Fix Health Care Policy

Would you ever read a 906-page law? You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would—but actor Jake McClain is, and he’s taking it to another level. On Friday, McClain began tweeting through every single word of the 906-page Obamacare law, which he opposes.

McClain is using tweetpower to send an effective message.

“Folks … this will probably take a long time to do, but I decided I will read every page, word by word, of Obamacare, and tweet every word,” he tweeted last week.

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Tags: 906 pages, actor, Jake McClain, ObamaCare, Tweet, Twitter

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Today marks three years since Obamacare was signed into law, and taxpayers probably aren’t celebrating.

Over the last three years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has revised its cost estimates for Obamacare’s new entitlements—the Medicaid expansion and exchange subsidies—many times, and they have more than doubled since 2010.

The first estimate in 2010 pegged the gross cost at $898 billion from 2010 to 2019. But this projection was deceptive, because it included only six years of spending on these provisions, since they don’t begin until 2014.

However, CBO’s latest estimate in February 2013 provides a more accurate cost projection, finally encompassing 10 years of full spending. The 11-year estimate places spending on these provisions at $1.85 trillion from 2013 to 2023.

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Tags: CBO, cost estimates, exchange subsidies, higher than projected, Medicaid Expansion, ObamaCare, three years

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Adding to the list of documented Obamacare failures (see here, here, here, and here) is the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP).

Obamacare created the ERRP to provide employers and other health plan sponsors funding for insuring early retirees between the ages 55 and 65 and their dependents. Eligible plan sponsors would receive partial federal reimbursement for health benefit claims beginning in June 2010 until 2014, serving as a bridge program until Obamacare’s government-run exchanges are up and running.

As Heritage research pointed out in 2011, “Based on a report from the Obama Administration, the program appears to be mostly a bailout for public-sector and union health benefit programs for early retirees.” Indeed, that Administration report shows that of the approved ERRP sponsors, government plans accounted for 47 percent of total plans and union plans accounted for 10 percent.

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Tags: broken promises, Early Retiree Reinsurance Program, government-run exchanges, ObamaCare, regulations

It’s Obamacare’s third anniversary. Though many key parts of Obamacare—including some of its tax hikes and mandates—don’t go into effect until next year, Americans are feeling many of its changes already.

Please share these impacts to mark three years of this bureaucratic nightmare.

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Learn more: Obamacare’s 18 New Tax Hikes

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Tags: anniversary, costs, health coverage, jobs, ObamaCare, premiums, regulations, repeal the law, three years

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Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)—a concept that a group of doctors and hospitals will work collectively to manage the care and costs of Medicare patients—were expected to transform the delivery of health care. Yet again, much like the rest of Obamacare, these promises appear to be falling short of expectations.

In writing for Heritage, founding member of the Galen Institute John Hoff explains:

ACOs, as described, are a strange hybrid of fee-for-service and managed care, subject to ongoing control by CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services]. Like other hybrids, they are not likely to breed naturally. ACOs are a keystone of the PPACA [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act], but they are unlikely to improve health care and reduce its costs. ACOs are further demonstration, if any is needed, that the PPACA is ill-conceived. CMS-directed change will not bring meaningful reform, but impede it.

Thus far, the experience of the first group of ACOs, the 32 “Pioneers” (as the government calls them), has been shaky, and some have suggested they might even drop out of the program.

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Tags: Accountable Care Organizations, ACOs, CMS, doctors, Medicare, ObamaCare, patients, pioneers

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom

When the same Congressmen who voted for Obamacare vote to repeal a provision of it, it’s obvious that provision must be totally unworkable on every level. And that’s what happened to the Community Living Assistance Services and Support (CLASS) Act.

Formally repealed in January’s fiscal cliff deal, CLASS was Obamacare’s attempt at creating a new long-term care entitlement that was once referred to by Senator Kent Conrad (D–ND) as “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” CLASS was one of Obamacare’s most overt failures.

CLASS was supposed to begin in 2011 as a voluntary, government-run long-term care program that was supposed to be fully funded by beneficiaries’ premiums and require no federal tax dollars. Like most government entitlements, this deal sounded too good to be true—and it was.

This concept was so flawed that even the Obama Administration recognized that implementation had to be stopped. A letter to Congress in 2011 from a CLASS administrator warned of extreme adverse selection in the program, stating that “if healthy purchasers are not attracted to the CLASS benefit package, then premiums will increase, which will make it even more unattractive to purchasers who could also obtain policies in the private market. This imbalance in the beneficiary pool would cause the program to quickly collapse.”

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Tags: CLASS Act, entitlements, extreme adverse selection, high costs, ObamaCare, repeal the law

J.M. Guyon/ZUMA Press/Newscom

One of Obamacare’s main selling points during the health care reform debate was the need to provide insurance coverage to those with pre-existing conditions—but like other aspects of the law, the plan is failing those it was intended to help.

Beginning in 2014, Obamacare will prohibit insurance companies from excluding anyone with a pre-existing medical condition from coverage (called guaranteed issue). Because this incentivizes people to wait until they’re sick to purchase coverage, Obamacare includes the dreaded individual mandate to force all Americans to purchase health insurance.

But these massive new insurance mandates don’t take effect until 2014, so in the meantime the law set up the pre-existing conditions insurance plan (PCIP), which funded new high-risk pools in each state, providing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions from 2010 to 2014. The PCIP was allocated $5 billion for that time frame.

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Tags: high-risk pools, Individual Mandate, insurance, ObamaCare, pre-existing conditions, purchase coverage, regulations, sick

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One of Obamacare’s many failures is the temporary small business tax credit, which is intended to encourage small employers to offer health insurance to their employees by partially offsetting the cost. Thus far it has largely failed to do so.

Initially, the IRS estimated that 4.4 million taxpayers could have been eligible for the credit. As J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, testified before Congress, “The IRS mailed approximately 4.4 million postcards at a reported cost of approximately $1 million, with basic information on the Credit to businesses that could be affected.”

But even after spending $1 million to advertise the credit, only 7 percent of potentially eligible employers claimed it. As George testified: “[T]hrough mid-October 2011, the IRS reported that 309,000 taxpayers…had claimed the Credit for a total amount of $416 million. This is substantially lower than the Congressional Budget Office estimate that taxpayers would claim up to $2 billion of Credit for Tax Year 2010.”

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Tags: congress, costs, crushing rules, employer mandate, small business tax credit, small employers, subsidies

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Remember that repetitive presidential promise to “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year”? As 2014 and full implementation of Obamacare get closer, it is crystal clear that won’t be the case.

Obamacare’s most onerous insurance regulations will directly cause insurance premiums to skyrocket, particularly in the individual and small group markets.

While there are many provisions that will increase premiums, two will have the most expensive impact:

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Tags: broken promises, higher costs, insurance, insurance regulations, ObamaCare, premiums

 

Expanding Medicaid will be costly for most states. The authors of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Obamacare) threatened to strip all federal funding for states’ Medicaid programs if they refused to expand the entitlement.

But 27 states filed suit over Obamacare and the Supreme Court struck down this threat as coercive, making the Medicaid expansion optional for states. Now, governors and state legislatures are debating whether to expand or not, as the above presentation shows. As Nina Owcharenko notes, Medicaid needs reform, not expansion.

Of course, states are tempted by the offer of new federal dollars. But, as Heritage expert Drew Gonshorowski writes:

The Medicaid expansion represents a massive increase in federal and state spending. Although some claim that states could experience savings, it is clear that this is the exception, not the rule. Expanding Medicaid will ultimately cost states in the long run.

For a breakdown of state-by-state costs, click here.

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Tags: expansion, federal funding, Medicaid, ObamaCare, strikedown, Supreme Court