Richard Fernandez:
The people in charge of the Obamacare rollout have may their difficult position even worse. The root of the latest self-inflicted catastrophe is their determination to forge ahead with an flawed product by simply papering over the cracks. These bands aids eventually come off and they find themselves worse off than before.
Having attained the dubious achievement of canceling millions of policies in America, including practically all the health care insurance in Guam without providing a working replacement system, the administration has decided to temporarily allow people to buy the “bare-bones” insurance policies formerly allowed only to people under 30. This was suppose to bridge the gap between those who’ve lost their policies under Obamacare and the time when it finally works.
Reuters describes the move vividly.
The Obama Administration has essentially waived the individual mandate under the Affordable Care Act, saying people can seek a “hardship” exemption if they lost their coverage. Actually, it is much more complicated than that: If you lost coverage as a result of Obamacare because your policy was not considered good enough, you can either seek a substandard catastrophic policy in the market (which likely still costs more than the one you had) or just carry no insurance at all, at least through all of next year.
As John Fund at the National Review notes, it’s the 14th amendment of the statue by executive order since Nancy Pelosi passed it to find out what’s in it.
However as Reuters notes the 14th fix has made things even worse.
First, by waiving the individual mandate, it makes chumps out of those who waited patiently, sometimes all night to buy something — nobody knows quite what since payments systems to insurance companies don’t always work — from the perverse Obamacare website.
It also suggests that the few who were able to enroll in Obamacare once their private insurers were forced to cancel their policies can now not pay for the new coverage and just claim an exemption. If you battled through the tech glitches, enrolled and actually wrote a check, you’re out of luck. You get the privilege of paying for your shiny new insurance, while millions more can keep those premium dollars in their own wallets.
If this sounds unfair to those who believed it is perhaps more unfair than you think. Reuters notes that the Supreme Court held that the mandate was a tax. Now the administration is giving some people a pass on the tax after making others pay. Can the administration waive the mandate for some but not for others? The article continues:
Such a tax exemption is unprecedented in the law. Never has a president told some people in the same class that they don’t have to pay a tax and others that they do. Again, this effects a certain group of people: those who lost coverage because of Obamacare. But, some of those people found replacement coverage, almost always at a higher premium, and are not exempt from the tax. They can’t get out of their insurance coverage and reap the benefits of tax exemption now granted to the people who couldn’t sign up by the Obamacare deadline.
Avik Roy in Forbes explains that the so-called bargains people who have lost their insurance are being offered are overpriced.
This ”14th Fix,” is so unfair it is hard to believe it came from the president of equality.
Many Americans whose insurance was cancelled went onto the ”exchanges” and picked out a much more expensive option because that was all that was available…..until now.
If they’d know what Obama was going to do, they could have waited to buy a catastrophic plan, or bought one on the non-exchange market, or gone without insurance entirely.
As I said before, anyone who goes into the ObamaCare sites and ”buys” any of it is a fool!
Wait!
Who knows what will be done to it by Obama tomorrow.