Tag Archives: health care

Another Obamacare Health Plan

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Senators Mark Begich (D, AK), whose reelection race this fall is in real trouble, and Mark Warner (D, VA), whose reelection race is much tighter than it should be, are pushing a new Health Plan for Obamacare.

…individuals and small businesses can buy so-called copper plans.  The plans likely would have lower premiums, but purchasers would pay more of their ordinary health costs upfront.

Copper plans would cover, on average, 50% of medical costs, and while consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses would still be capped, that limit likely would be higher than the $6,350 maximum for individuals and $12,700 for families currently set by the law.

What’s the value of a health plan that requires extensive costs to be paid up front by the sick person before the plan starts covering—just a part of—those costs?

Even the CMS is having trouble seeing the sense of this.

A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says there is not much more to say beyond what Jay Angoff, head of the Department of Health and Human Services office, told the WSJ about the plan: “I’m not sure that requiring people who have insurance to nevertheless pay for 50% of their costs themselves can reasonably be defined as decent coverage.”

I’m not sure, either.

Here Come the Insurance Company Bailouts

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Humana is taking point on this one.  This from Dr Scott Gottlieb at AEIdeas:

Humana announced that it expects to tap the three risk adjustment mechanisms in Obamacare for between $250 and $450 million in 2014.  This amounts to about 25% of the insurer’s expected exchange revenue.  This money is needed to offset losses that the insurer will take as a result of slower enrollment in its Obamacare plans, and a skewed risk pool that weighs more heavily toward older and less healthy members than it originally budgeted.

And

More than half of the money will come from the $25 billion reinsurance pool that Obamacare provides (collected through a tax on employer-sponsored health plans). The other half will come mostly from the risk corridors.

Of course, President Barack Obama was counting on the “migration” of folks in the private health insurance market to the plans pushed through ObamaMart.  However, as Humana is experiencing, and as other health plan providers (I hesitate to call them insurers, anymore) are discovering, that “migration” isn’t happening, and those that are buying have the wrong demographics for the law’s operation.

We know, though, that the “migration” was intended to be a forced migration, because during the 2010 Obamacare summit which our President hosted in the run-up to its party-line passage, he told [especially the first 30 seconds] then-Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, VA) that “8 to 9 million people…might have to change their coverage….”

And those that are “changing” still aren’t responding in the Obamacare-required demographic breakdown.

Hence bailouts.  Unless we get serious in the upcoming primaries and the fall elections.

A Thought on the Contraceptive Mandate

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Notre Dame, et al., finally are getting their day in court concerning the Obamacare Contraceptive Mandate.  Notre Dame’s case centers on the premise that the government’s compromise in formulating the mandate still leaves religious organizations required to be agents authorizing contraceptive coverage, which violates Notre Dame’s (et al.) religious beliefs.

Two things about this case disturb me.  One is the Seventh Circuit’s attitude in hearing the case, as illustrated by this exchange:

Matthew Kairis (representing Notre Dame): The government is requiring Notre Dame to play a role.

Judge Richard Posner: But that role seems so trivial.

The role exists, and it forces the school to violate its fundamental religious tenets.  There’s nothing trivial about that.

The other thing is this argument by the government’s attorney, Mark Stern.  It’s a slippery slope, Stern claims, threatening the heart of the contraception mandate.  This goes along with his distortion of Notre Dame’s position:

It’s not enough that Notre Dame is going to get out of it, they don’t want anyone else to get in.

The first is at the center of the problem with the contraceptive mandate: the mandate forces religious entities and secular entities that try to operate according to their owners’ religious tenets (see, for instance, the Hobby Lobby case) to violate those tenets, and so is a violation of the Establishment Clause.  Of course the mandate should be threatened.  It should be eliminated.

As to the latter, surely Notre Dame has an opinion on the morality of other organizations providing contraceptives and abortifacients.  However, Notre Dame is not presuming to speak for them or about their legal right to provide these things, nor is Notre Dame arguing that health plan providers should be barred from offering coverage that provides these things.  Notre Dame and its fellow plaintiffs are merely arguing that they ought not be forced to be parties to the transactions.

Obamacare Failure

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Some random thoughts on President Barack Obama’s latest…delay…of inconvenient parts of his health welfare law:

House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH):

[O]nce again, the president is rewriting law on a whim.  If the administration doesn’t believe employers can manage the burden of the law, how can struggling families be expected to?

This latest rewrite, now being carried out by the Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew in President Barack Obama’s name, is as lawless as Obama’s previous rewrites.  No authority to rewrite, or to refuse to enforce parts of, the Obamacare law or any other law exists in the Executive Branch.  Law writing and changing—both!—are the sole prerogative of the people’s elected representatives in the Congress.  What Obama is doing isn’t a rule adjustment in order to better effect the law, it’s a plain and simple refusal to enforce the law (under the guise of rewriting it), as the President and his Treasury Secretary are sworn to do.  And it was done solely for Democratic Party electoral gain; the move has nothing to do with what’s good for American businesses, and not at all with anything related to what’s good for American citizens.

Incidentally, the Treasurer’s oath of office is this (the President’s oath of office is in Art II, Section 1 of the Constitution):

I (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.  So help me God.

“Support and defend the Constitution of the United States” means, in this context, that the Treasurer is sworn to honor the separation of powers delineated in Articles I and II of the Constitution, which means in turn, he must do his part to enforce the law as it’s written; he cannot (as opposed to may not) rewrite it at convenience of for any other purpose.

I’m unsympathetic toward the insurers here.  Insurance company management wanted Obamacare, and they lobbied hard for it.  Now they’re reaping what they sowed, in terms of unbalanced costs.  The insurance companies’ management has been immoral and cowardly: they wanted to get into bed with government and take advantage of personal relationships with government bureaucrats and politicians so they could freeload off their fellow citizens and their tax money.  Instead, they should have chosen the path of being responsible fellow citizens themselves, taking advantage of their relationships with customers through free market.

As advertised, this…rewrite…is a temporary change, and the law will resume its full force in 2017 (conveniently after the next two elections, by the way).  As a temporary measure, it can have no effect on our economy, on business’ decisions as they operate in our economy, or on hiring (or not hiring).  This just extends the uncertainty, and it continues the drag on our economy and on Americans’ prosperity.  Any high school student of economics understands this, and so do Obama, Lew, and their Progressive fellows in Congress.

Again: this is a move purely for cynical Party gain, and nothing else at all.

Regulations Begetting Regulations

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Insurers are facing pressure from regulators and lawmakers about plans that offer limited choices of doctors and hospitals, a tactic the industry said is vital to keep down coverage prices in the new health law’s marketplaces.

Yeah—Obamacare regulates what coverages must be offered and at what prices (i.e., at no increase in price while adding mandatory coverage for contraceptives, pre-natal care, maternity care, etc.  And regardless of whether the man required to buy a health plan needs these things.  Or the empty-nesters.  Or post-menopausal women.  Or…).

However, since the insurers can only control costs—and remain in this new business of supplying government-mandated welfare—by controlling how many doctors or hospitals are in their networks, now we “need” additional regulations to “instruct” the insurers in this area.

Under [a] new federal proposal, insurers selling plans in the federally run marketplace would be required to submit to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services a full list of providers in a network before their plans are approved for listing in the exchanges.  In the future, regulators also plan to develop federal standards for the required number of providers.

And [Emphasis added]

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said he plans to revise his agency’s standards for insurers’ health networks partly because current regulations don’t give him enough power to continue oversight after a health plan goes on the market.

And so on, across lots of states.

Of course, absent government’s Obamacare intervention in this “market,” such layers of regulation wouldn’t be necessary.  The bottom layer of regulation wouldn’t be necessary.

But then, what would these bureaucrats do for jobs?  How would Progressive politicians justify their elective jobs?