Fix Health Care Policy

Obamacare at Three Years: A Broke Program for Early Retirees

Newscom

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.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

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

Thanks to Obamacare…

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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Read the rest on The Foundry…

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

Obamacare Pre-Existing Conditions Coverage: Low Enrollment, High Costs

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.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

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

Obamacare Hassle: A 127-Million-Hour Paperwork Burden

Photo: Tetra Images/Newscom

Three House committees have added up the total hours of burden that Obamacare’s regulations will cost Americans: over 127 million hours per year of paperwork.

Federal law requires agencies to estimate the paperwork burden created by rules and regulations, so the estimates for hours of burden come from the Obama Administration itself.

The committees’ new Obamacare Burden Tracker currently includes 157 different rules and regulations that make up the 127 million hours of paperwork.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: burden, cost, ObamaCare, Obamacare Burden Tracker, paperwork, regulations

Businesses Cutting Hours, Bracing for Costs of Obamacare

It seems that every day now brings another business owner in the news talking about cutting workers’ hours or making other cost-cutting moves in anticipation of Obamacare’s impact in 2013.

Here are just a few of the business owners’ comments on the health care law:

• “We’ve calculated it will [cost] some millions of dollars across our system. So what does that say—that says we won’t build more restaurants. We won’t hire more people,” Zane Tankel, chairman and CEO of Apple-Metro, which runs 40 Applebee’s restaurants. >> Tweet this quote
• “There’s no other way we can survive it, because we think it will cost us 50 cents a sandwich. That’s just the actual cost. If you have 40 or 50 employees at a restaurant, and the penalty is $2,000, and you’re going to pay $80,000 or $100,000 penalty, there goes the profit in your restaurant.”—Jimmy John Liautaud, founder of Jimmy John’s subs, who said he was considering cutting workers’ hours to come in under the Obamacare mandate threshold. >> Tweet this quote
• “It’s a great concept. We want to have everyone insured. The problem is, who is going to pay for it and how are we going to accomplish this?” — John Metz, who operates roughly 40 Denny’s locations and five Hurricane Grill & Wings franchises in Florida, Virginia, and Georgia, and has said he may have to add an Obamacare surcharge to his menus. >> Tweet this quote
• “New unit construction will cease if we have to allocate moneys for that construction to the [Affordable Care Act]. And building new restaurants is how we create jobs.” — Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

Heritage’s Alyene Senger explains that these businesses are responding to Obamacare’s employer mandate, which has a job-killing effect:

Obamacare requires all businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage for their workers or pay a $2,000 penalty for each employee after the first 30 workers. The employer mandate creates incentives for businesses to avoid higher costs by, for example, hiring part-time employees instead of full-time employees, since businesses will not be penalized for failing to provide health insurance to part-time employees….Businesses can also avoid penalties by keeping the number of employees under the mandate threshold of 50, which further discourages creating new jobs.

These businesses’ plans are only the effects based on what we know about Obamacare. There are still many, many crucial details that we don’t know. Health and Human Services (HHS) just released some of the new rules that will govern what kind of coverage insurers must offer —and Heritage’s experts are still going through the 300-plus pages of regulations to sort out what they mean.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: businesses, cutting worker hours, employer mandate, higher costs, ObamaCare, regulations

Top Five Ways Obamacare Crushes the Middle Class

President Obama has repeatedly claimed that he is “going to keep on fighting for what matters to middle class families.” Well, in this “fight,” the President seems to be his own worst enemy. His health care law does far more damage than good to the American middle class.

Here are the five most prevalent and harmful burdens the middle class will be forced to bear under Obamacare:

1. More taxes. Obamacare imposes $502 billion of new or increased taxes and fees. Heritage expert Curtis Dubay explains that several of the taxes “will ultimately be passed on to [middle-income families] through higher prices. These include the fees on medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance companies and the new tax on tanning services.” The middle class will also be burdened by the individual mandate to purchase insurance, new restrictions and limits on their tax-free health and flex savings accounts, and a new tax on high-cost (Cadillac) health plans. Starting next year, Obamacare increases the Medicare payroll tax from 2.9 percent to 3.8 percent for individuals earning above $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000 and for the first time extends the tax to income earned from investment. But the threshold for the higher rate isn’t indexed to inflation and will impact more middle-class families each year. The 2012 Medicare trustees report states, “By the end of the long-range projection period, an estimated 80 percent of workers would pay the higher tax rate.”

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: decision making, middle-class families, Obamacare impact, regulations, taxes

Tales of the Red Tape #28: Simplifying Insurance a la Obamacare

Obamacare requires health insurance companies to produce a summary of benefits and coverage (SBC) based on a government-imposed template and glossary. Below is a sampling of the requirements (70 pages) concocted by the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury to simplify the task.

1. The summary of benefits and coverage “must be presented in a uniform format, cannot exceed four double-sided pages in length, and must not include print smaller than 12-point font.” It also must “replicate all symbols, formatting, bolding, and shading.”
2. Plans and issuers must provide the summary of benefits and coverage in a “culturally and linguistically appropriate manner.” (The government’s template and glossary are available in “Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese, and Navajo.”)
3. “The items shown on page 1 [of the template] must always appear on page 1, and the rows of the chart [in the template] must always appear in the same order. The chart starting on page 2 must always begin on page 2, and the rows shown in this chart must always appear in the same order. However, the chart rows shown on page 2 may extend to page 3 if space requires, and the chart rows on page 3 may extend to the beginning of page 4 if space requires. The Excluded Services and other Covered Services section may appear on page 3 or page 4, but must always immediately follow the chart starting on page 2. The Excluded Services and Other Covered Services section must be followed by the Your Rights to Continue Coverage section, the Your Grievance and Appeals Rights section, and the Coverage Examples section, in that order.”
4. “The footer must appear at the bottom left of every page.”
5. “The uniform glossary of health coverage and medical terms may not be modified by plans or issuers” (e.g., “Emergency Room Care” is to be defined as “Emergency services you get in an emergency room”; “Physician Services” is to be defined as “Health care services a licensed medical physician provides or coordinates”; and “Prescription Drugs” is to be defined as “Drugs and medications that by law require a prescription.” The glossary is intended to be educational in nature and the definitions may not be the same as definitions used by a plan or issuer.”)

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: benefits, coverage, health insurance companies, ObamaCare, regulations

Want to Help Job Creation? Don’t Forget to Repeal Obamacare

There is an obvious omission from all the previews of the President’s upcoming speech on jobs: Obamacare.

Obamacare is perhaps the most damaging of the Administration’s policies that are impeding the country’s recovery. At a time when there should be a focus on cutting spending, reducing regulation, and lowering taxes, Obamacare does the complete opposite. It spends more, imposes costly new mandates and regulations, and raises taxes on individuals and businesses. This is no way to get the economy up and running again.  (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: Administration, job creation, mandates, ObamaCare, raises taxes, regulations, speech

Making Obamacare Bureaucrats Play by the Rules

In one of the most illuminating moments of the Obamacare debate, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Pelosi meant that we would learn the truth about the bill after the controversy had died down. However, her words apply to Obamacare more than she knew. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is not really a law, and we still do not know its full affects.

Laws set norms to regulate conduct. Obamacare, like most major laws, does not really do this. Instead, it authorizes administrators to make laws, insofar as they make the rules and regulations to govern our conduct. The public will not know the full implications of Obamacare until after unelected—and usually unknown—agency officials make the rules.  (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: bureaucracy, ObamaCare, regulations, rulemaking, rules

Less Than Meets the Eye: The Obamacare Exchange Regulations

Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released its proposed regulations for the Obamacare version of health insurance exchanges. State lawmakers are a key audience for these regulations, which is why HHS wrapped its announcement in talk of “state flexibility.”

In truth, the proposed regulations don’t give states any additional flexibility beyond what they are permitted under Obamacare anyway, and in some places they may further limit state lawmakers’ options.

For example, state lawmakers are particularly concerned about how Obamacare gives the exchanges control over Medicaid eligibility. Some are considering establishing an exchange mainly to retain state control over Medicaid by requiring the exchange to contract with their states’ Medicaid offices to determine eligibility—something explicitly provided for in the Obamacare statute. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: flexibility, HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, Medicaid, ObamaCare, regulations, state health insurance exchanges