioner the power to stop excessive health-insurance rate increases..
The Field Poll released Wednesday indicates broad support statewide for Proposition 45 ahead of what’s expected to be a costly and contentious battle between consumer groups and health insurers.
Overall, 69% of registered voters said they favored the health-rate regulation measure while 16% opposed it and 15% were undecided heading into the Nov. 4 election.
The poll found that a majority of registered Democrats and Republicans in the state supported Proposition 45.
Among Democrats, 75% of those surveyed offered support while 58% of Republicans also favored it.”
“Despite the president’s assurance that “if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan,” Obamacare caused significant disruption to people’s coverage as the health insurance exchanges prepared for their first open enrollment. Beginning October 1, 2013, insurers knew they would struggle to price policies in the exchanges accurately.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) included three mechanisms to backstop insurers’ risks: risk adjustment, reinsurance and risk corridors. The first, risk adjustment, consists of perpetual transfers of money from unexpectedly profitable insurers to unexpectedly loss-making insurers and is — at least conceptually — necessary to mitigate risk in a market where insurers are forbidden to charge beneficiaries actuarially accurate premiums.
The other two mechanisms, reinsurance and risk corridors, were designed to protect insurers from unforeseen losses in Obamacare’s first three years, when insurers would not have enough experience to know how much risk they faced. These financial protections are critical to insurers’ ability to survive in the exchanges through the end of 2016. Both schemes persist only through the first three years of Obamacare, by the end of which its architects believed actuarial risks in the exchanges will have stabilized.”
“Last Saturday, August 16, marked the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, which permanently established in federal law generous tax advantages for employer-paid health-insurance premiums. Those group health benefits are excluded from employees’ taxable wages and thereby are not subject to income and payroll taxes. This tax break has been praised as a pillar of our employer-based private health-insurance system, but its age is showing. A growing list of critics agrees that the tax exclusion needs to be changed. The key questions are when and how. We should expect a significant overhaul, but not a full retirement party, within the next five to ten years.
The simplified history of the tax exclusion for health care usually begins with a 1942 ruling by the War Labor Board that allowed employers to bypass wartime wage controls by providing fringe benefits to workers. In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service issued a special ruling that confirmed employees were not required to pay tax on the dollar value of group health-insurance premiums paid on their behalf by their corporate employers. Over the next decade, a number of IRS rulings and court decisions created additional uncertainty over the full scope of the tax exclusion. When Congress codified this area of tax policy in 1954, it provided many employers and unions with even stronger incentives to sponsor group health-insurance plans.”
“Almost 7 million people can sign up for health plans under ObamaCare even before the new enrollment period begins in November, according to an advocacy group.
Enroll America, an ObamaCare enrollment group with close ties to the White House, said Wednesday that millions of adults are eligible to sign up for insurance before Nov. 15 because they have moved, gotten married, had children, lost insurance or become American citizens.”
“It was late in the afternoon on a warm Friday in early fall and Doug Sumrell was mowing the lawn outside his suburban home in Evans, Georgia. As he pushed the mower across the yard, Sumrell began to feel faint — his chest tightened and the back of his neck started throbbing — so he went inside to take a break and drink a glass of water. But each time he went outside to finish the job, the feeling came back. He drove himself to the hospital as the sun was setting. On the way there, he left a message for his primary care doctor, Dr. Paul Fischer.
At the hospital, a cardiac enzyme test showed Sumrell’s levels were extremely high, a strong indication that Sumrell had experienced a heart attack. The emergency room doctors said that they wanted to admit him, but it was already after midnight and Sumrell’s symptoms had subsided. His wife was out of town and their dog Buddy needed to be let out. Sumrell checked himself out of the hospital.
He was jolted awake at 7:30 a.m. by the telephone. Dr. Fischer was on the line demanding that Sumrell return to the hospital immediately to meet Dr. Faiz Rehman, a cardiologist and friend of Fischer’s, to examine his heart. Within 15 minutes of arriving, Sumrell was in the hospital’s “cath lab,” where Dr. Rehman inserted a catheter through Sumrell’s groin and into his heart, allowing him to see blockages in Sumrell’s arteries. The news was bad: his left anterior descending artery — also known as the “widow maker” — was up to 98 percent blocked. “Lord, I would’ve stayed home and not told anybody if Dr. Fischer hadn’t interceded and gotten me down there and arranged everything,” Sumrell told me.”
“For all the endless talk about reforming the health care system these past five years, it’s remarkable how little we’ve done to solve its actual problems. Spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize insurance coverage for several million people? That’s the easy part. The hard part is addressing the fact that American health care is so expensive.
The high price of U.S. health care is the fundamental reason tens of millions of Americans are uninsured. It’s the principal suppressor of middle-class wage growth. It’s a constant threat to businesses’ operating margins, and it’s the primary driver of the federal debt.
In May the American Health Policy Institute surveyed the chief human resource officers of 360 large employers, representing 10 million workers. When asked what troubled them the most about the Affordable Care Act, 85% said “increasing access to the health care system without making significant improvements in the efficiency and affordability of that system.” Only 6% believed that “the ACA will help my company more effectively control health care costs”; 82% disagreed.
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook, the United States remains on an “unsustainable” trajectory, driven entirely by growth in the big federal health care entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare.”