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Posts Tagged ‘Insurance’
August 7th, 2014 at 3:24 pm
The Coming ObamaCare Bailout

Because of ObamaCare’s mismatched incentive structure, some savvy commentators are warning of an impending, multi-billion dollar bailout of the insurance companies selling health care policies under the law.

“Pre-ObamaCare,” writes Dan McLaughlin, “insurers had to price their policies mainly by reference to market forces (albeit in an already heavily-regulated market)… Guess wrong and you lost money. But under ObamaCare, consumers no longer have the choice whether or not to buy policies, and insurance companies no longer face any risk of losing money, because they’ve been promised a bailout. Money will still be lost, but it will be taxpayer money, and you never run out of that, do you?”

McLaughlin is talking about ObamaCare’s “3 R’s” – reinsurance, risk corridors and the risk adjustment program. I’ve written about this multi-year, $20 billion bailout before. In different ways, each is designed to subsidize insurers for lost revenue traceable to the health law’s dysfunctional mandates. The threefold scheme was buried in the legislation to buy the support of large insurance companies who would have refused to participate without it.

Now the bill is coming due.

Based on interviews and documents containing discussions between Obama administration officials and insurance industry executives, a House Government Oversight report reveals that insurers are expecting the following payments:

1)      $640 million from the Risk Corridor program for the 2014 plan year

2)      $346 million from the Risk Adjustment program

The reinsurance program redistributes money among private insurance companies, as determined by the federal government.

The numbers quoted above are two to three times higher than originally anticipated because of the high level of adverse selection – i.e. too many older and sicker enrollees, not enough younger and healthier ones. The latter group is avoiding enrollment, preferring to pay ObamaCare’s relatively low penalty. But even that is a mirage. Reports are surfacing that as many as 25 million uninsured Americans are getting ObamaCare penalty waivers for next year; further increasing the federal budget deficit.

Bailouts can be nice, if they apply to you. But as a governing strategy, they eventually bankrupt the entire system.

August 6th, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Vermont Latest to Fire ObamaCare Website Maker

After nearly a year of failed attempts, Vermont is firing CGI Federal – the company that bungled both the federal healthcare.gov and Massachusetts’ online insurance exchange – as its web designer.

“With Vermont still lacking a fully functioning health website more than 10 months after its glitch-plagued debut last October, Vermont officials said late Monday that they were pulling the plug on CGI’s CGI Technologies and Solutions’ contract,” reports Newsweek.

The decision will cost CGI almost $20 million, but at least Vermont has agreed not to sue the company for damages.

Vermont’s announcement follows several other states that have abandoned their original – and very expensive – ObamaCare websites. Some, like Nevada, Hawaii, and Oregon, are planning to cut their losses and transition to the federal healthcare.gov website. Others, like Massachusetts, Maryland, and now Vermont, are switching to new contractors hoping to recoup at least some of their investments.

Of course, there are success stories. State exchanges in Kentucky and Connecticut are routinely cited as well-functioning websites – though even these have glitches. However, the prevalence of so many high-profile failures indicates that this massive experiment in public-private partnerships has resulted in a huge transfer of wealth with precious little to show for it.

June 27th, 2014 at 6:17 pm
Cover Oregon Offers Bonuses to Staff Not to Leave

Oregon’s failed ObamaCare website is so fraught with failure the state is offering to pay employees bonuses just to keep them on the job.

After spending over $250 million – and retaining more than $50 million in federal grants – to build an ObamaCare health insurance exchange that failed to enroll a single person, Oregon decided to switch to Healthcare.gov, the federal equivalent.

Apparently, though, the crisis isn’t over. Since April, 27 staff members of Cover Oregon have left, taking with them valuable skills that can’t easily be replaced in time to transition to the federal website. To staunch the bleeding, Oregon is making a total of $650,000 in bonuses available to the remaining 163 employees, if they stay on till the end of the job.

As I explained in my column this week, state officials are primarily responsible for the costly disaster that is Cover Oregon. This news is just one more reminder that simple, avoidable mistakes by politicians and bureaucrats have huge and prolonged consequences.

H/T: NRO

May 21st, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Nevada Closes Its ObamaCare Exchange, Hawaii Next?

Fed up with a dysfunctional health exchange operated by Xerox, Nevada officials voted to terminate the contract and transfer responsibility to the federal government.

Apparently, spending $75 million to enroll about one-fourth the number of people initially projected convinced Nevada to throw in the towel.

Nevada joins Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts as states who have scrapped their original state-based exchanges because of exceedingly poor performance.

The next domino to fall may be Hawaii, whose ObamaCare exchange – the Hawaii Health Connector – has registered just 8,500 people but needs at least 150,000 enrollees to ensure the program is self-sustaining.

Not surprisingly, Hawaiian officials are already being pressured to shut it down.

May 20th, 2014 at 1:28 pm
Feds Can’t Verify Over 1 Million Income Statements Seeking ObamaCare Subsidies

Amid all the legitimate privacy concerns with ObamaCare’s regulatory apparatus – in particular the proposed data hub that allows agencies like the IRS, Social Security Administration and HHS to share reams of information about individual citizens with each other, states and insurance companies – it’s been taken for granted that the liberals in charge of this grand social experiment at least had the technical competency to build the necessary infrastructure.

But the facts say otherwise.

“Of the roughly 8 million Americans now signed up for coverage this year under the health care law, about 5.5 million are in the federal insurance exchange,” reports the Washington Post. “And according to internal documents, more than half of them – about 3 million – have an application containing at least one kind of inconsistency.”

The Post says the most frequent inconsistency is a discrepancy in the income reported on an ObamaCare application and the income reported to the IRS. This type of inconsistency is present on between 1.1 million and 1.5 million applications. To their credit, citizens have sent in “about 650,000 pieces of ‘proof’” to justify their asserted income.

Because of the level of detail required when filling out the 20-plus page ObamaCare application, it’s no surprise many people mistakenly enter something wrong; especially when considering that most people get help on their taxes from either a certified professional or software that easily finds all the right deductions. Neither option was readily available to the vast majority of ObamaCare applicants.

What is astonishing, however, is the federal government’s complete inability to process and verify corrections digitally. “Because the computer capability does not yet exist, the work will start by hand, according to two people familiar with the plans,” says the Post. (Emphasis added)

ObamaCare subsidies are the essential ingredient for claiming that ObamaCare insurance is “affordable” since they at least partially offset the increased cost of coverage. Failing to launch a website capable of verifying income claims that determine whether a person qualifies for subsidies is inexcusable.

If there is any silver lining to this latest blunder it’s that Serco – the federal contractor accused last week of billing HHS $1 billion while hiring employees literally to do nothing – is now on the hook for correcting the inconsistencies. Small comfort though, since apparently Serco gets paid based on the number of employees it hires rather than the efficiency of its work product. Requiring the company to sort paper applications by hand seems almost too awful to be true.

May 19th, 2014 at 2:05 pm
ObamaCare’s Cost Increases Could Push 90% of Workers at Large Firms onto Exchanges

“According to a new report from S&P Capital IQ, 90 percent of American workers who receive health insurance from large companies will instead get coverage through ObamaCare’s exchanges by 2020,” writes Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute.

Large companies are those that employ 10,000 workers or more. They cover 59 percent of the American workforce.

ObamaCare’s escalating barrage of mandates, fees and fines are estimated to extract “about $163 million to $200 million in additional cost per employer – or $4,800 to $5,900 per employee,” says Pipes. Compared to the $2,000 per employee fine for not offering health insurance, large employers will in effect be forced to dump workers on ObamaCare exchanges to stay profitable.

There are many aspects of ObamaCare that defy easy explanation, but this much is clear – Forcing large employers who want to provide health insurance to their employees to pay more than twice the price of compliance just doesn’t pencil.

The only financially sensible thing to do – from a company’s perspective – is to shove workers onto taxpayer-funded exchanges. That may keep the firm afloat, but it will only add to the federal government’s fiscal problems.

May 8th, 2014 at 6:48 pm
More States Eye Switching to Healthcare.gov

A CNBC report says that multiple states now operating an ObamaCare exchange could decide the costs are unsustainable and relinquish control to Healthcare.gov, the exchange run by the federal government.

The reasons are multiplying. Oregon decided to shutter its woebegone website after spending $248 million and failing to enroll a single person online. Massachusetts is abandoning its software program, but if its replacement isn’t ready to launch by the next enrollment period in November it plans to default to Healthcare.gov. Colorado and Rhode Island are trying to figure out how to make their exchanges financially viable once federal subsidies run out. And at least one expert thinks Nevada and Hawaii may also decide to let the feds be responsible for continuing IT updates and rules changes.

But it’s not like the once foundering Healthcare.gov is experiencing smooth sailing. Recent testimony before Congress confirmed the existence of duplicate enrollments that cast doubt on the Obama administration’s overall enrollment claims.

“Due to website glitches, some individuals may have enrolled multiple times,” explains the Illinois Policy Institute. “For example, if there are three people with one enrollment each and one person with two enrollments, the government will report this as five total enrollments. If the first three people paid for each of their policies and the fourth person paid for one policy, the insurer will report 100 percent payment. In this way, the government numbers may be further overstating enrollments.”

And with it, Healthcare.gov’s ability to handle the increased responsibility for processing many more people.

April 30th, 2014 at 5:33 pm
Oregon Scraps $248M ObamaCare Exchange

Oregon spent $248 million developing its own ObamaCare insurance exchange and never enrolled a single person online.

That kind of return on investment convinced state officials “to abandon the exchange entirely and switch to the federal website, the first state to do so,” writes Lou Cannon. “The Oregon board made its decision after being told it would cost $78 million to fix Cover Oregon compared to $4 million to $6 million to make the technical changes needed to join the federal exchange.”

Investigations are ongoing into why the state’s heavily bankrolled website was such a bust. Once thought to be a model for progressive high-tech governing, Cover Oregon is now a source of embarrassment for the state’s Democratic establishment.

Whatever the causes for the technology failure, Oregon’s switch to the federal alternative could hit enrollees hard. An estimated 70,000 Oregonians enrolled with paper applications through Cover Oregon, making many of them eligible for federal subsidies. However, the text of ObamaCare doesn’t make subsidies available if insurance is bought via the federal website. So far, the IRS isn’t making the distinction, but a three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit seems ready to apply the law as written.

The intent of ObamaCare’s drafters was to reward state citizens with federal subsidies if they chose to shoulder the start-up costs associated with running a state-based exchange. Now that Oregon is pulling the plug on its failed website, its citizens may be losing the assistance they need to make ObamaCare affordable.

April 17th, 2014 at 1:58 pm
Sebelius Back to Kansas as a U.S. Senate Candidate?

Say it ain’t so!

Soon-to-be-former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “is considering entreaties from Democrats who want her to run against her old friend, Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas,” reports the New York Times.

It’s hard to see how this news is anything other than an attempt to put a softer spin on Sebelius’s disastrous tenure as the face of ObamaCare.

Considering how much the Left loathes her mismanagement of Healthcare.gov – driving down public confidence in government to record lows – it’s no surprise that friends of Sebelius are trying to rehabilitate her image by saying the former two-term Kansas governor could be just the candidate to topple Roberts.

Making the GOP spend money and time on a race they would otherwise win easily could burnish Sebelius’s ‘good soldier’ credentials. Actually winning the seat would give Democrats their first U.S. Senator from Kansas since 1939.

Still, whatever goodwill Sebelius had as governor has been forgotten long ago. In the current reality, it’s difficult to see how she could step down from such a bad job at HHS into an underdog Senate campaign and emerge as anything other than a twice rejected public servant.

April 15th, 2014 at 6:31 pm
Suspicious Timing of Census Bureau’s New Health Insurance Questions Helps ObamaCare

After compiling three decades-worth of responses to health insurance questions, the U.S. Census Bureau is about to implement a new version that will make it impossible to compare insurance coverage data before and after ObamaCare.

Coincidence?

It gets better.

“An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a ‘total revision to health insurance questions,’ and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured,” reports the New York Times.

In practical terms this means “it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.”

According to the Times, the new survey has been in the works for awhile. But there is no explanation given for why it is going into effect in the same year when millions of Americans are transitioning to the ObamaCare regime. The controversial health law was sold as a way to extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Why would the non-partisan Census Bureau make it impossible for observers to see whether ObamaCare actually achieved its goal?

Whatever the official line, it’s difficult to understand the timing of this development as anything other than a naked attempt to avoid accountability.

April 14th, 2014 at 4:57 pm
Will Sebelius’ Replacement Follow Her Lawless Lead?

Here’s a suggested question for GOP Senators to ask Sylvia Burwell – President Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services – at her confirmation hearing next month.

Studies by the RAND Corporation and Goldman Sachs estimate as much as 20 percent of the claimed 7.5 million ObamaCare enrollments have not paid their first month’s premiums.

When enrollees start seeing how much their deductibles are – commonly $3,000 to $5,000 – many more may choose to stop paying ObamaCare’s higher out-of-pocket expenses.

If that happens, it’s really bad news for doctors and hospitals.

“Section 1412 of the health law gives consumers a 90-day ‘grace period’ before their subsidized plan is canceled for nonpayment. But insurers only have to keep paying doctors and hospitals for 30 days. The next 60 days of care on the care provider,” explains Betsy McCaughey.

“[I]t could pose a significant financial risk for medical practices,” the American Medical Association warns.

The HHS Secretary has no express power to bail out such care providers.

However, under the previous Secretary, the Department of Health and Human Services didn’t shy away from spending $8 billion without congressional authorization to hide Medicare Advantage cuts before the 2012 presidential election.

This and many other extra-legal actions by Secretary Sebelius have come to define HHS as the most powerful domestic federal agency.

Ms. Burwell, Do you think the absence of express authority to bail out care providers in the above situation limits you in any way from spending money for this purpose?

April 11th, 2014 at 2:44 pm
IRS’s ‘Big Brother’ ObamaCare Enforcement Coming into View

As Tax Day approaches, consider the bright side – at least there’s no ObamaCare form you have to fill out.

That changes next year.

“According to the agency, the IRS plans to include a specific line on the 1040 forms for taxpayers to ‘self-attest’ whether they purchased insurance,” reports Fox News. “It will most likely include a worksheet for taxpayers to calculate how much they owe – essentially either a flat penalty or a percentage of their income.”

Next year the penalty is either $95 or 1 percent of your income, whichever is greater.

The IRS plans to confirm whether taxpayers are telling the truth about purchasing insurance by getting enrollment records from insurance companies.

So along with increased paperwork, we can all look forward to a greater amount of government surveillance into our insurance (and eventually our health) records.

All in the name of helping us. Thank you, Big Brother.

April 5th, 2014 at 9:15 pm
Bipartisan Support for Repealing the Employer Mandate?

It sounds like there may be a growing bipartisan consensus to repeal ObamaCare’s onerous employer mandate.

“Republicans don’t like the mandate because they oppose the idea of government telling private sector entities what to do, but they also don’t support the lack of tax incentives for individuals who don’t pay for health care through an employer,” says The Street. For their part, “[s]ome Democrats don’t mind dumping the employer mandate because they would prefer to move away from businesses making health insurance decisions for individuals.”

The employer mandate is poised to hit small and growing businesses especially hard, since employing 50 full-time workers – defined as working 30 hours or more a week – triggers requirements to offer costly ObamaCare-compliant insurance plans.

This creates an obvious incentive to cut hours for people already at the margins, in effect robbing them of extra work and extra pay. Because of this liberal pundits like Ezra Klein have called for the full repeal of the employer mandate (and deplored the politically-motivated delays that have made ObamaCare’s implementation so arbitrary).

Of course, repealing the employer mandate isn’t a painless option. While it would no doubt free countless human resources directors from nimbly trying to anticipate the next extra-legal maneuverings of the Obama administration, it would also be a huge hit on ObamaCare’s financial scorecard.

“If you take [the employer mandate] out the congressional budget score looks a lot worse,” one academic supporter of ObamaCare tells The Street. That’s because the buck for subsidizing health insurance would move from private employers to the public treasury via a massive migration to ObamaCare exchanges. The individual mandate, remember, would be still be in effect. If that happens, expect ObamaCare’s price tag to soar.

So while it may be tempting for Republicans to ally with Democrats and vote to repeal the employer mandate, doing so could be used to charge the GOP with willfully spiking federal spending. Better, it seems, to just get rid of the whole law and start afresh.

April 4th, 2014 at 1:15 pm
Report: ObamaCare to Increase Large Employer Costs Up to $186 Billion

A new study by the American Health Policy Institute demonstrates that when it comes to ObamaCare’s disruption of the health insurance industry, the worst is yet to come.

The study looks at 100 large employers – defined as employing 10,000 workers or more – to estimate the direct and indirect costs of complying with ObamaCare’s costly mandates. (Due to extra-legal delays by the Obama administration, the employer mandate will go into effect starting in January 2015.)

When factoring in all of the direct mandates and fees – for example, covering children up to age 26 and accepting all enrollees regardless of preexisting conditions – as well as indirect costs – such as medical device companies and insurers passing on compliance costs to businesses in the form of higher prices – the total cost of complying with ObamaCare will be between $4,800 – $5,900 per employee. The net cost of ObamaCare for all large employers is projected to range from $151 billion to $186 billion.

Large employers employ about 52 million American workers, or about one-third of the nation’s workforce. You don’t have to be a Harvard-trained CFO to realize that companies “have a significant incentive to make fundamental changes to their health offerings” because of ObamaCare. The most obvious choice is to pay the $2,000 per employee penalty for not offering health insurance, and let employees try their luck on an ObamaCare exchange.

ObamaCare advocates insist that the law isn’t designed to separate workers from their health insurance, but the incentive structures buried within it tell a different story. Skeptics can be forgiven if the implementation phase looks like a coordinated effort first to get people into government-run exchanges, and eventually, under government-run health care.

H/T: Daily Caller

March 31st, 2014 at 6:20 pm
IRS Compliance Nightmare Looms as ObamaCare Site Crashes Ahead of Deadline

This morning Healthcare.gov – the federal ObamaCare website serving citizens in 34 states – went down for four hours, stymieing customers from accessing or completing their applications for insurance.

NBC News reports that people unable to log onto the website were put in a “queue,” meaning they would be notified by email when they could resume the enrollment process.

But with the deadline to begin an application (supposedly) ending at midnight, what will happen to people unable to return to their computer screens after the lengthy delay? Last week’s extension to mid-April only covers people who start the process for enrolling by the end of March. If other commitments – say family or work responsibilities – don’t allow an applicant to return, what then? How will federal regulators distinguish between people who never tried to use Healthcare.gov and those that did, but for various reasons beyond their control couldn’t finish?

If history is any guide, don’t expect the feds to make a distinction. More likely, the response sometime soon will be a blanket extension for enrollment that allows anyone – without precondition – to complete the process.

Then it will be the IRS whose head will spin. When it comes to enrolling on an ObamaCare exchange, the carrots are the subsidies and the sticks are the fines. Any adult that goes without health insurance for three consecutive months is subject to a fine of $95 or 1 percent of her annual income, whichever is higher. And since that fee gets levied at next year’s tax filing, it will be the IRS’ job to sort out who is subject to the penalty.

That is, as soon as the political operatives in the Obama administration decide when enrollment really, really – no really we’re serious this time! – ends.

March 29th, 2014 at 7:52 pm
Latest ObamaCare Delay an Attempt to Hold Down Rate Spikes?

Megan McArdle posits three reasons why the Obama administration extended the enrollment deadline for purchasing insurance through Healthcare.gov, the federal ObamaCare exchange.

The most interesting, and to my mind most plausible, is that pushing the deadline into mid-April will make it more difficult for insurers to calculate next year’s premiums.

“Extending open enrollment, which is essentially what they’re doing, would then be a desperate play to get more young, healthy customers into the exchanges, and perhaps to make it a bit harder for insurers to raise rates,” writes McArdle. “In some states, insurers have to file preliminary rate increases in May. And thanks to this latest extension, they won’t have final data to back up any requests for a premium hike.”

Originally, the Obama administration estimated it needed 40 percent of enrollments to be from young and healthy people to avoid rate spikes the following year. With the current mix stuck at only 25 percent, insurers are signaling that prices will go up next year to cover the likely costs of insuring an older and sicker population than anticipated.

But with this extension the Obama administration is putting insurers in a bind. Do they assume the 25 percent number will hold and justify rate increases to state regulators using that assumption? Or do they wait and see if a last-ditch push to inflate the number of young and healthy enrollees reaches the magic 40 percent threshold?

The dilemma for the insurance companies is just the most recent example of how bending the law for one group punishes another. True, many people won’t mind that insurance carriers are the ones holding the bag this time, but that just underscores the growing lack of resistance to arbitrary regulation. Today, it’s unpopular insurance companies. Tomorrow, it’s you.

March 27th, 2014 at 11:30 am
The Dangerous Unfairness of ObamaCare Delays

Viewed in the most favorable light, the Obama administration’s decision this week to extend ObamaCare’s enrollment deadline into the middle of April is a measure of justice to people forced to buy health insurance but unable to complete the transaction because of lousy government websites. Simply put, it’s just wrong to penalize people for failing at a task the government makes it impossible to do.

However, for every person receiving his due there are others getting the shaft. For example, consider all the people who diligently signed up for coverage last fall, spending hours surfing through glitch-prone websites and incoherent call centers, all because the Obama administration swore up-and-down that insurance had to be purchased by mid-December if coverage was wanted on January 1st. And then the deadline was extended.

Recall that millions of people lost their individual and family plans because they didn’t comply with ObamaCare’s heightened benefits mandates. Responsible customers swallowed hard and leapt into an ObamaCare exchange because the government said so. And then the Obama administration decided not to enforce its own law.

And let’s not forget the insurance companies, business owners and tax experts who spent thousands of hours trying to comply with ObamaCare’s deadlines and mandates only to watch those who did little or nothing to prepare get rewarded with delay after delay, or as we used to say during the last Bush administration, bailout after bailout.

So while it is true that it’s unjust that people should be penalized for government’s failures, it is equally unjust to punish those who are trying valiantly to play by the rules but then get hosed by last minute changes. The takeaway here is that the implementation of ObamaCare is destroying the incentive to take the government at its word. If this becomes its legacy, the law will be far more destructive than anyone thought possible.

March 21st, 2014 at 8:38 am
Maryland to Extend ObamaCare Enrollment Deadline

First the feds, now the states.

“To be clear, the state says it’s not an extension of the open enrollment period scheduled to close March 31. Only Marylanders who made an attempt to enroll by March 31 will get more time if they call a state hotline by that day. All four insurers selling on Maryland’s exchange agreed to the special extension,” explains the Washington Post.

Oregon and Nevada are also weighing whether to grant extensions for enrollment. Like Maryland, their residents have found it extremely difficult to complete the sign-up process for subsidized ObamaCare plans due to glitch-prone public websites.

Of course, anyone who’s watched the news since last October knows that the federal exchange – Healthcare.gov – has been notoriously difficult to use. So perhaps it’s no wonder that the Obama administration is considering granting its own extension to allow enrollment to continue after the original drop-dead date.

Granted, it’s not an individual’s fault that a government’s website is impossible to use. And it’s unfair in the extreme to turn around and penalize the same person when a government-imposed deadline passes without the mandated sign-up. But perhaps news of an extension would be easier to swallow if it wasn’t grouped with more than 30 other intentional delays that further complicate the law.

The news of enrollment extensions isn’t surprising. In its most basic elements, ObamaCare doesn’t work. But for its supporters propping it up with all kinds of extra-legal maneuvers, the law would collapse under the weight of its failed promises.

March 20th, 2014 at 3:48 pm
ObamaCare Rate Hikes Might be THE Issue in 2014

The Hill is reporting that ObamaCare’s politically-motivated delays may come back to bite Democrats this fall.

“[One] insurance official, who hails from a populous state, said his company expects to triple its rates next year on the ObamaCare exchange.” And, “In Iowa, which hosts the first presidential caucus in the nation and has a competitive Senate race this year, rates are expected to rise 100 percent on the exchange and by double digits on the larger, employer-based market,” says the website. (Emphasis added)

The spikes are coming primarily for two reasons. First, the percentage of young and healthy people enrolling for coverage is too low to off-set the cost of care for older and sicker enrollees. Second, insurance companies don’t trust the Obama administration to follow the law.

Delaying parts of ObamaCare that force people to do things they don’t like – such as pay more for less generous plans – feels good politically, but it skewers carefully laid business plans that rely on the government to faithfully apply its own regulations.

After watching the Obama administration change the rules at the eleventh hour this year, insurance companies are hedging their bets by passing the costs of arbitrary regulation onto consumers, starting with next year’s premiums.

The Democrats’ midterm dilemma is really a refusal to engage in delayed gratification. Had the Obama administration stood firm and applied the law as-is, an entire year would have elapsed before the party that passed ObamaCare would be held accountable. By then, people might have grown used to the frustrating parts of the health law, much like they have with the never-ending delays. But now, fiscal reality is staring Democrats in the face. And thanks to their backstabbing of the insurance industry, they have no one to blame but themselves.

March 19th, 2014 at 12:18 pm
California’s ObamaCare Exchange Expands Coverage, But at What Cost?

There is a lot of misreporting with ObamaCare numbers as the open enrollment period draws to a close March 31.

Consider these two examples from California.

First, Covered California – the state’s ObamaCare exchange – announced recently that more than 1 million people had applied for coverage and chosen an insurance plan. Liberal bloggers at the Daily Kos are cheering this news as a triumph. Before the enrollment period began last October, the state set as a goal 696,000 enrollments by the end of March. At 1,018,315 as of the end of last Saturday, ObamaCare supporters think they are 300,000 over their goal.

Except Covered California isn’t anywhere close. Look again at the goal and the announcement. California wants at least 696,000 people to be enrolled by the end of March. To date, they have over 1 million people who have applied to be enrolled. That’s not the same thing. In fact, in speaking recently to a source at Medi-Cal – the state’s Medicaid program – I was told that thousands of applications are in limbo across the state because computer systems at the state and county levels don’t talk to one another. This impacts Covered California’s numbers because many of the uninsured applying for insurance through the exchange qualify for the state’s expanded Medicaid program. To compensate for the technology failure, caseworkers are processing emergency requests by hand. So to recap, don’t be fooled by news about applications posing as enrollments.

The other example of misreporting is on the type of coverage most enrollees are choosing. The most popular plans also cost the least. That’s not surprising since ObamaCare requires people to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. On one hand, the increased number of policyholders does allow ObamaCare supporters to say the law is covering more people. But at what price? “[E]xperts worry plans with lower premiums could come with a different cost: Fewer doctors and hospitals could mean fewer choices and longer waits for care,” reports the San Jose Mercury-News.

Lower premiums also mean higher out-of-pocket costs. I’ve written previously about how reporting on lower-than-expected premiums ignores across-the-board spikes in deductibles. The IRS says that annual deductibles larger than $1,250 should be considered high. On California’s exchange, it’s common for the lowest priced plans to have deductibles in excess of $2,000 annually (and some as high as $4,500 or more).

When all the dust settles after March 31, it’s very likely that California won’t have hit its enrollment goal, and that of the enrollees it does have many will come to loathe the longer wait times and higher costs. Maybe then we’ll get more help from journalists in how ObamaCare insurance actually works. But probably not.