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House conservatives are hinting at support for a temporary extension of Obama-Care subsidies if the Supreme Court cripples the law, even as they set up a working group to develop their own plan. The high court is set to rule later this month in the case of King v. Burwell, which could invalidate subsidies for millions of people in at least 34 states using the federally run marketplace. Republicans say they need to be ready to address people losing their coverage, but have yet to coalesce around a plan. Now another proposal is in the works. Members of the conservative...

House conservatives are hinting at support for a temporary extension of Obama-Care subsidies if the Supreme Court cripples the law, even as they set up a working group to develop their own plan. The high court is set to rule later this month in the case of King v. Burwell, which could invalidate subsidies for millions of people in at least 34 states using the federally run marketplace. Republicans say they need to be ready to address people losing their coverage, but have yet to coalesce around a plan.

What Marketplace?:: By: Larry Walker II ::“Putting thoughts into words is vastly different from putting truth into words. For words are not truth. As ardently as writers sort and select and polish their words, at the end of the day they are still words. They are not, in themselves, truth...” ~ Lionel FisherThe act of naming the federal government’s unlawfully subsidized website an “Exchange” or “Health Insurance Marketplace” doesn’t make it one. In a true marketplace, when a product or service is inadequate new competitors are allowed to step in and offer something better. But free competition is stifled when...

Greta:Off the Record By the end of June, the US Supreme Court could make a ruling that impacts 8 million people on ObamaCare - and the Obama administration has no contingency plan

One fellow senator calls David Vitter’s years-long crusade to scrap health care subsidies for lawmakers and their staffers “disingenuous.” Another says it’s obviously being done “for political purposes.” “I just don’t think he’s made a lot of progress on this issue,” a third senator says. And those are just fellow Republicans talking. Within the chummy confines of the U.S. Senate, Vitter has emerged as one of the most disliked members. The second-term senator’s effort to kill the federal health care contribution, worth several thousand dollars to lawmakers and their staffers, is a big part of it.

Health-care experts call it D.C. insiderism at its worst. The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from Obamacare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies. The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the...

Health Reform: Providing still more evidence of how ObamaCare is "working," most enrollees learned this year that they had to pay back a huge chunk of their insurance subsidies. So much for "affordability."

Most filers who received government subsidies to buy Obamacare plans had to pay money back to the IRS this year, according to an H&R Block analysis released Monday that looks at the health law’s first full tax season. The tax-prep giant studied its own massive customer base and concluded that two-thirds of its filers who got subsidies from Obamacare were overpaid during the course of the year, and owed money back to the IRS on the April 15 deadline. They repaid $729 on average, cutting the average refund by about a third.

WASHINGTON — The Senate's top five Republican leaders have cosponsored legislation to extend until 2017 the Obamacare insurance subsidies that may be struck down by the Supreme Court this summer. The legislation, offered by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of the most politically vulnerable Senate incumbents in 2016, would maintain the federal HealthCare.gov subsidies at stake in King v. Burwell through the end of August 2017. The bill was unveiled this week with 29 other cosponsors, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his four top deputies, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roy...

Two reports released in the past week demonstrate a potential bifurcation in state insurance exchanges: The insurance marketplaces appear to be attracting a disproportionate share of low-income individuals who qualify for generous federal subsidies, while middle- and higher-income filers have generally eschewed the exchanges. The overall picture presented is one of a bifurcated, or even trifurcated, system of health insurance. Individuals who qualify for very rich insurance subsidies or Medicaid have signed up for coverage, while those who qualify for small or no subsidies have not. It raises two obvious questions: Whether and how the exchanges can succeed long-term with...

Experts have long worried that millions of Obamacare recipients will file their taxes this year and and get hit with an unexpected tax bill. The reason? They possibly underestimated their income for the year and wound up pocketing a bigger health care tax subsidy than they should have. Now we have a better idea of just how expensive that bill could be. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that more than half of U.S. households eligible for health insurance subsidies in 2014 will wind up having to pay back $794 to the government. The way the health law works now, Obamacare...

President Obama has talked a lot in recent months about how health care inflation has moderated in recent years, and he always manages to credit ObamaCare for the result. But there is rampant inflation in one part of the health care system, and ironically enough it involves ObamaCare premiums.

Nearly nine in 10 people who signed up for healthcare from the federal government this year qualify for subsidies, the Obama administration announced Tuesday. A total of 7.7 million people would receive subsidies this year in the roughly three-dozen states using HealthCare.gov – a figure that has held steady since ObamaCare's first year. The Obama administration touted the figure Tuesday to show that the vast majority of people in states using the federal exchange rely on subsidies as the Supreme Court weighs a case that could eliminate them. A total of 34 states using HealthCare.gov could lose subsidies if the...

Roberta and Curtis Campbell typically look forward to tax time. Most years, they receive a refund – a little extra cash to pay off credit card bills. But this year the California couple got a shock: According to their tax preparer, they owe the IRS more than $6,000. That’s the money the Campbells received from the federal government last year to make their Obamacare health coverage more affordable. Roberta, unemployed when she signed up for the plan, got a job halfway through the year and Curtis found full-time work. The couple’s total yearly income became too high to qualify for...

Employer mandates and penalties exist only in states with ACA subsidies, which are only available through state-based exchanges. Most individuals will also be exempt from the mandate and penalties because there's no "affordable" (subsidized) coverage.

The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act only offers premium subsidies, as the statute says, “through an Exchange established by the State.” Members of Congress who voted for the PPACA – most recently Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and former Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) – now swear it was never their intent to condition Exchange subsidies on state cooperation. Ironically, Casey’s and Nelson’s decision to wade into the King debate demonstrates why, when a statute is clear, courts traditionally assign no weight to what members of Congress claim they intended a law to say...

If You Received a Higher Obamacare Subsidy Than You Were Eligible For, You Don’t Have to Pay It Back This Year **SNIP** However, the IRS will waive the 2014 late payment penalty for those who received an excessive premium tax credit. The IRS has now granted these recipients of excessive federal benefits a one-year holiday. Even though they clearly owe the overpayment for 2014, they will effectively not have to, and no doubt won’t, pay the money back because they will not face any penalty if they do not pay it immediately. If the Obama administration delays the payment again,...

Did you know that the future of Obamacare relies on the credibilty of former Senator Ben "Cornhusker Kickback" Nelson? Yes, the Huffington Post and other liberal media outlets seem to think that what Nelson tells us was going on in his mind at the time that Obamacare passed is crucial to the outcome of the King vs Burwell case at the Supreme Court. Such is the desperate premise of Jonathan Cohn, Senior National Correspondent of the Huffington Post and other liberals looking for that lifeline out of the dilemma that the Obmacare law specifically says that only state based exchanges...

Remember the issue in Halbig? There’s a section in the ObamaCare statute that says federal subsidies to pay premiums are available to anyone who buys their insurance through “an Exchange established by the State.” But that phrase is vaguely worded. Is the federal ObamaCare exchange, Healthcare.gov, an exchange established by the state? Or was the idea that subsidies should apply only to exchanges created by the individual states, as an economic incentive to encourage state governments to create their own insurance marketplaces? You know what Jonathan Gruber thinks, or thought, about that. By this summer, we’ll know what John...

Paying Your Fair Share:: By: Larry Walker II ::In Tax Simplification, Part II, I expounded on a 2010 Annual Report to Congress, in which National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson focused on the need for tax reform as the No. 1 priority in tax administration. In particular, she focused on the problem of delivering social benefits through the tax system, which complicates the mission of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), resulting in a dual mission of welfare administration as well as revenue collection. But instead of taking heed, the federal government doubled down, adding a new health care excise tax...