Woman Hailed by President as Obamacare Success Story Now Can't Afford Obamacare

[bsteadman]

Woman Hailed by President as Obamacare Success Story Now Can't Afford Obamacare

The Weekly Standard
Daniel Halper
11/19/2013

Excerpt:

CNN reports that a woman the president hailed as an Obamacare success story just realized she won't be able to afford Obamacare because it's too expensive:

"Jessica Sanford was cited by the president as an Obamacare success story at a health care event he had here at the White House in the Rose Garden on October 21," says a reporter for CNN from the White House. "That of course being just last month. The 48-year-old single mom from Washington state purchased what she considered to be affordable health care, life-changing event, she said, on the Washington state health exchange. She decided she was so excited about this news, she wanted to write an e-mail to the president to say that this had really changed her life and that she was thankful for the Afforable Care Act. The president included her e-mail in his remarks to people on hand for the event. Here's a bit of what the president had to say."

The CNN report quotes President Obama as saying, "I recently received a letter from a woman named Jessica Sanford in Washington state. And here's what she wrote, I am a single mom, no child support, self-employed. and I haven't had insurance for 15 years because it's too expensive. I was crying the other day when I signed up, so much stress lifted."

"But days, just really three days after she was mentioned by the president, Jessica Sanford started having problems, she was receiving letters from the Washington state health exchange," reports CNN. "The first letter telling her that tax credit was reduced, therefore, increasing the cost of her health care plan and the, take a look at this, then she received a letter just last week telling her that her tax credit had been taken away all together. Show you another document here, showing what the tax credit worked out to be... zero dollars according to this document that was provided to us by Jessica Sanford. She describes all of this as a roller coaster ride. Now she says she can't afford insurance in Washington state because of the new developments."
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View the complete article, including video, at:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...re_767868.html

[bsteadman]

Obamacare’s Death Spiral

Defining Ideas -- A Hoover Institution Journal
Richard A. Epstein
11/18/2013

Excerpt:

Striking the law down will be an act of mercy for the American people.

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It has been a tumultuous two weeks since I last wrote about the Obamacare’s moral blindness. The President’s dismal performance since that date has only confirmed my initial impression. He has refused to take full responsibility for the key policies embedded in that legislation. He has also endorsed naïve short-term fixes that do nothing to correct the fundamental designs of the Affordable Care Act.

Those two errors will give way to two larger public debates, one constitutional and one social. First, should the President’s new proposals be subject to attacks under the oft-discredited doctrine of substantive due process? Second, will the failures of Obamacare require a massive leap to a single-payer system to avert a return to some status quo ante that is morally and socially intolerable? It’s clear that we need to kill Obamacare and avoid a single-payer system at all costs.

The President’s Listless Apology

The President’s November 14 press conference reveals that he is unable to come to grips with the fatal flaws of his healthcare program. He claims that “in the first month, nearly a million people successfully completed an application for themselves or their families.” Deconstructed, what that really means is a paltry 27,000 people have been able to get coverage on the federal exchanges and some 79,000 others through the state exchanges. The million-person figure includes the 975,000 people deemed “determined eligible” for coverage that they have not purchased but, he assumes, they soon will.

The President thinks this shows the pent-up demand for his program. But he hasn’t addressed the composition of the applicant pool, which clearly attracts individuals with known healthcare conditions who will receive extensive public subsidies to join the ranks of the insured. There is no way that the government exchanges can remain viable without attracting large numbers of healthy young persons, all of whom are well-advised to stay away in droves, until they become sick and can sign up with the plan of their choice, no questions asked. Obamacare can only remain solvent with an enormous public subsidy. But the President compares apples to oranges when he disparages the private plans he considers substandard while he praises the efficiency of the public plan, even though it will require public subsidies. To him, taxpayer costs don’t matter.

The President fared no better when he claimed he misspoke in saying, repeatedly, that “if you like your current healthcare plan, you can keep it.” His tortured explanation had two parts. First, he did not focus enough on the individual market; second, the grandfather protection built into the ACA turned out to be “insufficient.” One key difficulty with the individual plan is that its ten categories of Essential Health Benefits are not met by the policies offered in the individual healthcare market. But as the HealthCare.gov website makes clear, “The Affordable Care Act ensures health plans offered in the individual and small group markets, both inside and outside of the Health Insurance Marketplace, offer a comprehensive package of items and services, known as essential health benefits.” The small group market covers firms with under 50 or 100 workers depending on the state. But the President never once discusses how Obamacare undermines both markets. Millions now find themselves in a similar bind with group plans.

The President is also flatly wrong to assume that the defects in plan structure are confined to the individual market. Nor can he claim that the grandfather provision just turned out to be “insufficient.” They were that way by design. From start to finish, the entire exception was a sham. The President has no patience for the “substandard” policies rolled out by the voluntary market, which may lose, or in many cases have lost, their grandfathered status the moment they introduced any material change in their coverage formulas or rate, which they routinely do. In addition, “most PPACA requirements apply to grandfathered plans,” including limitations on waiting periods and essential healthcare benefits, which lie at the root of the problem. The tragedy remains that it is far easier to force people out of healthcare plans that they want than it is to enroll them in healthcare plans that they don’t.

Possible Legislative Fixes

Public outrage and Democratic uneasiness has forced the President to back down from his hard-line position that would force millions of individuals with canceled polices to seek coverage on the dysfunctional government website. But once again, the President’s unyielding opposition to substandard coverage has made it impossible for him to beat a graceful retreat from his flawed program. The House just passed (with 39 Democratic votes) a Republican legislative plan from Michigan Congressman Fred Upton that would allow all insurers one more year to offer policies identical to those now in effect, without running afoul of the ACA.

The logistical difficulties that stand in the path of the implementation of this simple fix are serious. It’s not easy to close the floodgates after the water has raced downstream. The situation is made still worse because the President has vowed to veto this bill on the basis that, gasp, it lets insurance companies sell their “substandard” policies to new customers, who in his view should have their options limited solely to products offered for sale on the dysfunctional exchanges.

The President’s position raises yet again the thorny legal question of whether any president can suspend the operation of a law that he is supposed to execute. His legal position is ever so tenuous, because his fix doesn’t just suspend the law. It also requires insurers to inform consumers “‘what protections these renewed plans don’t include’ and alert customers to potentially better and more affordable insurance in the new federal and state marketplaces.” A major new disclosure program will need to be built from scratch over the Christmas holidays, on top of a reinstatement process that has to overcome huge hurdles within individual companies who have to reprice their revised policies before gaining regulatory approval on a state-by-state basis. No wonder their executives are up in arms.

Constitutional Complications

The President’s adamant position in the face of an industry-wide insurance meltdown ought to force a serious reconsideration of the constitutional issues at play over Obamacare. As everyone recalls, the constitutional challenges raised in the Supreme Court case over Obamacare, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius,were over issues of Congressional power, not of individual rights. Chief Justice Roberts walked an implausible line when he held that Congress did not have the power to enact the legislation under its commerce power, but could do so under its power to tax and spend for the general welfare of the United States. From the outset, no one took seriously the view that the individual mandate posed any threat to the individual liberty protected under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Our New Deal legacy has left economic liberties to the tender mercies of the national and state governments. The individuals who are bound by minimum wage and mandatory collective bargaining laws have grounds to attack a statute that proclaims it protects patients and supplies them with affordable health care.

One real price of the first generation challenges under the tax and commerce powers is that they focused exclusively on a small slice of the overall legislation, thereby ignoring its most coercive and corrosive effects. But the extraordinary claims for government domination over individual rights comes front and center when the President announces that he will protect the fundamental right to healthcare by barring ordinary folks from acquiring coverage in the voluntary market, in order to force them to seek coverage they don’t want—like treating maternity care for men as an essential minimum benefit—in a nonfunctional government market that serves none of their personal needs.

The Obamacare fiasco now flunks Justice Holmes’ extreme rational basis test in the 1905 decision of Lochner v. New York: “I think that the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law.”

In the light of day, Obamacare is that bad, even if the minimum wage law is not. Even the most ardent defender of government power must concede that it is sickening when a president tells people without healthcare insurance that they must navigate his government websites or go without. If “the right to healthcare” is fundamental, Obamacare violates it. Delay here is no option. If left in place, every single structural problem that besets Obamacare today will continue to wreck innocent lives a year from now. Striking it down is an act of mercy for the American people.

Single Payer: From the Frying Pan into the Fire
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View the complete article at:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/d...article/161901

[bsteadman]

Obama implores supporters for help on health law crisis

Yahoo! News
AFP
11/18/2013

Excerpt:

Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama delved into his grass-roots organizing past Monday, appealing to his most faithful supporters to help him out of the political maelstrom over the botched rollout of his health care law.

"It is a long race, and we aren't near the tape yet, we have just got to keep on running," a tired-sounding Obama said, on a scratchy phone and Internet call with his Organizing for Action political group.

"I hope you still have as much fight in you as I do. We aren't going to stop until we get this done," Obama said.

"When you are on the right side of something it gives you energy, it gives you motivation."
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View the complete article at:

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-implores...035358777.html