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Why is Massachusetts, of all places, requesting waivers from Obamacare? By Josh Archambault The Obama administration’s recent decision to postpone enforcement of the employer mandate, a key provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the House’s recent vote to delay both the employer mandate and the individual mandate (with 35 Democrats joining most Republicans in supporting delay of the employer mandate, and 22 Democrats on the individual mandate) should come as no surprise to close observers of the law’s rocky implementation process. This latest delay joins the growing list of carve-outs granting year-long or multi-year “grace periods” on various...

Surprised by the recent waivers from the Obama administration on the Affordable Care Act? Get ready for more, writes Margot Sanger-Katz at National Journal, because the employer mandate is far from the only piece of ObamaCare that’s not ready for prime time. In fact, it might be easier to select the few components that might be ready for the implementation target date than to number those that won’t: If you’ve been reading all the Obamacare stories lately, you might get the impression that the administration has just realized it will not be able to implement the massive health reform as...

Among the objections to ObamaCare, one that has not gotten as much attention as it should is the president's power to waive the law for any company, union or other enterprise he chooses. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution provides for "equal protection of the laws" for all Americans. To have a law that can cost an organization millions of dollars a year either apply or not apply, depending on the whim or political interest of the President of the United States, is to make a mockery of the rule of law. How secure is any freedom when there is...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional budget analysts are now estimating that nearly 6 million Americans — most of them in the middle class — will have to pay a tax penalty for not getting health insurance once President Barack Obama's health care law is fully in place.

Six million Americans will pay the health care tax rather than obtain coverage under President Obama’s health care law, according to a new Congressional Budget Office estimate Wednesday — a 50 percent increase over CBO’s estimate of just two years ago. CBO also said there will be 30 million people without insurance, though all but the 6 million will be exempt from the tax. The exempt Americans are a combination of illegal immigrants and those with incomes too low to pay income taxes. The agency said the government will collect about $7 billion from the tax in 2016, and $8...

The Obama administration granted more than 1600 waivers over compliance with parts of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruling that the individual mandate is a tax will not affect the waivers, as they dealt with what kind of insurance people have, not whether they have it. The ruling, and the waivers, point us directly to the disaster that awaits the country unless the PPACA is fully repealed. (snip) What happens on January 1, 2014? That's when the state-based exchanges are supposed to be up and running, allowing federally subsidized insurance to supplant the policies getting waivers....

Isn't there some sort of legal precedent that taxes have to be applied equally? Does yesterday's ruling invalidate the "waivers"?

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

You know Kathleen Sebelius well. She's Secretary of Health and Human Services, which, among other things, makes her in charge of implementing Obamacare. You'd think she'd know the law inside and out, and that she'd be able to at least semi-coherently answer questions about it at a Senate hearing. But when Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) asks her about the program's effect on the national debt, she melts into a stuttering puddle, and he schools her on the economics of the law. The most damning exchange occurs when he asks her about healthcare waivers, which would exempt certain employers from having...

This, despite the supposed "tightening" of rules made by HHS last summer. The Daily Caller: Labor unions continued to receive the overwhelming majority of waivers from the president's health care reform law since the Obama administration tightened application rules last summer. Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama's signature legislation since June 17, 2011. By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.

Labor unions continued to receive the overwhelming majority of waivers from the president’s health care reform law since the Obama administration tightened application rules last summer. Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation since June 17, 2011. By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers. The Department of Health and Human Services revised the rules governing applications for health reform waivers June 17, 2011, amid a steady stream of controversial news...

Roughly 1,200 companies received waivers from part of the healthcare reform law, the Health and Human Services Department said Friday. Friday marks the last time HHS will have to update the total number of waivers, putting to rest a recurring political firestorm. The department had been updating its waiver totals every month, prompting monthly attacks from the GOP. Republicans say the need for waivers proves that the healthcare law is unworkable. HHS argues that the waivers show the law provides flexibility. All told, 1,231 companies applied for and received waivers from the law’s restrictions on annual benefit caps. The law...

In a column about the revolving door between big government and the lobbying world, here’s what the irreplaceable Tim Carney wrote about the waiver process for folks trying to escape the burden of government-run healthcare. Congress imposes mandates on other entities, but gives bureaucrats the power to waive those mandates. To get such a waiver, you hire the people who used to administer or who helped craft the policies. So who’s the net winner? The politicians and bureaucrats who craft policies and wield power, because this combination of massive government power and wide bureaucratic discretion creates huge demand for revolving-door...

According to testimony at a recent hearing of the House Oversight health care subcommittee, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) doesn’t actually grant the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to exempt employers from the law’s annual minimum health care coverage requirements. The Daily Caller reports: Language granting HHS that power was never in the original law. Instead, through new rules and regulations, HHS gave itself the power last summer using a broad interpretation of certain parts of the law.The annual limit requirement waivers exempt recipients for one year from having to increase the amount...

Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, Cigna, Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan. Answer: They are all among the 1,372 businesses, state and local governments, labor unions and insurers, covering 3,095,593 individuals...

Can't we all just get a waiver from Obamacare? Unfortunately not, but the list of people applying is getting longer by the day. There are now 1,372 companies, labor unions and states that have applied for and been granted waivers from an early provision of the law that says health policies must provide at least $750,000 a year in insurance protection. In the latest batch of waivers, one in five went to expensive restaurants, spas and other businesses in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's district in San Francisco. What a coincidence! Nearly two dozen states have either applied for or...

No one seems to know what criteria HHS uses to grant or deny waivers to insurers from provisions in ObamaCare. The White House won’t release the names of those insurers and employers refused waivers or discuss denials at all. But maybe, just maybe, we could all agree that organizations that publicly pushed ObamaCare to approval should be ineligible to escape its consequences? The Daily Caller has learned that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rate review rules, which it finalized on Thursday, exempt “Medigap” policy providers, like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), from oversight when such...

Outside of the unions, there was perhaps no group more ardent in its support of Obamacare than the AARP. The advocacy group spent $121 million on advertising in favor of Obamacare, and millions more lobbying for it on Washington DC. But now AARP’s insurance business, Medigap which competes with Medicare Advantage (a program AARP lobbied to have hamstrung by OBamacare), just got a waiver from complying with the law. ... Keep in mind, again, that AARP is set to rake in billions in profits now that Obamacare has effective knocked Medicare Advantage out of the market.

Monday’s New York Times had another classic entry in the annals of Obamacare. It seems that nursing homes are asking HHS for waivers from Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health coverage to their workers. Nursing homes, even though they are in the health-care business, often don’t provide insurance to their employees. They can’t afford to. And why is that? Mark Parkinson, president of the American Health Care Association, the largest trade group for nursing homes, says the problem is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid and Medicare, set by government agencies, do not pay them enough to offer their employees medical...

White House, Pelosi: Obamacare waivers a regular thing, we’ve approved more than 1300 Matthew Boyle - The Daily Caller 38 mins ago White House Press Secretary Jay Carney downplayed the significance of the 38 Obamacare waivers luxurious hotels, gourmet restaurants, hip nightclubs, day spas and four-star hotels received in April in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district. In the Tuesday press briefing, he said the administration has approved more than 1,300 waivers from the health care law’s requirements, and has rejected less than 100 waiver-applications. The total of approved waivers “is not that much,” he said, adding that the temporary...