Cato’s Michael Cannon has doubled down in his latest Forbes column on his outrageous claim that,“Yes, Marco Rubio’s Obamacare Replacement Plan — Tax Credits — Is An Individual Mandate.”
Sen. Rubio’s health policy plan provides an advanceable, refundable tax credit that can be used to purchase insurance. This idea is a centerpiece of free-market health policy. It would create fairness by equalizing the tax treatment of health insurance between those currently receiving employer-based health insurance and those who are shut out of this market. It would allow portability of coverage, make costs more transparent, and turn down the fires on the inflation-generating tax exclusion for job-based health insurance.
Cannon explains the Rubio tax credit this way: “If you purchase a government-approved health plan, you could save, for example, $2,000 on your taxes. If you don’t, you pay that $2,000 to the government. That is exactly how Obamacare’s individual mandate works.”
Transitional Reinsurance is a key part of the Affordable Care Act. It’s a component of a set of provisions designed to lure private health insurers into selling insurance on various Exchanges. Without continued private insurer participation, Obamacare as we know it falls apart. Congress thought it needed lures (1) because health insurers did not have much experience with the medical expenses of the population they would be insuring and (2) because Congress was outlawing health insurers’ favorite technique for staying profitable: pricing policies according to the predicted medical expenses of the insured. Congress set the hook by giving insurers selling on the Exchanges something for free that they otherwise would have to pay for: reinsurance. With “Transitional Reinsurance” The federal government would itself pick up the bill three years for much of the expense of insureds who ended up having high medical expenses.
But, as with lunch, there is really no such thing as free reinsurance.
Funding a problem doesn’t solve a problem. There are ways to make health care more affordable and accessible with less government dependence. For starters, Congress should seriously reconsider the way the program is financially structured so states can be granted more flexibility to devise ways that can improve the value Medicaid brings to its beneficiaries.
The other component involves reducing regulation to make medical care more affordable, like repealing Certificate of Need, permitting mid-level providers to practice within their full scope of authority, exercising right-to-try laws, reducing the number of health insurance benefit mandates, or changing the federal tax code to allow the direct primary care market to expand.
Liberals have been claiming for decades that U.S. companies are at a disadvantage because they help finance health insurance for their workers while their competitors in nations with government-run health systems don’t bear those costs.
Instead of addressing the problem, ObamaCare made it worse.
- The law mandated that U.S. firms provide their workers with health insurance or pay a fine of $2,000 to $3,000 per worker, and imposed significant regulatory compliance burdens on them.
- The American Action Forum estimates that the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $50.1 billion in state and private-sector burdens and added 177.9 million annual paperwork hours.
- The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law will result in a reduction in work hours equivalent to the loss of two million jobs over the next decade.
A big hospital chain’s surprise decision to write off a slug of bad debt may be a signal of much deeper consumer healthcare strains being caused by ObamaCare.
Community Health Systems surprised analysts this week, announcing that among other things, the company would take a $169 million provision for bad debt. The write off was a big part of Community’s dismal fourth quarter earnings report, leading to a 22% drop in the company’s stock on Tuesday.
In the lexicon of hospital finance, bad debt is another word for unpaid bills.
The rising amount of uncollected co-pays and deductibles may be an early sign of consumer stress as the economy weakens. But more likely, it also reflects changes in the healthcare market that are saddling consumers with a much bigger share of their medical costs. For this, ObamaCare is playing a big role.
Earlier this month, Speaker Paul Ryan announced six task forces, each comprised of House Committee Chairmen, to develop a “bold, pro-growth agenda.” What was remarkable was that one of the task forces was on health care reform. Many had thought Congressional Republicans were investing too much time and energy grandstanding ObamaCare repeal, and not enough developing a credible alternative.
That may have changed with the selection of four Committee Chairman to the Health Care Reform Task Force. They are: Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA), Education & the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN), Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX).
Scalia exposed that in King v Burwell, the Court elevated politics over both the rule of law and the separation of powers.
In King, a six-justice majority of the Supreme Court acknowledged the operative statutory text authorizes those taxes and subsidies only in states that establish an Exchange. But because the majority determined ObamaCare would collapse without them, it ruled the IRS could continue to implement those taxes and subsidies. Scalia’s dissent exposed that, rather than give effect to Congress’ intent, the majority simply substituted its own policy preferences for those of the legislature.
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wasn’t a fan of the Affordable Care Act and opposed it when it came before the nation’s high court every time.
Known for his blunt writings, here are some highlights from a dissenting opinion he wrote, published June 15, 2015, in what was the high court’s second major decision upholding President Obama’s signature legislative achievement. Scalia wrote the following passages in the famous King vs. Burwell case on behalf of a three-vote minority that included Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. The entire dissent can be read here.
Click through to read five of the best quotes from Scalia’s dissent.
On more than one occasion, President Obama has said that the core idea behind ObamaCare came from the Heritage Foundation and Politifact rates the claim as “mostly true.” More than one left-of-center commentator has made the same charge, often tracing the lineage from the Heritage building in Washington, DC to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts to the Obama administration. Most recently, John Aravosis writing at the America Blog claimed that the core idea behind ObamaCare (the individual mandate) comes from a 1989 lecture by Stuart Butler, then a health economist at Heritage. The same notion is almost as common on the right as it is on the left.
There is just one problem. This is all malarkey.
What is ObamaCare? If you sift through the hundreds of pages of legislation, the thousands of pages of regulations and all of the ridiculous complexity you will find that ObamaCare in its essence is a bastardized form of what health economists call “managed competition.”
With the results now in from the Affordable Care Act’s third open enrollment period, it’s getting increasingly difficult to sugarcoat the extremely low numbers of enrollees relative to original projections. The 12.7 million people who signed up for an exchange plan amounts to just half as many enrollees as was projected by government and private sector research organizations when the ACA passed.
The Rand Corporation predicted 27 million, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Servicespredicted 24.8 million, the Urban Institute predicted 23.1 million, and the Congressional Budget Office predicted 21 million.