When selling Obama Care, the president “absolutely reject[ed]” the claim that the individual mandate is a tax, largely because the individual mandate heavily affects the middle class, and the president promised in the campaign not to raise any taxes on them. Now that the bill has passed, the Obama Administration is arguing that the individual mandate is Constitutional because Congress is empowered to levy taxes by the Constitution, contradicting his earlier position.
The Obama Administration has filed its response to the 20 state lawsuit challenging the Constitutionality of ObamaCare. Among the Justice Department’s arguments is a claim that forcing Americans to buy health insurance or pay a tax is a power granted to Congress just like the power to levy any other tax. This flatly contradicts Obama’s earlier insistence that the individual mandate was not a tax, but merely a responsibility fee. “Put another way, the administration is now arguing in federal court that Obama signed a massive middle-class tax increase, in violation of his campaign pledge.”
The federal government has finalized the specific changes employers are allowed to make to their insurance plans to still remain “grandfathered” and exempt from ObamaCare’s new restrictions. Accordingly, the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Labor estimate that 51% of all employers will lose their “grandfathered” status because of small changes they make to their health insurance plans and be subject to the full force of ObamaCare’s coverage restrictions by 2013.
New rules determining how much a company’s insurance plan can change before it’s considered a new plan, and thus no longer exempt from ObamaCare’s mandates, are likely to lead to people losing the plans that they currently have and like. “The regulation, released by the Department of Labor, the Treasury and HHS, estimates that 13 percent to 42 percent of employers would lose their grandfathered status by next year, and 34 percent to 80 percent would by 2013. Small businesses are considered more likely than larger companies to lose their grandfathered status.”
Consumer-directed health plans have been tremendously successful at controlling otherwise rising health care costs for families and businesses. High-deductible health policies, coupled with health savings accounts, empower patients to choose the best care for the best value, but ObamaCare threatens to take away such plans, because of new regulations to standardize health insurance policies and mandate more expensive, less flexible plans.
When drafting ObamaCare, Congress left the decision of how to manage the transition for current plans to meet the new Washington-approved health care mandates up to the Administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has issued new rules, which will require many firms to drop their current coverage to comply. “Although President Obama and many Democrats promised during the health care reform debate that ‘if you like your health plan, you can keep it,’ the health insurance plans that are now offered by small businesses probably will not survive the transition to a regulated marketplace.
An ill-conceived provision of ObamaCare is already threatening to upend insurance policies for millions of Americans. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners reported to HHS recently that they would not meet a regulatory deadline because of the massive disruption strict adherence to the new law would precipitate. According to some sources, there is potential for millions of people to lose their insurance next year based on rules which are supposed to control premiums by regulating the amount insurers are allowed to spend on administrative costs but actually just drive insurers out of the marketplace altogether.
The Massachusetts health-care program provides a clear blueprint for what would happen nationwide under ObamaCare: Increased demand and decreased supply would raise costs and lengthen lines; increased mandates would increase costs still further; and increased costs would lead to employers bailing out and insurers going out of business, with government-run health care being the inevitable end-result.
A one-page chart examining all of the different ways ObamaCare’s employer mandate (free rider provision) will negatively affect hiring decisions of businesses at the margins.