Freedom Line Blog

Today, the Obama administration announced $67 million in grants to 105 groups nationwide who will assist people trying to find health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange, according to Politico.

The groups are non-insurance organizations that will in turn employ so-called “navigators” to help insurance seekers fill out an ObamaCare application, obtain insurance, and yes, even register to vote.

Some of the groups receiving grants include Planned Parenthood affiliates and various community organizers and activists. Care to speculate which political party they’ll steer registrants to?

The likely pay isn’t bad either.

In a proposed regulation issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid two weeks ago, it is suggested that the groups employing navigators pay between $20 and $48 an hour. (Navigators are prohibited by law from being paid by insurance companies, so compensation is expected to come from grant recipients.)

You’ve got to hand it to liberals. Not only do they manage to find a way to pay themselves to grow an entitlement, they get to grow their political support too.

What’s that line about democracy lasting only until the people discover they can vote themselves the treasury…?

There are a lot of reasons to lament the rise of the administrative state. There’s the lack of accountability that comes from policy decisions being made by unelected bureaucrats. There are the cozy relationships that often form between regulators and those they regulate. There’s the avalanche of rules and regulations that make the law so vast as to be virtually unknowable. But one factor that’s become especially salient during the Obama years is the fact that administrative caprice undermines equality before the law. Case in point: the outbreak of waivers for favored clients of the Obama Administration.

While we’ve heard about this trend most often in regards to Obamacare, it’s also become a serious issue in education. As noted in Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook:

No Child Left Behind technically expired in 2007. But Congress didn’t manage to do anything about it. They just kept appropriating money for the zombie bill. And so the outdated provisions of this out-of-touch bill began strangling the education system.

NCLB says that fully 100 percent of school districts need to meet tough proficiency goals in reading and math in 2014 or they lose tons of money. It’s not going to happen. They’re not going to hit those targets and that’s been clear for years now. Everyone knows NCLB needs an overhaul. But, you know, Congress.

So the Obama administration has started waiving NCLB for states that propose sufficiently rigorous alternative plans. So far, 39 states and the District of Columbia have been let out of No Child Left Behind. On Wednesday, they were joined by eight individual school districts in California — Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.

“This is a pretty troubling development,” Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, told The Post. “The states have always traditionally been in control of accountability for most school districts. . . . The idea that the secretary of education is controlling the accountability system in eight districts in California is kind of mind-boggling.”

Of course, the Obama administration says, with some justification, that it would’ve been even more troubling to leave the million kids in these districts in the grips of a law that no longer makes any sense.

Luckily, we have a mechanism for amending or repealing laws that don’t make sense: it’s called Congress. If you can’t get a fix through, too bad. You don’t get to change the rules when you don’t like the outcome.

The Obama Administration shouldn’t be in a position to determine “sufficiently rigorous alternative plans” and favor some states over others. That’s a legislative judgment that needs to be worked out on Capitol Hill. And even that, frankly, is too much. Ideally, education should be managed exclusively at the state and local level. The bowels of the federal administrative state, however, are the last place from which control should be emanating.

We all recall former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous instruction that Congress should pass ObamaCare so that we can all find out what’s in it.  Well, it turns out that Congress itself didn’t like what it found, and desperately worked to secure a free pass from the ObamaCare mandates to which other Americans are bound.  Like in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” some are apparently more equal than others despite the law’s statutory language that Congress and its staffers would be subject to the law that they passed.  As our old compatriot Quin Hillyer notes, that not only violates the law and all concepts of fairness, it also contravenes an important portion of the Contract with America:

For decades, Congress had exempted itself in myriad ways from laws or rules applying to the rest of the country.  The Contract vowed to change that – and on the very first day of the new Congress in 1995, it did.  Here was the language:  “First, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress.”  How simple.  How straightforward.  And how important!  And for the next 18½ years, until this past week – and despite frequent rumors to the contrary – that’s exactly what Congress did.  For all its faults, Congress actually abided by the Contract’s rule.  But now that’s gone. Now, via a ruling worked out between certain congressional leaders and the White House, federal subsidies for health insurance – of a sort available to no private-sector workers – will continue to be provided for congressmen and their staffs.  This sort of special exemption for government workers is not a merely symbolic annoyance; instead, it feeds a perception that soon becomes an attitude that soon makes itself manifest in various actions.  The perception is that government workers are above the law; the attitude that can grow among the federal workforce is that those workers are our masters rather than our servants; and the actions that flow from that attitude can include many abuses, small and large, of privacy or liberty.”

An important point, and one that Americans should raise as Congressional leaders head home for August recess and citizen townhall meetings.

Avik Roy, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, discusses the Obama Administration’s unilateral decision to delay parts of ObamaCare, why delaying the employer mandate while continuing to implement the individual mandate is unfair to hard-working Americans and evidence that the law is failing to work as intended, and how ObamaCare will make health insurance less affordable as premiums rise.

Listen to the interview here.

Today, I’m up with a column that identifies what ObamaCare’s employer mandate really means for small businesses.

Note to Members of Congress and HR consultants – it’s not what you think.

Most of the attention on this particular mandate has focused on the idea that employers can avoid the twin threats of costly insurance or hefty fines if they pare back full-time employees to part-time status.

By not employing 50 full-time employees a small business can avoid triggering the mandate, or so the thinking goes.

But the reality is that ObamaCare adds up the total amount of part-time hours worked to create “full-time equivalent” (FTE) employees that count toward the 50 employee total. Meet or exceed the threshold, and say hello to huge compliance costs.

This is why a proposed legislative fix won’t actually solve the underlying problem, which is capping the amount of hours a small business can pay out to 50 FTEs – whether they are full-time, part-time or some combination of both.

It’s time for Congress to take a closer look at how ObamaCare’s employer mandate works and repeal it.

With just eight weeks to go until ObamaCare’s October 1 enrollment, the Health and Human Services department is scrambling to meet the deadline.

Its first order of business: A log-in portal where users can create a personal account.

In a few clicks you can get a sense of the kind of information you’ll be sharing via your account: family size, personal income, health history, age, gender and employment status.

Yes, some level of government likely has access to most if not all of this information, but it is ObamaCare’s user account that will, for the first time, house all of it in one place.

It will then be the Federal Data Hub’s job to share this information with the applicable state-based insurance exchange, and check your entries against another federal database to ensure accuracy.

As I’ve written before, the two federal databases will attract attention from hackers and identity thieves.

The ObamaCare user account creates a third inviting target.

Enjoy your privacy, while it lasts.

In a last ditch effort to shield Members of Congress and their staff members from having to pay the same outrageous premiums set to hit everyday Americans under ObamaCare, President Obama personally intervened to ensure that the government would instead pay the bill.

The deal preserves a 75 percent contribution by the federal government for Congress and its staff toward the price of the new, costlier health insurance premiums available under ObamaCare, according to Politico.

The decision flies in the face of an amendment attached to ObamaCare that requires Congress and staff to use the same health insurance exchanges as everyone else with the same rules. Until today, that meant that a person’s salary – from a Senator’s to an entry-level staff member’s – would determine whether a person qualifies for a federal subsidy and if so for how much.

But now we see that, once again, Congress and this President are choosing to operate by a different set of rules than the ones they enforce on everyone else.

The number of constituencies for Obamacare keeps shrinking everyday. From Elizabeth MacDonald at Fox Business:

Health reform is now causing job turmoil across the country in three key groups that the White House has depended on for support—local government, school workers and unions.

School districts in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Indiana are dropping to part-time status school workers such as teacher aides, administrators, secretaries, bus drivers, gym teachers, coaches and cafeteria workers. Cities or counties in states like California, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Michigan and Iowa are dropping to part-time status government workers such as librarians, secretaries, administrators, parks and recreation officials and public works officials.

The next time you hear the president drone on about income inequality, remember that his signature domestic achievement has a nasty habit of kneecapping the working class. Even if the president’s gripe is that these people had low wages and no health insurance before he took office, consider the net effect of his tenure: they now have even lower wages (thanks to fewer hours) and still have no insurance. Heck of a job, Barry.

IPAB – aka, the Independent Payment Advisory Board – is one of the chief cost-containing elements of ObamaCare. As designed, a presidentially appointed panel of medical experts will convene to decide how much the government will pay for certain kinds of care, and who gets which treatments.

That means that “The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” writes Howard Dean in the Wall Street Journal. “By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”

Dean, who is a licensed medical doctor and spent 11 years as the Democratic Governor of Vermont before running for president in 2004, knows from experience that IPAB is doomed to fail.

“There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting – the essential mechanism of the IPAB – has a 40-year track record of failure,” says Dean. “What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.”

Dean goes on to call for a bipartisan repeal of IPAB, which is great to read and should be acted on. But the logic of including IPAB with ObamaCare’s structure makes perfect sense. Government-controlled health care is centrally-controlled and -planned health care.

If Dr. Dean wants a more patient-centered health care system he should be calling for repeal of ObamaCare in its entirety and greater deregulation of the health care industry. Empowering a new generation of medical entrepreneurs that can leverage advances in technology into boutique health care outlets would drive down costs, increase business opportunities and improve the quality of individualized care.

Dean is right to shudder at the care-killing cost of bureaucracy. Maybe one day he’ll discover the possibilities of a freer health care market too.

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

From Obamacare to the current Gang of Eight immigration bill, the only thing more threatening to consensual government than enormous pieces of legislation is the even larger corpus of rules and regulations that they inevitably breed. Consider this analysis of Dodd-Frank, as reported by The Hill:

Rules implementing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law could fill 28 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, according to a new analysis of the Wall Street overhaul [by the law firm Davis Polk]…

All told, regulators have written 13,789 pages and more than 15 million words to put the law in place, which is equal to 42 words of regulations for every single word of the already hefty law, spanning 848 pages itself.

And if that seems like a lot, keep in mind that by Davis Polk’s estimate, the work implementing the law is just 39 percent complete.

I don’t think you have to be a limited government conservative to realize that government of this scope just can’t work. We no longer have a meaningful legislative branch if members of Congress are only responsible for writing 2 percent of what eventually becomes the law (the easiest 2 percent, it should be noted — it’s in the rules and regs, not the statutes, that oxes really get gored). There will be no one capable of enforcing all of these provisions, nor anyone capable of complying with all of them (though you can bet that they’ll be an army of consultants offering compliance services for a pretty penny).

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.

The reliably great Johan Goldberg’s newest column considers liberal outrage over the NSA surveillance scandal and comes to what strikes me as an utterly reasonable conclusion: if you’re a leftist who’s bothered by this sort of invasiveness, there’s a whole world of outrages awaiting you upon inspection of President Obama’s domestic record:

What I have a hard time understanding, however, is how one can get worked up into a near panic about an overreaching national-security apparatus while also celebrating other government expansions into our lives, chief among them the hydra-headed leviathan of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). The 2009 stimulus created a health database that will store all your health records. The Federal Data Services Hub will record everything bureaucrats deem useful, from your incarceration record and immigration status to whether or not you had an abortion or were treated for depression or erectile dysfunction.

In other words, while the NSA can tell if you searched the Web for “Viagra,” the Hub will know if you were actually prescribed the medication and for how long. Yes, there are rules for keeping that information private, but you don’t need security clearance or a warrant to get it.

Then there’s the IRS. We already have evidence of abuse there. For instance, the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, had its tax returns and private donor information leaked to the news media last year, presumably in order to embarrass Mitt Romney (he gave the group $10,000) and others during the presidential election.

And yet, worrying about NSA abuse is cast as high-minded, while worrying about Obamacare or the IRS is seen as paranoid. Why?

The answer, it seems to me, lies in the ideological priors of those doing the complaining. Unlike conservatives, liberals default to an essentially benevolent view of government and those that populate it — unless they happen to work in fields concerned with public safety, such as the military, intelligence, or law enforcement.

For my money, they all deserve scrutiny. But the track record also shows that the government officials who give the left night terrors are the ones that tend, on balance, to be the most responsible. Why? Well, I’d argue because they’re the only ones who retain a sense of that abstract virtue known as duty.

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.

… remind them of this announcement from earlier today in Politico:

The Obama administration is postponing the federal health care law’s insurance mandate for employers next year, in a major concession to the business community and lawmakers who have become increasingly vocal about the law’s potential to damage a slowly recovering economy.

The announcement doesn’t affect the main coverage tools in the law — the individual mandate and the new subsidized insurance markets. But it could boost the cost of the law if more people end up seeking subsidies instead of getting covered on the job.

Of course, this is great news in one respect. Going a little longer without one of the most economically damaging aspects of Obamacare kicking in is a very good thing.

But note the irony that there’s no delay on applying the individual mandate. If Joe Taxpayer doesn’t comply, the government will be at his door with a bill in no time flat.

Washington’s willing to wait when it comes to sticking it to business. But when the little guy is the one who’s ox is getting gored? No such luck.

As full implementation of ObamaCare approaches, each passing day seems to bring new negative revelations about how it’s making employers reluctant to hire, it will increase the budget deficit, medical costs will rise, insurance options will decline, physicians will be driven from practice, and so on.  Today, Gallup released a survey suggesting another casualty:  Americans’ confidence in the medical system.  Gallup summarizes the results in its usual understated manner:

This year marks the ramp-up to the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act next January, and the resulting attention the ACA has received could be a factor in Americans’ lower levels of confidence in the U.S. medical system.”

Paraphrasing Nancy Pelosi, they passed the bill, and now Americans are finding out what’s in it.

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.