Tag Archives: obamacare

Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

Mother Jones

From Politico:

Jeb Bush is stepping down from the board of a health care company that has reportedly profited from Obamacare, a move that comes as the Republican explores a run for the presidency.

According to various media reports, Tenet backed President Barack Obama’s health reform act and has seen its revenues rise from it. Bush’s involvement with Tenet could give ammunition to conservatives in the GOP who view him as too moderate — particularly those who despise the Affordable Care Act.

I can’t help but get a chuckle out of this. In normal times, Bush would have left Tenet because it’s a big, soulless corporation that’s paid fines for Medicare fraud and been criticized for dodgy tax practices at the same time it was beefing up executive pay. A man of the people who aspires to the Oval Office can’t afford to be associated with this kind of dirty money.

But no. At least if Politico is to be believed, this isn’t really an issue in the GOP primary. What is an issue is that Tenet might have profited from Obamacare, which in turn means that Jeb may have profited from Obamacare. Even if it’s a double bank shot, that’s dirty money in tea party land.

Of course, Jeb also has some of the more conventional plutocratic image problems:

Soon after his tenure as governor ended, Bush became an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays….In May 2013, Bush set up Britton Hill Holdings and dove into the private equity business….Bush’s first fund invested in Inflection Energy….His next one, BH Logistics, raised $26 million this spring from investors including China’s HNA Group….Bush’s newest fund, U.K.-based BH Global ­Aviation, is his largest and most complicated. It deepens his financial ties to China and Hainan….“In many deals, the U.K. ­effectively serves the same function as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda,” Needham says. “It’s like a tax haven, except it’s the U.K.”

Plus there’s the fact that Jeb stayed on as an advisor to Barclay’s for years after it was fined for illegally trading with various blacklisted countries, notably including Cuba and Iran. If being on the board of a company that profited from Obamacare is a problem, surely this is at least equally bad. The attack ads write themselves, don’t they?

Anyway, apparently Jeb is now in cleanup mode:

“These are all growth investments that the governor has worked on,” said Bush’s spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell….Campbell said the 61-year-old former governor is “reviewing all his engagements and his business commitments” now that he’s begun to focus on a potential race. “That’s a natural next step,” she said.

Indeed it is. On the other hand, Mitt Romney severed most of his ties with Bain Capital a full decade before he ran for president, and just look at how much good that did him. Jeb probably isn’t out of the woods yet.

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Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

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Could Immigration Sink Obamacare at the Supreme Court?

Mother Jones

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David Savage writes today that President Obama’s executive order on immigration could have an unintended consequence: convincing Chief Justice John Roberts that Obama really is riding roughshod over the rule of law and needs to be reined in. And perhaps the latest challenge to Obamacare is just the place to start:

Two years ago, the chief justice surprised many by joining liberals on the court to uphold the constitutionality of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And he probably holds the deciding vote in a second legal challenge to the healthcare law — one that seeks to eliminate government insurance subsidies to low- and middle-income enrollees in two-thirds of the nation.

But Roberts, an appointee of President George W. Bush, has shown an increasing skepticism toward what conservatives call Obama’s tendency to overreach….The question now is whether the president’s immigration action will influence the thinking of the justices, and particularly of Roberts, as they consider in the upcoming healthcare case whether the president exceeded his authority.

….Critics are appealing to Roberts and the court’s conservatives, arguing the president and his advisors have no power to unilaterally change a law passed by Congress. Their argument echoes the criticism voiced over Obama’s immigration directive, accusing the president of trying to fix a broken system by acting on his own rather than waiting for Congress.

Experts say that legally the healthcare case is a close call. If so, the outcome may turn on whether the justices are inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, or whether they believe it’s time to rein him in.

Granted, Savage is just speculating here. He really has no evidence for this at all and quotes nobody aside from a single legal expert from the Cato Institute. Still, you have to assume that perhaps Savage has been hearing rumors that prompted him to write this. And it certainly fits into speculation that Roberts may be hunting around for an excuse to atone for his apostasy two years ago when he upheld Obamacare in the first place.

It’s kind of unnerving to even suspect that Supreme Court justices might really think this way. But it’s hardly inconceivable. The law itself, along with the real-world consequences of the court’s actions, don’t seem to occupy a large share of the justices’ minds these days. These are becoming bleak times in Supreme Court land.

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Could Immigration Sink Obamacare at the Supreme Court?

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Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Challenge to Obamacare

Mother Jones

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It looks like the Halbig challenge to Obamacare is a go:

The justices on Friday say they will decide whether the law authorizes subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income people afford their health insurance premiums. A federal appeals court upheld Internal Revenue Service regulations that allow health-insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for consumers in all 50 states. Opponents argue that most of the subsidies are illegal.

In case it’s slipped your mind, this is the case that hinges on whether a typo in one sentence of the Affordable Care Act should wipe out health care subsidies in every state that uses the federal exchange. If the challengers win, subsidies will be available only in states that run their own exchanges.

Given the facts of the case, I’d normally say the whole thing is laughable. The intent of the law is, and always has been, crystal clear. But the current Supreme Court really doesn’t seem to care much about laughable. If they want to cripple Obamacare, they’ll do it. The shoddiness of the argument doesn’t much matter to them.

So this is going to be a nail-biter. If it goes the wrong way, 6 million people or more will lose access to affordable health care—and half the country will cheer giddily about it. Because there’s just nothing more satisfying than denying decent health care to millions of your fellow citizens.

UPDATE: Although this challenge is the same as the one in Halbig, the actual case the Supreme Court agreed to hear is King v. Burwell. Sprry for the mistake.

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Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Challenge to Obamacare

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Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

Mother Jones

Since the 2010 midterm elections, Republican-controlled legislatures in 21 states have made it harder to vote, enacting restrictions on early voting, ending same-day registration, and requiring government-issued ID at the polls. Many of these measures have been found to reduce turnout among poorer and minority voters.

Meanwhile, the Affordable Care Act provided President Barack Obama with a tool that could have helped counter the effect of the new laws restricting voting and made it easier for non-white voters to get to the polls. But he decided not to use it.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as the Motor Voter law, requires that departments of motor vehicles and other public assistance agencies provide voter registration services. According to HHS, the health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act count as public assistance agencies under the statute. That means that the assistants who walk uninsured Americans through the exchange’s insurance sign-up process should also have to offer to guide applicants through the voter registration process. While HHS can’t directly control compliance at the state-run health exchanges, the agency can ensure that assistants who help the uninsured sign up for coverage on the federal exchange—called navigators—provide voters with step-by-step guidance on registering to vote. But that hasn’t been happening.

Voting rights advocates have been pressuring HHS for more than a year to reverse course and make sure navigators fully comply with the Motor Voter law. But since a backlash last year by Republicans, the administration has demurred. So the more than 5.4 million uninsured Americans who have signed up for insurance at healthcare.gov since October 1, 2013 have not received extra assistance in registering to vote. Thirty-seven percent of the enrollees who chose to report their ethnicity were minorities.

Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Health Care Reform and American Politics, told me earlier this year that the administration is “running from a political fight”:

GOP opposition to signing up new voters through the health insurance exchanges has been fierce. Right-wing talk show yeller Rush Limbaugh said in June that it shows “the purpose of Obamacare… It’s about building a permanent, undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority.” In March, Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee worried about how Obama-friendly “associations like the now-defunct ACORN”—such as FamiliesUSA and AARP that the administration will fund to help sign up the uninsured—would use applicants’ voting information. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) wrote a letter to HHS this past spring, charging that the health care law “does not give your Department an interest in whether individual Americans choose to vote,” and asking HHS to provide justification for including voter registration questions in health insurance applications.

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which Obama created last year to assess voting problems around the country, released a study in January calling for better enforcement of government agencies’ compliance with the Motor Voter law, noting that it was “the election statute most often ignored.”

While the federal exchange website provides a link to the federal voter registration website as part of the health insurance application process, advocates say the department has failed to ensure that navigators automatically offer people who need help with their insurance application aid with voter registration applications as well. “It’s likely that many thousands of citizens would have applied to register to vote if the administration had complied,” says Lisa Danetz, the legal director at the think-tank Demos. “And we know that once registered, people turn out to vote at a relatively good rate.”

It’s not too late for the administration to use Obamacare to help Americans register to vote. Another 10 million uninsured Americans are expected to obtain coverage through the Affordable Care Act in 2015, and more than 24 million a year are expected to sign up 2015 and 2016.

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Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

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Happy Halloween From Mitch McConnell and Friends

Mother Jones

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Republican lawmakers have been getting in the holiday spirit today by reminding people about their longstanding beef with Obamacare. Senate Republicans put out a list of articles on their website under the headlines “Spooked by higher costs” and “All tricks, no treats”.

Oh, there’s also a video floating around from the Republican-controlled House Financial Services committee. You can watch it below. It’s really, really not scary:

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Happy Halloween From Mitch McConnell and Friends

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Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

Mother Jones

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When Obamacare compelled Hobby Lobby to buy employee health insurance plans that covered emergency contraception, the Green family, who own the national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. So what happened when Mother Jones reported that Hobby Lobby contributed millions of dollars to employee retirement plans with stock in companies that make emergency contraception?

According to Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, nothing.

That revelation came on Friday, when MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon published parts of an interview with Green, whose Supreme Court case resulted in the partial dismantling of Obamacare’s contraception mandate.

Carmon asked Green for his response to the Mother Jones report, which noted that Hobby Lobby’s employee retirement plans had stock holdings in companies manufacturing the very drugs and devices at the center of the Supreme Court case: PlanB, Ella, and two types of intrauterine devices. Green doesn’t often speak to the press, so it was the first time he had publicly responded to this information since I first reported it in early April.

In the interview with Carmon, Green dismissed the idea that it mattered where his employee’s 401(k) plans had indirect investments, telling her it was “several steps removed.”

Of course, the Greens were also several steps removed from any emergency contraception Hobby Lobby’s female employees may or may not have obtained through the company’s insurance plan. And as I pointed out in April, divestment from certain companies does matter to many Christian business owners, who have fueled a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen for morally objectionable stocks.

But Green indicates he wasn’t troubled enough by Mother Jones‘ report to investigate for himself or make any changes to Hobby Lobby’s employee retirement plan:

Whether they do or not invest in these drugs and devices, I couldn’t confirm or deny it. I don’t know if it’s even true. Of course, the other question I would ask is, do those companies also provide a lot of life-saving products that our employees are dependent on? I don’t know that either. But we’ve not made any changes.

Carmon also confronted Green with the overwhelming scientific evidence that using emergency contraception does not cause abortions. The Greens’ contention that emergency contraception was a form of abortion was key to their argument that Obamacare violated their free exercise of religion. Read Carmon’s whole story here.

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Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

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Obamacare Isn’t Perfect, But That’s No Reason to Give Up On It

Mother Jones

A few days ago I noted that health insurance companies were starting to price certain drugs at higher rates. Not just certain brands of drugs, but entire classes of drugs. This is being done in an apparent attempt to discourage patients with certain conditions from applying for insurance. Better to have some other insurance company pick up the cost of their expensive illness.

The reason this is happening is that Obamacare prohibits insurance companies from turning away customers with pre-existing conditions. So instead they need to find cleverer ways of making sure they’re someone else’s problem. David Henderson comments:

I predict that none of this will cause Kevin Drum to reconsider his pre-existing view that pricing for pre-existing conditions should be illegal.

Quite right. When it comes to Obamacare, there are two kinds of people. Henderson is the first kind. Whenever they hear about a problem, their invariable response is that this proves Obamacare is a hopeless mess and needs to be abandoned.

I’m the second kind. When I hear about a problem, my response is that we need to try to fix it. This is because I believe everyone should have access to decent health care at a reasonable price, and one way or another, we need to figure out how to provide it. We don’t give up just because it’s hard.

For what it’s worth, this particular problem is not something that’s taken any of us by surprise. Capitalism has a well-known capacity for motivating people to find clever ways to make money, and Obamacare supporters were all keenly aware that insurance companies would try to game the rules to maximize their profits. It was one of those things that required constant vigilance. Unfortunately, that never happened because it turned out that Republicans in Congress are so uncompromisingly opposed to Obamacare that they’ve prevented problems of any kind from being addressed, apparently in the hope that someday these problems will grow serious enough that the public will turn against the whole thing.

I guess you can decide for yourself if you consider that a praiseworthy response to a law you don’t like. I consider it loathsome myself. As for my pre-existing view about pre-existing conditions, that’s easily explained. I supported Obamacare as a good first step, but if I had my way the whole edifice would get torn down and replaced with a sensible national health care plan of the kind used by virtually every other civilized country on the planet. This is because health care of the kind that civilized people desire simply isn’t a good that can be efficiently provided by the free market, for reasons that are fairly obvious to anyone familiar with the literature. Nor is this just an academic point. Half a century of experience shows us that national health care works better on nearly every measure than our Rube Goldberg system. It’s not perfect, because nothing ever is. But it would be a big step forward.

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Obamacare Isn’t Perfect, But That’s No Reason to Give Up On It

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Opposition to Obamacare Suddenly Spiked in July

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest news on Obamacare from the Kaiser Family Foundation: it suddenly became a lot more unpopular in July:

So what happened? I can’t think of any substantive news that was anything but good, so I figure it must have been the Hobby Lobby decision. Did that turn people against Obamacare because they disapproved of the decision? Or because it reminded them that Obamacare pays for contraceptives? Or what? It’s a mystery, all the more so because every single demographic group showed the same spike. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all spiked negative. The rich and the poor spiked negative. The young and the old spiked negative. Ditto for men, women, whites, blacks, and Hispanics. It’s a little hard to figure out why the Hobby Lobby decision would have affected everyone the same way, but I can’t think of anything else that happened over the past month that could have caused this. It certainly wasn’t John Boehner’s lawsuit, and I very much doubt it was the Halbig decision.

So it’s a bit of a puzzler—though perhaps another chart explains it. It turns out that in conversations with family and friends, people have heard bad things about Obamacare more than good things by a margin of 27-6 percent. Likewise, they’ve seen more negative ads than positive by a margin of 19-7 percent. Roughly speaking, the forces opposed to Obamacare continue to be louder and more passionate than the forces that support it. I don’t think that’s actually changed much recently, so it probably doesn’t explain the sudden spike in July’s polling. But it might explain part of it.

Or, it might just be a statistical blip. Who knows?

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Opposition to Obamacare Suddenly Spiked in July

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent points us to an interesting new CNN poll about Obamacare. It asks the usual question about favoring or opposing the law, with the usual results. The basic question shows that Obamacare is unpopular by 40-59 percent, but when you add in the folks who “oppose” it only because they wish it were more liberal, it flips to 57-38 percent. In other words, if you confine yourself to garden variety conservative opposition to Obamacare, there’s not nearly as much as most polls suggest.

But then there’s another question: Has Obamacare helped you or your family personally? About 18 percent say yes. How about other families? Do you think Obamacare has helped anyone at all?

And guess what: A huge majority of Republicans and conservatives don’t think the law has helped anybody in this country.

Among all Americans, the poll finds that 18 percent say the law has made them and their families better off….Meanwhile, 44 percent say the law hasn’t helped anybody — a lot, but still a minority.

Crucially, an astonishing 72 percent of Republicans, and 64 percent of conservatives, say the law hasn’t helped anyone. (Only one percent of Republicans say the law has helped them!) By contrast, 57 percent of moderates say the law has helped them or others. Independents are evenly divided.

Perhaps these numbers among Republicans and conservatives only capture generalized antipathy towards the law. Or perhaps they reflect the belief that Obamacare can’t be helping anyone, even its beneficiaries, since dependency on Big Gummint can only be self-destructive. Either way, the findings again underscore the degree to which Republicans and conservatives inhabit a separate intellectual universe about it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little more dismayed by the news that even a large number of moderates and independents don’t think Obamacare has helped anyone. In a way, that’s more disturbing than the dumb—but predictable—knee-jerk Republican view that automatically produces a “no” whenever the question relates to something positive about Obamacare.

I guess the lesson is that liberals still haven’t done a very good job of promoting the benefits of Obamacare. Maybe that’s an impossible task since, after all, it’s not as if you can expect the media to run endless identical stories about local folks who finally got health insurance. Still, it’s a funny thing. If you passed a law that gave cars to 10 million poor Americans, pretty much everyone would agree that some people benefited from the program. But if you pass a law that gives health insurance to 10 million poor Americans, lots of people think it’s just a gigantic illusion that’s helped no one. What’s more, the number of people who believe this has increased since last year’s rollout.

Why? Certainly not because they think health insurance is worthless. Just try taking away theirs and you’ll find out exactly how non-worthless they consider it. Is it because they don’t think Obamacare policies are “real” health insurance? Or that all these people had health insurance before and the whole thing is just a scam? Or what? It’s a peculiar view that deserves a follow-up.

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

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John Boehner May Plan to Sue Obama Over Immigration

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Fine. Washington is consumed with trivia. So let’s talk trivia. A couple of weeks ago, when John Boehner announced he would sue President Obama over his refusal to “faithfully execute the laws of our country,” he listed several issues of particular concern:

On matters ranging from health care and energy to foreign policy and education, President Obama has repeatedly run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators, straining the boundaries of the solemn oath he took on Inauguration Day.

At the time, I wrote that I was surprised Boehner didn’t include immigration in this list, since this is one of the tea party’s biggest hot buttons. Was this just an oversight, or was it deliberate? Well, on Sunday, Boehner wrote an op-ed for CNN that said this:

The President’s habit of ignoring the law as written hurts our economy and jobs even more. Washington taxes and regulations always make it harder for private sector employers to meet payrolls, invest in new initiatives and create jobs — but how can those employers plan, invest and grow when the laws are changing on the President’s whim at any moment?

I don’t take the House legal action against the President lightly. We’ve passed legislation to address this problem (twice), but Senate Democrats, characteristically, have ignored it.

Wait a second. Which problem? What is Boehner talking about here? Brian Beutler, who apparently reads tea leaves better than I do, suspected Boehner may have been signaling an interest in immigration, so he called Boehner’s office to ask about that:

Boehner didn’t name the two bills in the article. But his staff confirms that they are the ENFORCE the Law Act and the Faithful Execution of the Law Act, both of which were drafted with an eye toward reversing DACA. The former would expedite House and Senate lawsuits against the executive branch for failing to enforce the law. The latter would compel government officials to justify instances of non-enforcement.

DACA is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals directive, which Obama signed in 2012. It instructs immigration officials to stop trying to deport children who arrived in the United States at an early age and are still undocumented.

This is potentially interesting. If you’d asked me, I would have said that Boehner’s best bet for the first couple of lawsuits would be Obama’s unilateral extension of both the employer mandate and the individual mandate in Obamacare. Politically it’s a winner because it’s Obamacare, and the tea party hates Obamacare. Legally, it’s a winner because Boehner has a pretty good case that Obama overstepped his authority.

But if Beutler is right, he may instead be targeting DACA, the so-called mini-DREAM Act. This is peculiar. True, the tea party hates it, so it has that going for it. However, it was a very popular action with the rest of the country. It was also, needless to say, very popular with Hispanics, a demographic group that Republicans covet. And legally, this puts Boehner on tricky ground too. Presidents have pretty broad authority to decide federal law-enforcement and prosecutorial priorities, so Obama will be able to make a pretty good case for himself. It’s not a slam-dunk case, and it’s certainly possible he could lose. But he sure seems to be on more solid ground than with the Obamacare mandate delays.

We’ll see. ENFORCE and FELA both cover more ground than just DACA, so we’re still in the dark about what exactly Boehner plans to sue Obama over. Mini-DREAM sure seems like a loser to me, though. Do Republicans really want to put a final nail in the coffin of their efforts to expand their reach in the Hispanic community? This would do it.

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John Boehner May Plan to Sue Obama Over Immigration

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