OPINION:
Obamacare has been unpopular from the time it became law. Now President Obama’s health-care scam has gone rogue, and maybe illegal. That’s the conclusion of analysts both inside and outside of the federal government. They say the Obama administration is diverting taxpayer funds to save the president’s scheme from collapse, if only until after he leaves office. This is a clear indication that Congress must prepare a replacement for Obamacare that rests on the free market.
The most recent evidence that the so-called Affordable Care Act, the official name of Obamacare, is gaming the system comes from C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel. He says the administration is diverting money meant for the U.S. Treasury to pay insurance companies hemorrhaging money under the plan. Mr. Gray says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, has unlawfully redirected $3.5 billion in premiums to insurance companies to help them cover ill policyholders with large medical bills: “The allocation scheme prioritizing payments to reinsurance-eligible issuers over payments to Treasury violates the [terms of the act],” he says.
The misuse of funds has been orchestrated as part of the Transitional Reinsurance Program, which was established to compensate insurance companies that agreed to sell policies in compliance with the Obamacare coverage mandates. Policyholders paid a tax of $63 to fund the program in 2014, $44 in 2015 and will pay $27 this year. In addition to paying off insurers, the Affordable Care Act, as enacted by Congress, requires the program to contribute $5 billion to the U.S. Treasury. But when the amount collected was insufficient to do both, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chose to make the insurance companies whole, and stiff the taxpayers. The Obamacare insurers received $15.6 billion of $16 billion they were owed, and the amount the Treasury will receive is expected to be $495 million of $4 billion.
The former White House counsel’s opinion, written at the request of the Galen Institute, a free-market health-care policy think tank, draws a conclusion similar to the one reached by the Congressional Research Service in February. In a memorandum to several House committees, the Congressional Research Service said that “insofar as [the government’s] interpretation allows the entire contribution of an issuer to be used only for reinsurance payments, such that no part of it is used for the U.S. Treasury contribution, then that would appear to be in conflict with the plain text of [the statute].” Andrew Slavitt, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told House members at an April 15 hearing, “We believe we have the statutory authority” to pay insurance companies rather than the Treasury.
Words have meaning, and in Barack Obama’s Washington, words often have several meanings, sometimes conflicting. Somewhere in the record there’s probably an exegesis of Obamacare’s 20,000-odd pages contending that the health care law’s handlers may, in effect, rob Peter to pay Paul for the good of the nation or, at least, for the good of Barack Obama. It’s probably in the same section with Mr. Obama’s famous declaration that “If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan.” Rationales that fail to match reality explain why support for Obamacare has never polled higher than 44 percent. Freeing health care from government control, and enabling competition to deliver both medical excellence and good value is the way to end dodgy insurance schemes that require taxpayer cash to stay afloat.
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