“The District’s health exchange has a problem — a big money problem.
Like the 14 states that started online marketplaces, the District faces a year-end deadline to prove its Web site can move past technology glitches to meet the next looming challenge in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act: financial self-sufficiency.”
“The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Employer Shared Responsibility provision, commonly referred to as the Employer Mandate, requires all employers with 50 employees, or 50 Full Time Equivalents (FTEs), to provide health insurance coverage beginning in 2014. Similar to the law’s individual mandate to carry health insurance, noncompliance carries a fine, levied to help offset the cost of providing insurance coverage in the ACA’s state based insurance exchanges.”
“In April, the U.S. economy added 288,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest numbers, which easily beats expectations of around 215,000 hires. The unemployment rate dropped to an encouraging 6.3 percent, but not because of that impressive headline number.”
“Even if Obamacare really has enrolled 8 million Americans through its health insurance exchanges, that’s not good enough. For the exchanges to work, people must enroll and stay enrolled.
If too many enrollees drop out, premiums will climb until the exchanges collapse.”
“The economic news this week may have people wondering whether they have gone through the Looking Glass into Wonderland. The Bureau of Economic Analysis issued its advance estimate of first-quarter growth in 2014, which barely made it into the black with an annualized GDP growth rate of 0.1 percent. Even that terrible result – the worst quarter since 2012, and tied for second-worst since the start of the technical recovery in June 2009 – would have been worse without an explosion of health-care spending as Obamacare enters its first year of implementation.”
“The House approved bipartisan legislation Tuesday to exempt U.S. health plans sold to expatriate workers from having to comply with requirements under the Affordable Care Act.”
“Recent polling conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for the 2017 Project asked Americans, “If you could undo one thing that President Obama has done as president, what would it be?” The choices that the poll provided were “overregulation of the economy,” “high deficit spending,” “tax increases,” “the economic stimulus package,” and “Obamacare.” And the winner, by a wide margin, was Obamacare.”
“A new survey demonstrates the Affordable Care Act’s negative impact on employment. According to the Journal, ‘nearly half of small-business owners with at least five employees, or 45% of those polled, said they had had to curb their hiring plans because of the health law, and almost a third—29%—said they had been forced to make staff cuts, according to a U.S. Bancorp survey of 3,173 owners with less than $10 million in annual revenue that will be released Thursday.'”
“Since Obamacare “hit” its “enrollment” “target,” Democrats, liberals, and their friends in the press have enjoyed some old-fashioned taunting of Republicans. This would be justifiable if a.) Republicans had destroyed the website that needed fixing or b.) predicted that nobody would sign up for the program in the first place.
Neither condition holds, of course. The website was totally the design of CMS, HHS, and the White House, which are all run by Democrats. Meanwhile, as Michael Cannon argued, it is no big feat to get people to sign up for a heavily subsidized product.”