Archive

Posts Tagged ‘defund’
October 10th, 2013 at 4:21 pm
Cost of Obamacare Website Compared to Tech Giants

Healthcare.gov, Obamacare’s federally-run, error-prone health insurance exchange, costs north of $500 million, according to the best information available.

To put this in perspective, compare that amount to the operating budgets of some of the tech industry’s biggest names:

·    Facebook operated for six years before passing the $500 million mark in 2010

·    Twitter operated for five years on $360.17 million in total funding

·    Instagram used $57.5 million before being bought by Facebook last year

·    LinkedIn has raised $200 million, while Spotify has raised $288 million

Despite the huge funding disparities, however, all of these private sector firms fielded much better online products than the glitch-filled, click-and-crash monstrosity offered by the Obama administration.

After more than a week of operation, Healthcare.gov is doing little more than waste people’s time.

Defunding never looked so good.

September 20th, 2013 at 1:38 pm
House Report: More Problems with ObamaCare Navigators

If you’re looking for talking points to defend the House GOP’s vote to defund ObamaCare today, look no farther than a report released by the chamber’s Government Oversight and Reform committee.

In it, several alarming abuses are described relating to the health law’s controversial “navigators” program. Navigators, CFIF readers will recall, are taxpayer-financed middle men.

Thanks to the House committee’s report, we now know that:

·    The Obama administration has failed to create adequate training standards for Navigators, even though the administration assumes most Navigators will lack prior knowledge of ObamaCare or health insurance markets.

·    Allowing organizations that receive Navigator funding to pay their employees based on the number of individuals they enroll creates an incentive for those employees to provide biased or incomplete information about ObamaCare to maximize enrollment.

·    Despite the statutory requirement that Navigators be free of conflicts of interest, the administration has decided that individuals employed by Navigator organizations will not have to disclose that they are paid per enrollee to individuals with whom they interact.

·    Neither Congress nor an independent entity reviewed the training materials for Navigators, despite the statutory requirement that Navigators provide “fair and impartial information.”

·    Moreover, the incentives that encourage Navigators to maximize enrollment raise the risk of massive fraudulent spending on Medicaid and exchange subsidies for individuals who do not meet eligibility requirements.

·    And get a load of this – Substantial risks remain because the administration decided not to require background checks and fingerprinting of individuals hired by Navigator organizations.

These are just a few of the many, MANY reasons to defund ObamaCare.

Check out the entire report here.

September 12th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Delay ObamaCare, Spend Savings on Sequester?

House Republican conservatives are considering an alternative to using the upcoming budget fight as an attempt to defund ObamaCare. In its place, the GOP would vote to delay all of ObamaCare for a year and use the money saved to restore budget cuts caused by the sequester, reports the Washington Examiner.

To entice Democrats, the proposal would also raise the government’s debt ceiling, which is estimated to be reached sometime in late October.

On the plus side, the one-year delay puts President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats on the defensive. After delaying the employer mandate and income eligibility requirements, it would be difficult to justify opposing the whole scale delay of a law that is turning into a “train wreck” to implement.

Shifting the money saved on ObamaCare implementation also lets Republicans take credit for restoring budget cuts, but here the plan starts to look less favorable. Conservatives want to restore funding to the military, but liberals are likely to demand restoration across the board – including budget items that Republicans would otherwise like to see shrink or eliminated.

Besides, if at the end of the year the sequester gets “paid for,” what was the point of going through all the downsizing? Angling for praise for restoring spending in a budget that doesn’t balance seems like an odd goal for fiscal conservatives.

Finally, there’s the debt ceiling issue. Between the White House, Senate Democrats and House Republican leadership there appears to be agreement that the debt ceiling should be raised. While that’s certainly the politically correct thing to do, it too seems contrary to the fiscal instincts of conservatives.

And yet, this trial balloon proposal might be attractive to House conservatives, also known as the best hope for imposing any kind of spending discipline in Washington. If this is the best they think they can do, then it means momentum inside Congress for defunding ObamaCare is dead.

If that’s true, let’s hope they can get a full and complete delay. Otherwise, capitulating on those terms will lead to more spending, more debt and more regulations. Not exactly a win for conservativsm.

August 16th, 2013 at 2:51 pm
Study: Young & Healthy People Can Defund ObamaCare

Want to defund ObamaCare, but think DC’s politics make it impossible? Don’t worry. A new study confirms that convincing young healthy people to opt out is the best and fastest way to starve the beast.

“This study finds that in 2014 many single people aged 18-34 who do not have children will have a substantial financial incentive to forego insurance on the exchanges and instead pay the individual mandate penalty of $95 or one percent of income,” says the study’s author, David Hogberg, Ph.D.

Both the savings and the numbers of people affected are potentially huge. “About 3.7 million of those ages 18-34 will be at least $500 better off if they forgo insurance and pay the penalty,” Hogberg writes. “More than 3 million will be $1,000 better off if they go the same route. This raises the likelihood that an insufficient number of young people and healthy people will participate in the exchanges, thereby leading to a death spiral.”

The reason for the massive savings is that young and healthy people won’t use health insurance as much as older and sicker people on the same plan. Thus, the young and healthy will “cross-subsidize” the old and sick by paying in more than they take out in services.

The Obama administration knows this and is gearing up a multi-million ad campaign to convince at least 2.7 million 18-34 year olds (the amount estimated necessary to make the risk pools solvent) to buy a product ObamaCare’s architects don’t want them to use.

But if that sounds like too much of a conspiracy for some (albeit one that’s true), the young and healthy should be reminded of this: Cash-strapped cities like Chicago, Detroit and others are planning to dump thousands of retired public employees into ObamaCare’s risk pools to reduce the legacy costs associated with unsustainable union benefits. Filling the pool with even more older and sicker consumers than anticipated will make enrolling in ObamaCare even more financially absurd for the young and healthy.

Despite all the spin, paying for insurance through an ObamaCare exchange is little more than a voluntary tax on the young and healthy. If conservatives want to stop the health law in its tracks, hammering this point seems like a great way to do it.