“The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations meant to enable certain businesses and charities to steer clear of the Affordable Care Act’s so-called birth control mandate, while ensuring free contraception coverage for women under the law.
The action amounts to an administrative workaround in response to a slew of legal challenges from groups citing religious objections to portions of the mandate. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that closely held religious companies cannot be compelled to offer their employees certain forms of birth control.
Under the proposal, the government would step in and cover the law’s contraception requirements in instances where employers announce their religious objections in writing. The organizations would not have to play any direct role in providing for contraceptive coverage to which they object, according to a final interim rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.”
“The Affordable Care Act gives the president’s cabinet officers sweeping powers to implement the law, but the administration managed to overreach these powers by allowing people in 36 states to illegally access health insurance subsidies.
That was the conclusion of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in July.
At issue is the ability of people who sign up for coverage through exchanges established by the federal government to receive credits to reduce the cost of their health insurance.
D.C. Appeals Court Judge Raymond Randolph said the statute was quite clear in repeating seven times that subsidies are available only “through an Exchange established by the State.”
When the health law was passed, its authors apparently believed they had sufficiently cajoled the states. Jonathan Gruber, a chief architect of the law, said in early 2012, “if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”
But when it became clear that most states would not be coerced, the White House called on the Internal Revenue Service to write a regulation that would allow the subsidies to flow through the default federal exchanges as well.
In Halbig v. Burwell, the D.C. court held that subsidies — as well as the coverage mandates that travel with them — apply only in states that have established their own exchanges.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson is taking the federal government to court.
Attkisson, a senior independent contributor to The Daily Signal, filed the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services to obtain information about the troubled Obamacare rollout last year.
The former CBS News reporter and Emmy award-winning journalist won’t be going alone; the legal group Judicial Watch will represent her in court.
The lawsuit follows four unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act requests. In October 2013 and again in June of this year, Attkisson requested information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) concerning the efficiency and security of the HealthCare.gov website.
All four requests went unanswered.”
“An Indiana man who purchased health insurance through Obamacare’s federal exchange says he was assured he had dental coverage. When he needed care, though, he learned that his insurance provider wouldn’t cover the work. Now, he’s warning others they could also be getting misleading information. “You might be very surprised you’re not covered when you were told that you were,” he says.”
“A majority of people are worried about employers moving them on to insurance exchanges, with Republicans reporting the highest level of concern at 72 percent. But once they actually get insurance on the exchange, most Democrats and Independents, 43 percent and 39 percent respectively, think the shift would have “no impact” on their coverage. In contrast, most Republicans, 41 percent, think it would have a “very negative” impact. The majority of Republicans and Independents say they would consider looking for another job if they were shifted onto an exchange, at 62 percent and 52 percent respectively. Democrats reported that they would look for another job at a rate ten percentage points below Independents, at 42 percent.
Republicans are the most worried that their employer will shift health coverage to the insurance exchanges, with 72 percent reporting some level of concern. Independents and Democrats are less worried, with 60 and 53 percent respectively reporting some degree of concern.”
“Instead of shutting down Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, the government should expand them so that they also include patients who now are covered by Medicaid, Medicare, and veterans health programs.
That’s the gist of a big new health care policy proposal that’s getting a lot of attention.
It’s newsworthy in part because it’s so counter-intuitive. It comes from a think tank, the Manhattan Institute, that’s generally known for conservative, free-market, center-right policy ideas. You’d expect them to be in favor of repealing Obamacare entirely, not expanding it.
The proposal is attracting respectful praise from other conservative voices. Steve Forbes, the former Republican presidential candidate, tweeted a link about the proposal with the words “what true patient-centered, consumer-driven healthcare reform would look like.” (The plan’s author, Avik Roy, is the opinion editor of Forbes in addition to being a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.)
At the conservative web site Townhall.com, Conn Carroll wrote, “Some conservatives will oppose Roy’s plan since it does not begin by repealing Obamacare.” But he insists, “fetishizing full repeal at the expense of smaller, more popular reforms would be a huge mistake… Progressives did not create the modern welfare state in one fell swoop. They did it by incrementally building it up over time. Conservatives should steal a page from their playbook and begin to cut the size and scope of the federal government whenever they can. If we wait to do at all at once, we may be waiting forever.””
“Rob Weiner is at it again over at Balkinization. This time alleging he’s found some smoking gun to prove that the Halbig litigation is “anti-democratic” and rests on a flawed legal theory. As with his posts on the D.C. Circuit’s en banc procedures, Weiner’s diatribe is long on bluster, but short on meaningful claims. And, as before, he says some things that are false, irrelevant, or both.
Weiner starts with the supposed discovery of a video that shows the theory underlying Halbig was illegitimate from the start. The video is of a December 2010 conference at the American Enterprise Institute at which Vanderbilt law professor James Blumstein and health law attorney Tom Christina discussed pending and potential legal challenges to the PPACA. It was this presentation – though the slides posted on the AEI website, not the video as Weiner claims – that first alerted me to the fact Section 1401 of the PPACA only authorizes tax credits in health insurance exchanges “established by the State,” and not in federal exchanges. It was also where Michael Greve urged listeners to find a way to upend the PPACA. This, in Weiner’s telling, shows the unholy origins of the Halbig litigation.”