Quote:

 

http://online.wsj.com/articles/surprises-lurk-for-people-re-enrolling-on-healthcare-gov-1415854801

Surprises Lurk for People Re-Enrolling on HealthCare.gov
Low-Priced Plans Can Make Tax Credits Smaller for Those Who Don’t Shop Around



In a twist, an influx of lower-priced health plans on HealthCare.gov could lead many Americans to pay more for coverage next year thanks to smaller insurance tax credits.

A handful of insurers in 14 states are offering aggressively low premiums on the federal insurance enrollment site, which reopens Saturday, in a bid to undercut big rivals who snapped up customers last year.

The move is pulling down the value of federal tax credits that consumers get to offset the cost of their coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The credits are pegged to the price of the second-lowest-cost midrange plan in a given geographic area, as well as an enrollee’s income.

The reduced tax credits are good news for the federal government, which stands to pay less to subsidize people’s premiums. The influx of new low-cost plans is also a plus for the millions of uninsured people expected to look for 2015 coverage through the law’s insurance exchanges.

But many people who re-enroll in their 2014 plans face higher insurance costs even if their premium remains flat. To avoid paying more, they would have to switch plans, which many consumers don’t do.

“If you shop, there are big savings to be had,” said Jon Kingsdale, managing director at the Boston office of Wakely Consulting Group, an actuarial firm. “If you don’t, you could be in for a rude shock.”

[...]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/11/14/did-jonathan-gruber-earn-almost-400000-from-the-obama-administration/

FACT CHECKER
Did Jonathan Gruber earn ‘almost $400,000′ from the Obama administration?
[it is fact!]
[...]

That adds up to $392,600 — or “almost $400,000.”

[...]

Gruber’s consulting was largely unknown at the time [June 2009], and eventually it became an issue as he had been frequently quoted by journalists and lawmakers who may not have known of his connection to the administration; he also generally did not disclose his connection when writing opinion articles.

In one especially fishy circumstance, Nancy-Ann DeParle, at the time director of the White House Office of Health Reform, wrote about Gruber’s work on the White House blog on Nov. 29, 2009. “MIT Economist Confirms Senate Health Reform Bill Reduces Costs and Improves Coverage” was the headline on the post.

DeParle made no reference to the fact that Gruber had already earned hundreds of thousands of dollars working for the administration. She described him as an “MIT economist who has been closely following the health insurance reform process.”

(The emphasis on reducing costs in Gruber’s report is especially interesting in light of the Gruber video that emerged Thursday. “What the American public cares about is costs,” Gruber said in 2010. “And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90 percent health insurance coverage and 10 percent about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control.”)

[...]

Quote:

 

http://www.cato.org/blog/bland-cbo-memo-or-smoking-gun

December 16, 2009 7:49AM

Bland CBO Memo, or Smoking Gun?
By Michael F. Cannon

This weekend, the Congressional Budget Office released “a very strange memo” titled, “Budgetary Treatment of Proposals to Regulate Medical Loss Ratios.” You wouldn’t know it from the title, but that little memo is the smoking gun that shows how congressional Democrats have very carefully hidden more than half the cost of their health care bills.

First, a little history. Like both the House and Senate bills, the Clinton health plan would have mandated that individuals and employers purchase private insurance. In its 1994 score of the Clinton plan, Bob Reischauer’s CBO included those mandated “private” payments in the federal budget –- i.e., as federal revenues and federal expenditures.

And yet, none of the CBO scores of this year’s bills include the costs of similar individual/employer mandates as federal revenues or federal spending.

My read of the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan is that the private-sector mandates accounted for around 60 percent of the Clinton health plan’s total cost, the remainder being (traditional) government spending. So how is it that the CBO made the full cost of the Clinton health plan apparent to the public in 1994, but may now be revealing only 40 percent of the cost of the Obama health plan?

For some time, I’ve suspected the answer is that congressional Democrats have very carefully tailored their individual and employer mandates to avoid CBO’s definition of what shall be counted in the federal budget. Democrats are still smarting over the CBO’s decision in 1994. By revealing the full cost of the Clinton plan, the CBO helped to kill the bill.

Since then, keeping the cost of their private-sector mandates out of the federal budget has been Job One for Democratic health wonks. While head of the CBO, Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag altered the CBO’s orientation to make it more open and collaborative. One of the things about which the CBO has been more open is the criteria it uses to determine whether to include mandated private-sector spending in the federal budget. The CBO even published a paper on the topic. Read this profile of Orszag by Ezra Klein, and you’ll see that those criteria were also a likely area of collaboration with lawmakers.

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun. It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget. Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate – such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo – are dropped. Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding. But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation. It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail

Quote:

 

http://t.co/YIq7LsBJ57

Jonathan Gruber

Dr. Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a Research Associate, and President Elect of the American Society of Health Economists. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. He has published more than 150 research articles, has edited six research volumes, and is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text, and Health Care Reform, a graphic novel. In 2006 he received the American Society of Health Economists Inaugural Medal for the best health economist in the nation aged 40 and under.

During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber was on leave as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department. From 2003-2006 he was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort. During 2009-2010 he served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the Administration and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011 he was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” by Slate Magazine. In both 2006 and 2012 he was rated as one of the top 100 most powerful people in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine.

Quote:

 

http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/daniel-horowitz/republicans-have-made-peace-obamacare

Republicans Have Made Peace With Obamacare

The average voter would never know from listening to the campaign rhetoric of Republican candidates and sitting members of Congress: they have no intention of fighting for anything close to full repeal of Obamacare.

With the exception of a few aspects of the law most ardently opposed by K Street lobbyists, Republicans have come to grips with their new dancing partner in the statist oligarchy of the D.C. cesspool.

Typically, whenever a new program is passed into law, even if it was unpopular at its inception, the legitimacy brought to bear by signing it into law brings with it an aura of acceptance with the American people. Hence, the success of the perennial expansion of government.

But Obamacare is different. There are fewer services more vital than health care and the American people incurred immediate pain as a result of its passage. They are experiencing the pernicious effects with skyrocketing premiums, loss of coverage, and loss of family doctors. Mothers and fathers who once proudly supported their families with hard work and dignity are now being forced into government dependency and subpar care. Businesses owners are being smothered with the crushing costs. Experienced health care professionals are retiring early because they can’t juggle their commitment to their patients along with the onerous regulations, restrictions, and paperwork.

And this is just the beginning. Once the funding mechanisms collapse and the federal safety hammock for insurance companies is rendered insufficient, premiums will rise to unaffordable levels for everyone.

Indeed, the American people want an end to this law and they want it now. Obamacare is undoubtedly one of the biggest factors, if not the biggest factor, contributing to the unprecedented wipeout of Democrats in two consecutive elections. Americans want it repealed and they want it now.

Even the predication of mass signups for Obamacare (whether by choice or by force) has not materialized, and most of the new applications have been for Medicaid enrollment. The dependency has not yet reached critical mass so as to preclude full repeal.

The time for repeal is ripe, but as Politico’s David Nather observes in his latest piece on Ted Cruz, “an Army of One,” everyone else in the party has given up on repealing Obamacare. Now, like most tabloid-style political reporting, this piece exaggerates the facts. Mike Lee is certainly committed to repealing Obamacare through an all-of-the-above “whatever it takes” approach, as are a few others. But the basic premise that Republicans are ok with Obamacare beyond the medical device tax and some of the regulations on business is true. And everyone on both sides of the aisle in Washington has known that for quite some time.

[...]

kbp

Nov 14 2014, 06:28 PM

I've posted much of Michael Cannon's work here. Here's an oldie from his library of data on Obamacare (a library you can get lost in!). Think about the strategy Gruber has been exposing!

Quote:

 

http://www.cato.org/blog/bland-cbo-memo-or-smoking-gun
December 16, 2009 7:49AM
Bland CBO Memo, or Smoking Gun?
By Michael F. Cannon

[...]

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding. But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation. It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail

He told us that in 2009!

• 
  
• … this bill [the Affordable Care Act] was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass. … Look, I wish … that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

LTC8K6

Nov 14 2014, 07:24 PM

Well, I got my BCBSNC letter today.

+22.5%

kbp

Nov 14 2014, 07:27 PM

LTC8K6

Nov 14 2014, 07:24 PM

Well, I got my BCBSNC letter today.

+22.5%

Have you checked to COMPARE with any other employees that get subsidies?