‘The dozen failed ObamaCare cooperatives have not repaid any of the $1.2 billion in federal loans they received and still owe more than $1 billion in additional liabilities, according to recent financial statements cited Thursday at a congressional hearing.
“We shouldn’t hold our breath on repayment,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said in his opening statement at the hearing.
“In some states, these losses will be absorbed by other insurance companies—which means, by the policyholders of other insurance companies who have to pay increased … premiums,” he said. “In other states, doctors, hospitals and individual patients stand to suffer large out-of-pocket losses due to the co-op failures—as our report details.”
Portman’s statement, first obtained by Fox News, refers to an investigation by the committee’s majority staff.
It claims the most recent balance sheets provided to the subcommittee show the failed cooperatives owe more than $700 million to doctors and hospitals for plan year 2015.
The failed cooperatives lost $376 million and exceeded the projected worst-case-scenario losses outlined in their loan applications by more than $260 million in 2014. They lost an additional billion dollars in 2015, according to the report.
“Once the co-ops got going in 2014, things went south in a hurry—both in terms of financial losses and enrollment figures that wildly deviated from the co-ops’ own projections,” Portman said. “Despite getting regular reports that the co-ops were hemorrhaging cash, HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] took essentially no corrective action for over a year.”’ - Failed ObamaCare co-ops have not repaid $1.2B in federal loans, docs say, foxnews.com, 03/10/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/03/10/failed-obamacare-co-ops-have-not-repaid-1-2b-in-federal-loans-docs-say.html
“The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, is one of the more notorious provisions of the Affordable Care Act because it is the perfect embodiment of belief in technocratic expertise. The IPAB’s 15 “expert” members would have great power and little accountability.”
“The IPAB is fundamentally flawed concept for two reasons:
It tramples on Congress’ power to write laws. The IPAB would have the authority to rewrite any aspect of Medicare’s payment policies -- everything from hospital payments, to physician fees, and even how Part D prescription drug plans pay for covered medications -- to achieve additional savings. Congress has the constitutional power to write new legislation for a reason; voters can hold their elected representatives accountable for the kinds of laws they pass. Not so with the IPAB. IPAB members will get six-year terms and will be allowed to be reappointed once. Removing them from their positions will be extremely difficult.
It emphasizes payment reductions at the expense of real Medicare reform. The constraints placed on what the IPAB can recommend were not accidental. The authors of the ACA support restraining Medicare spending, but only with government-imposed payment restrictions, not financial incentives. So the IPAB can impose blunt payment cuts on physicians and hospitals -- and for the HMOs serving Medicare Advantage patients -- but it cannot recommend structural changes, like giving participants in the program incentives for selecting low-cost, high-value care. If payments are reduced too much, the network of willing providers of medical services becomes very constrained, and the participants in the program begin to have trouble securing access to the care they need. Congress could easily find itself undoing payment cuts it previously approved, much like it did for years with the “doc fixes” aimed at undoing the Sustainable Growth Rate formula for physician fees.” - Don't Forget about the IPAB, Real Clear Health, James Capretta, 03/08/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://mercatus.org/expert_commentary/dont-forget-about-ipab?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=twam&utm_campaign=HC
“Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s healthcare plan has set off a fierce debate among economists about whether his numbers add up.”
“The question of how much Sanders’s proposals would cost has set off a “war of the wonks,” with liberal economists on the front lines.
Sanders’s plan already has essentially no chance of passing Congress, given that Republicans are expected to control at least one chamber in 2017, but there are questions about the policy as well as the politics.
The main challenge to Sanders’s math comes from Kenneth Thorpe, a well-respected health economist at Emory University who advised Vermont on its efforts to create a state-level single-payer system.
Thorpe says Sanders’s plan would cost about $1 trillion per year more than Sanders says it would: $2.5 trillion per year versus $1.38 trillion per year. The resulting funding shortfall would mean that Sanders would have to hike taxes even more to pay for his plan, he says.
Thorpe also argues that Sanders’s proposed 8.4 percent in extra payroll and income taxes would instead have to rise to a 20 percent combined extra tax.
Sanders argues that middle class families would save thousands of dollars under his proposal because they would no longer have to pay health insurance premiums. But the higher taxes envisioned under Thorpe’s analysis would flip the script for many people: He found that 71 percent of workers and their families currently with private insurance would end up paying more, not less, under Sanders’s plan.”
“ Much of the dispute among the experts, and the $1 trillion difference in cost estimates, centers on how much savings would be achieved from switching to a single-payer healthcare system.”
“ Companies that currently pay high health costs for their workers would see huge savings by no longer having to pay for healthcare, but smaller companies that don’t offer much coverage would now be hit with a new tax, said Henry Aaron, a health expert at the Brookings Institution.
“You are going to be spreading across the American industrial landscape huge amounts of income redistribution,” Aaron said.
Friedman contests this skepticism, saying other advanced countries with single-payer systems are able to provide good care at much lower costs.” - Debate rages over the cost of Bernie's government, the hill.com, 02/18/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/269786-debate-rages-over-the-cost-of-bernies-government
Note: Regardless of the “expert” discussions/arguments above, there is only one single-payer system in the world and that is Canada. Multiple single-payer systems, which implicitly exist as an argument point above, do not in fact exist. For more information see link below associated with the post entitled ACA/Obamacare: How Universal is “Single Payer” Healthcare? Not Very!
http://thelastembassy.blogspot.com/2016/01/acaobamacare-how-universal-is-single.html
“Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairman David Vitter is questioning why Congress is able to get its health care through the Small Business Health Options Plan (SHOP) — which requires a business to have 50 or less employees — when the tax forms provided list Congress as a large employer.
In a letter written to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen Wednesday, the Louisiana Republican said it appears Congress is “misrepresenting itself to either DC Health Link or the IRS” and questioned whether the contradiction violates the Internal Revenue Code.
While the Affordable Care Act required lawmakers and their staff to buy insurance through state or federal exchanges, the Office of Personnel Management exempted them by qualifying Congress as a small business, allowing them to buy health care using DC Health Link to keep employer subsidies.” - Congress Is Exempt From Obamacare Because It’s Listed As A Small Business, dailycaller.com, 02/10/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/10/could-congress-obamacare-exemption-be-in-trouble/
“During the Democratic presidential debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned that as president she would build on President Obama's signature health care plan. The Affordable Care Act "is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country," she added. I beg to differ.
First, the ACA didn't reform the health care system. It just threw trillions of dollars at an already dysfunctional system. In the next 10 years alone, ACA spending will be at least $1.5 trillion.
To our already burdensome tax system, it also adds many new taxes, including an individual mandate excise tax, an employer mandate tax, a 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, an excise tax on comprehensive health insurance plans, a hike in Medicare payroll tax, a Medicine cabinet tax and many more.
The law's subsidies — available to lower-income people to make the ACA plans more appealing — are also a huge drag on the economy, since they drop sharply as income increases. As such, it's not surprising that the Congressional Budget Office projects the ACA will reduce work by an amount equal to two million full-time jobs and lower the nation's economic output by half of 1 percent. However, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan thinks the negative effects of the ACA will be twice as large as the CBO projects.
The ACA's many mandates increased individual market premiums by close to 50 percent between 2013 and 2014. And those mandates are burdensome, even for employer-based plans. For instance, a new study by Harvard and Stanford Universities finds that the popular dependent care mandate will have very unpopular consequences: It lowers wages for workers at firms with employer-based coverage by $1,200 every year. And here's a prediction: Politicians will be quick to blame the reduction on greedy employers, and rather than remove the mandate, they'll try to fix the problems with more mandates.” - The Affordable Care Act -- Mission Accomplished?, Creators Syndicate. Veronique de Rugy, 01/22/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://mercatus.org/expert_commentary/affordable-care-act-mission-accomplished?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=SBI
"Obamacare enrollment is lagging far behind what economists had projected, the Congressional Budget Office said in a new report that cuts the total number of customers expected to buy plans on the exchanges from 21 million down to just 13 million this year.
Of those, 11 million will be getting government subsidies — down from the 15 million the CBO had projected just a year ago.
The updated projections came as part of the CBO’s 2016 budget outlook, and confirm the administration’s own dim estimates of how many people would take advantage of the health exchanges, which are at the heart of President Obama’s health law." - Obamacare enrollment projections down nearly 40 percent,
washingtontimes.com, 01/25/2015
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/25/obamacare-enrollment-projections-down-43-percent/
