Fix Health Care Policy

Obamacare Silver Linings: A Limited Victory for Limited Government

Today’s Supreme Court decision on Obamacare—though it is tragic with regard to statutory interpretation and health care policy—has two significant constitutional silver linings. At the constitutional level, the stakes are much more significant and resistant to political influence. In short, the American people may elect new representatives to repeal Obamacare, but today’s constitutional rulings are far more enduring. And they are, on balance, wonderful.

The Court is inexplicable in reading the mandate penalty as a tax when President Obama and congressional sponsors emphatically denied it was a tax, but that is only a misreading of a statute. On that statutory ruling, the Court majority held that the mandate penalty is not a tax for purposes of the tax Anti-Injunction Act, but is a tax under Congress’s taxing power, despite the fact that the law never calls it a tax. Yes, this is a terribly strained reading of the statute, but conservative constitutional scholars who challenged the mandate never said that Congress did not have the power to enact a tax similar to the mandate penalty.

Despite the Court’s error in reading the individual mandate penalty as a tax, five justices opined that the mandate, standing alone, cannot be justified under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause. This is not remarkable to anyone who knows the original meaning of the Commerce and Necessary and Proper powers, but it is a serious blow to 90 percent of the legal academics and about 90 percent of Congress, since these have been the clauses used to justify so much of the modern administrative state.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: constitutional, penalty, repeal, silver lining, Supreme Court ruling, tax, upheld law

Obamacare After the Court

The policy landscape will change dramatically after 10 a.m. today. If the Supreme Court does not strike down Obamacare in its entirety, Congress should move to repeal it. Americans support repeal of the health care law, as they have demonstrated in more than 100 polls since it passed in 2010. The infamous individual mandate is only the beginning of the problems Americans face under this law. Most importantly, Americans need real health care reform, and we need to begin moving toward a patient-friendly system where people have the freedom to choose the care that is best for them.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: ObamaCare, public support, repeal, Supreme Court, uphold

Side Effects: Doctors Fear Obamacare

The American public doesn’t support Obamacare, and a new survey shows that doctors have an even worse opinion. No one has a better grasp on the state of the health care system than physicians, and according to the Doctors Company survey, 60 percent of them believe that Obamacare will have a negative impact on overall patient care. This survey is consistent with the findings of another doctor survey taken in October 2010, which also showed doctors’ lack of confidence in Obamacare.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: doctors, fear, negative impact, ObamaCare, repeal, unpopular law

New Analysis Reveals Obamacare Will Cost More Than Expected

When Obamacare was passed into law, its proponents touted the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis showing that it would reduce the deficit. A lot has changed since then. Heritage research reveals that “a close examination of what CBO said, as well as other evidence, makes it clear that the deficit reduction associated with [Obamacare] is based on budget gimmicks, sleights of hand, accounting tricks, and completely implausible assumptions.”

Now, a recent hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health has further revealed that the cost of Obamacare will be higher than expected. Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, highlighted that CBO’s March 2011 updated analysis of the health care legislation shows its coverage provisions costing $1.1 trillion between 2012 and 2021. This is $90 billion more than the prior month’s estimates for the same time period. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: $1.1 trillion, CBO analysis, ObamaCare, repeal

Obamacare’s Failed First Year

“I think that health care, over time, is going to become more popular,” then-White House senior advisor David Axelrod promised David Gregory about Obamacare last September. That same month, the Health Information Campaign, founded by high-profile leftist activists including former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, spent $2 million on a national television ad campaign touting Obamcare’s first insurance mandates. Now, six months after Axelrod’s promise, and a full year after the bill was signed into law, the results are in: Obamacare is more unpopular than ever.

Look at any poll and you’ll see that Obamacare has only gotten less legitimate. Last year at this time Newsweek showed 40 percent of Americans supporting Obamacare and 49 percent opposing it. Today, only 37 percent support it while 56 percent oppose. According to Quinnipiac, after Obamacare passed last year, 44 percent of Americans approved of President Obama’s handling of health care while 50 percent opposed. Today, only 44 percent approve while opposition has grown to 56 percent. And according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, after Obamacare passed, 62 percent of Americans thought the law would either have no effect on them or make them worse off. Today that number is up to 69 percent.

The reason why President Obama and his liberal allies have failed to turn public opinion around is simple: The major claims made by the President in the effort to pass Obamacare have all been exposed as frauds, and the early implementation by his Administration has been a complete disaster. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: Obamacare anniversary, Public Opinion, repeal, Side Effects

Heritage in Focus: Anniversary of Obamacare

This week marks the first anniversary of Obamacare, and already some of the less egregious aspects of the law have taken effect: minimum loss ratio regulations, the small-business health insurance tax credit, high-risk pools, and coverage mandates on insurance companies. However, the worst parts of Obamacare won’t kick in until 2014. You can learn more about in our recent Heritage in Focus podcast with Heritage expert Bob Moffit. Click here to listen.

So what has health reform accomplished over the past year?

First off, as a result of new laws imposed, insurers cannot limit lifetime benefits, nor can group plans limit yearly benefits. On top of that, it is now permissible that people can stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26. These policies have resulted in premium increases: BlueShield of Oregon has attributed 3.4 percentage points of its 17.1 percent rate increase to Obamacare, while Celtic Insurance Company in Wisconsin and North Carolina has attributed 9 percentage points of its 18 percent rate increase to Obamacare. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: Heritage in Focus, high-risk pools, Obamacare anniversary, Podcast, premium increases, repeal

The “Untouchable” $23.6 Billion

Untouchable. That’s the treatment being given to the $23.6 billion being spent right now to implement Obamacare.

This $23.6 billion is part of the $105.5 billion appropriated by the last Congress to fund Obamacare. The remainder (Think of it as post-dated checks for the other $81.9 billion.) automatically becomes available between now and FY2019.

None of this is to be confused with an additional $115 billion authorized for additional appropriation to Obamacare—but which the current Congress is unlikely to provide.

The most pressing question, however, is whether any of the current $23.6 billion will be rescinded as part of the spending reductions being pursued in Congress.

Despite campaign promises to defund Obamacare, it isn’t being done. Why not?

The excuses are flimsy. Claims that it “cannot” be done under House rules are wrong and misleading. The House has constitutional authority to package legislation however it wishes. Self-imposed rules of the House should be no barrier to action, either. Those same rules were waived repeatedly to permit defunding of other programs in the series of continuing resolutions (CRs) that are being used to keep the full federal government open.

In the first full-year CR, the relevant rule (House Rule XXI) was waived to permit 123 previous appropriations to be rescinded. But Obamacare funding was not touched. Perhaps doing the same thing for the 124^th time was considered going too far? (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: continuing resolution, defund, House rules, ObamaCare, repeal

Rep. Bachmann Helps Expose Secret Stash of Obamacare Cash

You’d think that billions of dollars in government spending would be hard to hide, especially from the Members of Congress who voted for it. Think again.

Buried in the 2,700 pages of last year’s Obamacare legislation lies $105 billion in appropriated funds that bureaucrats are already using to implement Obamacare. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) brought that news to light when the subject turned to budget cuts.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN: …There was a Congressional Research Service report that just was issued in February, and we discovered that secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress, over $105 billion was hidden in the Obamacare legislation to fund the implementation of Obamacare. This is something that wasn’t known. This money was broken up, hidden in various parts of the bills. And we have worked very hard to discover $61 billion in cuts that we could put forward, get to the president. So, in effect, David, we’ve taken one step forward and two steps back because we’ve found now that $105 billion had already been implemented. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: appropriated funds, Obamacare slush fund, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, repeal

Repeal is Not Enough: How States Can Survive the Impending Medicaid Crisis

Mark your calendars for July 1st. That is the day that Obamacare’s failed health care model will crash head on to the fiscal reality of strained states budgets. For all the headlines that Obamacare’s individual and business mandates get, perhaps the dirtiest little secret about Obamacare is that over half of the health insurance coverage gained through the law is accomplished through Medicaid.

Medicaid already covers one of every six Americans, eats up 22 percent of the typical state budget, and total federal and state Medicaid spending has quintupled over the past two decades. States have been able to prolong the day of reckoning thanks to more than $100 billion of federal “stimulus” poured into state budgets, but that ends July 1. Worse, Obamacare has added strict “maintenance-of-effort” eligibility requirements that are preventing states from reforming their Medicaid programs to keep them from busting their budgets. All 29 Republican governors signed a letter to Congress and the White House asking that the Medicaid maintenance-of-effort requirements for eligibility in the new health care law be repealed. But as Heritage analyst Brian Blase explains, repeal is not enough. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: budget crisis, federal stimulus, Medicaid, ObamaCare, repeal, States

Breaking Health Care Research: How Obamacare Undercuts Existing Health Plans

Before passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), President Obama made several promises to the American people in an attempt to build support for his health care plan. Among them was a promise that “nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

However, since the PPACA was signed into law and began down the long road of enactment, the truth has proven to be the opposite: No matter how much individuals may like their current health plan, under the new law, there’s no guarantee they can keep it. In recent Heritage research, health policy expert John Hoff explains the many ways in which this will occur.  (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: health care plan, insurance, ObamaCare, repeal