FixHealthCarePolicy

A Piecrust Promise from Pelosi and Reid?

A piecrust promise is one that is easily made and easily broken. The promise – more a rumor than anything else – that the U.S. Senate will use the reconciliation process to adopt a strong ban on abortion funding if the House passes the Senate-approved bill is flakier than most. Never before in the history of the 34-year abortion funding debate have pro-life members of Congress approved a bill containing abortion funding on the promise that a subsequent vote will fix the problem.

The scenario being discussed in the media requires some explanation. The House-passed version of health care reform includes the blanket provision known as Stupak-Pitts. (more…)

Tags: Hyde amendment, reconciliation, senate health care bill, Stupak-Pitts provision, taxpayer funded abortion

Democrats Weigh in On Reconciliation

President Obama and congressional leadership are nearing the end of the road on health care reform. The only option left to pass their grandiose visions of a government overhaul of the nation’s health care system into law is to pass the Senate-passed bill in the House. However, House Democrats will only go along with this if the bill is followed by a side-by-side bill including changes to the Senate bill, which could only clear the Senate using reconciliation, a method which would be both unpopular and unprecedented.

This does not come without its own laundry list of problems, as Democrats acknowledged this morning on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. According to Bill Hoagland, a lobbyist for CIGNA and former Republican Staff Director for the Senate Budget Committee, “reconciliation cannot amend something that’s not law…so, if you’re trying to make changes to the health care reform bill to get it more appealing to the House members, they first have to hold their nose and cross their fingers and vote to pass the Senate-passed health care reform bill and send it to the President.” (more…)

Tags: House Democrats, reconciliation, senate health care bill

Morning Bell: No Votes Until the People Speak

On March 5th of last year, firefighter Travis Ulerick, of Dublin, Indiana, introduced President Barack Obama at a White House summit on health care. Upon hearing the first rumblings of dissent about the President’s plan, Ulerick tells USA Today he thought at the time: “I definitely think it’s going to have to be a huge consensus.”

It’s now 12 months later, and the only consensus that exists among the American people is strong opposition to the President’s health care plan.The White House, however, is now completely uninterested in establishing a consensus for their health care plan before they jam it through Congress. Today, in a speech from the White House, President Barack Obama will urge Congress to move swiftly to pass his health care plan by implementing a legislative tactic that can be used to pass legislation that has failed to gain broad support among the American people. It’s known as reconciliation.

Reconciliation has been used in the past, but only for procedural reasons, not because the underlying policy change was unable to muster 60-vote support. So, for example, the 1996 welfare reform law signed by President Bill Clinton was passed through reconciliation, but it also ended up getting 78 votes in the Senate (28 of them from Democrats). President Ronald Reagan also passed seven bills through reconciliation, but every single one of those bills passed through a Democratically-controlled House and won Senate votes from both parties. Never has reconciliation been used to pass any bill on purely partisan lines. (more…)

Tags: ObamaCare, President's proposal, reconciliation, senate health care bill

Buffett to Obama: Scrap Current Bill and Start Over

Last week’s bipartisan summit on health care reform seems to have done little, if anything, to build support for the President’s vision of health care reform. Strong opposition to the Democrats’ proposals remains the position of a majority of Americans. And now, even the President’s biggest fans are following suit.

In an interview‘ with CNBC, Warren Buffett, a Democrat and supporter of President Obama, advised the President to follow the wishes of the American people to scrap the current health care legislation and start over. Buffett highlighted the failure of Democrats’ proposals to address cost as his biggest concern:

“We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control…And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else.”

But concerning the current proposals before Congress, Buffett lamented that, “unfortunately, we came up with a bill that really doesn’t attack the cost situation that much.” Buffet’s concerns have been certified by the President’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who have reported that the Senate health care bill would raise national health expenditures by $234 billion by 2019. (more…)

Tags: Health Care Summit, ObamaCare, senate health care bill, start over, Warren Buffett

Senate Health Care Timeline

Obamacare is not yet law, but the battle over which elements of it should be repealed has already begun with both sides believing they will have the upper hand. Key to this debate will be which elements of Obamacare phase in when. Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Book has poured through the Senate bill and produced the following chart (pdf) detailing how the Senate version of Obamacare is scheduled to be implemented between 2010 and 2017. Highlights from each year include:

2010: Physician Medicare payments decrease 21% effective March 1, 2010

2011: “Annual Fee” tax on health insurance, allocated according to share of total premiums. Begins at $2 billion in 2011, then increases to $4 billion in 2012, $7 billion in 2013, $9 billion in the years 2014, 2015, and 2016, and eventually $10 billion for 2017 and every year thereafter. Two insurers in Nebraska and one in Michigan are exempt from this tax.

2012: Medicare payment penalties for hospitals with the highest readmission rates for selected conditions. (more…)

Tags: senate health care bill, timeline

Nothing Voluntary About Obamacare’s Mandate

Some supporters of the health care “reform” bill being shoved through the Senate are dismissing concerns over the individual insurance mandate and the tax penalty imposed on those who don’t meet that requirement. They claim that because § 5000A of the bill waives criminal prosecution of taxpayers and says that no liens or levies can be filed on the taxpayer’s property, this is supposedly a “voluntary mandate” and the IRS can’t do anything against you if you refuse to pay the penalty.

That claim is wrong for a number of reasons. First of all, if you refuse to pay the penalty or you refuse to provide any information on your health care status on your tax return, you will face the prospect of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, something that rightly scares all taxpayers, including those who are law abiding and have done everything they think they should to comply with the law. IRS tax audits are notoriously intrusive, intimidating, and expensive, and the IRS is known for its consistent inconsistency in applying its complex and Byzantine rules and regulations. (more…)

Tags: Individual Mandate, IRS, senate health care bill

Morning Bell: Coal for Christmas from the Senate

This morning just after 7 AM EST, the United States Senate passed, again on a straight party-line vote, President Barack Obama’s health insurance bill. Originally scheduled for a 9 PM vote tonight, the bill’s Senate passage is a welcome Christmas gift for a beleaguered White House. However, as the First Family jets off for Hawaii, the American people, liberals, moderates, and conservatives are all saying this bill is closer to a lump of coal in their stocking than real health care reform.

The American Public Does Not Want This Bill: When the American people first turned their attention to President Obama’s health care plan, bare majorities of the American public told pollsters they supported his health care reform plan. But as the debate wore on, and the American people looked past the rhetoric and examined the details of Obama’s proposal, support for the legislation steadily declined. By mid July, more Americans opposed than supported the plan. Now that the House and Senate have both approved separate versions of the bill, strong majorities of Americans now oppose Obama’s plan. (more…)

Tags: Christmas Eve vote, Congressional Budget Office, party-line vote, senate health care bill

Could the Senate Bill Eliminate Private Insurance?

The Senate health care bill no longer contains an explicit “public option,” but it does include heavy regulation of private health plans, including minimum amount they must spend on medical claims, and taxes that will not count toward those limits, limits on deductibles and co-payments, and authority for federal regulators to define what services plans must cover. It’s entirely possible – in fact, even likely – that a combination of three particular regulations could combine to make it impossible for private health plans to legally operate, by making it impossible to meet all the requirements at the same time. By forcing private health insurers out of business, it would appear to “prove” that the public option is “necessary.”

There is an implicit maximum legal premium in the Senate bill. It results from the combination of the 40% excise tax on “excessive” premiums (over $8,500 for a single plan) and the 85% medical loss ratio (the percent of premiums that must be spent paying claims). A little algebra shows that if the premium exceeds 1.6 times the threshold, then it’s impossible to both required medical loss ratio and pay the excise tax. (more…)

Tags: administrative costs, co-payments, excise tax, medical claims, Medicare, senate health care bill