A couple items of note with respect to the unfolding trainwreck that is the rollout of the new federal healthcare law:
During the legislation of the law, proponents of ObamaCare insisted that the law simply must pass and pass sooner than later because 40,000 a year were dying because they did not have health insurance.
Since one good fear-mongering turn deserves another, we ask what are ObamaCare fanboys and fangirls to make of the President making a unilateral decision to delay for one year the employer mandate whereby businesses of over 50 employees must provide federally-approved healthcare plans to their employees?
We won't be holding our breath for any blowback from the increasingly hypocritical progressive camps but the non-partisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) chimed in with a report detailing just what the monetary and human cost would be for a one-year delay of the employer mandate.
From Reuters:
President Barack Obama's decision to delay implementation of part of his healthcare reform law will cost $12 billion and leave a million fewer Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance in 2014, congressional researchers said Tuesday.
The report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is the first authoritative estimate of the human and fiscal cost from the administration's unexpected one-year delay announced July 2 of the employer mandate - a requirement for larger businesses to provide health coverage for their workers or pay a penalty.
The analysts said the delay will add to the cost of "Obamacare's" insurance-coverage provisions over the next 10 years. Penalties paid by employers would be lower and more individuals who otherwise might have had employer coverage will need federal insurance subsidies.
This is a double-whammy because not only will people not be insured by their employers, the subsidy funding that would help defray the cost of healthcare insurance in the individual markets for these folks goes wanting because companies won't be paying the monetary penalty for not insuring their employers for one more year.
We are still in self-debate as to whether the hopelessly-flawed manner in which this law was constructed is due to monumental ineptness or due rather to brilliant cleverness as the unworkability of ObamaCare in its current state will just move us all towards a single-payer system, the progressive goal all along.
Title for this next subsection could be: Lawmakers freaked out they will have to live with a law they wrote and passed.
Not too long ago, we noted that members of Congress only just recently got around to the realization that… holy crap, they would be losing their current government employee healthcare plan and would be forced to shop for insurance plans in the state exchanges without, possibly, being reimbursed for the price of the plan.
The New York Times helpfully calls this a “wrinkle”:
Under a wrinkle that dates back to enactment of the law, members of Congress and thousands of their aides are required to get their coverage through new state-based markets known as insurance exchanges.
But the law does not provide any obvious way for the federal government to continue paying its share of the premiums for the comprehensive coverage.
If the government cannot do so, it could mean an additional expense of $5,000 a year for individuals and $11,000 for families under some of the most popular plans.
Not surprisingly, that idea is unpopular on Capitol Hill.
The provision to dump members of Congress and their staffs into the public exchanges was in the original Senate Bill and remained there as the House never took up the question of reimbursement.
Amazing.
Think about this for a moment: How jacked up is this law and how bad is it going to be for the rest of us if the people who legislated the damn thing did not even take time to figure out how to shield themselves and particularly their staffs from the added expense they will now be facing shopping for plans through the exchanges?
Back to the article:
At a Congressional hearing in April, House members pressed the administration to say what would happen to their health insurance if they went into exchanges.
Jonathan Foley, a senior official at the United States Office of Personnel Management, deflected the questions. “That is right now a subject of regulation,” Mr. Foley said. “It would be inappropriate for me to comment.”
Edmund D. Byrnes, a spokesman for the personnel office, echoed that statement on Monday. “Nothing has changed,” Mr. Byrnes said. “We are still working on a regulation.”
In its work plan for the next six months, the personnel agency said it was developing a proposed rule “regarding coverage for members of Congress and Congressional staff.” The agency said it hoped to issue the proposal in October.
That is rather late, since the exchanges are supposed to open on Oct. 1.
Nancy Pelosi was right, sort of. Yeah, the rest of us are, sadly, finding out what’s in this law, however, the Democrats that wrote it, 3-1/2 years later, still don’t know what is happening to their own health insurance plans. Priceless.
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