It seems, once again, that Obama and congress have decided that one more part of ObamaCare can’t really work right now. I know…shocker!
Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation.
So what does this mean?
Small businesses will still have the ability to purchase a health plan for their employees through a health insurance exchange set up under the law. But the employees won’t have a choice of plan. Originally, the law called for the small business exchanges to let small employers pick a benefit tier to offer their employees; workers would then be able to select from a variety of plans within that tier. Because of the delay, the 33 exchanges run by the federal government will only allow employers to pick a single plan to offer all employees. States running their own exchanges will have the option to offer choice, but won’t be required to do so.
What that means is that exchanges in the majority of states won’t be offering health plan choice to small business owners. For all practical purposes, then, the law’s exchanges will offer nothing to small business owners and employees. As health policy professor (and ObamaCare supporter) Timothy Jost noted in Health Affairs when the delay was first proposed, the choice option was the “primary benefit” offered by the law’s small business exchange system. Without that option, he wrote, it’s “unclear what advantage” those exchanges would actually offer to small employers over currently available insurance options. The Chamber of Commerce seems to agree. As USA Today notes, it issued a statement saying that because of the delay, small business insurance purchased in the health exchange, “will be of little or no value to employers, or by extension, their employees.”
Yuyal Levin has a few questions:
Leaving aside the question of where exactly the administration is getting the authority for the delay (given the fact that the requirement to implement this provision, in section 1311(b)(1) of the law, begins with the words “Each State shall, not later than January 1, 2014, establish”), and leaving aside the fact that this provision was the price of at least one senator’s vote for Obamacare (Mary Landrieu’s) and perhaps others’, the fact of the delay should get members of Congress from both parties thinking. We have already seen other deadlines pushed back, and we will see more. Why not formalize this process and just push back the implementation of the entire law by at least a year?
Sure, why not. Lets delay it a year, and then next year delay it again. We all know this scheme isn’t going to work, the question is at what point will leaders of both parties get their heads out of their asses and come to grips with this?
Krauthammer laid it out last night…
Bret Bier – The bottom line there Charles is the thing that ObamaCare is supposed to do, which is change the cost curve, it does not appear that it is set up to do that at this point, in fact the cost curve is going the other way.
Charles Krauthammer – Of course, we already know from the CBO numbers that is will increase the cost of healthcare by 1.3 trillion dollars, the reason that it is deficit neutral is because ObamaCare at the same time increases taxes by the same amount plus a dollar so it looks as though its not costing anything. This is what happens when you have an administration that has the idea that it can reform, remake, and completely re-regulate 1/6th of the biggest economy on planet earth. I mean I’m not surprised that the regulations are late and are unclear, and they are also incredibly arbitrary. The waivers people get, thousands of them, who gets them? Who gets it, who doesn’t, somebody that the government or the democrats and liberals likes. Somebody who is not liked are you going to get a waiver? Look, when you take away the essence of insurance. You set a premium by actuarial risk, so if your 60 your health care costs are six times what it is for a twenty year old. Your premiums are six times as much but the congress in its wisdom has decided it should be three times instead of six so once you do that you no longer have an insurance company, this is not insurance anymore, this is regulation, this is government dictated rates like the electrical company and people are surprised that all of a sudden you got all these things that aren’t working harmoniously as you would in a market. So all of this stuff, the delays, the regulations, the arbitrariness, the unfairness, is a direct result of taking over a sixth of the American economy on a flier in a system that nobody else has devised in the history of man.
ObamaCare requires insurers to take on more risk with less premiums.
THIS WILL NOT WORK.
Instead we will have another entitlement ponsi scheme like Social Security, Medicare and all the rest, that we, our children, our grandchildren will be paying out the nose for with increased taxes.
Under the Affordable Care Act, medical claim costs, the largest driver of health insurance premiums, are expected to increase by 32 percent for individuals, a new study by the Society of Actuaries finds.
Though some states might see declines in cost-per-person medical claims, the report found “the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers,” the Associated Press reports.
California’s claim costs are estimated to increase by 62 percent by 2017. In Ohio, it’s expected to be 80 percent. Florida costs are expected to grow 20 percent and in Maryland, 67 percent. The higher claim costs are related to the increase in sick people expected to join the pool, according to the report.
And what will we get once it gets implemented?
Look how Britain currently (and America in the future under ObamaCare) has suffered with health care that simply reflects the truth of that old adage:
You want low-cost and high-quality health care? Fine, you’ll have to wait for several months to see a doctor, but that’s OK — you got two out of three.
Don’t want to wait? OK, we can do that, too. It will be fast and cheap, but we can’t guarantee top quality. Now are you happy?
Oh, you want top quality and you want it immediately? Fine, we can do that, too, but you can forget cheap.
And these trade-offs apply not just to health care, but to everything else that government (or private industry, for that matter) provides.
Buckle up kids…it’s going to get mighty bumpy.
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