Obamacare implementation could spell trouble for Democrats in 2014

Washington Examiner ^ | 11/15/2012 | Philip Klein

[SeekAndFind]

The good news for Democrats is that Obamacare will now be implemented. But the bad news for Democrats is also that Obamacare will now be implemented.

President Obama's re-election ensures that his signature health care law will not be repealed before its major provisions go into effect. But that also means, to borrow a phrase from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Americans will begin to find out what's in the law.

Starting Jan. 1, several key provisions of the health care law will kick in. Americans will only be allowed to contribute $2,500 to flexible spending accounts, which allow participants to pay for medical expenses on a pretax basis. Also, from then on, the accounts can only be used to pay for drugs with a prescription, excluding over-the-counter drugs, which still may be legitimate medical expenses and were previously allowed.

The new year will also ring in a wave of new tax increases. One is the Medicare tax hike on individuals earning more than $200,000 and married couples earning more than $250,000. Another is the 3.8 percent tax on interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents. On top of that, there will be a 2.3 percent tax increase on medical devices. These will be on top of any tax hike that comes out of current end-of-the-year negotiations between Republicans and Democrats to avoid the "fiscal cliff."

Most of the major provisions of the health care law go into effect in 2014. During that year, individuals will be forced to purchase government-approved insurance policies or pay a tax. The tax will hit 6 million uninsured Americans, most of them middle-class, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Employers who have at least 50 workers could have to pay a $2,000-per-employee fine for not providing health insurance. As Zane Tankel, who owns 40 Applebee's locations in the New York area, recently explained on Fox Business, this provision will force him to hold off on expanding or hiring, and even to re-evaluate his current workforce. Business owners throughout the nation have echoed his thinking.

In addition, 2014 will usher in the expansion of Medicaid and the creation of new exchanges. On these exchanges, eligible individuals will receive government subsidies to purchase government-designed insurance plans administered by private companies. These two components are projected to cost $1.7 trillion over a decade.

Governors, right now, are trying to decide whether to participate in the expansion of Medicaid, a program that is already crushing state budgets, and to implement the exchanges themselves or back out and let the federal government set up the exchanges for them.

The establishment of an exchange involves a massive data compilation process in which the federal government will have to figure out Americans' income levels to determine their eligibility to receive benefits. The exchanges are supposed to be up by the fall of 2013 so that individuals can begin enrolling in them.

Each state faces its own challenges in setting up the exchanges. In Washington, D.C., officials determined that the uninsured population was too small for the exchange to function. So they have taken the step of conscripting individuals and businesses with between two and 50 employees to purchase health insurance through the exchange, making it the sole marketplace in D.C. for plans that aren't "grandfathered in."

During a meeting with The Washington Examiner, Mohammad Akhter, chairman of the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority Executive Board, noted the difficulty of setting up an exchange under the federal time constraints.

With a number of Republican governors deciding that letting the Obama administration set up their state-based exchanges is the lesser of bad options, the federal government will be facing a number of logistical challenges to getting them up and running.

If it goes badly, this could spell trouble for Democrats up for re-election in 2014. But who's ever heard of a massive government database and software development program going badly?

Philip Klein (pklein@washingtonexaminer.com) is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner.

[rlmorel]

Ever since 2000, the options to vote have become far looser and varied, or so it seems to me.

I have been against it since day one. Don’t get me wrong, there has been and is a place for absentee ballots. I voted in my first election in 1976 when I was in the USN that way.

But to make it simply convenient for people was and is wrong. All it does is open wider doors to voter fraud, and that is it. The early voting ballots and absentee ballots have a longer journey through more hands, and the chain of custody is complete crap. We know how the government at all levels works when things get complicated. It doesn’t. And there are plenty of people who have been exploiting that.

When someone’s livelihood depends on quality, you usually get just that. When the result of a difference between quality work and a shrug of the shoulders is exactly ZERO, you will get a shrug of the shoulders. It is FOOLISH to depend on the good will, good intentions and ingrained work ethic to deliver results in the vast majority of people. Yet that is just what well-meaning liberals and utopians depend on, and it is why liberalism is doomed to fail. And it is why government and unions at all levels operate far less efficiently than capitalist alternatives.

That last paragraph is, in a nut, the heart of the difference between liberalism and conservatism.

[rlmorel]

Exactly. See my post at #6.

[Ezekiel]

Excellent post. It has appeared to me that convenience has become more important than the integrity of the voting process. Liberty is anything but convenient.

I should have been more clear on my last comment/question:

Wouldn't states such as OR and WA be able to create a database of every voter's voting record for the purpose of political persecution?

The secret ballot is going the way of the dinosaurs. But aside from the normal concerns about prying/threatening eyes or someone other than registered voter doing the voting (those are bad enough), what happens when the ballot reaches the folks opening the mail (assuming it gets there)? Somebody knows how the name on the envelope voted. It's much more specific than a generic party affiliation. From the private voting booth the ballot goes into the box with all the rest.

If absentee ballots had remained rare then the problems associated with them would have remained rare. But when all voting is by mail, it sure seems like a recipe for not only fraud, but a complete undermining of the secret ballot process and a high potential for data-mining abuse or outright persecution. Proponents point to the fact that there are hard copies, but at what price?

And of those not-so-good intentions, what is the matter with liberals? The evil profit motive weeds out a great deal of the do-gooder incompetents. Need a brain surgeon? Better the guy who wants to stay in top demand in order to afford a fifth Ferrari than a government paycheck collector who shrugs and says, "Oh well better luck next time. Is it lunch yet?"

Looks like America opted for the union surgeon. Brains are all over the floor. But he is such a nice man with good intentions, unlike that rich man with the giant carbon footprint.