Obama Dismantles Obamacare: Insurers Get Cost Cap Waivers
August 13, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments
The perverse irony of the whole thing is that while the Republicans have done nothing to stop Obamacare, Obama is busily dismantling his own program by postponing important pieces of it for political reasons.
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Obamacare was enough of a mess in its complete form. Then Obama decided to avoid some of the backlash by postponing pieces of it and then he had to try and balance the resulting imbalance by postponing more pieces of it.
The whole thing is manifestly illegal. He has no right to do it and he has admitted as much, claiming that he is acting on behalf of some nebulous public interest by crumpling and tearing out pieces of Obamacare in the hopes of doing better in the midterm elections and avoiding the public anger coming his way.
Instead all that Obama has done is make Obamacare more unstable. Each time he takes out a piece that disadvantages one interest, he is besieged by demands for exemptions from the interests who are hurt by it.
Obamacare messily hurt everyone from insurers to unions to consumers to employers, but tried to turn those pains into some sort of balance. Now the balance is undone and Obama is just tossing things out, granting waivers and exemptions, to try and keep the whole thing from turning over.
In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.
The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.
The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed. When asked in recent days about the language — which appeared as an answer to one of 137 “frequently asked questions about Affordable Care Act implementation” — department officials confirmed the policy.
Under the policy, many group health plans will be able to maintain separate out-of-pocket limits for benefits in 2014. As a result, a consumer may be required to pay $6,350 for doctors’ services and hospital care, and an additional $6,350 for prescription drugs under a plan administered by a pharmacy benefit manager.
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All this looks like short term bandaging. It’s policy triage. A game of health care whack-a-mole that will eventually wreck the Obamacare coalition.
But it’s clear that Obama doesn’t really care. He’s sacrificing the long term viability of Obamacare (to the extent that it ever had one) in order to continue ramming the rest of his programs through the system while leaving it to someone else to fix his mess.
And that best sums up who Obama is and how he has run things. He is the man with the big ideas. Don’t ask him to clean up after his big ideas have made a mess. He’s too busy moving on to the next big idea.
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