OK
…nevermind (sorta)Posted on 11/15/2013 7:00:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Under this president, even if you like the law of the land, you can’t keep it. His administration, no stranger to ignoring or refusing to enforce pages of the Federal Register, is now rewriting another key part of the Affordable Care Act to escape the political fallout from the insurance cancellations that are an integral part of its design.
Using its preferred legislative tool, lawless executive decree, the administration has decided not to enforce some of Obamacare’s costly mandates in 2014, allowing insurance companies, in theory, to renew plans that don’t meet them. Insurers may cancel many of the plans anyway on grounds it is too complicated and expensive to go back now, and state insurance regulators may not want to backtrack, either. Washington State has already suggested it will ignore the “fix” and follow the ACA’s regulations. Surely this is the reaction the White House is hoping for, so it can give lip service to addressing cancellations without truly changing anything, and so it can blame someone else — the insurers, state regulators — for the consequences of its own law.
The White House knows that the viability of the exchanges depends on younger, healthier people getting forced out of their plans and onto the exchanges. As the president admitted in his press conference yesterday, he realized at the time that his promise about keeping your insurance wouldn’t apply to everyone, and he is giving insurers only a brief escape hatch because he ultimately needs and wants “non-compliant” policies canceled — despite his infamous promise and despite his semi-apologies about it now.
If sufficient political pressure is brought to bear on insurers, though, they may well let enough people keep their current plans to further undermine the Obamacare exchanges that are already suffering from tiny enrollment figures. Many of the canceled policies continue through the end of the year — in other words, people are still on them — and there are waves of cancellations that haven’t occurred yet. The insurance industry understandably feels as though it is getting yanked back and forth, but excuse us if our sympathy is limited: The insurers got into bed with Obamacare and are still invested in the exchanges and their promised federal subsidies.
The president felt compelled to offer his “fix” to stop a Democratic stampede in favor of grandfathering legislation proposed by Representative Fred Upton in the House. The bill would allow insurance companies to offer plans eliminated by Obamacare for another year and allow them to sell the plans to people who don’t already have them. Some on the right are skeptical of the bill because it repairs rather than repeals Obamacare, but it would really be a step toward dismantling. It would keep people from and draw them out of the exchanges, and were it to become law, the pressure to renew it after the first year would be irresistible. If the president had lost 100 Democrats’ votes to the Upton bill, it could have effectively been the end of the Obamacare coalition in Congress. Hence the urgency to offer his “fix.”
There is only one true fix worthy of the name, of course: repeal and replace. The president’s move yesterday was cynical and lawless, but we should take heart. We have been told again and again that Obamacare is inevitable and that resistance is pointless and irrational. Yet it is the defenders who are on the run.
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…nevermind (sorta)Isn’t Obama just playing Calvinball with the law?
REPEAL it — and don’t replace it.
Pass a bill in the House repealing Obamacare and send it to the Senate. See if they will fall on their swords for Obama or let him take the fall.
CalvinCare.
No, it’s not time to repeal yet. It has done enough damage, and there are still too many stupid people who don’t understand what the employer mandate will do. If we are going to turn the direction of this nation, we need the public to understand the nature of liberalism.
“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”
- Abraham Lincoln
Make it purely voluntary so it can nose dive into the ground all by its lonesome without unwilling passengers.
Let it collapse. Then it will be ‘fixed’.......................
It will sink just as the Titanic sunk. the only question is how many Dems will be holding on to the railings once obamacare finally slips below the surface.
Even the Left would admit that O’Care is very bad on every level privately but would NEVER say Cruz was right even though he is.
ObamaCare is the Democrat’s Humpdy Dumpty.
This line shows exactly why (one reason anyway) a full repeal will never happen. The GOP agrees on very little (except some ‘no’ votes) and certainly not a replacement.
Personally I liked Bachman’s idea this week as it is promising as far as convincing Americans to go along, unlike most of the others.
Let the exchanges go through but the mandates only apply to them, not to any policies outside of exchanges. Then let them all compete for the customers including uninsured.
And while a toxic idea here now, all Americans need to be insured for emergency room visits (or hold a bond) that are mandated by congress and Reagan rather than just stiffing hospitals as many do now. No that never worked.
…immigration reform (anyone?)0bamacare is working as planned. He will simply keep on pushing, ignore any compromise with the GOP, and rule by Executive Order.
Who is going to stop him?
Exactly. And NRO was no better than John McQueeg in their reaction to Senator Cruz when he was fighting the good fight.
Even if the end result of the effort was blocked by Dingy Harry and the 0 in the WH, it did not make the fight not worth having.
The vindication is very very sweet.
.....Cancel Obamacare : The Only True Fix.....
RIGHT!!!!
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