“In March, the CBO released a new study on employee migration out of job-based plans and into Obamacare’s state exchanges. The effect of ObamaCare on employer-based insurance has been hotly debated ever since the law was enacted in March 2010. Several independent analysts predict that ‘dumping’ into the exchanges will occur at a much higher rate than CBO assumed in its original estimates of ObamaCare and argued that the result would be much higher federal costs than CBO estimated.”
Details“One element of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the advancement of ‘comparative effectiveness research’ (CER). Intended to compare available treatment options, CER can benefit patients if used for informational purposes only, but it could also be harmful in practice. The expansion of the Medicare bureaucracy under the PPACA will allow the use of CER for more government micromanagement of personal medical decision making—hurting patients, doctors, and the practice of medicine.”
Details“The most astonishing result is that while, as expected, two-thirds of Republicans want all of Obamacare struck down, about half of Democrats do not want the Court to uphold all of Obamacare. Half of Democrats do not fully support President Obama’s crowning domestic achievement, the fulfillment of a ‘century of trying’ and as Representative Clyburn put it, the 21st-century Civil Rights bill!”
Details“Absent the mandate, ObamaCare will not function as intended because the program’s coverage guarantee and expansion is financed, in part, through cross-subsidies generated by mandating that individuals purchase insurance policies that cost several times more than their expected insurance claims. Defenders of ObamaCare rationalize these compulsory transfers as inherent to “insurance,” which they erroneously present as a system where low-risk policyholders are expected to overpay for their coverage to reduce the cost of the policies for those with predictably high claims.”
Details“The most important front right now is to ensure that states do not create the health-insurance exchanges Obamacare needs in order to operate. Refusing to create exchanges is the most powerful thing states can do to take Obamacare down. Think of it as an insurance policy in case the Supreme Court whiffs.”
Details“The ACA unambiguously worsens federal finances. As the accompanying graph shows, under a variety of possible assumptions (all based on the analyses of CBO and CMS), our annual deficits will be much larger because of the ACA than they would have been under prior law.”
Details“The health law’s backers relied on—and are still hiding behind—government budgeting conventions in order to argue that the law will result in lower overall deficits relative to expectations about the current fiscal trajectory. No matter how you run the numbers, the law can be expected to increase both total federal health spending and deficits.”
Details“President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.”
Details“Many of its opponents were passionately convinced that ObamaCare marked an unprecedented and ominous interference by the federal government in the lives of American citizens. At the root of these fears lay the provision of the program known as the individual mandate. If the government could make us buy health insurance, or incur a penalty for failing to, what could stop it from compelling people to purchase electric cars, memberships in a health club, or, that old favorite, broccoli—indeed, anything at all?”
Details“Uncertainty over changes in national health care policy has emerged as an issue in supermarket labor contracts.
Union employees of Giant and Safeway stores in Washington and Baltimore last week agreed to a new contract with an unusual duration of 19 months, a period during which both sides hope to gain more visibility into the potential financial impacts of changes set to take place as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the sweeping changes in national health care policy approved two years ago.”