Freedom Line Blog

Seton Motley, President of Less Government, catalogues in blistering fashion why ObamaCare’s Federal Data Hub – a database designed to link all of the personal medical and financial information held by the states and federal government – may not be a good idea:

The government spies on reporters. And their parents.

The government collects phone call data on hundreds of millions of Americans. It allows thousands of National Security  Administration (NSA) analysts to listen to them at their individual discretion. These same analysts can also read our emails, texts and Instant Messages, and watch our video chats. The government is working with many of the largest Internet companies to take possession of much of the information they have on us.

The government uses our data to sic the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on opponents, inhibits select political organizations from forming or gaining approval, then releases damaging information on and audits anyone not with the big government program.

With this as its track record, how in the world can Americans trust the government to protect some of our most precious personal information and refrain from abusing it?

Better to pull the plug on the Hub and the law that mandates its existence.

H/T: The Daily Caller

Add the Laborers International Union of North America to the list of organized labor groups criticizing ObamaCare’s disastrous effects on the status quo.

In a letter to Democratic leaders, President Terry O’Sullivan called for a halt to the health law’s “destructive consequences” on the costs and provision of health care.

Unlike the Teamsters and other unions, Laborers International did not support ObamaCare when it was passed into law. Unfortunately, they are just as oppressed by the law’s cost increases and coverage interruptions as those that did.

With the employer mandate delayed for at least a year, maybe there’s enough angst brewing among the Democrats’ liberal base to pressure delaying the entire law for at least as long.

ObamaCare will kill the Teamsters union, and Jimmy Hoffa’s son is an accomplice.

Now, Hoffa’s heir is in full damage-control mode.

In an open letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), James P. Hoffa – son of the famous Teamsters boss and the union’s current General President – blasts the Obama White House for “shatter[ing] not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy[ing] the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

Hoffa is upset that after lending his union’s money and muscle to get ObamaCare passed, the Obama administration is refusing to carve out an exception for union-run health insurance providers. Absent the special treatment, union-run health insurance will become too expensive to offer. Without an attractive health insurance plan to offer its members, the Teamsters and every other union in their situation will lose one of the biggest incentives they have for retaining members.

Having exhausted their pleas to the White House for special treatment, Hoffa and company are turning their unfriendly fire on congressional Democrats. “Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem, you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of [ObamaCare] are severe.”

As I explained in a recent column, the problem for Hoffa and his union brethren is that they failed to get the kind of concrete assurances from the Obama administration that are standard operating procedure when it comes to negotiating with private businesses.

That failure will cost them dearly.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is using a populist line of attack to show how delaying ObamaCare’s employer mandate will harm individuals and families that don’t get an exemption, according to Politico.

“If you’re a software company making billions in profits, you’re exempt from Obamacare next year,” he said. “But if you’re a 28-year-old struggling to pay off your student loans, you’re not.”

“If you’re a big bank or financial company, you don’t have to comply with Obamcare,” Boehner added. “But if you’re a single parent trying to make ends meet, there’s no exemption for you.”

To level the playing field, Boehner is scheduling back-to-back floor votes in the House next week to delay both the employer and the individual mandate. The move would pose a dilemma for Democrats looking to support President Barack Obama’s policy, but unable to justify exempting businesses but not families and individuals too.

This strikes me as a good strategy. It’s past time for Democrats to own ObamaCare and all its flaws.

The best indicator of what someone will do tomorrow is what they’re doing today.

Applying this principle to the Obama administration’s abuse of power regarding the implementation of ObamaCare, key members of the House GOP see no reason to expect a different outcome with comprehensive immigration reform.

Conn Carroll summarizes the growing sentiment:

“They have shown no respect for traditional Constitutional separation of powers,” Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., told National Review’s John Fund about the impact of the ObamaCare delays on the immigration debate, “and that makes it difficult to pass laws where the fear is that they will simply ignore the parts they don’t like.”

Carroll goes on to write that, “Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, who is on the House Judiciary Committee and had been a member of a bipartisan group working on immigration reform, echoed Roe’s concerns on Meet the Press. ‘In fact, if you look at this ObamaCare debacle that they have right now, this administration is actually deciding when and where to actually enforce the law. And that’s what some of us in the House are concerned about. If you give to this administration the authority to decide when they’re going to enforce the law, how they’re going to enforce the law… what’s going to happen is that we’re going to give legalization to 11 million people and Janet Napolitano is going to come to Congress and tell us that the border is already secure and nothing else needs to happen.’”

That’s exactly right. Members of Congress can negotiate all they want among themselves about a pathway to citizenship, security triggers and the like, but unless there is a change in the current president’s management style, all such agreements and understandings are worthless. As President Obama clearly showed by suspending enforcement of ObamaCare’s employer mandate last week, the law as written is merely a starting point for executive policy making.

A new Gallup poll of 603 small business owners shows how ObamaCare is impacting the job market, and with it, future economic growth.

Some of the key findings include:

·    41% of businesses have frozen hiring
·    19% answered “yes” when asked if they had “reduced the number of employees you have in your business as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act” (i.e. ObamaCare)
·    38% said they “have pulled back on their plans to grow their businesses” because of ObamaCare
·    52% say they expect a reduction in the quality of health care under ObamaCare

The main policy goal of ObamaCare is to make health insurance, and with it health care, more available to people. Doing this, however, will not make either insurance or care more affordable.

The best way to make health care more available is to make it universal, preferably by a provider who isn’t constrained by cost. That would be the government. By increasing the cost beyond what companies can pay and stay in business, ObamaCare will move millions of Americans from a private sector model to a public provider model in just a few years’ time. That helps liberals achieve their main political goal: Single-payer health care, or if you prefer, socialized medicine.

With ObamaCare going online in 2014, the movement of workers from private to public health care provision will complicate the reform job conservatives need to accomplish. Repeal of the law is necessary, but unless there are other reforms in place that reroute severed workers into new private sector models, it won’t be sufficient. Hopefully, a conservative consensus forms around a replacement option soon.

Otherwise, Western Europe here we come!

H/T: CNBC

Thanks to a little-noticed Republican amendment, ObamaCare puts Members of Congress and their staffers under the same insurance rate-shock being anticipated by the private sector.

Reporting in Politico gives a useful summary:

“Currently, aides and lawmakers receive their health care under the generous Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. The government subsidizes upward of 75 percent of the premiums for the health insurance plans. In 2014, most Capitol Hill aides and lawmakers are expected to be put onto those exchanges, and there has been no guidance whether the government will subsidize those premiums. This is expected to cause a steep spike in health insurance costs.”

The source of the heartburn is the Grassley Amendment. Added to ObamaCare in 2010 during Senate debate, the amendment requires aides and lawmakers to use insurance plans that are either “created” by the law or “offered through an exchange.”

Partisans on both sides agree that the text and the intent of the amendment ensure that Congress and its employees will be subject to the same regulatory pain ObamaCare imposes on everyone else.

So, unless the feds carve out an exemption for Congress, there could be a sudden burst of retirements as staff members try to avoid paying higher premiums on lower incomes than they could get in the private sector.

If that happens, the coming brain drain in Congress will negatively impact the quality of work it produces. But unlike every other employer in America, the national legislature has only itself to blame.

A group of conservative House Republicans is readying an anti-ObamaCare messaging campaign to coordinate arguments against the controversial health law in the run-up to its debut in October.

The initiative aims to make criticisms of the law more mainstream.

“The goal of the House ObamaCare Accountability Project is to raise public awareness about ObamaCare’s impact on jobs, health costs and access to care. HOAP is a group of select House members who will supplement and echo the work being done by the House Committees of jurisdiction and all members of the House Republican Conference on this important issue,” a spokeswoman told Politico.

HOAP is being spearheaded by House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The effort includes 25 House GOP members drawn from across the country.

As far as I can tell, there’s no website or talking points available yet, but even just an announcement is a start in the right direction. Conservatives need to find a way to turn the public’s dissatisfaction into a movement for repeal. With the media in favor of the status quo, that means a messaging unit like this – that’s very good – is needed to get the conversation moving in the right direction.

Despite initial reports that California’s ObamaCare health insurance exchange will offer plans that are cheaper than currently available, a closer look at the data shows that the state specializing in concocting fake budgets also lied about the supposed cost savings.

Initially, Covered California, the state’s ObamaCare-ready exchange, announced that insurance rates would drop up to “29 percent below the 2013 average,” prompting many of the health law’s defenders to claim victory over critics who estimate double-digit increases.

But the bloom fell off the rose fast. In order to make the new prices look as favorable as possible, Covered California didn’t compare current individual insurance rates to future individual rates. Instead, it compared current small business rates to future individual rates, and reported the “savings” of 29 percent.

Many conservative analysts caught the switch, and deconstructed the ploy. Avik Roy compared current individual rates in California to future individual rates under ObamaCare and surprise, surprise, confirmed that rates will increase between 64 – 146 percent.

Of course, much of the damage from the false information has already been done. I was in a meeting hours after the rates were announced and was greeted by a liberal friend smiling and saying something along the lines of, “Well, how about that; it looks like ObamaCare is better than your side thought all along. Have you seen the California numbers yet?”

At the time I’d only heard the summaries, none of which drew attention to the obvious apples-and-oranges comparison by Covered California. A week later, none of the liberal cheerleaders for the California miracle are going out of their way to correct the record.

At least now we know the truth. Too bad the left and their friends in the media don’t seem to be interested.

Up to 20 million union members and their families will be ineligible for ObamaCare subsidies to help pay for their Cadillac-style health insurance plans, says CBS News.

Instead, members of unions for part-time and seasonal workers and their dependents will likely have to choose between higher premiums to stay on their plans – whose cost will rise because of the health law’s new coverage mandates – or cheaper plans that cover less – but are subsidized – on the state-based ObamaCare exchanges.

The reason for the choice is because ObamaCare only gives subsidies to people who are not covered by their employer. If union members opt to stay with the plans jointly administered by their union and their employer, then they, in effect, are choosing higher premiums.

Of course, opting out of the union’s negotiated health benefits makes union membership itself a much less attractive prospect, causing union leaders to fear that a mass exodus by members to qualify for ObamaCare subsidies will have the effect of shrinking union enrollment.

For its part, the Obama administration is refusing to carve out any exceptions for the affected unions, prompting at least one union official to say, “In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer-sponsored coverage could keep it.”

Welcome to the club.

The Hill reports that the plot is thickening as key members of Congress ask 15 insurance companies to turn over any records related to potentially illegal fundraising to support ObamaCare by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The request went to industry giants Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Cigna, Coventry Health Care, H&R Block, HCSC Group, Highmark, Humana, Independence Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare, WellPoint, America’s Health Insurance Plans, BlueCross BlueShield Association, and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield.

The controversy first surfaced when the Washington Post confirmed that HHS Secretary Sebelius is personally contacting private members of the health care industry – including insurance providers – to ask that they donate six- to seven-figure sums to Enroll America, a pro-ObamaCare non-profit advocacy group running a national summer and fall ad campaign to promote enrollment in state-based insurance exchanges.

H&R Block, one of the companies contacted by both Sebelius and Congress, has already committed to donating $500,000 to fund Enroll America’s efforts, according to the New York Times.

With its records request, you can bet that Congress wants to know what exactly was said/indicated/promised in the Sebelius-H&R Block conversation, as well as any other communications between top health insurance companies and their chief regulator.

If those requests aren’t honored voluntarily, expect to see subpoenas follow very quickly.

How big is a “gap” in coverage when it affects 840,000 people?

The Los Angeles Times says that California is racing to pass a “bridge” program into law that helps individuals and families likely to be caught between qualifying for Medi-Cal (the state’s version of Medicaid), and ObamaCare’s new state-based health insurance exchange.

In California, residents earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $15,000 a year, will be eligible for Medi-Cal next year. Individuals earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or about $46,000, will be eligible for subsidies through the exchange, known as Covered California.

The Covered California board approved a plan in March to help patients expected to jump between the two. The “bridge plan” would enable patients now on Medi-Cal managed care whose incomes rise to continue to stay with their health plan once they move to the exchange.

The program, which still needs federal approval and state legislation to take effect, could serve as many as 840,000 people next year. The plan should streamline the process, keep out-of-pocket premiums low and make it easier for people to keep their providers, said David Panush, external affairs director with Covered California. “It is better for their quality of care, it is better for continuity of care,” he said.

While it’s refreshing to see California taking steps to protect people from being penalized for working more, what the article doesn’t mention is how related government policies are putting the squeeze on the state’s working poor.

California’s anti-business climate – coupled with ObamaCare’s perverse incentive structure that makes it more affordable for businesses to cut hours rather than pay hefty premium increases for employee’s health insurance – are underreported tax increases on the working poor.

By diminishing the number and quality of jobs available to people at the bottom of the employment ladder, certain public policies make it exceedingly difficult for people to work their up into a better standard of living.

Because of this, one way to think of the constant tinkering and enlargement of public benefits is as a way to compensate the working poor for taking away their access to an abundance of jobs where they can get the experience and skills needed to move upward an onward.

Under the current regime, a “bridge” program between Medi-Cal and Covered California is the least state policymakers can do. Still, those entangled in the state’s safety net deserve better.

As I discuss in my column this week, the primary beneficiary of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s legally suspect lobbying of private health companies is the non-profit community organizing outfit Enroll America.

The group’s Advisory Council includes several members of the liberal establishment such as NAACP, La Raza, Planned Parenthood, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

But wait, there’s more:

“Enroll America’s board of directors is made up of insurers and hospital organizations that will benefit from enrolling millions of people in Obamacare. But its management is 100 percent political. Its president is Anne Filipic, formerly deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, where she networked with community organizers. Before that, she had a top job at the Democratic National Committee, and before that she managed Obama’s victorious 2008 Iowa Caucus bid,” according to the Boston Herald.

“To design a media campaign, Enroll America hired Lake Research, which also manages messaging for ACORN, MoveOn.org, LaRaza and 39 members of Congress, all Democrats”

At least now we know how Sebelius is feathering her post-HHS nest – by funneling money to just about every radical liberal group in America.

A group of powerful Republicans in the House and Senate is demanding an investigation into potentially illegal fundraising calls by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to private health companies.

In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, three House committee chairmen and two Senate ranking members said, “The Secretary’s actions show an apparent disregard for constitutional principles and may violate the Antideficiency Act, the prohibition against augmenting congressional appropriations, and executive branch ethics laws,” according to reporting by Politico.

As I explain in my column this week, Sebelius has been caught quoting specific dollar amounts that private companies should donate to a pro-ObamaCare community organizing group getting ready to promote the law ahead of this year’s October enrollment.

Whatever GAO decides to do, it’s a near certainty that the relevant Republican-led House committees with jurisdiction over this scandal will soon launch investigations into Sebelius’s conduct.

Sally Pipes identifies an “escape hatch” for small businesses trying to avoid the costly employer mandates threatening employers with costly insurance premiums or fines:

A RAND analysis found that a fifth of firms with 50-200 workers had self-insured by 2010, the year Obamacare became law — up from 14 percent of such companies in 2006.

A survey by Munich Health North America found that 82 percent of health insurance executives report seeing growing interest in self-funded coverage among employers. A California-based benefits consulting firm that helps companies self-insure told Kaiser Health News that its business has doubled in the past six months. And Cigna says that it saw self-coverage for small businesses grow by a fifth last year.

Companies with younger, healthier workforces are leading the way. After all, with their population of low-risk employees, they have the most to gain. And that’s bad news for Obamacare’s exchanges.

The problem for ObamaCare is that the only way health insurance premiums will be (theoretically) affordable is if legions of young, healthy people join the exchanges’ insurance pools. That’s because they are needed to pay into the system so that older and sicker people can draw down the benefits.

But if small businesses opt to self-insure – especially if they are newer businesses more likely to employ younger and healthier workers – then that will drain the ObamaCare pools of the very people who will make them (barely) affordable.

With this in mind, don’t be surprised to see an IRS or HHS rule come down that prohibits self-insurance to prop up ObamaCare’s exchange pools.

As with the so-called “family glitch,” it’s a ploy the Obama administration will be ready to use if its slapdash law continues to produce embarrassing unintended consequences.

On the heels of a Washington Post report that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is actively soliciting health industry executives for six- to seven-figure “donations” to help publicize ObamaCare, the New York Times reveals how much she’s netted in pledges so far: $10.5 million.

And that’s just from two groups. One is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which bills itself as the largest public health philanthropy. It pledged $10 million. The other is the for-profit tax preparation company H&R Block who, according to the Times, “sees a large role for itself in helping low- and middle-income people apply for tax credits that can be used to buy private health insurance.” It promised $500,000 for the propaganda outreach effort.

An unbiased observer could look at this and easily see at least the probability if not the certainty of a quid pro quo arrangement where payment to an HHS-backed initiative now means preferential treatment later.

And remember, these two transactions are only the tip of the iceberg. Once more health industry entities confirm their involvement Sebelius’ project we’ll be able to see which firms will reap the lion’s share of benefits of ObamaCare’s corrupt pay-to-play scheme.

Crony capitalism is alive and well in the Obama Administration.

Earlier this year Michael Barone catalogued a litany of abuses to the rule of law perpetuated under the Obama Administration. “Gangster Government” is the term Barone coined to describe the behavior.

As of Friday, Barone needs to update his list.

Sarah Kliff broke the news that Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been calling health care executives, “asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law…”

Imagine the conversation. A health care CEO gets a personal call from the chief regulator of his business suggesting that the company and the people it employs make financial donations to promote a law administered by the regulator.

Sounds like a suggestion that can’t be refused, right?

As Barone would say, this is Gangster Government.

Republicans in Congress need to push back hard on this abuse of power by Sebelius.

The people running businesses are there to make profits, not spend precious resources on ruinous fights with thugs spending taxpayer money.

If Sebelius can get away with coercing businesses to “donate” money to promote a law that increases her power over them, an awful precedent will be set. She – and any of her successors – will be able to tax, fine and now “fundraise” the very people they regulate.

Fail to pay enough, and say goodbye to your livelihood.

Congress needs to put a stop to Sebelius’ abuse of power. Now.

The editors at National Review Online give some much-needed advice to the congressional GOP:

“The basic outline of a workable strategy is easy to draw up. First, Republicans should explain why Obamacare is unlikely to work. Second, they should finally unite behind an alternative that would let at least as many people get coverage as Obamacare but without the law’s side-effects. Third, they should say that they plan to repeal and replace Obamacare as soon as they can do so — whether in one fell swoop, which could occur only under a new president in 2017, or one step at a time. Fourth, they should advance bills that both replace parts of Obamacare and highlight its flaws.”

The most perplexing thing about congressional Republicans is that no one has stepped forward to be the Paul Ryan of health care reform. Ryan spent years in the background learning the federal budget process to construct a clear, workable reform that slows down the growth of entitlement spending while making Medicare and Medicaid more market friendly.

With ObamaCare on the books since 2010, it’s a wonder that no Republican in the House or Senate has taken on the responsibility of putting together an alternative that the GOP can rally around. To my knowledge, no one – not the 16 Republican physicians in Congress or anyone on a relevant committee – is taking steps to make sure there’s a workable replacement in the event conservatives get their wish and repeal ObamaCare.

It’s not enough to be right that ObamaCare is wrong on the merits and impossible to implement. There’s also got to be a contrasting vision of health care reform that is better than ObamaCare.

As of now, we’re still waiting.

And the hits just keep on coming.

After news broke that the leadership in both the House and Senate were conspiring to exempt themselves from ObamaCare’s costly insurance exchanges, we’re told that the problem isn’t Congress shirking responsibility for a law it passed.

It’s worse.

The real issue, according to reporting by health policy expert Ezra Klein, is that Congress is too stupid to write a law clear enough to know what it does.

Per Klein:

“Here’s how it happened: Back during the Affordable Care Act negotiations, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed an amendment forcing all members of Congress and all of their staffs to enter the exchanges. The purpose of the amendment was to embarrass the Democrats. But in a bit of jujitsu of which they were inordinately proud, Democrats instead embraced the amendment and added it to the law.
…
“So Grassley’s amendment means that the largest employer in the country is required to put some of its employees — the ones working for Congress — on the exchanges. But the exchanges don’t have any procedures for handling premium contributions for large employers.

“That’s where the problem comes in. This was an offhand amendment that was supposed to be rejected. It’s not clear that the federal government has the authority to pay for congressional staffers on the exchanges, the way it pays for them now in the federal benefits program. That could lead to a lot of staffers quitting Congress because they can’t afford to shoulder 100 percent of their premiums.”

Got that?

Rather than think through how an amendment would alter the structure of a law that, as one of its architects put it recently, “is probably the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress,” Democrats opted to play games. No wonder the lead author of the law sees “a huge train wreck coming down.”

Whether it’s a fine that’s really a tax, a “family glitch,” or now an ambiguous gap in coverage, ObamaCare’s so-called drafting errors are making it one of the worst written laws ever.

And now the other shoe drops.

Less than a week after telling HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that her implementation of ObamaCare’s costly and confusing health care system is a “train wreck,” U.S. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) announces he’s retiring.

Baucus’s comments caused a stir because they met the Washington, D.C. definition of a gaffe – telling the truth in public.  With the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and lead ObamaCare author, on record as criticizing the President’s signature policy, it looked like it might finally be acceptable for Democrats in Congress to admit the obvious: ObamaCare is a disaster in the making.

But rather than stick around and fight to reform the law, Baucus is choosing to bow out of a tough reelection campaign in 2014. The decision could make it much easier for Republicans to pick up the seat, potentially adding another vote to the conservative-led repeal caucus.

Whatever the spin, this much is clear. Last week Baucus let it be known he could no longer defend the law. Now, it’s clear he can’t win with it either.

Hopefully, it’s the start of a trend.