A federal judge overseeing the latest lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act questioned claims from Democratic attorneys general defending the constitutionality of the health law during oral arguments Wednesday.
The line of questioning from U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor often echoed assertions made by the Republican officials from 20 states who brought the suit. They argue the ACA is illegitimate now that Congress has repealed the law’s tax-based penalty on people who don’t have health insurance.
Part of the fun of running for office appears to be taking creative liberties with your opponent’s record, so get ready for a fiction-filled autumn. An early ObamaCare misdirection out of Wisconsin is one that Republicans nationwide will have to anticipate.
Is Bernie Sanders a socialist like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, whose mania for wealth redistribution has brought a country to its knees? Or, as Mr. Sanders suggests, is he merely a “socialist” in the manner of Scandinavian politicians, who presided over thriving free economies before imposing entitlement programs and have since cut corporate tax rates to allow economic growth to fund their promises?
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced a finalized rule change to ObamaCare that once again makes short-term, catastrophic health-insurance plans available—a revision that will bring formerly marginalized Americans like me back into the health-insurance fold.
Even if Congress were to double what it collects in individual and corporate income taxes, there still wouldn’t be enough money added to the federal coffers to finance the costs of Medicare for All.
Democrats are making an election issue of rising health care costs, so it’s strange that they are now criticizing a new Trump Administration rule that would make cheaper insurance available to more Americans. Maybe they fear people will like it.
House Republicans want to pass a bill delaying Obamacare’s 40% excise tax on high-cost employer plans—the “Cadillac tax”—by another year, to 2023. GOP hostility to this tax is a mistake. Capping the tax break for job-based insurance is essential for a market-based approach to cost control. The federal government heavily subsidizes every extra dollar spent on job-based insurance, which undermines the incentive for employers and workers to seek out lower-cost options. Some Republicans believe they can kill the Cadillac tax and replace it later with a better alternative. That’s wishful thinking. If Congress keeps delaying the tax and eventually kills it, there will be no appetite to impose a different version of the same policy.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it would suspend $10.4 billion in risk adjustment payments, which are designed to compensate insurers that enroll sick, expensive patients. Unlike with other ObamaCare subsidy programs, risk adjustment payments shuffle money from insurers with relatively healthy populations to others. Some co-ops have sued on grounds that the funding formula is unfair to small insurers. In January a federal court in Massachusetts ruled the formula wasn’t arbitrary and capricious. But a month later a federal judge in New Mexico said it was. The left is complaining that HHS halted the payments too casually, but on all the evidence the Trump Administration is trying to abide by the ruling while the courts resolve the dispute. This is called following the law.
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Health care is fast becoming an unsustainable expense for American families. This year the total cost of insurance for the typical family of four eclipsed $28,000, according to the Milliman Medical Index. Rising insurance premiums are also eroding worker compensation, as companies shift increased costs to employees.
Health care in the U.S. suffers symptoms of what Justice Louis Brandeis once termed the problem of “Other People’s Money.” Often a patient ordering and receiving medical care mistakenly believes he is not the one paying for it. This misconception is due in large part to the employer tax exemption for health insurance, which conceals the true cost of coverage from most workers.
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This year will be the last in which uninsured Americans are forced to pay ObamaCare’s penalty for lack of coverage. The change—part of the GOP’s tax reform—comes as relief on the demand side of health insurance. Yet nothing has changed on the market’s supply side. Without additional reforms to ObamaCare’s restrictions on insurers, millions of Americans will continue to choose from a limited range of lackluster plans.
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