Category Archives: health insurance
Line-Item Veto
Ben Sasse is the president of the Cornhusker Kickback state’s Midland University, and The Weekly Standard’s hope for the U.S. Senate. When President Obama deleted the employer mandate from the Affordable Care Act for one year Sasse said, “The president has just given himself the line-item veto, well after he had signed the bill into law.” … “Apparently Obamacare is a living, breathing document designed to grow and change with the desires of the president.”
The president, who insists he is not a king, later ruled to retain the individual mandate on the honor system.
Update: Actually, Justice John Paul Stevens says you don’t have a line item veto. From Michael McConnell in the WSJ:
“There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.”
Train Wreck
Enroll America, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Obamacare, has not been intimidated by the IRS. In fact, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been shaking down …er..offering health care companies the opportunity to make contributions to the operation.
IRS Care
The Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate is a tax and therefore Obamacare is constitutional under Congress’s power to tax. That means lots more work for the IRS. They’re building the largest government data base ever to combine personal information from agencies around the country.
It’s Complicated
HHS Secretary Sebelius admitted that ObamaCare is complicated. Senator Jay Rockefeller calls it “the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress”. And he helped design it.
Meanwhile the ACLU says IRS is reading your email.
Obamascare
Health insurance rates are taking off under Obamacare, especially if you now carry a high deductible plan. Kathleen Sebelius agrees.
“Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don’t pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus,” she said. “They’re really mortgage protection, not health insurance.”
Megan McCardle at the Daily Beast thinks Sebelius is confused about what insurance is.
Sebelius’ response is apparently that catastrophic insurance isn’t really insurance at all–which is exactly backwards. Catastrophic coverage is “true insurance”. Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance at all; it’s a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan.
“This is not insurance anymore. This is regulation, this is government dictated rates, like the electrical company…”
