Last November, the American people voted for change in Washington. They elected Republican majorities to both chambers of Congress and elected a Republican president because, as a party, we pledged to fix the broken status quo of the past eight years.
Reforming our dysfunctional federal government and restoring sanity to our nation’s capital starts with relieving the American people from the burdens and excessive costs of our defective health care system and requiring Washington to once again live within its means.
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In less than three weeks’ time, when Donald Trump becomes our next president, he will take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
It is fitting, then, that Trump has committed to repealing and replacing one of his predecessor’s most infamous unconstitutional policies, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. But he won’t be able to do it alone. Repealing Obamacare requires Congress to write legislation for the president to sign into law.
Congress can and should do this in January, before Inauguration Day. There is no excuse not to.
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In the midst of open enrollment for Obamacare, there is plenty of bad news for health law supporters, from skyrocketing premium rates to diminished insurer participation. Public opinion remains steadily opposed to the law.
After a fluid first few months in 2009 as the plan got underway in Congress, public opinion of Obamacare settled into a consistent trend in early 2010, with opposition outweighing support—often by a sizable margin.
Gallup’s tracking, for instance, shows that since the law took effect in 2013, a majority of Americans have consistently disapproved of it, ranging from a low of 48 percent in July 2015—just after the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the law’s federal subsidies—to a high of 56 percent.
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One of the most frequently heard claims from the Obama administration is that Obamacare is responsible for insuring 20 million adults who were previously uninsured. But Heritage Foundation research shows the administration’s figure is off by a few million.
It is important to note that the administration’s coverage estimates are based on survey data rather than calculating the actual change in coverage in different markets. Though surveys can provide useful information, they are not as precise as using enrollment data taken directly from insurance companies.
A recent analysis by The Heritage Foundation’s Edmund Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski uses the more accurate method, taking actual enrollment data from Medicaid and private insurance companies to assess the impact Obamacare has had on coverage.
The researchers found that just over 14 million people gained coverage from the end of 2013 to the end of 2015. Of those 14 million, 11.8 million gained their insurance through Medicaid and 2.2 million through private coverage.
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The GOP’s long-discussed dreams of repealing Obamacare became closer to reality early Wednesday morning when Donald Trump was elected president.
Six years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law and after more than 60 attempts to repeal it, Republicans now have a good chance to advance their own agenda.
While on the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised voters that he would repeal Obamacare if he was elected president and even called on congressional Republicans to call a “special session” to move forward with rolling back the law.
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A rarely discussed aspect of Obamacare, one that appeared to give states an “exit strategy” to avoid provisions of the health care law, is likely to become more widely known next year.
But while states led by Democrat governors are beginning to see “innovation waivers” as a way to change their health care systems—and move toward proposals such as a public option—states with Republican governors are proceeding with caution.
The waivers come with strings attached by the Obama administration that some policy experts say constrain free market health care reforms as an alternative to government mandates.
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Since Obamacare’s rollout in the fall of 2013, 16 co-ops that launched with money from the federal government have collapsed.
The co-ops, or consumer operated and oriented plans, were started under the Affordable Care Act as a way to boost competition among insurers and expand the number of health insurance companies available to consumers living in rural areas.
Now, just seven co-ops—Wisconsin’s Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative; Maryland’s Evergreen Health Cooperative; Maine Community Health Options; Massachusetts’ Minuteman Health; Montana Health Cooperative; New Mexico Health Connections; and Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey—remain.
Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who is an expert in health policy, said each of the seven remaining co-ops have “warning indicators” leading up to when, and if, they fail.
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Rushing to enact the giant Obamacare bill in March 2010, Congress voted itself out of its own employer-sponsored health insurance coverage—the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Section 1312(d)(3)(D) required members of Congress and staff to enroll in the new health insurance exchange system. But in pulling out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, they also cut themselves off from their employer-based insurance contributions.
Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for ordinary Americans are generous, but capped by income. No one with an annual income over $47,080 gets a subsidy. That’s well below typical Capitol Hill salaries. Members of Congress make $174,000 annually, and many on their staff have impressive, upper-middle-class paychecks.
Maybe the lawmakers didn’t understand what they were doing, but The New York Times’ perspicacious Robert Pear certainly did. On April 12, 2010, Pear wryly wrote, “If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?”
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Top Obamacare officials told a Senate panel Thursday that they can’t guarantee that the government ever will recover billions of taxpayer dollars loaned to health insurance “co-ops.”
“Today’s hearing is about the families who lost their health care plans, it’s about the taxpayers who were swindled, it’s about the bureaucrats who mismanaged this program, and it’s about the local governments who had to cut budgets from firefighters and schools to make up for Washington’s failures,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said.
During the hearing, held by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations within the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, senators paid particular attention to the 12 of 23 ObamaCare co-ops that have failed.
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UnitedHealthcare’s decision to not offer Affordable Care Act exchange plans next year in “at least 26 of the 34 states where it sold 2016 coverage” may soon be followed by similar announcements from other health care insurers.
At least that is one implication that can be drawn from the findings reported in a new paper analyzing the performance of insurers that offered exchange coverage in 2014.
The paper’s authors—Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Ed Haislmaier, Mercatus Center senior research fellow Brian Blase, and Galen Institute senior fellow Doug Badger—examined enrollment and financial data for the 289 Qualified Health Plans sold on the exchanges in 2014.
They found that, in the aggregate, insurers incurred substantial losses offering exchange coverage. Furthermore, the poor results were despite insurers receiving substantial subsidies—indeed, more than they originally expected—through the Affordable Care Act’s “reinsurance” program.
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