Tag Archives: Health insurance

A Press Conference To Remember

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This is part of the transcript of today’s Presidential Press Conference posted at the Washington Post today:

With respect to health care, I didn’t simply choose to delay this on my own. This was in consultation with businesses all across the country, many of whom are supportive of the Affordable Care Act, but — and who — many of whom, by the way, are already providing health insurance to their employees but were concerned about the operational details of changing their HR operations if they’ve got a lot of employees, which could be costly for them, and them suggesting that there may be easier ways to do this.

Now what’s true, Ed, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what? This is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. It has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not. It looks like there may be some better ways to do this. Let’s make a technical change of the law.

That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do, but we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to, quote- unquote, “Obamacare.”

We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so. But this doesn’t go to the core of implementation.

Let me tell you what is the core of implementation that’s already taken place. As we speak, right now, for the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they are benefiting from being able to keep their kid on their — on their plan if their kid is 26 or younger. That’s benefiting millions of young people around the country, which is why lack of insurance among young people has actually gone down. That’s in large part attributable to the steps that we’ve taken. You’ve got millions of people who’ve received rebates because part of the Affordable Care Act was to say that if an insurance company isn’t spending 80 percent of your premium on your health care, you get some money back. And lo and behold, people have been getting their money back. It means that folks who’ve been bumping up with lifetime limits on their insurance that leaves them vulnerable — that doesn’t exist. Seniors have been getting discounts on their prescription drugs. That’s happening right now. Free preventive care, mammograms, contraception — that’s happening right now.

I met a young man today on a bill signing I was doing with the student loan bill who came up to me and said, thank you — he was — he couldn’t have been more than 25, 26 years old — thank you; I have cancer; thanks to the Affordable Care Act, working with the California program, I was able to get health care, and I’m now in remission. And so right now people are already benefiting.

Now, what happens on October 1st, in 53 days, is for the remaining 15 percent of the population that doesn’t have health insurance, they’re going to be able to go on a website or call up a call center and sign up for affordable, quality health insurance at a significantly cheaper rate than what they can get right now on the individual market.

And if, even with lower premiums, they still can’t afford it, we’re going to be able to provide them with a tax credit to help them buy it. And between October 1st, end of March, there will be an open enrollment period in which millions of Americans for the first time are going to be able to get affordable health care.

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail. Their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care; and presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned — kids staying on their parents’ plan, seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs, I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance, people with pre-existing conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.

That’s hard to understand as a — an agenda that is going to strengthen our middle class. At least they used to say, well, we’re going to replace it with something better. There’s not even a pretense now that they’re going to replace it with something better.

This is such total garbage I don’t know where to start. ObamaCare is not going to strengthen the Middle Class in America. It may well destroy it. Employers are increasing the number of part-time employees in order to avoid the mandate that says they must provide insurance for full-time employees.

On July 1, Forbes Magazine reported:

Three months from today—October 1, 2013—is X-Day, the day that Obamacare’s subsidized health insurance exchanges are supposed to become fully operational. And today brings more news of “rate shock,” the phemonenon by which Obamacare dramatically increases the underlying cost of health insurance for people who buy it on their own. Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal looked at insurance rates in eight states, and found that while some sicker people will get a better deal, “healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage.”

The President neglected to mention that one way that the government is attempting to save money on healthcare is to decrease the amount of money it pays to hospitals and doctors for providing care. The result of that is that some doctors and hospitals will stop taking Medicare patients and other patients covered by government health care. Every American may have a card saying that they have health insurance, but they will have a hard time finding a medical facility that will accept that card.

The President is lying to us. ObamaCare is a bad deal for all Americans. As all of us begin the experience its ‘benefits,’ I hope we will remember to vote out every member of Congress who voted for it. We also need to remember that, thanks to the President, Congress is exempt from ObamaCare. That should tell us all we need to know.

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Do They Know Something We Don’t?

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National Review posted a story today about the call centers being set up to help Americans work through the changes in their healthcare insurance that will occur on October 1. These call centers will be accessible 24 hours every day.

The article reports:

One branch of that call center will be located in California’s Contra Costa County, where, reportedly, 7,000 people applied for the 204 jobs. According to the Contra Costa Times, however, “about half the jobs are part-time, with no health benefits — a stinging disappointment to workers and local politicians who believed the positions would be full-time.” The county supervisor, Karen Mitchoff, called the hiring process “a comedy of errors” and said she “never dreamed [the jobs] would be part-time.”

ObamaCare is one piece of bad news after another. Even the people who will help Americans access health insurance will be working limited hours so that their employees do not have to provide health insurance. Amazing.

Hot Air reported today that the National Treasury Employees Union (the union of the Internal Revenue Service) has indicated that it does not want to be covered under ObamaCare. The IRS employees are covered under the same health insurance coverage as other government employees, and they do not want to go into ObamaCare.

The article reports:

This is the agency that will be collecting data on you and, if you’re not in compliance, levying the penalties and collecting them.  But under ObamaCare, they have the misfortune of having a “Cadillac plan”.  Currently their health care insurance is provided through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the same program which covers members of Congress.  Naturally Congress has exempted themselves from the law.

The first requirement of ObamaCare should be that politicians and federal employees should not be allowed to be exempt from it. If it is good enough for us average Americans, it should be good enough for the political class.

ObamaCare will not be repealed under President Obama no matter how unpopular it is. If you want to get rid of this awful law, the only way it will happen is if the Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency. Otherwise, like death and taxes–it is forever.

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Is The Government Really That Naive?

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Yesterday National Review posted an article about one aspect of the delay in putting the employer mandate in place that has not received a lot of attention. Since the paperwork involved in the employer mandate was to be used in determining the eligibility for government subsidies to employees in ObamaCare, there is now no way of confirming a person’s eligibility.

The article reports:

Many if not all of the state exchanges, and presumably also the federally-run exchanges, were planning to use the required employer reports to facilitate the eligibility reconciliation that you have to do at tax filing time when people receive advanceable tax credits like those set to be offered in the exchanges. If employers weren’t required to provide reports for 2014, the process of confirming eligibility (that is, confirming that people receiving subsidies had in fact not been offered affordable insurance coverage at work) would become more difficult to pull off, since it’s not really clear what other data sources the exchanges would have, and the exchange subsidy system would therefore become that much more difficult to manage.

The article explains the government’s solution to the lack of confirmation which will result from the delay in the employer mandate:

In 2014, applicants can more or less be deemed eligible for subsidies in the state-run exchanges if they say they are eligible. If it has no external sources of information regarding what insurance employers offer, the rule states, “the exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan and eligibility for qualifying coverage in an employer-sponsored plan for the benefit year for which coverage is requested without further verification.” In fact, the exchanges are not only released from the obligation to verify whether applicants are eligible for employer coverage, they are also released from the obligation to confirm applicants’ statements regarding their household incomes before providing them with what is supposed to be an income-based benefit.

So is this actually about? In order to work at all, ObamaCare needs Americans to enroll in their state’s healthcare exchanges–this is the government-run healthcare program. If the penalties for employers for not providing health insurance are dropped, theoretically employers will begin to drop health insurance as a benefit. This forces people to seek health insurance elsewhere (as the personal mandate to carry health insurance is still in place). If the exchanges are set up with built-in subsidies based on income and you don’t have to verify your income, getting your health insurance through the exchanges while claiming an income within the range of subsidies is like free money.

It is my hope that Americans would not lie about their income in order to save money, but that is a hope–I’m not that naive. However, the government is.

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When Reality Gets In The Way Of Promises

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Remember the promise that ObamaCare would eventually make health care cheaper for everyone because universal coverage would make us all healthier? Well, it seems as if we tend to be as healthy as we want to be regardless of whether or not we have universal coverage.

On Friday the Daily Beast reported that a study on Oregon’s Medicaid expansion showed that the people who were now eligible for medical treatment had no improvement in their health (as measured by basic health indicators such as like blood pressure or cholesterol).

The article reports:

…health insurance doesn’t actually improve access to necessary treatment that much.  If someone else covers the cost, it can help with the financial burden of health care.  But uninsured people will mostly find a way for the most important treatments, the ones we know improve health, from stitches to control bleeding, to antibiotics, to blood pressure medication.  It’s the expensive stuff on the frontier–the stuff that’s as likely to be useless, or harmful, as it is to help–that the uninsured mostly forego. 

When you consider the fact that hospitals are not permitted to turn away patients because of their inability to pay, this makes sense.

The article concludes:

…But I think it’s instructive that the political campaign for Obamacare leaned so heavily on claims about death and untreated suffering.  Whether or not we should provide that sort of insurance, I don’t think that Obamacare would have passed if its backers had said “The best study available shows that we’ll probably get a nice reduction in depression and catastrophic expenses, but no statistically significant improvement in diabetes, mortality, or cardiovascular health.”

That should give us pause.  We passed a big, complicated piece of legislation on the assumption that Medicaid expansions like Oregon would make us healthier–so much helathier that we’d obviously be able to measure it.  It just made gut sense, after all.  And that shouldn’t just make us pause and think about Obamacare. What other policies are we pulling out of our intestinal loops?

Frankly, I think the best thing the government could do for the health of Americans would be to get out of healthcare. Repeal ObamaCare, and set up a system that subsidizes low income people who need insurance and let the free market run healthcare. There would have to be some basic guidelines set up for pre-existing conditions, but the healthcare industry knows much more about healthcare than the government does. Let’s let them take care of America.

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Unions And Obamacare

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There have been a lot of problems with Obamacare that have recently come to light–increased veterinarian bills, more part-time workers, not being able to keep your current health insurance, higher health insurance premiums, etc, and the Republicans have put repealing Obamacare into their latest budget proposal. However, the one thing that may actually cause a problem for Obamacare is the lack of support from unions as they realize the negative impact it will have on them and their members.

The March 25th Weekly Standard contains an article by Mark Hemingway that reports on some of the criticism of Obamacare coming from union leaders.

The article reports:

“I heard [Obama] say, ‘If you like your health plan, you can keep it,’ ” John Wilhelm, chairman of Unite Here Health, representing 260,000 union workers, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “If I’m wrong, and the president does not intend to keep his word, I would have severe second thoughts about the law.” Besides Wilhelm, some of the nation’s largest union bosses have taken to publicly criticizing the Affordable Care Act.

In actuality, current figures estimate that approximately 7 million Americans will lose their current health care policies by 2022.because of Obamacare. When the law was passed, the unions, because they are such a powerful political force, were supposed to be exempt from much of Obamacare. They are now finding out that those exemptions may have an expiration date.

The article points out:

The Obama administration has thus far issued waivers from Obama-care’s onerous requirements to unions representing 543,812 workers. By contrast, the administration has issued waivers for only 69,813 nonunion workers. While these waivers are a significant benefit, they accrue to a small fraction of the nation’s 14 million union workers. Further, many of the waivers have been granted on an annual basis, and no waiver has been granted for longer than two-and-a-half years. Eventually even union health plans are going to have to comply with Obama-care regulations.

The article also reports that the tax Obamacare places on what the law refers to as Cadillac health plans may begin to affect even average plans–another unforeseen problem.

The article concludes:

Beyond the specifics, what union leaders are really saying is that they have no confidence Obama-care will live up to its central promise​—​that the government can provide millions of uninsured Americans with health care coverage that both is affordable and meets their needs.

Surely organized labor must realize that Obama-care has only begun to be implemented. If the Democrats’ most ardent constituency and most prolific fundraisers are already having second thoughts about Obama-care​—​fearful that besides being expensive and unworkable, the law will make unions less attractive to workers and undermine collective bargaining​—​the law may be less secure than its apologists assume.

Obamacare is bad law and needs to be repealed. It will be interesting to see what happens as the politically powerful special interest groups in the Democrat Party begin to realize this.

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While The News Media Is Focused On Sequestration…

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Today Breitbart.com reported:

In an announcement on Friday, however, the Obama administration revealed that it would be significantly reducing funding for Medicare, a move that one health insurance analyst said “would turn almost every plan in the industry unprofitable.”

…According to Richard Foster, former chief actuary to the Medicare program, ObamaCare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage will likely force half of its current participants back into the old Medicare program, originated in 1965. It is estimated that this change will cost Medicare enrollees an average of $3,714 in 2017 alone.

On July 14, 2012, I posted an article (rightwinggranny.com) explaining that the Obama Administration had launched an $8.35 billion “demonstration project” to delay Obamacare cuts to the Medicare Advantage program until after the 2012 election. This was to prevent seniors who were not paying attention from seeing what was actually happening.

To those of us that have followed Obamacare from the start, the cutting of Medicare is not a surprise. The people who were behind Obamacare were known to hold the belief that the group of people the government should spend the majority of their healthcare dollars on are those between twenty and forty–the most productive years. There was a philosophy that the younger and older members of society were not contributing as much as the group between the ages of twenty and forty, and therefore were not entitled to the same quality of healthcare. That is one of many reasons why Medicare is being cut and Medicaid is being increased. One of the other reasons is to redistribute wealth in America. Obamacare has never been about healthcare–it’s about power and wealth redistribution.

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I Guess This Shouldn’t Be A Surprise

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On Friday, Forbes Magazine posted an article about the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance tax. I hate to admit it, but this is news to me. I didn’t realize that there was an entire new group of taxes in Obamacare that will impact the middle class and the elderly.

The article reports:

…the tax increases that remain on the books will cost taxpayers more than $675 billion over the next ten years. Chief among these will be the sales tax on the purchase of health insurance, totaling $101.7 billion, and making it larger than all the other industry-specific taxes combined.

The article concludes:

In fact, Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will see costs rise from $16 to $20 per member per month in 2014 – increasing to between $32 and $42 by 2023. The costs for Medicare Advantage coverage over the next ten years is expected to reach $3,590. Individuals on Medicaid managed care will see increase costs on an average of $1,530 per enrollee between 2014 and 2023.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) supports Ignagni and Goodman’s warnings, stating that the health insurance sales tax will be “largely passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums.” Unfortunately, as Goodman predicts, “this is only one example of many middle income taxes buried in ObamaCare.” The time to repeal and replace is narrowing, with just months now separating us from another massive tax hike that Americans cannot afford.

This is one more reason to repeal Obamacare. I suspect there may be a lot of Democrats at this point complaining that this is not what they signed up for. If it is what they signed up for, they should be voted out of office.

 

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The Cost Of ObamaCare

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Yesterday the Washington Examiner posted an editorial explaining the impact Obamacare will have on jobs.

The article reports:

And so in order to avoid paying fines or buying massively more expensive health plans that are Obamacare-compliant, Darden is now experimenting with limiting its employees’ hours instead. By keeping workers to fewer than 30 hours per week, Darden can categorize them as “part-time.” Thus, the company avoids the Obamacare fines and leaves employees to the new government health insurance exchanges, where they may receive subsidies to purchase insurance. At least two other restaurant chains — White Castle and McDonald’s — are considering similar plans.

Thus, Obamacare is resulting in people working fewer hours, less tax revenue for the government, and bigger government.

The article concludes:

So to sum up, Obamacare is leading to fewer hours worked, less tax revenue for the government and bigger government subsidies for health insurance for people who were already insured in the first place. If enough companies do this, Obamacare will become a massive dead weight on the federal budget, even as it does little more than shuffle people from one insurance plan to another, whether they like it or not. The Congressional Budget Office estimates, at the high end, that 20 million workers could see their health plans dropped thanks to Obamacare.

One person who commented on the article at the Washington Examiner stated:

In 2009, Barack Obama stood up before the nation, and boasted that, if Obamacare was passed, you could keep your original health care plane.   That clearly was an out and out lie.

The more we see of Obamacare, the worse it gets. It needs to be repealed and replaced as soon as possible. The replacement needs to balance the needs of the health insurance consumer with the needs of the health insurance companies. There is nothing wrong with health insurance companies making a profit–that is why they are in business. The challenge is to make sure that they also meet the needs of the consumer.

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The Impact Of Obamacare On Health Insurance Premiums

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The chart below is from Investors.com. It shows what has happened to family health insurance premiums since 2008.

The article explains what has caused the rise in premiums:

First, the law piles on new coverage mandates. It requires insurance companies to provide 100% coverage for various types of preventive care, bans lifetime coverage limits, extends parents’ coverage to offspring up to 26 years old, and requires plans to meet certain “medical loss ratios.” Coming up are rules on “essential standard benefits,” limits on deductibles, bans on annual spending caps, and much more.

The experience with state mandates show that they only tend to grow over time, and get more expensive. The Council for Affordable Health Insurance found more than 2,200 state benefit mandates, which add from 10% to 50% to the cost of coverage.

“One of the biggest cost drivers in our health care system is the steady proliferation of federal and state-based coverage mandates,” noted CAHI’s Victoria Craig Bunce.

Meanwhile, ObamaCare‘s insurance reforms — guaranteed issue and community rating — will likely raise premiums, too.

Health insurance is a business. It needs to make a profit in order to stay in business. The question here is simple, “Is President Obama so ignorant of business practices that he does not understand that a business needs to make a profit in order to continue to exist or is President Obama purposefully moving healthcare out of the private sector and into the public sector?”

Public sector healthcare does not work well. There have been so many horror stories coming out of Britain about older people not receiving the proper treatment in the government health system and about all patients having to wait too long for appropriate treatment. If you love your grandmother, you need to elect people in November who will overturn Obamacare.

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Just A Short Rant (Well, Not So Short)

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I am a registered Republican. I am not always in agreement with the Republican party (particularly here in Massachusetts), but it’s the best I can do at this particular moment. I will be voting for Mitt Romney unless the October surprise from the Obama campaign is proof that Mitt Romney is an alien ax murderer sent from the planet Zenon to invade the earth. Then I might possible rethink my vote–but I doubt it. Anyway, I listen to talk radio and I listen to the people around me, and I hear a lot of comments about Governor Romney and the fact that he was Governor of Massachusetts when the Massachusetts healthcare law was passed. I am not a fan of Massachusetts healthcare. I will tell you why.

I have had cataract surgery twice. Both times I had good medical insurance through my husband’s workplace. The first surgery cost me $250 out of pocket, and the second surgery cost me $2450 out of pocket. What was the difference? In both cases the lens of my eye was replaced with a prescription lens–I have worn thick glasses since I was a small child. Before Massachusetts healthcare was passed, the prescription lens was included. After Massachusetts healthcare was passed, the prescription lens was optional–I could have had them put in a clear lens and it would have cost me $250, but if I wanted the best possible outcome–being able to see without glasses, it was extra. Think about this–the medical care I needed was available–the lens with the cataract was replaced, but if I wanted the best outcome, it was not covered by insurance. That is what government insurance does–it saves money by compromising on the quality of care.

Now, about Mitt Romney and Massachusetts healthcare. The people of Massachusetts (after all, this is Massachusetts) wanted universal health coverage. Universal coverage was going to pass the legislation. There was no way Mitt Romney could have stopped it. He did attempt to curb some of its provisions, but there was no way it was going to be stopped. I don’t blame Mitt Romney for Massachusetts healthcare–I blame the voters of Massachusetts who are content with a one-party state that allows corruption at a level where it is routine for the Speaker of the House to serve jail time for his actions as speaker. This has happened often enough so that it is almost routine. Don’t blame Romney–blame to voters!

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Keeping Your Doctor

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Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal posted an article by Dan Henninger entitled, “ObamaCare‘s Lost Tribe: Doctors.” The article quotes the promise President Obama made to the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in 2009. The President stated, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.”

Well, did anyone ask the doctors about this? Somehow lost in the discussions of the processing of healthcare claims, the demand that everyone must have health insurance, and the institutional representatives of hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies, we have forgotten what healthcare actual boils down to–a relationship between a doctor and a patient.

The article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us:

A Wall Street Journal story the day after the Supreme Court ruling examined in detail its impact across the “health sector.” The words “doctor,” “physician” and “nurse” appeared nowhere in this report. The piece, however, did cite the view of one CEO who runs a chain of hospitals, explaining how they’d deal with the law’s expected $155 billion in compensation cuts. “We will make it up in volume,” he said.

Volume? Would that be another word for human beings? It is now. At Obama Memorial, docs won’t be treating patients. They’ll be processing “volume.” And then, with what time and energy remains in the day, they’ll be inputting medical data to comply with the law’s new Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

This may be good for the government, but it is not good for the patient. The article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal goes on to explain how the emphasis in Obamacare on volume will impact medical care in America. Healthcare needs to be reformed, but Obamacare is not the answer. 

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As We Await The Supreme Court’s Decision On Obamacare…

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CNS News posted a story on Friday about the impact of Obamacare on the cost of health insurance.

Edward Fensholt, senior vice president of Lockton Companies, LLC, an insurance brokerage and consulting firm that provides employee-benefits expertise to 2,500 mostly middle-market employers, told the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions:

“These mandates have increased our clients’ health plan costs 2 to 3 percent on average to this point,” he said. And he said the costs will escalate further when new rules — such as reductions in waiting periods and the automatic enrollment requirement — take effect in 2014.

Note that the new rules take effect long after the coming election.

The article reports:

Bill Streitberger, vice president of human resources for the Red Robin restaurant chain, told the panel that when health care costs increase, his company has less money to invest in opening new restaurants.

For the last three years, he noted, Red Robin’s health care costs per employee have increased more than six percent every year — a much greater pace than the growth of Red Robin’s sales or net income, he said.

There are some basic changes needed in America’s health insurance system–portability, tax breaks for buying health insurance, tort reform, etc. Obamacare never addresses tort reform. Obamacare takes away the free market and places the entire healthcare system under government control. That is a really bad idea, and hopefully the Supreme Court will strike down the entire bill so that the current Congress can try again.

 

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Some Thoughts On The Supreme Court Debate On The Affordable Care Act This Week

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Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post posted an article yesterday summing up her feelings about the Supreme Court debate this week.

Ms. Rubin wrote that Obamcare suffered a severability trainwreck at the Supreme Court. The argument for striking down the entire law if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional is that without the individual mandate to herd customers to insurance companies and provide financial support for the other provisions of the law, the goal of universal access would be thwarted. The individual mandate is the only way that Obamacare can provide insurance coverage for everyone. Because Obamacare goes against basic business principles (as well as the U. S. Constitution), it will not work.

The article reports:

It was that kind of day for the government. The argument today was another instance in which the challengers rolled up their sleeves, got into the text of the statute and made a convincing case. The government never sufficiently spelled out how the mandate could be severed from the rest of the bill without upsetting the intricate system of subsidies and the goal of expanded access. In hiding the ball from the public by virtue of an overly intricate fog of misdirection, and in disguising the essence of the scheme — healthy, young people who might not otherwise want insurance are compelled to buy it to ameliorate the costs of others — Congress sent the Supreme Court a legal knot that will be hard to undo.

Part of the arguments for Obamacare come from people who do not understand how insurance works. There does need to be some protection for people who develop serious medical problems so that their insurance companies cannot abandon them–however, we can use a fly swatter instead of a nuclear weapon to deal with this issue and still get the job done.

If the free market were allowed to operate in health insurance, we would be able to find our way out of any current insurance problems without doing things that will not work and are unconstitutional. A few basic suggestions–tort reform, portability of health insurance from one job to another, tax breaks to help people afford health insurance, selling health insurance across state lines. These ideas are all constitutional and might actually help solve the problem of the high cost of health insurance.

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Behind The Scenes On Obamacare

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The Associated Press posted an article today on the behind the scenes activity that is taking place on Obamacare.

The article reports:

The federal government is taking on a crucial new role in the nation’s health care, designing a basic benefits package for millions of privately insured Americans. A framework for the Obama administration was released Friday.

Obamacare will be decided at the Supreme Court this session, but the government is already putting together a package of government-run healthcare.

The article reports how the government is changing the healthcare insurance industry:

Until now, designing benefits has been the job of insurers, employers and states. But the new health care law requires insurance companies to provide at least the federally approved package if they want to sell to small businesses, families and individuals through new state markets set to open in 2014.

I suppose it is nice that the government is planning ahead, but I sincerely hope that Obamacare is repealed as soon as possible. The good news is that the healthcare plans are set to start in 2014. We need to elect every Republican we can in 2012 in order to get Obamacare repealed–whether it be by Congress or the Supreme Court.

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More Healthcare Waivers

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The Hill reported Friday that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has granted another106 waivers to President Obama’s healthcare law. This brings the total number of waivers up to 1,472. The HHS has announced that it will stop granting waivers in September.

The article reports:

HHS has been approving a new batch of one-year waivers at the end of each month. The department announced it would cut off applications after September, but let companies that received one-year exemptions extend their waivers through 2014. The 106 waivers approved in July will last three years.

It seems to me that the logical thing to do at this point would be to repeal Obamacare and start over with ideas like tort reform and allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines. The idea of health insurance plans carried by an individual rather than with an employer, therefore going with a person when they changed jobs, would also be a really good idea!

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