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March 23, 2010: Obamacare was signed into law by President Obama. How have we fared since then? Sally Pipes over at NYDailyNews gives a good overview of how Obamacare has failed to live up to its expectations.
“Obamacare turns five years old today. But there’s little to celebrate.
When he signed his signature piece of legislation into law, President Obama guaranteed lower health-care costs, universal coverage and higher-quality care. Americans wouldn’t have to change their doctors if they didn’t want to. Five years later, the health law has failed to fulfill those grandiose promises.
“In the Obama administration,” candidate Obama boasted in 2008, “we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family in a year.”
Not quite. A recent report from the National Bureau of Economic Research examined the non-group marketplace, where families and individuals who don’t get coverage through work shop for insurance. The report concluded that 2014 premiums were 24.4% higher than they would have been without Obamacare.
On Obamacare’s third birthday, the White House reassured Americans the law would protect vulnerable patient populations from increases in drug prices.
“Preventing them from being charged more because of a pre-existing condition or getting fewer benefits like mental health services or prescription drugs,” was a key purpose of the law, explained the White House.
Instead, drug costs for these patients have skyrocketed. The majority of health plans on the exchanges have shifted costs for expensive medications onto patients.
In 2015, more than 40% of all “silver” exchange plans — the most commonly purchased — are charging patients 30% or more of the total cost of their specialty drugs. Only 27% of silver plans did so last year.
Part of the problem is that Obamacare has quashed competition.
The president promised in 2013 that “this law means more choice, more competition, lower costs for millions of Americans.” But that hasn’t turned out to be true. According to the Heritage Foundation, the number of insurers selling to individual consumers in the exchanges this year is 21.5% less than the number on the market in 2013 — the year before the law took effect.
The Government Accountability Office reports that insurers have left the market in droves. In 2013, 1,232 carriers offered insurance coverage in the individual market. By 2015, that number had shrunk to 310.
A man looks over the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare) signup page on the HealthCare.gov website in New York in this October 2, 2013 photo illustration.
As competition in the exchanges declines, so does quality — just like Obama inadvertently predicted in 2013, when he said: “without competition, the price of insurance goes up and the quality goes down.”
Consumers who purchase insurance on the law’s exchanges have fewer options than they had pre-Obamacare. McKinsey & Co. noted that roughly two-thirds of the hospital networks available on the exchanges were either “narrow” or “ultra-narrow.” That means that these insurance plans refuse to partner with at least 30% of the area’s hospitals. Other plans exclude more than 70%.
Patients may also have fewer doctors to pick from. More than 60% of doctors plan to retire earlier than anticipated — by 2016 or sooner, according to Deloitte. The Physicians Foundation reported in the fall that nearly half of the 20,000 doctors who responded to their survey — especially those with more experience — considered Obamacare’s reforms a failure.
The Obama administration claims the health-care law has been a success because millions have gained insurance coverage. But that coverage is worthless if they can’t find a doctor or hospital who will see them.
Further, as many as 89% of the Americans who signed up for Obamacare when the exchanges opened in 2013 already had insurance. In other words, many exchange enrollees simply switched from one plan to another.
And the law is set to cover far fewer people than initially promised. In March 2011, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that 34 million uninsured would gain insurance thanks to Obamacare by 2021. But this month, the agency revised that estimate to 25 million obtaining coverage by 2025.
Covering those people isn’t cheap. This month, the CBO estimated the law’s 10-year cost will reach $1.2 trillion — a far cry from the President’s initial promise of $940 billion.
So much for President Obama’s five-year-old declaration that he would not sign a plan that “adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.”
Time and again, Obama has been proven wrong about what his health law would accomplish. Quality hasn’t improved, and costs continue to grow out of control. So far at least, that’s Obamacare’s legacy.”
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There have been many reports about incorrect 1095A forms being sent out. The 1095A (the Health Insurance Marketplace Statement), is the form that the government sends you if you enrolled in an Obamacare plan last year, and is your proof of insurance. This form is necessary in order to fill out your 8562 worksheet on your 2014 tax form. For more about the 1095A, go here and here .
Considering that only 6.7 million people enrolled in and paid for an Obamacare plan in 2014 (after adjusting for counting dental plans), it’s pretty terrible that the Administration sent out about 820,000 incorrect 1095A forms; that’s about 12-13% of all enrollees.
The original forms were supposed to arrive in everyone’s mailbox by January 31st (like W-2s and 1099s), but then the Administration pushed that arrival date into the first week of February. Now we are in the 3rd week of March. All the people who have incorrect 1095As have been delayed in filing their taxes.
But, a correction is near!
“Federal officials said on a Friday press call that about 740,000 corrected forms have been mailed out or can be downloaded from the HealthCare.gov site. About 80,000 corrected forms will be mailed and available online next week, they said.
Consumers who already filed their tax returns using the incorrect forms provided though state or federal exchanges won’t be required to file amended forms, and the Internal Revenue Service won’t assess additional taxes, said Mark Mazur, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy.
The Obama administration may re-evaluate filing extensions because of the incorrect forms, but at this time, April 15 is the end of tax-filing season based on statute, officials said.”
So all these people have had to wait an additional 7-8 weeks for a correct 1095A form that they are required by the federal government to have in order to correctly calculate their “Premium Tax Form” (Form 8562) on their 2014 taxes, because the federal government screwed up their forms in the first place. Now they have to scramble to finish their taxes by April 15th.
Good luck to the Obamacare victims.
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Jeffery Anderson over at The Weekly Standard took a peek at Obamacare’s initial projected enrollment numbers and compared them to the current actual figures. What he found was that Obamacare is not as widely successful as the rosy Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates from 2010.
“Given that Obamacare’s supporters like to take the Congressional Budget Office’s overly optimistic scoring of the president’s signature legislation as gospel, it’s fun to look at how poorly Obamacare is actually doing in relation to earlier CBO projections. When the Democrats rammed Obamacare through Congress in 2010 without a single Republican vote, the CBO said that the unpopular overhaul would lead to a net increase of 26 million people with health insurance by 2015 (15 million through Medicaid plus 13 million through the Obamacare exchanges minus 2 million who would otherwise have had private insurance but wouldn’t because of Obamacare).
Fast-forwarding five years, the CBO now says that Obamacare’s tally for 2015 will actually be a net increase of just 17 million people (10 million through Medicaid plus 11 million through the Obamacare exchanges minus 4 million who would otherwise have had private insurance but won’t, or don’t, because of Obamacare).
In other words, Obamacare is now slated to hit only 65 percent of the CBO’s original coverage projection for 2015.
Obamacare’s under-publicized failure on this key point is attributable to a variety of factors, including but not limited to the following: People aren’t thrilled with Obamacare-compliant insurance’s high cost and limited doctor networks, and some would even rather pay a fine for refusing to buy such insurance than pay its premiums; the Supreme Court ruled that part of Obamacare was unconstitutional, thereby giving states more freedom not to help expand it; and HealthCare.gov has been more reminiscent of DMV.org than of Expedia.com.
In addition (and just as the CBO originally projected), the bulk of Obamacare’s net coverage gains are coming from dumping people into Medicaid (59 percent of the current projected net increase in 2015), not from getting people enrolled in private insurance (41 percent). Of course, President Obama rarely if ever talks about that aspect of Obamacare — but Republicans should.”
Desperate to get more people enrolled too, the Obama Administration announced last month another “special enrollment period” around tax time this year, to allow those who found out they have to pay a penalty/tax/fee instead of having insurance in 2014, the opportunity to not make the “mistake” again.
Those who opted not to have insurance in 2014 are fined $95, or 1% of their income, whichever is greater, which they pay when then file their 2014 taxes this year. In 2015, the fine increases to $325 or 2% of income. Enrollment in the special enrollment period has been lackluster so far.
The Administration just doesn’t seem to get that many people still don’t think Obamacare to be such a great piece of legislation, and certainly aren’t tripping over themselves to purchase an Obamacare plan.
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I have written extensively about why Loretta Lynch should not become the next Attorney General of the United States. The vote has yet to be taken and is said to be very, very close — about 50 votes, allowing Joe Biden to cast a tie-breaker if necessary. That being said, Dick Durbin, the Senator from Illinois, blasted Republicans for not having held the confirmation vote yet, saying that Loretta Lynch has been sent to the “back of the bus”.
John McCain rose to the occasion yesterday in the Senate and called out Senator Durbin’s remarks, telling him, “such inflammatory rhetoric has no place in this body and serves no purpose other than to further divide us.” It was nice to see McCain stand firm and blast Durbin’s race-baiting histrionics (who, incidentally, did not support Condoleeza Rice for Secretary of State).
There are a myriad of reason not to support Loretta Lynch for Attorney General, but race is certainly not one of them. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous, infantile, and desperate. Take 5 minutes and watch McCain’s speech.
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In Obama’s Keystone recent veto message to Congress, our President cited the ongoing State Department review as the basis for his decision. He stated, “And because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest — including our security, safety, and environment — it has earned my veto.”
How incredibly obnoxious and incompetent is the President to say that after SIX years, the State Department has failed to complete its review. Nothing else at all needs to be said as to why the economy is still deplorable. The Keystone saga encapsulates the entire failure of the “shovel ready jobs” schtick, if it takes six years and counting for the federal government to make a decision on one pipeline project.
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The nomination of Loretta Lynch to the position of Attorney General is before you. Although her intelligence, experience, and poise may appear to make her a superb candidate, it is clear now that she would be an extremely poor – even dangerous — choice due to her strong position on civil asset forfeiture.
The need to safeguard civil liberties and individual rights is a priority for all Americans. Do you really want to consider confirming a person who has been exceedingly proud of her record of taking property without due process…of practicing guilty until proven innocent? This is a very serious issue, not to be taken lightly.
Civil asset forfeiture is a particularly egregious abuse of power, allowing the government to seize property and cash if it merely suspects wrongdoing, even with no evidence and no charging of a crime.
Loretta Lynch was particularly lucrative in this regard as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Between 2011 and 2013, the forfeiture operations under her management netted more than $113 million in civil actions. Lynch’s division was among the top in the country for its collections. But this is not something to be proud of.
In one particularly appalling case, Loretta Lynch’s office seized nearly a half-million dollars from two businessman in 2012 and sat on it for more than two years without a court hearing or appearance before a judge. In fact, no crime had been committed. These men were denied due process and deprived of their assets without warning or criminal charges. Lynch suddenly returned the money just weeks ago on January 20, 2015 — on the eve of her confirmation hearings, having found no wrongdoing by the men either.
During Lynch’s confirmation hearing testimony pertaining to civil asset forfeiture, Lynch stated that “civil and criminal forfeiture are very important tools of the Department of Justice as well as our state and local counterparts.” She further argued that forfeiture is “ done pursuant to court order, and I believe the protections are there.” This is, in fact, not true. In the case mentioned above, there was not only no court order, but also no hearing at any time in nearly three years. That is unconscionable. And this is only one of many similar, well-documented, incidents.
The problem of civil asset forfeiture is that the government can confiscate money or property under the mere suspicion of a crime without ever actually charging someone. The person must prove his innocence to reclaim what was seized, which is a burden of time and money and readily seems to go against our staunch American belief of “innocent until proven guilty.” What’s more, besides the obvious threat to civil liberties, those most likely to be victims are poor and minority citizens.
Thankfully, in recent months, individuals and organizations on both sides of the political aisle have come together to demand reform to this unjust practice. Bipartisan legislation has been proposed in Congress; groups ranging from the Heritage Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union have been increasingly critical of civil asset forfeiture practices. Even Eric Holder has called for changes and the IRS has recently and publicly pledged to reduce its involvement as well.
Loretta Lynch and her record on civil asset forfeiture represents the worst of this “tool for law enforcement”. A vote for her confirmation is a vote you will never be able to walk back. Do you really want to confirm a person who is so deeply committed to civil asset forfeiture at the very same time in America that there is strong bipartisan support for protecting civil liberties and walking back the laws pertaining to this practice? It makes no sense to proceed down this path.
Loretta Lynch may arguably be the most successful forfeiture agent in government today. This is not a positive quality for an Attorney General. The practice is abusive and her tactics even more so. Voting to confirm a person with such an atrocious civil liberties record is certain to cause problems for you down the road when you have to answer for your support. Therefore, on behalf of all Americans, I urge you to vote no for her confirmation.
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As I read this recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Sluggish Productivity Hampers Wage Gains” I mulled as to whether or not the Wall Street Journal had started a new satire section — but then it occurred to me that the author’s analysis of the current market was completely serious. Is he so clueless that he actually does not understand why there is “tepid productivity”?
The author, Greg Ip, cites 1) Faulty data may be partly to blame, 2) the severity of the financial crisis and recession and 3) weak business investment, but completely misses the elephant in the room: the meddling, anti-business policies of the current administration.
This administration has been exceedingly heavy-handed in its efforts to demonize businesses, while promising that businesses will be highly taxed and regulated. Whether it is labor regulation by the NRLB or environmental regulation by the EPA, government interference has been overreaching and restrictive.
Additionally, there have been huge increases in both criminal rules and regulations about what businesses are allowed and not allowed to do — from nitpicky labor rules, to dictating employee minutiae, to minimum wage requirements, all which restrict business hiring.
More unfortunately, Obama has provided the background for a litigation-friendly environment. If a larger, more financially stable company wants to steal something from a smaller company, they can sue them or just threaten with a costly legal battle. Likewise, “disparate impact” and IRS asset forfeiture are two practices which demonize business owners by merely suggesting wrongdoing — and put the burden of the business owners to prove their innocence.
And recently, the Obama Administration has decided to wage war on business inversions, by declaring companies who wish to move their headquarters abroad in order to stay competitive, to be “unpatriotic”, and “tax dodgers”, calling the perfectly legal process of inversion to be a “loophole”. Couple that with the fact that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world and it’s no wonder that businesses struggle to survive.
Usually the Wall Street Journal is fairly en pointe. It’s hard to believe any editor would have let this article be published while utterly ignoring Obama’s detrimental business policies that have plagued the economy over the last 6 years — which is why something needed to be said.
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According to the LA Times, Hillary Clinton has revealed that aides “deleted more than 30,000 emails that she deemed personal.”
In fact, Clinton herself breaks down the email numbers: there were 62,320 total messages. 30,490 of these were provided to the State Department, and 31,830 were private records that were destroyed.
That’s right, she wrote more personal emails than professional ones during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State from March 2009 to February 2013. That’s four years minus one month. 4 years is 1460 days, plus minus 30 days, totaling 1430 days as Secretary of State. If she sent 31,830 private mails, that averages roughly 22.2 personal emails each day, 365 days a year, the entire time she was Secretary of State.
Does your employer tolerate that many personal emails a day?
It’s even worse if you don’t factor in weekends and federal holidays, just strict federal government working hours. The government calculates that federal employees work 2,087 hours a year. For Clinton’s term as Secretary of state, 2087 hours x 4 years is 8348 hours. Subtract a month (174 hours) and you get 8174 hours.
If she was able to delete 31,830 personal emails over her term, she sent 3.89 personal emails an hour, or one about every 15 minutes, racking up 31 personal emails over an 8 hour work day. On taxpayer money. On taxpayer time. Hillary Clinton was paid $186,600 a year as Secretary of State.
At least we now know what she was probably doing during Benghazi.
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During oral arguments of the Burwell Obamacare case before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, a possible resolution seemed to rear its ugly head when Chief Justice Roberts questioned U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli over the contested ambiguity of the application of Obamacare subsidies. Verrilli made the case that the “court should defer to the interpretation of the Internal Revenue Service, which said the tax credits apply nationwide.” This reasoning is absolutely the worst possible solution — but of course not entirely unexpected from the federal government.
The idea of “deference” refers “ to “Chevron deference,” “a doctrine mostly unknown beyond the halls of the Capitol and the corridors of the Supreme Court. It refers to a 1984 decision, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., and it is one of the most widely cited cases in law. Boiled down, it says that when a law is ambiguous, judges should defer to the agency designated to implement it so long as the agency’s decision is reasonable.”
Given the current catastrophic state of the Internal Revenue Service, the courts must run from this idea as quickly as possible. The IRS has proven overwhelmingly in the last few years that no decision it makes is “reasonable” and therefore cannot be trusted as an unbiased, independent agency capable of carrying out a professional opinion on this or virtually any manner. IRS officials engaged in targeting of conservatives, “lost” official emails, mislead Congress and investigators about their existence, and corresponded with agencies such as the FBI, the House Oversight Committee, the DoJ, and the White House in 2509 documents over a multi-year period.
No wonder the federal government requests deference to the IRS to sort out the language and spirit of Obamacare subsidies. It’s like the fox guarding the hen house!
The IRS is no more capable of making such a determination in the first place as the FCC was in implementing net neutrality or the EPA rules changes on limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Agencies have repeatedly exceeded their statutory jurisdiction. SCOTUS would be wise to ignore this suggestion to put the onus back on the IRS to sort out the mess. The IRS has never answered satisfactorily for its repeated scandals, and therefore cannot be considered non-partisan or capable of any prudent judgment, via “deference”, at this time.
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The Wall Street Journal had an excellent article a couple weeks ago calling out the egregious prosecutorial misconduct of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. In this farce of a case, Schneiderman is hell bent on going after Hank Greenberg (formerly with AIG) in an attempt to discredit his name in a state civil lawsuit. The manner in which Schneiderman is conducting himself is a disgrace to his position as prosecutor and reflects a trend of prosecutorial abuses that has grown alarmingly in recent years.
In the Schneiderman-Greenberg case, Eric Schneiderman has been pursuing civil charges against Hank Greenberg related to an “allegedly fraudulent reinsurance transaction” some years ago while disgraced Eliot Spitzer was the Attorney General. Mr. Greenberg was the defendant in a prior, failed criminal prosecution involving this particular transaction several years ago; in preparation for this upcoming civil case, it came to light that the “federal government has been hiding potentially exculpatory evidence” from the prior trial of Mr. Greenberg. The key witness for the government in that case, a Mr. Napier, who never had any direct communication with Mr. Greenberg about the deal in question apparently provided such “compelling inconsistencies” that an Appeals judge wrote “Napier may well have testified falsely.” Yet, Napier’s testimony is the very piece of evidence upon which Schneiderman has built his civil case.
For several years, and as recently as January, the federal government continued to claim that the notes and evidence collected during the first case should be kept under seal. It was only recently, under pressure, that the prosecutors relented and provided that notes and memos which showed the blatant inconsistencies of Mr. Napier. Had that release not occurred, however, Mr. Schneiderman would have been allowed to pursue the civil case against Greenberg relying “on a Napier deposition conducted years before the appeals court cast doubt on his testimony and before Mr. Greenberg’s legal team uncovered the notes.” What’s more, Mr. Greenberg was denied a trial by jury, and because “it’s a civil case and Mr. Napier doesn’t live in New York, he cannot be compelled to appear.” Thankfully, in light of the new exculpatory evidence, the trial has been stayed to decide whether or not to continue with the farce.
It is clear that Schneiderman’s decision to doggedly pursue this case for years even in the face of tainted, unreliable evidence is abusive. Schneiderman himself should be under investigation for malicious prosecution, going after a “big name” for his own political and personal gain.
This unprofessional prosecutorial behavior is unfortunately not limited to Eric Schneiderman. The nominee for Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, who also hails from New York has an egregious record of abuse particularly relating to civil asset forfeiture while she was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. In the most outrageous case during her tenure, her offices colluded with the IRS to seize nearly $450,000 from the bank account of two businessmen known as the Hirsch Brothers in May 2012, for “suspicion”, not actual charges, of criminal activity.
For nearly 3 years, the brothers were never charged with any crime, and Lynch’s office wholy ignored stringent deadlines regarding forfeiture cases. Prosecutors were compelled by law to file a court complaint within a certain amount of days following the seizure, but that never actually happened at any time, and the Hirsch brothers never had the opportunity to appear before a judge. In fact, there was never any case presented against them at anytime; Lynch’s office just sat on the seized money, all while offering to cut a deal with the brothers to keep some of the funds in return for dropping the matter. The brothers turned down every offer made to them.
Suddenly, a week before the Lynch’s confirmation hearing, in late January 2015 — two years and eight months after the case began — Lynch’s office returned all the money to the brothers. Lynch’s office clearly violated the law in the manner by which her prosecutors ignored forfeiture rules and denied due process to the Hirschs while going after the “big money”.
In a similar manner, NBC has covered another practice of Lynch’s office: using the “John Doe” alias in an overwhelmingly high amount to keep witness and court information from becoming public information. “Federal prosecutors in New York’s Brooklyn-based Eastern District pursued cases against secret, unnamed “John Doe” defendants 58 times since Loretta Lynch became head prosecutor in May 2010.” In comparision to others, “none of the nation’s 93 other federal district courts has charged more than eight “Does” during the same time period, and the national average is under four.” National Review has also covered the specifics of some of these cases, calling out Lynch’s “secret docket”. The repeated use of such secrecy invites Lynch’s office to the criticism that such practice undermines the right to a public trial guaranteed by our Constitution.
The conduct of Schneiderman and Lynch is unacceptable. The fact that Schneiderman is and will remain the Attorney General for New York and Loretta Lynch is poised to become the next Attorney General for the United States is disconcerting. It is not the first and it certainly won’t be the last, but it is increasingly brazen. This type of behavior undermines the integrity of our justice system when the nations leading prosecutors can’t be bothered to follow the rules and conduct themselves in an unbiased, professional manner. How can citizens protect their liberties in the face of such prosecutorial abuse?
