Category: New Health Care Law

Shocking: Employers Can Satisfy ObamaCare Rules with Bare-Bones Health Plans

They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit. Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing.

Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty…Such policies would generally cost far less to provide than paying the penalty or providing more comprehensive benefits, say benefit-services firms. Some low-benefit plans would cost employers between $40 and $100 monthly per employee, according to benefit firms’ estimates.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

Print FriendlyPrint

May 20, 2013 | 11 comments | by

Resolving the Question about Federal Employees, I Think

We previously asked whether federal employees could enter the (ObamaCare) exchanges and get tax subsidized contributions from their employer at the same time. Timothy Jost, at the Health Affairs blog, seems to have an answer. According to this Department of Labor notice, employers must notify new employees, as well as current employees no later than March 1, 2013:

  1. Of the existence of the marketplace, the services it offers, and how employees can contact it;
  2. That if the employer’s share of total allowed costs of benefit provided by the benefits plan is less that 60 percent of total costs (that is, it does not meet minimum value requirements), the employee may be eligible for a premium tax credit through the marketplace; and
  3. That if the employee obtains coverage through the marketplace, the employee will lose the employer’s contribution and corresponding tax benefits.
Print FriendlyPrint

May 16, 2013 | 9 comments | by

How is This Different from a Shakedown?

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said. Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.

This is from Sarah Kliff.

Print FriendlyPrint

May 14, 2013 | 10 comments | by

ObamaCare Application Form Isn’t Simple After All

The much-derided 21-page application was for families. It is now down to 11 pages, thanks to a trick. Eight pages in the longer application called for filling in information for four additional family members. The new form cuts these pages but says that if you have children, “make a copy of Step 2: Person 2 (pages 4 and 5) and complete.” The work required of the applicant remains the same.

Grace-Marie Turner in The Wall Street Journal.

Print FriendlyPrint

May 14, 2013 | 13 comments | by

Republicans Implode on Health

We have previously written that there is no unifying vision for health reform among Republicans in Congress. (See here and here.) Josh Barro apparently thinks there is zero vision. He’s wrong. There are multiple visions and they are all in fundamental conflict.

Not only is there no unifying alternative to ObamaCare, Republicans can’t even agree on minor changes to the act. Divisions in the Republican ranks killed a House bill this week that would have removed about $4 billion from a special Prevention and Public Health Fund (that the administration has been using as a “slush fund” to help finance the creation of health insurance exchanges and is planning to use to propagandize for ObamaCare). The bill would spend most of the money on the new federal risk pools that provide insurance to uninsurable individuals. The administration has frozen enrollment at the current level of 107,000 people, even though there are thousands of other potential enrollees.

So the bill would (1) defund the ObamaCare exchanges, (2) defund the administration’s propaganda efforts, (3) support a health reform idea that almost all Republicans are on record as liking and (4) take away from the Democrats the sole reason they gave for supporting health reform in the first place: insurance for the uninsurable. It had the backing of the Republican leadership, Grover Norquist and most conservative health economists.

Yet it was successfully opposed by the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth. “Subsidizing health care is not what Republicans should be about,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) said at a Capitol Hill event organized by the Heritage Foundation.

If you don’t see irony in that, you haven’t been paying attention.

Print FriendlyPrint

Apr 26, 2013 | 15 comments | by

The Government Wants to Study You

The Affordable Care Act created the Patient Centered Research Outcomes Institute (PCORI) to…spend $68 million to fund a network of health-care systems that cover as many as 12 million patients. The idea is to use all the doctor visits that already happen — and all the treatments that doctors prescribe — to figure out which ones do best for a certain type of patient…

Nancy Davenport-Ennis, founder of the National Patient Advocate Foundation, also raised concerns about whether patients would want to participate in these wide-reaching experiments. She recalled attending a recent meeting in Washington, of about 500 people who work in health care, where they were asked how many would be interested in having their data used for research, provided that it was made anonymous.

Only two attendees raised their hands.

This is Sarah Kliff.

Print FriendlyPrint

Apr 25, 2013 | 12 comments | by

Wasn’t This the Reason for ObamaCare?

The White House is threatening to veto a Republican bill that would shore up one part of President Barack Obama’s health care law by siphoning funds from another part. The House bill would add billions to a temporary program to help uninsured people with pre-existing medical problems. Obama’s health care law requires companies to cover those people, but that provision doesn’t kick in until Jan. 1. The cash-strapped program has stopped taking new applicants to ensure it doesn’t run out of money. (The Associated Press/Washington Post)

Is the president abandoning the whole reason for health reform?

Print FriendlyPrint

Apr 24, 2013 | 7 comments | by

Why Nobody Knows What ObamaCare Will Cost

It turns out that the costs of the Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare to its unyielding Republican foes — are sprinkled here and there through hundreds of pages of budget books. It’s partly due to the arcane ways of government budgeting. It may also be an effort to avoid giving foes more of a target.

“I’m sure somebody has a spreadsheet somewhere, but clearly they are not publishing it in this budget,” said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “There is a political aspect to this and there is literally a green-eyeshade part. Once you have adopted a policy it’s difficult to just pull it out.”

More in The Washington Post.

Print FriendlyPrint

Apr 19, 2013 | 9 comments | by

Who Will Bear the Cost of ObamaCare? The Employees

[T]he great bulk of the cost of newly offered coverage will come, not out of profits or hiring, but out of worker cash wages. That is what happened in Massachusetts when “RomneyCare” was implemented. While there was little impact on the overall labor market, there was a striking change for those workers who gained new insurance: they saw wage reductions (relative to the trend) of almost precisely the cost of health insurance to their employers. Adding further evidence for the power of the employer side of the labor market to adjust in the face of an individual as well as an employer mandate, the number of employers offering health insurance actually increased following reform.

By Mark Pauly, et al.

Print FriendlyPrint

Apr 16, 2013 | 9 comments | by

Michael Novak Anticipated ObamaCare Thirty Years Ago

In his landmark 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak identified why socialism was failing and capitalism was prevailing. This was before the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had really begun to have an impact on their economies and well before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He noted that even dedicated Marxists had already begun to reinvent themselves in anticipation of the crushing change of fortunes. They were moving on to what they called democratic socialism, but Novak saw that as a contradiction in terms. You cannot have democracy without individual (not collective) rights, including the right of property, yet socialists continued to insist on collective ownership, or at least control over all property.

Novak cites a 1974 conference held in England to redefine what socialism means. One of the conference organizers, Stuart Hampshire said −

Print FriendlyPrint

Apr 12, 2013 | 28 comments | by
Next Page »