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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (78678)	3/26/2010 4:47:43 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Health-Care Time Bombs If the past few days are any indication, activists will find plenty in the health-care bill to keep them motivated for the next eight months. Stephen Spruiell National Review Online I recently asked Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, how grassroots conservative activists will be able to maintain their intensity now that the health-care bill has been signed into law. “It’s going to be just like the stimulus,” he answered. “People are going to start finding out what’s in this bill, and all of its nasty surprises are going to go off like a series of time bombs between now and November.” Pass it and find out what’s in it — just like Nancy Pelosi said. That process has already begun. The day after the health-care bill passed, it was reported that the committee staffers who wrote the bill would be exempt from provisions requiring their bosses to obtain insurance through the exchanges the bill sets up. Now another provision is blowing up in the Democrats’ faces: a tax change that exposes companies such as Caterpillar, John Deere, and Verizon to hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs and may lead some of them to drop prescription-drug coverage for retirees. The provision did not attract much attention during the larger debate over the health-care bill, but now corporate memos are starting to leak in which employees are told to expect changes to their health-care plans as a result of the legislation. The tax change affects a subsidy that was designed to help employers continue offering prescription-drug plans for retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare Part D. The Democrats’ health-care bill would make the subsidy “less valuable to employers, like Verizon” — according to an internal Verizon memo obtained by National Review Online — “and as a result, may have significant implications for both retirees and employers.” In other words, Verizon and other employers will probably drop their retiree prescription-drug coverage. After all, why pay for something if the government is offering to pick up the tab? If we do see a large number of employers eliminate prescription-drug coverage from their retiree benefit packages, it will mean two things. First, it will illustrate once again the emptiness of Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it. Retirees whose companies cut their prescription-drug plans will have to switch to Medicare Part D. According to a study put out by the American Benefits Council, “Employer plans generally provide much better protection than the standard Medicare PDP benefit, but these employers are likely to drop their plans in favor of commercial PDP plans because of the new law’s impact on earnings.” Second, it reveals yet another budgetary gimmick in a bill full of them. The Congressional Budget Office, under instructions from the Democrats, scored the tax change as adding $5.4 billion in revenue to the bill. If Verizon and others drop their retiree drug plans, then not only won’t that revenue materialize, but Medicare Part D outlays can be expected to go up substantially: According to a report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, it costs the government twice as much to provide coverage under Medicare Part D than to subsidize a private plan. A spokesman for the American Benefits Council, which started sounding the alarms on this issue months ago, tells me the group tried to get CBO to score the provision more accurately, but that “CBO can only score what’s in front of them, and we couldn’t get them to account for retirees that would be added to Part D.” Employers dropping their plans could not only erase the $5.4 billion in revenue scored for the proposal, but end up adding billions more to the cost of the bill. The bump that Obama and the Democrats hoped to receive from the health-care bill’s passage has been barely noticeable; Rasmussen is already out with a poll in which 55 percent of respondents favor repealing the health-care bill. A lawsuit filed by 13 state attorneys general promises to pull the unpopular individual mandate into the spotlight. A provision purporting to immediately prohibit insurance companies from excluding children with preexisting conditions does not appear to work as intended. And the bill’s defenders appear terrified to admit in public that the agency tasked with enforcing the bill’s mandatory-coverage provisions will be the Internal Revenue Service. In other words, the time bombs have already started to go off, and with 2,000-plus pages to work with, activists are sure to find plenty to keep them motivated for the next eight months. — Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter. .