Spiraling into the Black Hole-Muscatine IA-Muscatine

Delay Can’t Avert ObamaCare Crackup

After years of critics predicting that ObamaCare was too cumbersome and intrusive to implement without causing major dislocations for the American economy and workers, that opinion was finally confirmed by what we in the media would, in another context, probably term a highly placed government source: the Obama administration. Yesterday afternoon’s announcement that implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer them health insurance or face crippling fines will be put off for a full year until 2015 rather than being rolled out in January 2014 is the first official signal that even the White House is now aware that ObamaCare is a disaster that can only be managed rather than averted. Though the administration says the rest of the president’s signature health care plan—including the individual mandate to buy insurance and the creation of state insurance exchanges—will still be put into effect on schedule, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that even its supporters are coming to grips with the fact that the law is a mess.

It should be remembered that the original schedule for ObamaCare implementation was wisely crafted with an eye on the president’s reelection. Though passed in 2010, the law was not to be put into effect until after President Obama was safely reelected in 2012, meaning that the devastating impact on employment and on the cost of insurance for many Americans was not an issue last year. Instead, Obama was able to claim that he had merely pushed for a measure that would ensure more people were insured without having to be held accountable for the impact this system had on everyone else. The same political motivation appears to be behind the decision to put off the business mandate since a postponement will make it harder for Republican critics to claim that ObamaCare is sinking the economy and causing layoffs during next year’s midterm elections.

It’s not clear whether that will help many Democrats next year. Nor can we be certain just how effective a campaign focused on stopping ObamaCare will be for the GOP. But we do know that the ObamaCare crackup is inevitable and will be felt throughout the economy once it is in place. What this first official indication of distress tells us is that no delay in implementation will be long enough to avert the looming economic disaster that is ObamaCare.

The excuse we’re hearing from the administration is that the extra year will somehow make it easier for businesses to comply with a system that is so complex that few have much confidence that they can navigate it with assurance. Given the potentially catastrophic penalties that the government can assess against a business that it deems to be not in compliance with the law, it is little surprise that many are contemplating changes that may drastically reduce the number of full-time employees, thus dealing a devastating blow to employment in the name of granting insurance to all.

Rather than this move being, as Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett claimed yesterday, merely an effort to “get this right,” there’s little doubt the decision was based on the idea that postponing implementation will function as a reprieve for Democrats next year. Americans are not likely to fully grasp just how intrusive the law is or how badly it will affect the economy until all parts of it are enforced. But whether that realization comes before the midterms or after them, the day when most Americans understand just how badly this massive expansion of government power will impact their lives is not long in coming. Putting off the moment when the backlash against ObamaCare is truly felt in Washington until after 2014 will not make it any less potent.

This move should encourage Republicans to keep chipping away at the law and to try and stop it via funding cuts or any other measure (such as preventing the Internal Revenue Service from being placed in control of much of the penalties to be assessed) they can try to pass. The assumption on the part of the administration has always been that once this law is functioning it will be too late to repeal it no matter how angry it makes some people. But what yesterday’s announcement tells us is that even the White House is starting to understand that they may have made a drastic miscalculation about how awful the reality of life under ObamaCare will be.

The White House says you can sign up 'without further
verification.'

The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws
it helped to write. On the heels of last week's one-year suspension of the
Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to offer insurance to workers, the
Administration is now waiving a new batch of its own ObamaCare
prescriptions.

These disclosures arrived inside a 606-page catch-all final rule that the
Health and Human Services Department published on July 5—a classic Friday news
dump, with extra credit for the holiday weekend. HHS now says it will no longer
attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead
will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information
consumers provide is accurate.

Remember "liar loans," the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took
borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s? ObamaCare is now on
the same honor system, with taxpayers in tow.

People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not
provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business
to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't
ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either.

HHS calls this "a slight technical correction" though it is much more than
that. The exchanges will not only start dispensing benefits "based on an
applicant's attestation" about his employment insurance status. HHS is also
handing the exchanges "temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation
of projected annual household income without further verification."

In other words, anyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging
the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service
collects. This change has nothing to do with the employer mandate, even
tangentially. HHS is disowning eligibility quality control because pre-clearance
is "not feasible" as a result of "operational barriers" and "a large amount of
systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in
time for October 1, 2013."

You've got to love that passive voice. It's true that coordinating and
managing vast amounts of information from hundreds of millions of Americans and corporations, and monitoring compliance with more than 10,000 pages of fine-print Federal Register regulations so far, is hard to do. Yet that is the system Democrats installed when they passed the law, which is not supposed to be optional due to administrative incompetence.

HHS promises to develop "a more robust verification process," some day, but
the result starting in October may be millions of people getting subsidies who
don't legally qualify. This would mean huge increases in ObamaCare spending.
Some of these folks could be fraudsters, much as 21% to 25% of Earned Income Tax Credits flow to people who aren't eligible, according to the Treasury inspector
general. The same error rate for ObamaCare would amount to as much as $250
billion in improper payments in its first decade.

The irony in the case of ObamaCare is that liberal health policy is
predicated on the notion that if Congress commands something on paper, it will happen in the real world. Architects Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel are still claiming against all evidence that their policy experiments in human behavior
modification will yield huge cost savings.

Yet now we are discovering that Democrats passed a bill that is so large and
convoluted that even they can't implement it in practice. So don't be surprised
if millions of individuals decide they're eligible for the subsidies, or should
be, and wait for someone eventually to say they aren't.

Liberals are also now claiming that the employer mandate and these
eligibility rules were never important parts of ObamaCare. This is revisionist
history, not least because the mandate and eligibility limits helped reduce the
cost as measured by the Congressional Budget Office.

The revisionism is also false because every provision of ObamaCare is
supposed to "solve" a problem created by some other provision of the bill. Kick
out one of the struts like the business mandate and the whole apparatus becomes
even more unstable. In the case of the lawless decision to shelve any income or
employer insurance scrutiny, HHS's logistical challenges are real. But our bet
is that the Administration is also using them as a pretense in a deliberate bid
to make it much easier to join the exchanges.

That's because the health planners are terrified that enough healthy,
low-cost people won't sign up and therefore the Affordable Care Act's strict
regulations on underwriting and risk-pooling will blow up insurance markets. As
more and more of ObamaCare tumbles, the Administration is resorting to anything that can salvage the goal of permanently expanding the U.S. entitlement state.

All of this fits with ObamaCare's entire bloody-minded history. Democrats
were determined to make their rendezvous with the liberal destiny of
government-run health care, so they imposed this debacle on the country on a
partisan vote and despite public opposition. Now that they are discovering how
difficult it is to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, they are rewriting the
law as they go and telling Americans they have no choice but to live with the
consequences.

hiroad Respected Neighbor The Hilltop 5055 Posts	Delay Can’t Avert ObamaCare Crackup Jonathan S. Tobin \| @tobincommentary 07.03.2013 - 9:45 AM After years of critics predicting that ObamaCare was too cumbersome and intrusive to implement without causing major dislocations for the American economy and workers, that opinion was finally confirmed by what we in the media would, in another context, probably term a highly placed government source: the Obama administration. Yesterday afternoon’s announcement that implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer them health insurance or face crippling fines will be put off for a full year until 2015 rather than being rolled out in January 2014 is the first official signal that even the White House is now aware that ObamaCare is a disaster that can only be managed rather than averted. Though the administration says the rest of the president’s signature health care plan—including the individual mandate to buy insurance and the creation of state insurance exchanges—will still be put into effect on schedule, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that even its supporters are coming to grips with the fact that the law is a mess. It should be remembered that the original schedule for ObamaCare implementation was wisely crafted with an eye on the president’s reelection. Though passed in 2010, the law was not to be put into effect until after President Obama was safely reelected in 2012, meaning that the devastating impact on employment and on the cost of insurance for many Americans was not an issue last year. Instead, Obama was able to claim that he had merely pushed for a measure that would ensure more people were insured without having to be held accountable for the impact this system had on everyone else. The same political motivation appears to be behind the decision to put off the business mandate since a postponement will make it harder for Republican critics to claim that ObamaCare is sinking the economy and causing layoffs during next year’s midterm elections. It’s not clear whether that will help many Democrats next year. Nor can we be certain just how effective a campaign focused on stopping ObamaCare will be for the GOP. But we do know that the ObamaCare crackup is inevitable and will be felt throughout the economy once it is in place. What this first official indication of distress tells us is that no delay in implementation will be long enough to avert the looming economic disaster that is ObamaCare. The excuse we’re hearing from the administration is that the extra year will somehow make it easier for businesses to comply with a system that is so complex that few have much confidence that they can navigate it with assurance. Given the potentially catastrophic penalties that the government can assess against a business that it deems to be not in compliance with the law, it is little surprise that many are contemplating changes that may drastically reduce the number of full-time employees, thus dealing a devastating blow to employment in the name of granting insurance to all. Rather than this move being, as Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett claimed yesterday, merely an effort to “get this right,” there’s little doubt the decision was based on the idea that postponing implementation will function as a reprieve for Democrats next year. Americans are not likely to fully grasp just how intrusive the law is or how badly it will affect the economy until all parts of it are enforced. But whether that realization comes before the midterms or after them, the day when most Americans understand just how badly this massive expansion of government power will impact their lives is not long in coming. Putting off the moment when the backlash against ObamaCare is truly felt in Washington until after 2014 will not make it any less potent. This move should encourage Republicans to keep chipping away at the law and to try and stop it via funding cuts or any other measure (such as preventing the Internal Revenue Service from being placed in control of much of the penalties to be assessed) they can try to pass. The assumption on the part of the administration has always been that once this law is functioning it will be too late to repeal it no matter how angry it makes some people. But what yesterday’s announcement tells us is that even the White House is starting to understand that they may have made a drastic miscalculation about how awful the reality of life under ObamaCare will be. July 7th 2013 Report Reply

tinman911 Respected Neighbor USA 275 Posts	For the whitehouse to hear it is one thing but to understand it is different, if they listened they would have understood. We know the answer to that statement. July 7th 2013 Report Reply
hiroad Respected Neighbor The Hilltop 5055 Posts	PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’ By Wesley Pruden - The Washington Times Friday, July 5, 2013 Nancy Pelosi told us there would be days like this. The only way to find out what was in Obamacare was to pass it and see what happens. Congress passed it, the messiah signed it, and we’re beginning to see what happens. Barack Obama and the gang that can’t shoot straight aren’t having much fun, but if they think they aren’t having fun now, just wait. The “best” is yet to come. The best the Democrats can say about Obamacare is that it’s an approaching train wreck, in the memorable description of Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. Mr. Baucus was one of the authors of the legislation and now he’s hurrying home to Montana for good, anxious to avert his eyes from all the hair, teeth and eyeballs soon to be scattered along the railroad right-of-way. Pundits and professors are rifling through the thesaurus, looking for the right word to describe what the Wall Street Journal calls “a fiasco for the ages.” The Journal editorialists reminded everyone that they “fought the Affordable Care Act from start to passage, and we’d like to apologize to our readers. It turns out we weren’t nearly critical enough.” The editors of The New York Times, Mr. Obama’s most reliable sycophants, are deep in mourning, but working furiously to apply more rouge to the corpse before it turns the parlor too fragrant for a wake. It’s summer, and they’re running out of ice. The “downside” to the delay in implementing the employer mandate is that it gives Republican critics the facts and figures, the “ammunition to portray the health care reforms as a failure,” The Times says. But not to worry, the year’s delay decreed by the president will allow the Internal Revenue Service time to figure out “how this mandate will work … it is more important to do this right than to do it quickly.” It’s ever so reassuring to know the IRS is on the case. SEE RELATED: Tweaks, twists and turns of Obama’s health law; mandate delay just the latest Mr. Obama and his gang obviously don’t know what to do next. Handwringing and delay is never a strategy for D-Day; when the beach slides under the bottom of the Higgins boats it’s too late to consider whether the invasion was a good idea. The White House announced the one-year delay in enforcing the employer insurance mandate for Obamacare, which might not even be legal, just as everyone was hurrying out of Dodge for the Fourth of July holiday. Minions were hastily assigned to explain the delay. Mark Mazur, the deputy assistant (or is it the assistant deputy?) of the Treasury assigned to dream up new taxes, complained that the delay was caused by the “complexity of the requirements.” Life, in addition to being unfair, turns out to be complicated, too. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s most trusted (if not necessarily most competent) adviser, promised that the determined president is “staying the course.” This is not reassuring, either, since it’s “the course” that’s the source of the disaster. The flood has washed out the bridge across the river, but never mind, the road to where the bridge used to be is still there. Obamacare probably can’t be fixed short of dumping it and starting over, but this would require an admission by the president and his men (and women) that they’re as incompetent and maladroit as events reveal them to be. The president’s acolytes in the media hail the delay as a genius stroke of politics, something to get the Democrats past the 2014 congressional elections before “the fiasco for the ages” is displayed in full. The president knows better. If this is a genius stroke of politics, he would have called the correspondents into the Rose Garden and, flanked by Cabinet ministers, announced the delay to cheers and applause. Over the weeks and months leading to November 2014, as The Times observes, the Republicans will have ample opportunity to apply their ammunition to a very fat and attractive target. Even now, the lawyers are searching for clients and precedents to attack the legality of Mr. Obama’s delay. The language of the Affordable Care Act sets out in Section 1513 in “black-letter law” that its provisions “shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” The language is plain and clear; only a lawyer or judge could misunderstand it. Plain and clear though the language is, Obamacare was carelessly written and pounded through Congress with such speed and abandon that no one had time (or inclination) to see what was in it. Now we know, and the best is yet to come. July 8th 2013 Report Reply
hiroad Respected Neighbor The Hilltop 5055 Posts	July 7, 2013, 6:32 p.m. ET ObamaCare's 'Liar' Subsidies The White House says you can sign up 'without further verification.' Comments (702) smaller Larger The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws it helped to write. On the heels of last week's one-year suspension of the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to offer insurance to workers, the Administration is now waiving a new batch of its own ObamaCare prescriptions. These disclosures arrived inside a 606-page catch-all final rule that the Health and Human Services Department published on July 5—a classic Friday news dump, with extra credit for the holiday weekend. HHS now says it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information consumers provide is accurate. Remember "liar loans," the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s? ObamaCare is now on the same honor system, with taxpayers in tow. People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either. HHS calls this "a slight technical correction" though it is much more than that. The exchanges will not only start dispensing benefits "based on an applicant's attestation" about his employment insurance status. HHS is also handing the exchanges "temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification." In other words, anyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects. This change has nothing to do with the employer mandate, even tangentially. HHS is disowning eligibility quality control because pre-clearance is "not feasible" as a result of "operational barriers" and "a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013." You've got to love that passive voice. It's true that coordinating and managing vast amounts of information from hundreds of millions of Americans and corporations, and monitoring compliance with more than 10,000 pages of fine-print Federal Register regulations so far, is hard to do. Yet that is the system Democrats installed when they passed the law, which is not supposed to be optional due to administrative incompetence. HHS promises to develop "a more robust verification process," some day, but the result starting in October may be millions of people getting subsidies who don't legally qualify. This would mean huge increases in ObamaCare spending. Some of these folks could be fraudsters, much as 21% to 25% of Earned Income Tax Credits flow to people who aren't eligible, according to the Treasury inspector general. The same error rate for ObamaCare would amount to as much as $250 billion in improper payments in its first decade. The irony in the case of ObamaCare is that liberal health policy is predicated on the notion that if Congress commands something on paper, it will happen in the real world. Architects Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel are still claiming against all evidence that their policy experiments in human behavior modification will yield huge cost savings. Yet now we are discovering that Democrats passed a bill that is so large and convoluted that even they can't implement it in practice. So don't be surprised if millions of individuals decide they're eligible for the subsidies, or should be, and wait for someone eventually to say they aren't. Liberals are also now claiming that the employer mandate and these eligibility rules were never important parts of ObamaCare. This is revisionist history, not least because the mandate and eligibility limits helped reduce the cost as measured by the Congressional Budget Office. The revisionism is also false because every provision of ObamaCare is supposed to "solve" a problem created by some other provision of the bill. Kick out one of the struts like the business mandate and the whole apparatus becomes even more unstable. In the case of the lawless decision to shelve any income or employer insurance scrutiny, HHS's logistical challenges are real. But our bet is that the Administration is also using them as a pretense in a deliberate bid to make it much easier to join the exchanges. That's because the health planners are terrified that enough healthy, low-cost people won't sign up and therefore the Affordable Care Act's strict regulations on underwriting and risk-pooling will blow up insurance markets. As more and more of ObamaCare tumbles, the Administration is resorting to anything that can salvage the goal of permanently expanding the U.S. entitlement state. All of this fits with ObamaCare's entire bloody-minded history. Democrats were determined to make their rendezvous with the liberal destiny of government-run health care, so they imposed this debacle on the country on a partisan vote and despite public opposition. Now that they are discovering how difficult it is to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, they are rewriting the law as they go and telling Americans they have no choice but to live with the consequences. July 8th 2013 Report Reply

Muscatine

Spiraling into the Black Hole

Delay Can’t Avert ObamaCare Crackup

PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’

ObamaCare's 'Liar' Subsidies

The White House says you can sign up 'without further verification.'

Incorrect username and password combination.

The White House says you can sign up 'without further
verification.'