Freedom Line Blog

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.

The Republican National Committee has launched a humorous and biting four-part commercial series to “expose the deep flaws of Obamacare.”

In keeping with its long tradition of being on the cutting edge, the clips parody Apple’s 7-year-old “Get a Mac” ad campaign. (Apparently the GOP couldn’t figure out a way to look even more out-of-touch by criticizing Obamacare by spoofing “Where’s the beef?,” or by dusting off Spuds MacKenzie or Max Headroom to make the point.)

In the RNC’s commercials, two guys representing “The Private Sector” and “Obamacare” square off much in the same way Justin Long and John Hodgman did as Mac and PC back in the good old days when Obamacare was just a bewildering scheme floating in the vacant expanse between Barack Obama’s goofy ears.

The first commercial, “Down” will air during tonight’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central.

The ads will appear primarily in the Washington, D.C. market. If you’re fortunate enough not to live in the greater Baltimore-Washington Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, have no fear. The videos are available online here, here, here and here.

Hopefully the ads will help spread distrust of Obamacare and represent another step in building the critical mass necessary to eliminate the program.

There is a bit of irony that the RNC is spending millions on ads trying to overturn – or, at least, overhaul – Obamacare when, if the organization had done its job in years past, Obamacare would’ve never been created in the first place.

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.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Generation Opportunity, a national organization of young people focused on promoting liberty, presented the main contractor behind HealthCare.gov – the Obamacare website – with the first ever Youth Defender Award.

In a deliciously tongue-in-cheek press announcement released on Monday, Generation Opportunity noted that CGI Federal, the American subsidiary of the Canadian multinational CGI Group, has done “more than anyone to date to save young people from the increased costs and privacy invasions of Obamacare.”

Generation Opportunity continues:

“Sure, CGI is billing the government over 300% of their original contract, and taxpayers could be on the hook for $292 million dollars for the healthcare equivalent of Project ORCA. But no cost is too much to bear to help young people avoid this expensive and creepy law.

Generation Opportunity congratulates all the worthy candidates, including the runner-up, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who reminded young people on The Daily Show that they can get the same exemption from Obamacare as businesses by opting out and paying the penalty. After all, Sebelius had the foresight to hire CGI knowing they had a track record of protecting patients from government-run health care. The Canadian government had previously fired CGI’s parent company for failing to create a functioning website for Ontario’s medical registry.

Generation Opportunity developed the awesomely sardonic award in order to promote its OptOut.org website, which encourages young Americans to choose health insurance plans outside of the Obamacare exchanges.

The young folks at Generation Opportunity deserve an award themselves – for providing those of us who despise Obamacare with a big laugh.

A school district in Oconomowoc, Wis., recently celebrated the achievements of a new program for special-needs students. Unfortunately, the staff responsible for helping those special-needs students succeed are seeing their hours cut dramatically thanks to Obamacare.

Investor’s Business Daily reports the school district would face a $1.5 million hit due to the Affordable Care Act’s employer insurance requirements if it didn’t slash the work hours of the paraprofessional staff.

“Instead of one full-time paraprofessional working a full day; one part-time paraprofessional would work the morning half of the day, while a second part-time paraprofessional would work the afternoon portion of the day,” the district told parents.

More than 100 school districts across America have already cut support such as teacher aides, bus drivers and cafeteria workers to avoid massive Obamacare-related costs, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

We already knew that Obamacare harms the economy, reduces the quality of available healthcare and limits choice. Sadly, the scheme also interferes with the ability of school districts to provide a quality education to our children.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Dan Epstein, Executive Director of Cause of Action, discusses the risks Americans face in disclosing their personal medical and financial information on the ObamaCare exchanges and the risk of waste, fraud and abuse of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars states are receiving to run their exchanges.

Listen to the interview here.

Adding to the parade of horribles attending the Obamacare rollout that Ashton mentions below is this fact: the websites are inconvenient to consumers because — unlike virtually any other e-commerce transaction — you have to build an account and start submitting personal information before you are so much as allowed to browse your possible options. Reporting in the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein notes that this isn’t a design flaw; it’s an intentional barrier to sticker shock:

As originally envisioned, Healthcare.gov (which serves the residents of 36 states) was supposed to enable individuals to shop for health insurance starting Oct. 1, 2013, just as they would shop for airline tickets on Orbitz.

But unlike Orbitz, Healthcare.gov makes consumers seeking information on their available choices go through a multi-step process to create an account and then log in and enter personal information.

Administration officials imposed these extra steps because they didn’t want consumers to see the base price of the health insurance plans offered – which are inflated by new regulations – before the system could collect their income data and calculate what they’d pay in premiums after receiving government subsidies.

For a program that’s supposedly so benevolent, it’s interesting how often getting the public to accept Obamacare either requires legal compulsion or outright evasion.

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.

Software glitches and tepid interest in the program have famously plagued Obamacare signup efforts since open enrollment began on October 1.

Now, more than two weeks in, hard numbers are leaking out that prove the failures of Obamacare registration efforts are more humiliating than anyone ever imagined.

The Obama administration announced a goal of 7 million enrollees in the new exchanges by the end of March. Embarrassingly, just 36,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week.

At that rate, fewer than a million Americans will sign up for the scheme by the March goal. The Obamacare enrollment website is receiving a good number of hits – nearly 9.5 million unique visitors in the first week – but a laughable .004 percent of the people who have visited healtcare.gov actually signed up for the service, according to Jeff Dunetz at “The Lid.”

State-specific Obamacare enrollment information is beginning to trickle in, as well, providing additional comic relief.

In the first two weeks, no one at all from Alaska enrolled in the Obamacare exchange. Zero out of 731,449 people. And that’s despite having one of the highest percentages of uninsured residents in the country.

What does that mean for Obamacare? It’s too early to say. But the more times the program can fall on its face in these early stages, the more likely it is that free market, limited government-minded lawmakers can eliminate the program – or at least gut the most reprehensible portions of the law – in years to come.

I would vote “no” on the Senate deal. I would insist that without a delay of at least six months in the ObamaCare individual mandate, I would not vote for it. In the end, it is the president who must make sure that the nation doesn’t go into default. He can only do so by meeting halfway with the House that holds the power of the purse. The failed ObamaCare rollout has proved that it makes no sense to require somebody to enroll in something they literally cannot enroll in, because the government isn’t ready to have them enroll. No, no, no.

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.

My wife is not often prone to nightmares. Indeed, so rare and mild are her nightmares that she has asked me NOT to wake her up if I hear indications that she is having one, UNLESS she seems like she is in abject terror for an extended period of time (i.e., not just for three or four seconds).

Late last week, after more than 15 seconds of hearing her cry out in absolute misery in her sleep, I figured those rare conditions applied, so I woke her up — and she was grateful that I did. She then went back to sleep.

But here’s the rub: When I asked her the next morning if she remembered what she had been dreaming about, she answered as only a company Treasurer/Human Resources chief could (she basically fills both roles for a family business). Her nightmare, she said, was about ObamaCare. Literally. In her dream, she kept getting caught up in the bowels of the Affordable Care Act’s endless pages of regulations, so much so that somehow all of those regulations seemed to be closing in on her and entrapping her and drowning her.

It was the worst nightmare she had had in years.

And it hasn’t ended for her, or any of us, since she woke up.

True story.

Tom Bevan thinks so.

“Any corporation that allowed a COO to mismanage a new product line as important to its image as the Affordable Care Act is to Obama’s would be contemplating their severance package,” writes the Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.

“The fact that Republicans haven’t called for Sebelius’ scalp should tell Democrats all they need to know about how much conservatives think she is hurting Obamacare’s cause. If the president cares about rescuing his signature policy initiative, he should consider putting it under new management right away.”

Though cathartic, I’m not sure Bevan’s idea helps the GOP all that much.

True, if Obama fired Sebelius it would touch off a huge confirmation battle over her successor as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the agency overseeing Obamacare’s implementation. But since Democrats control the Senate, confirmation would be won eventually.

Better, I think, to schedule a series of high-profile congressional hearings to grill Sebelius, her deputies and the contractors responsible for the glitch-heavy federal insurance exchange website. Sebelius is fast-becoming the bureaucratic face of Obamacare – let her try to defend it.

The tone coming from House GOP members should be sharp but measured. Already, Speaker John Boehner has used a line that would be devastating to repeat to every pro-Obamacare witness at every hearing:

“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?”

Then there are the simple questions Sebelius couldn’t answer in a cringe-inducing appearance on The Daily Show.

Host Jon Stewart – an Obamacare supporter who thinks America deserves a single-payer system – got no good answers from Sebelius about why Healthcare.gov stinks and businesses get a one year mandate delay but individuals do not.

In response, Sebelius said – without a shred of evidence – that the site is getting better, and that individuals can delay the mandate, so long as they pay a fine.

If that’s the best she can do with a friendly host, imagine the possibilities under good cross-examination at a House hearing.

No, Obama shouldn’t fire Sebelius until House Republicans get a chance to turn up the heat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defunding never looked so good.

In a wide-ranging indictment of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), Philip Klein describes just how easy it is for government-run health care to turn into a nightmare.

“One of the most recent scandals has its roots in the 1990s, when the NHS established a set of best practices for providing care to patients at the end of their lives. Known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, it has since been applied to hundreds of thousands of people,” writes Klein.

“Last November, the Mail reported, an independent review found that 60,000 people were put on the pathway without their consent and a third of the time families weren’t even informed. Thus, they had no idea that their close relatives were removed from life support equipment and were being denied nourishment. In extreme cases, nurses shouted at relatives who attempted to give their dying loved ones sips of water. According to the Mail, hospitals were given incentive payments for putting more people on the pathway – effectively, the government was providing bonuses for ending people’s lives earlier.” (Emphasis added)

After a huge outcry, NHS is abandoning the Liverpool Care Pathway, admitting that “Caring for the dying must never again be practiced as a tick-box exercise and each patient must be cared for according to their individual needs.”

This is welcome news for those saved from murder, but it is cold comfort for the 60,000 Britons who were intentionally killed by their caregiver.

As this example from the world’s most famous single-payer health system attests, death panels are a logical extension of government-run health care. Cost-benefit calculations can easily be made to discard individuals for the sake of the faceless collective; especially when the doctor, the actuary, and the bean counter all work for the same government.

Interestingly, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) didn’t mention any of the horrors Klein catalogues in his op-ed to Britons explaining why Obamacare is a “good first step” toward a single-payer system like NHS.

No wonder.

Disfiguring the truth seems to be one of the primary skill sets at Covered California, the state’s Obamacare-aligned insurance exchange.

When the online platform launched on Tuesday, it erroneously stated receiving 5 million hits. A day later, that number was revised down to 645,000.

“Someone misspoke and thought it was indeed 5 million hits. That was incorrect,” said a Covered California spokesman.

This isn’t the first time the Golden State’s Obamacare exchange has been caught misstating the truth.

Earlier this year it misleadingly announced that individual insurance premiums in 2014 would be lower than they are today. The news was quickly circulated as a refutation of the criticism that Obamacare’s heightened coverage requirements will necessarily result in more expensive plans.

But Covered California’s own press release showed that the exchange was comparing apples to oranges. Instead of comparing individual insurance rates from 2013 to 2014, it compared small business rates from 2013 to individual rates in 2014. This sleight-of-hand had the effect of creating a more favorable (i.e. higher) baseline from which to compare Obamacare’s higher individual rates.

In other words, it was a distortion meant to persuade people that Obamacare does the opposite of what it actually did.

And now Covered California is issuing “incorrect” opening day numbers that artificially inflate its popularity.

Call me a cynic, but I think I see a pattern here…

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.