Tag Archives: HHS

Insurance Industry Campaigns To Keep Unlawful ObamaCare Cash

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When is a gov­ern­ment pro­gram not a gov­ern­ment program?

When the insur­ance indus­try says it isn’t.

In its effort to keep bil­lions in unlaw­ful Oba­macare cor­po­rate sub­si­dies flow­ing, the indus­try is try­ing to per­suade Con­gress that it receives no fed­er­al funds through the fed­er­al “rein­sur­ance” pro­gram. Good luck with that.  Read more.

Walls Closing In On Obamacare Lawlessness

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Congress and the courts are losing patience with the government's lawless implementation of Obamacare, which involves unlawful expenditures to subsidize insurance companies. [Credit:forbes.com]

Con­gress and the courts are los­ing patience with the gov­ern­men­t’s law­less imple­men­ta­tion of Oba­macare, which involves the diver­sion of bil­lions in tax­pay­er dol­lars from Trea­sury to insur­ers. [Credit:forbes.com]

The Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion is unlaw­ful­ly divert­ing bil­lions of dol­lars from tax­pay­ers to insur­ance com­pa­nies that sell Oba­macare policies.

That is the con­clu­sion reached in a legal opin­ion let­ter writ­ten to the Galen Insti­tute by for­mer Ambas­sador and White House Coun­sel Boy­den Gray. Read more on Forbes.com.

Obamacare’s Tax-Subsidized Failure

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Here’s some bad news for the insur­ance indus­try: Unex­pect­ed­ly gen­er­ous cor­po­rate sub­si­dies didn’t save com­pa­nies sell­ing Oba­macare poli­cies from bleed­ing red ink.

The worse news: Those sub­si­dies are set to expire in 2017, mean­ing that insur­ers will have to make ends meet with­out bil­lions in hand­outs.  Read more at Nation­al Review Online.

You can also read the Mer­ca­tus Cen­ter study that Bri­an Blase, Ed Haislmaier and I wrote here.

Will HHS Get Away With A $3.5 Billion Heist?

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CMS administrator Andy Slavitt has a $3.5 billion problem. Will Congress and presidential candidates talk about it? [Credit:nextgov]

CMS admin­is­tra­tor Andy Slavitt is plan­ning to short the U.S. Trea­sury $3.5 bil­lion. Will Con­gress and pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates talk about it? [Credit:nextgov]

The Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices (HHS) announced Fri­day night that it was in the process of short­ing the U.S. Trea­sury $3.5 billion.

Well, they didn’t exact­ly announce it.  You had to read between the lines. Con­tin­ue read­ing →

What We Know And Don’t Know About Obamacare, Part II

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More than five years after its enactment there still are many questions about whether Obamacare is working. Here are four of them.

More than five years after its enact­ment there still are many ques­tions about whether Oba­macare is work­ing. Here are four of them.

My pre­vi­ous post dis­cussed what we know about Oba­macare as its third open enroll­ment sea­son begins.  Here are four major ques­tions about the future of Oba­macare that remain unanswered.

Can insur­ance com­pa­nies make mon­ey in the exchanges with­out cor­po­rate wel­fare? Oba­macare con­tains some very expen­sive sweet­en­ers to entice insur­ance com­pa­nies to sell through the exchanges. These include risk cor­ri­dor pay­ments and $20 bil­lion over three years in inapt­ly named “rein­sur­ance” pay­ments, mon­ey gov­ern­ment takes from par­tic­i­pants in group health plans and gives to insur­ers that par­tic­i­pate in the exchanges. Both are sched­uled to end in 2017.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

What We Know And Don’t Know About Obamacare, Part I

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Obamacare's third open enrollment season launched yesterday. Here are six things we know about the program. (Tomorrow: four things we still don't know.) Credit:americanlegislator.org

Oba­macare’s third open enroll­ment sea­son launched yes­ter­day. Here are six things we know about the pro­gram. (Tomor­row: four things we still don’t know.) Credit:americanlegislator.org

Obamacare’s third open enroll­ment sea­son has kicked off, begin­ning the next chap­ter in its tur­bu­lent his­to­ry.  Today’s post dis­cuss­es what we know about Oba­macare.  Tomorrow’s will dis­cuss what we still don’t know.

What We Know

Few­er peo­ple are unin­sured. How many few­er is a mat­ter of dis­pute, but the improve­ment is sub­stan­tial by any mea­sure.  HHS Sec­re­tary Sylvia Bur­well cred­its Oba­macare with reduc­ing the num­ber of unin­sured peo­ple by 17.6 mil­lion since 2010.   And though you’ll like­ly hear this num­ber repeat­ed (and often round­ed up to 18 mil­lion), it’s almost cer­tain­ly exag­ger­at­ed.   Con­tin­ue read­ing →