“As the Affordable Care Act (ACA) celebrates its third anniversary, the law has already imposed $21 billion in private-sector burdens, $9.8 billion in unfunded state liabilities, and 111 million paperwork burden hours. When the American Action Forum (AAF) reviewed the law’s regulatory impact last year, the ACA had imposed a combined cost of $12.4 billion and 50 million hours, meaning in the last year the administration has more than doubled the cost of implementation and added 21 million compliance hours.”
“Starting in January, employers with at least 50 workers must offer affordable coverage or pay a penalty. To stay under this limit, some are considering outsourcing jobs to specialists such as Kelly Services, Manpower, Robert Half and Randstad, whose stock prices have soared.”
“Medical claims costs — the biggest driver of health insurance premiums — will jump an average 32 percent for Americans’ individual policies under President Barack Obama’s overhaul, according to a study by the nation’s leading group of financial risk analysts. The report could turn into a big headache for the Obama administration at a time when many parts of the country remain skeptical about the Affordable Care Act. The estimates were recently released by the Society of Actuaries to its members.”
“Report after report has established that the only changes that have materialized under the ACA are, in fact, the opposite of what small-business owners have been demanding for decades. The law has increased costs and added profound complexity to an already confusing system; higher taxes and thousands of pages of new regulations are having a tremendous impact on the small-business community and have contributed to the slow recovery of Main Street.”
“Since the mid-1980s, medical inflation has outpaced all other inflation by an ever-increasing margin. While many factors play into this phenomenon, Obamacare fails to address the drivers of excessive and continuous price increases for medical goods and services. By shifting costs to government and taxpayers and by increasing overall U.S. health-care spending, Obamacare will, by its own standards, fail to control health-care costs.”
“The problem is that the benefits in question are neither ‘free’ nor likely to produce valuable savings. ObamaCare’s rules eliminated individual cost-sharing for a number of preventive services, but, as the administration admitted a few months after the law passed, at the cost of higher insurance premiums on average. It’s like a gym that suddenly makes all the drinks and snacks at its café ‘free’—but raises the price of membership.”
“State officials say they need 20,000 people for the job of signing up millions of Californians for health insurance in the coming months, but a battle is brewing over whether these workers should undergo background checks and fingerprinting. At issue is the level of screening these ‘assisters’ should receive before they handle confidential information about the people they are enrolling this year in the state’s new health insurance exchange, called Covered California.”
“The IRS said it did not need to go through that assessment because only large employers — defined as businesses that employ 50 or more people — are required under the healthcare law to either provide workers with health insurance or pay a fine. But Sargeant and his assistant chief counsel, Dillon Taylor, said the act of a small business assessing whether or not it should comply with the regulation — and the paperwork it must keep in case it does — impose a heavy burden.”
“President Obama often claims he wants to cut the budget smartly, using a “scalpel”—not a meat axe, machete, cleaver or chainsaw, to list a few of his favorite metaphors. He’ll need a more inspired term to describe what he’s now doing to Medicare Advantage, perhaps napalm or WMD. The Affordable Care Act drained $306 billion from this growing version of Medicare that 29% of seniors use to escape the traditional entitlement and obtain modern private insurance, but the Administration is imposing the cuts in ways that are even more harmful than the law requires.”
“Big government likes big providers. That’s why ObamaCare is gradually making the local doctor-owned medical practice a relic. In the not too distant future, most physicians will be hourly wage earners, likely employed by a hospital chain. Why? Because when doctors practice in small offices, it is hard for Washington to regulate what they do.”