Freedom Line Blog

Byron York has a characteristically subtle and devastating critique of the Obama administration’s recent attempt to ruin Thanksgiving.

The kerfuffle began when Obama’s still operating campaign arm, Organizing for Action, released talking points to convince relatives and friends to enroll in Obamacare over Thanksgiving dinner. Reluctantly, conservative blogger Ben Domenech responded with counterpoints.

Watching from afar, York was reminded of an exhibit in Berlin explaining how the communists who ran East Germany for the USSR tried to make every personal event into a celebration of socialism.

The memory prompted York to make this heretofore unnecessary declaration: “Now is the time to state definitively: The United States is not communist East Germany. It’s not in any way close to being communist East Germany. So why is the Obama administration seeking to politicize Thanksgiving? And Hanukkah, too? At the very least, why invite the ridicule and derision that inevitably follow?”

It’s crazy to think we’re in an era where the President of the United States is green-lighting not only massive increases in government-run health care, but also beseeching everyday Americans to make support for such interventions the topic of completely private, non-political family gatherings.

York can be excused for sensing some totalitarian tendencies in the present administration. The parallels seem obvious.

“Since the Oct. 1 rollout of the Affordable Care Act in New York, nearly half of New Yorkers who signed up for insurance on the state-run exchange qualified for Medicaid,” reports the New York Post.

Apparently, the media attention surrounding Obamacare enticed many lower-income Empire State residents to apply for insurance, only to find out they qualified for taxpayer subsidized Medicaid instead. If every New Yorker that qualifies for Obamacare’s expanded version of Medicaid actually signs up, the state’s total Medicaid population could hit 6 million in a few years. That would be nearly 1/3rd of the state’s population.

The implications for federal spending levels are ominous. Currently, Medicaid spending is split between states and the feds. But once 2014 arrives, “the feds will pick up 75 percent of the tab and eventually 90 percent for childless Medicaid adults, instead of the current 50 percent.”

As the Post’s article indicates, Obamacare’s failure to lure enough buyers onto its public-private insurance exchanges is only half the story. The real win for those who want to impose a government-run, single-payer system onto the American health care system may be in the massive expansion of Medicaid consumers paid for out of the federal treasury. Thus, even if the public-private part of Obamacare fails, the number of citizens depending on Washington for health care will increase dramatically. In the long run, that may be just what Obamacare’s staunchest supporters desire.

The launch of the Obamacare website for small businesses will be delayed until November 2014 – a full year from when it is required by law to go online.

Along with the Obama administration’s inability to create functioning health insurance portals, today’s announcement is yet another craven attempt by Washington liberals to shield themselves from the political consequences of their failures.

By pushing back the federally-run small business exchange (called SHOP) until after the 2014 midterm elections, President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress want to avoid a fresh round of voter anger when the newest website inevitably implodes.

But doing so means that three federal elections will have taken place between the time Obamacare passed into law in 2010 and its full implementation in 2014. That time period will cover half of the Obama presidency. If performance predicts the future, all we have to look forward to in 2014 is more failure.

Republicans should spare Americans the experience and put forward a slate of candidates that run and win on a promise to repeal Obamacare, without delay.

California’s Obamacare-aligned health insurance exchange will not bail out President Barack Obama.

Data released by Covered California, the state’s exchange, explains why.

“People between the ages of 45 and 64 have enrolled in California’s health exchange at a much higher rate than their overall portion of the state’s total population, while younger adults’ enrollment levels essentially track their overall population,” reports CNBC.

“If the trend holds up, it could mean that insurance plans are overweighted with older customers, and underweighted with younger, presumably healthier people. Since their premiums are much needed to offset the cost of benefits paid out to sicker individuals, that could lead to higher premium prices in 2015.”

In other words, Covered California – like any other Obamacare exchange – can’t afford President Obama’s costly ‘fix’ that would allow young and healthy people to keep their pre-Obamacare insurance plans and stay out of the post-Obamacare risk pools. As I explain in my column this week, doing so would lead to the dreaded ‘death spiral’ that will doom the Obamacare exchanges.

There’s no other way to say it. California’s refusal to go along with Obamacare’s latest ‘fix’ is a huge blow to President Obama. So far, the Golden State is home to the most Obamacare-related enrollments, so if it’s afraid that adopting Obama’s enforcement delay will put its fiscal sustainability in jeopardy, it’s hard to see how any other state that’s serious about the issue will disagree.

All four of the cyber security experts that testified before a House committee yesterday agreed that Americans should not use Healthcare.gov until its security features are enhanced, or in some cases, built.

Three of the four said the website should be shut down until the security problems are fixed; preferably by rebuilding the site from scratch.

While that may sound drastic, an Obama administration official responsible for developing Healthcare.gov says that up to 40 percent of the site isn’t finished yet – including the parts that deliver subsidies to insurance companies on behalf of qualified Obamacare enrollees.

And it’s not like the roughly 60 percent of the website that is completed is running smoothly, as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius discovered when it crashed while she was demonstrating its (in)effectiveness to the public.

Bombarded as we are with the epic ineptitude of this fiasco, it’s hard to improve on Charles Krauthammer’s sentiments: “…this is a level of incompetence that is indescribable. And it stands to reason. We have a president who never ran anything. He was never a governor. He never ran a hot dog stand in his life and he presumed that his team could remake one-sixth of the American [economy] and this is what happens.”

Brace yourself. There is much more to come.

Time’s Swampland blog quotes a health care industry expert to confirm the obvious: “Many people are going to find out that the second part of the promise – that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor – just wasn’t true,” says a former George H.W. Bush Medicare and Medicaid official.

Fundamentally, Obamacare is designed to increase access to health insurance. It does this by increasing its costs and then transferring the extra money to eligible people in the form of insurance subsidies and enlarged Medicaid programs. To compensate, insurance companies will narrow their doctor networks. In many cases this will result in people losing access to the doctor of their choice.

In other words, the logical outcome of President Barack Obama’s law is to show that his promise of keeping one’s doctor is a lie.

Though the Swampland writer says “It’s unclear why the President made the promise about keeping your doctor,” it is abundantly clear that without such a promise Obamacare could not have passed. People were told they could get a flashy new entitlement at no cost to themselves. Now, they are finding out how truly wrong that promise was.

If you’re thinking about using Healthcare.gov to shop for an Obamacare-approved insurance plan – wait.

The personal information you enter to create an account may be unprotected from hackers.

That is the startling reality uncovered in testimony given by one of Healthcare.gov’s top IT officials to House investigators. Apparently, a memo documenting several “open high findings” – including the website’s vulnerability to identity thieves – was kept away from the person responsible for green-lighting its launch.

As the plot thickens, Avik Roy asks several pertinent questions: “First: Did Tony Trenkle intentionally conceal this critical information about high security risks from Henry Chao, or was it an accident? Second: Would Chao have recommended that the exchange go forward if he had been aware of high findings? Third: Did Marilyn Tavenner—the head of CMS—know about these issues when she issued the final go-ahead authorization? Fourth: Now that this information is public, why is the Obama administration encouraging people to enter their sensitive personal data into the non-secure healthcare.gov website?” (Emphasis added)

Why indeed?

Could it be that there is such a rush to spike Healthcare.gov’s enrollment numbers that Obama administration officials are willing to overlook the potential risk to millions of Americans’ private information?

It brings a whole new ominous meaning to the warning buyer beware.

Fox News says Democrats in Congress gave the Obama White House an ultimatum today: Fix the Obamacare-caused insurance policy cancellations by Friday, or we’ll vote for Republican measures that do.

Ordinarily, I would welcome bipartisan fervor allied against the Obama administration, but the 48 hour deadline has me holding my applause. No good policy or law can result from a two-day cram session overseen by panic-stricken political appointees. We’re much more likely to see a hastily written executive order rather than a carefully targeted proposal.

Because of that, it’s very likely that whatever the Obama White House produces on Friday will – over time – cause more problems than it fixes.

As to the Republican proposals that seek to reinstate canceled insurance plans, I’m not sure that’s a sound strategy either. Republicans didn’t vote for Obamacare, so they have zero responsibility for helping President Barack Obama keep his fallacious promise to let people keep their insurance policies if they want to.

People are losing their insurance plans because Obamacare changes the insurance market. If Republicans want to keep pre-Obamacare insurance plans, they should insist on returning to a pre-Obamacare insurance market. Thus, as ever, the simplest Obamacare ‘fix’ is also the most effective: Complete repeal.

Anything else runs the risk of further distorting an already overregulated part of the health care sector.

Leave it to a former federal prosecutor to make the case for impeaching President Barack Obama over the latter’s massive fraud regarding the security of insurance policies after Obamacare.

“Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime,” writes Andrew McCarthy. “In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.”

As everyone knows by now, President Obama has lied repeatedly since at least 2010 that Americans who like their insurance will be able to keep it.

But just because Obama won’t be prosecuted doesn’t mean that his actions should go unpunished. As McCarthy reminds us, the standard for impeachment is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers as relating “chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

I agree with McCarthy that the billions of dollars lost by millions of health insurance consumers seems to qualify as a massive injury to society perpetuated by the man in the Oval Office.

Read the entire piece here.

Another day, another leaked attempt to make an end-run around Congress.

In the wake of the widespread insurance policy cancellations forcing individuals onto Obamacare exchanges, Obama administration officials are letting it be known that they are working on an “administrative fix” that would somehow provide financial relief for those affected that don’t qualify for federal subsidies to offset the health law’s higher premiums.

This trial balloon seems to be the necessary corollary to President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday night “to work hard to make sure that [people losing their individual policies] know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

Even if that means rewriting the law without Congress, and exploding the cost of Obamacare.

As written, Obamacare subsidies are capped at 400 percent of the federal poverty line, which translates into an annual income of no more than $46,000 per year for an individual.

But, “In June 2009, the CBO evaluated a draft proposal from the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee that offered subsidies as high as 500 percent of the federal poverty level,” writes Philip Klein.

“In the period from 2014 through 2019 alone, CBO estimated that the exchange subsidies would cost $1.2 trillion.” Dropping the cut-off level to 400 percent of FPL reduced the cost estimate to $458 billion over the same six year period.

If the Obama administration elects to go this route, Klein says expect to see another famous presidential pledge come under fire: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. I will sign if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”

Last night President Barack Obama issued a half-hearted apology for lying to millions of Americans.

“I am sorry that they [i.e. people who are losing their insurance plans due to Obamacare] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News Thursday night. “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

But even with the mea culpa, Obama couldn’t resist trying to minimize his culpability. His method was trying to make the amount of people affected seem like a rounding error.

“I mean, we’re talking about 5 percent of the population.” Of course, 5 percent of the American population is still 15 million people – enough to swing an election. More importantly, that number would be several times larger if Obama hadn’t already delayed the employer mandate.

A reasonable person in Obama’s shoes would now spend the next month or two in lock-down mode trying to fix his broken website and restore credibility to his administration’s ability to govern. But instead this president is going on the campaign trail to defend the indefensible to a skeptical public.

The president doesn’t seem to realize that achievement is what’s needed now, not tired empty rhetoric. If this keeps up, the odds look good for another Republican wave election in 2014.

It looks like the glitch-ridden federal health insurance portal Healthcare.gov isn’t the only Obama administration website in need of fixing.

A statement on WhiteHouse.gov still parrots President Barack Obama’s recently disavowed promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” reports Fox News.

On a page labeled “health reform details” the following statement appears: “For Americans with insurance coverage who like what they have, they can keep it. Nothing in this act or anywhere in the bill forces anyone to change the insurance they have, period.”

And yet President Obama said to his supporters on Monday, “What we said was, ‘You could keep if [your plan] if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.’”

The about-face is due to the President of the United States being caught in a multi-year, bald-faced lie.

As I explain in my column this week, the Obama administration from the president on down has known since at least June 2010 that nearly 100 million Americans would lose their pre-Obamacare health care plans if the law was implemented as written. That’s one reason they delayed the employer mandate, and with it, the vast majority – almost 80 million – of projected policy cancellations. (Consumers in the individual insurance market are the ones being hit as the law intended.)

The conflicting statement on WhiteHouse.gov is just more confirmation that President Obama and his administration can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

A meme circulating through the liberal punditry claims that the jaw-droppingly bad launch of Healthcare.gov, the federal Obamacare insurance website, is nothing to get all hot-and-bothered about. Remember the Bush administration’s poor rollout of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit? Its website was glitch prone at the start, but now the portal and the program are considered successful.

The same fate awaits Obamacare.

Or so supporters claim.

The analogy doesn’t hold though.

For starters, Part D was a far simpler program than Obamacare because it (1) added a new benefit to an existing federal scheme, and (2) could tap into existing relationships between Medicare and the intended beneficiaries. By contrast, Obamacare’s exchange model fundamentally changes how millions of individual Americans must buy health insurance; including those without any previous history of doing so.

Unlike liberal sympathizers who want to blur the distinctions in order to obscure Obamacare’s much more significant problems, thoughtful analysts like health expert Yuval Levin see the analogy pointing in a very different direction.

“The fact that even a much simpler federal undertaking ran into real problems should lead us to think that Obamacare could well encounter far, far worse and more difficult problems, on a scale that may not be readily addressable – as in fact seems now to be happening,” writes Levin. “It doesn’t suggest everything will be fine, it suggests the government hasn’t been good at even much easier tasks than the ones now set before it.”

Time will tell if the Obama administration’s “tech surge” fixes the glitches, but in the meantime it would be better if liberals stopped hiding behind false analogies, and admit that their big gamble to remake health care is dangerously close to an unprecedented failure.

Daniel Himebaugh, a friend and lawyer at Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), sends along an update about his firm’s ongoing challenge to Obamacare as violating the Origination Clause. Under the clause, all bills raising revenue via taxes must originate in the House of Representatives.

As Dan explains in a blog post, “We contend that the legislation that eventually became Obamacare failed to comply with the Origination Clause because it contains a tax on individuals that originated in the Senate. That’s where Majority Leader Harry Reid took a bill the House had already passed – HR 3590, which would have provided incentives for veterans to buy their first homes – and replaced all its contents with what became the ‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.’”

Importantly, none of the Supreme Court’s existing exceptions to the Origination Clause apply to the circumstances of Obamacare. Thus, striking down the entire law could be as straightforward as finding that the Senate failed to follow the constitutional process for passing a revenue bill.

PLF’s case, Sissel v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, is beginning its appellate journey in the D.C. Circuit, with an opinion anticipated early next year. CFIF readers and all lovers of liberty would do well to acquaint themselves with the details of the lawsuit, which the firm makes easy with links to a case page, an in-depth backgrounder and its opening brief.

Like the other legal challenges to Obamacare working their way through the court system, PLF’s case deserves not only a hearing, but a favorable result.

Though Obamacare’s individual mandate barely survived the Supreme Court last year, there’s no guarantee that some of the law’s other elements will be so lucky.

Last week, Tim explained that litigation challenging the health law’s federal subsidy structure is proceeding toward the Court. If the Court’s four consistent conservatives and swinger Anthony Kennedy stay true to the text, citizens in 34 states won’t be eligible for subsidies that make Obamacare-approved insurance plans (somewhat) more affordable.

Another series of cases challenge the controversial ‘HHS mandate’ that requires all non-houses of worship to provide employees with access to contraceptives and abortion-related services; despite the objecting employer’s religious beliefs. Appellate level decisions are split between the government and private business, meaning the Court is very likely to decide the issue as a way to provide continuity throughout the nation.

If recent trends hold, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in both lines of litigation sometime next spring, releasing a high-profile opinion in mid-summer.

As long as Obamacare is the law of the land, there will be no end to the headaches it creates.

If you think Obamacare-approved insurance is expensive now, imagine how high it could go if the Supreme Court rules federal subsidies illegal.

Currently, there are four lawsuits making their way through the federal judiciary. I’ve profiled one from Oklahoma previously, and its arguments are essentially the same as the others.

In a nutshell, the text of Obamacare makes federal subsidies available to people buying health insurance on state-run exchanges created under Section 1311 of the law. The law says nothing about subsidies being available for insurance bought through federally-run exchanges created under Section 1321.

The Internal Revenue Service tried to paper-over the problem by issuing a regulation that made subsidies available on both sets of exchanges, but that’s being vigorously challenged as an illegal affront to the plain meaning of the Obamacare statute.

As Sean Trende notes, this challenge to Obamacare, if successful, wouldn’t kill the law outright. That might make voting against the IRS’s power grab more palatable for Chief Justice John Roberts, who cast the crucial fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate last year.

Of course, if the subsidies aren’t available to people in the 34 states where HHS is operating an exchange, then the system will implode. Even with subsidies many people are struggling to pay for the higher costs. Take them away and a huge political backlash will be unleashed.

If any of these cases gets to the Supremes, let’s hope they stick to the law and leave the politics for Election Day.

President Barack Obama lied. NBC News says so.

In 2009, President Obama went around the country saying “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan.” After Obamacare passed, he persisted: “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

But in between, the Health and Human Services department gutted that guarantee.

“The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be ‘grandfathered,’ meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law,” reports NBC.

“But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date – the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example – the policy would not be grandfathered.”

See the game? Obama can claim that so long as insurance companies freeze a plan in time, the consumer won’t be bothered. But change any part of a product – including making it cheaper – and the grandfather clause no longer applies.

In other words, insurance companies can either ignore their market’s price signals and lose money, or respond and get blamed for forfeiting their clients’ health plan.

The worse part: “[T]he administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.”

That’s because HHS put that estimate in a federal regulation in July 2010.

Looks like President Obama has about as much respect for the American people as he does for the rule of law: Zilch.

Yuval Levin has a must-read summary of the problems crippling Obamacare’s federal health insurance exchange, Healthcare.gov.

The summary is based on Levin’s interviews with sources in the Obama administration and in the health insurance industry.

Key problems include:

·    Overly Complex: A “late-in-the-game decision to require users to go through a complex account-creation process before even reaching any coverage options.” Not only does this block users from seeing prices up front, the slap-dash decision is the main reason people can’t access the site.

·    Inadequate Oversight: The Obama administration did not hire a general contractor to oversee the IT project, opting instead to keep oversight in-house. The inability of health policy people to adequately manage the technical details meant big problems were not understood until too late.

·    Erroneous Subsidy Calculations: So far, this hasn’t gotten much attention because only a few people have been able to complete the purchasing process. But as Levin points out, if the front-end log-in problems get resolved, the back-end problems regarding faulty subsidy calculations could severely undercut both consumers’ and providers’ confidence in the system. If millions of people buy insurance with a subsidy they don’t qualify for, that’s millions of angry voters who will owe a refund to the IRS come tax time.

Today, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) gives more detail into this burgeoning crisis.

“Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations,” reports the paper.

The reality is that the dissatisfaction with Healthcare.gov is likely to get much worse. With the shutdown saga behind us, perhaps some politically savvy conservatives in Washington can figure out a way to turn the growing frustration into a mandate for delay.

Even though it’s been delayed for a year, Obamacare’s employer mandate is still giving business owners cold sweats.

North Georgia Staffing, a family-owned boutique staffing agency, currently employs 18 full-time workers and 400 temporary workers. Next year it plans to add another 200 temps.

The problem facing Debbie and Larry Underkoffler, the owners, is whether to extend the same insurance coverage to all workers or pay a $2,000 per employee fine, they told Fox News.

The projected fine would be $400,000, while giving all workers an Obamacare-approved plan would top $2 million.

The Underkofflers’ case is particularly galling because prior to any government mandate they already provide their workers – both full-timers and temps – with access to health insurance.

Yet under Obamacare’s system of mandates and penalties, it makes better financial sense for the Underkofflers to dump their temporary workers on Georgia’s federally-run exchange and pare back benefits for the full-timers. In both cases, workers are projected to pay more for health insurance and get less.

All this makes perfect sense, however, if you agree with Obamacare’s primary goal of increasing the number of people with health insurance by regulatory fiat.

North Georgia Staffing, supporters would argue, is laudable but an outlier. Most temporary workers don’t have health insurance. The way to (somewhat) pay for the cost of covering them is to either (1) make employers eat the price increase, or (2) use the fines when they refuse to (partially) fund the federal subsidies temps will use to buy insurance on an exchange. If that means that some owners and workers will pay more for less, it’s a worthy sacrifice to increase access to health insurance for others.

That’s the baseline policy argument for Obamacare’s employer mandate. No doubt it doesn’t poll as well as “If you like your doctor and insurance you can keep it,” but at least it’s the truth.

If anyone is looking for another reason to criticize the Obamacare website rollout, here it is.

“Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance,” reports the Washington Examiner.

An open, competitive process would have revealed that CGI was fired in 2011 by the Ontario government for failing to deliver on time “a new online medical registry for diabetes patients and treatment providers.”

In other words, CGI – the firm responsible for creating a health insurance portal to service 36 American states – couldn’t deliver a much less complicated system for 1 Canadian province. The service was so bad that the Ontario government still refuses to pay any outstanding fees it owes to CGI.

Remember when liberals screamed bloody murder about the no-bid contracts awarded by the George W. Bush administration to defense contractors?

Well, it’s time to mount their high horses again and demand accountability.

I’m looking at you in particular, Jon Stewart.