From Investors Business Daily

Broken Pledge: An early draft of regulations written for the health care overhaul estimates that more than half of U.S. workers will see their medical insurance change. Funny, that’s not the promise we remember.

Late last week, reports surfaced that an 83-page White House document had been leaked from the White House. If the rules included in this draft are promulgated, the health plans of 51% of workers will be subject to change within three years.

In the new system, companies that modify employee coverage after Jan. 1, 2014, will lose their “grandfather” status and be forced to comply with ObamaCare rules. This means they will have no choice but to buy plans that will cost more because the law says they must include expanded coverage.

Changes in plans that would cause a company to lose its grandfather status can be as modest as a small shift in the co-payment amount or in the employees’ contribution to the coverage. By merely asking workers to share a bit more of the burden, companies will have to buy new plans.

Many Americans are likely to find the added coverage of the new plans unnecessary for their needs and the extra costs taxing to household budgets. How many who liked their plans will have new ones forced on them by a bureaucracy that’s not equipped to make decisions for people it doesn’t know?

According to the midrange estimate cited in the White House document, small businesses will be hit hardest. Two-thirds of them “will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013″ while 45% of large employer plans will be affected.

“In the worst-case scenario,” reported IBD’s Sean Higgins and David Hogberg on Monday, “69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law.”

Are the bureaucrats writing these regulations unfamiliar with the promise President Obama made repeatedly last year: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”?

Did they know that Linda Douglass, the White House fixer who said it was her job to “keep track of all the disinformation out there about health insurance reform,” assured the public that Obama was sincere when he said that? The answer to both is an emphatic yes.

So why write regulations that break a presidential promise? Because that promise was never meant to be kept. Like all the misrepresentations about cost, it was meant to mislead the public and generate support for, or at least blunt opposition to, a government takeover of the health care sector.

From Investors Business Daily

Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare.

From the Washington Examiner

By Senator Tom Coburn — President Obama and his allies kicked off an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized political campaign this week to sell to the public a legislative program that has already been signed into law.

The obvious coordination between the White House and its allies outside government who are running a $125 million campaign raises troubling questions. But, first, I’ll address the substance of what the president talked about, and ignored.

On Tuesday, the president trumpeted a provision in his plan that will give seniors a $250 rebate check if they reach the Medicare prescription drug benefit “doughnut hole” coverage gap in 2010. The president also spent a great deal of time repeating his talking points from last year’s health care debate. He claimed his plan would reduce the deficit and claimed the arguments of his critics were not “anchored in reality.”

As a practicing physician with more than 25 years of experience, and as a former business owner in the health care sector, I’d suggest this new PR campaign is grounded in politics rather than reality. The so-called experts behind this effort appear to be political hacks and career politicians who have zero real-world experience in the health care sector.

First, the president’s claims about the supposed benefits of a $250 rebate check for seniors are wildly out of proportion to both the reality of Medicare and his own program. Less than 10 percent of seniors enrolled in Medicare will receive a rebate check.

On the other hand, a greater percentage of seniors enrolled in Medicare – the 25 percent participating in Medicare Advantage – will see their benefits cut because the White House ultimately wants to kill the program for ideological reasons. Seniors are about to learn that if they like their plan, they can’t keep it. Medicare Advantage providers are already planning on cutting benefits and raising fees because of the law.

The president’s interest in the doughnut hole also suggests the PR campaign is willfully overlooking and exacerbating a much greater threat – Medicare’s $38 trillion unfunded liabilities. Our real national challenge is not the doughnut hole but our financial black hole of debt that is threatening to swallow not only Medicare but our entire economy.

During the most recent meeting of the president’s debt commission two esteemed economists, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard and Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, declared that our debt is already at 90 percent of our GDP, which they view as a tipping point at which economic growth slows considerably.

Borrowing from future generations and foreign governments to pay for rebate checks represents the kind of perverse short-term decision making that has brought our nation to the edge of a fiscal black hole. At best, throwing rebate checks at Medicare is an exercise in futility that will postpone real reform.

The president made a number of other claims that weren’t anchored in reality, such as his claim that his plan will reduce the deficit. When real-world accounting is applied to health care spending and necessary expenses like the doctor fix are included, all of the so-called savings evaporate.

Even the Congressional Budget Office, which the White House sites as its authoritative source, has contradicted the White House. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf recently said, “The rising costs of health care will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond … In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.”

Yet, perhaps the most important reality check in this debate is to acknowledge the obvious. This new PR campaign has nothing to do with improving the health of Americans and everything to do with improving the job security of politicians who voted for this bill against the wishes of their constituents. Turning federal agencies into de facto direct mail and political advertising branches of the Democratic political establishment will refill the swamp and remind voters why they loath Washington.

The American people have not only made up their minds about this bill, they are fatigued with this debate and the condescension of the Washington establishment who considers their objections to be based on fear, scare tactics and hysteria.

The American people have studied this law more intently the politicians and unelected staff who wrote it. They have made decisions based on information, not misinformation. The campaign’s rhetoric of victimization is not a comeback at Republicans but an insult to the millions of Americans who did their homework and made good faith, informed judgments about a bill that fixed the wrong problem.

The reality is Congress and the White House had a chance to do something bold and bipartisan to fix the real problem, and they blew it. This law represents a failure of content, not communication. Sooner or later, a nation that aspires to a future beyond a rendezvous with debt will insist that this misguided law be repealed and replaced.

From Health Care News

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)—the nation’s largest small-business advocacy organization—has joined the ranks of twenty state attorneys general in a lawsuit attacking the constitutionality of President Obama’s new healthcare law.

The May 14 announcement came on the heels of repeated calls from NFIB members nationwide to challenge Obamacare in court, according to Elizabeth Milito, senior executive counsel for the NFIB Small Business Legal Center in Washington, DC. Milito said the lawsuit charges the new healthcare law directly undermines the organization’s mission, which is to promote and protect the rights of small business owners to “own, operate, and grow their business.”

“NFIB worked diligently throughout the legislative process to try to shape and improve the healthcare bill as it was being debated,” Milito said. “When we felt the legislation had reached a point that was unacceptable to our members and us, we were vehemently opposed to the bill and worked to defeat it.”

 

‘This Unconstitutional Law’

There are many provisions in what she called “this unconstitutional law” that will devastate small business, Milito said, noting the lawsuit’s two main legal claims relate to the “unconstitutionality” of the individual mandate.

“We do not believe the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate inactivity,” Milito said. “Requiring every individual to purchase health insurance or face a fine is an unprecedented and unconstitutional act of Congress. Requiring NFIB members to obtain and maintain health coverage deprives our members of their liberty and property interests without the due process of law.”

John Graham, director of health care studies at the California-based Pacific Research Institute, agrees.

“By allowing the federal government to define ‘coverage’, Obamacare reduces individuals’ and businesses’ freedom to decide what they want in a health-insurance policy and how much of their health dollars they’d prefer to spend on medical care, which is under their own control,” Graham said.

Read the rest of the article

From Washington Examiner