This plan is well thought out substantively and politically.  It would cover tens of millions of Americans with private insurance, solve the pre-existing condition problem, inject cost discipline into the marketplace, and begin the process of reforming the nation’s massive health entitlement problems.  And it would do all this without unduly disrupting current insurance arrangements (including employer plans), and without the federal power grab or massive spending and taxes of Obamacare.

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The ObamaCare law thus made insurance a less valuable product for most people, even as it pushed up the cost of buying it.

The coercion of the individual mandate was supposed to balance the equation, but it’s far too weak to do so — and it’s getting weaker each time the administration proclaims another exemption.

You can read the rest of the column here.

Especially troubling is the “risk corridor” provision of the law, under which taxpayers are on the hook for covering large portions of the losses that insurers incur on the Obamacare exchanges. If an insurer pays out claims that exceed 108 percent of its premium collections, taxpayers would cover about 75 percent of its losses.

A mirror-image provision is also supposed to recoup 75 percent of any profits above 108 percent of premium collections. But because Obamacare’s design is so flawed and its rollout has been so bungled, enrollees in the exchange insurance plans are likely to be significantly older and sicker than the insurance company actuaries assumed (there was also a great deal of political pressure on insurers to lowball their premiums in this first year of the program). There will thus likely be few if any insurers rebating profits under this risk-corridor provision, only a large cost to the taxpayer. The insurers are counting on this massive bailout to avoid a bloodbath of losses from Obamacare.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The battle lines in this emerging debate are becoming visible over the extension of long-term unemployment benefits and raising the federal minimum wage requirement. Much like the 2012 presidential contest, the president and his allies want to advance proposals that poll very well and which many Republicans oppose for principled reasons in an attempt to paint GOP candidates as insensitive to the plight of those struggling in today’s still sluggish economy.

But this latest embrace of economic populism by the president is not a dead-certain political winner. After all, President Obama has been in office for five years, and Mitt Romney is not on the ballot this year. Like it or not, today’s economy should rightfully be considered the Obama economy, not the Bush economy or the Republican economy. The president may want to assume the pose of an innocent bystander to today’s economic conditions, but attempts to blame his political opponents for sluggish growth and the diminished prospects many families now face should be an increasingly hard sell with voters.

You can read the rest of the column at e21.

As the legal wrangling continues, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that this clash between sweeping health-policy objectives and religious freedom was inevitable at some point, and that a judicial remedy can help define where the lines should be drawn going forward.

But this is far too benign a view of how this issue came about. There was nothing inevitable about this fight. The truth is that the Obama administration manufactured this confrontation and did so for entirely political reasons. Prior to 2011, the Obama administration never argued that the lack of access to “free” contraceptives and sterilization procedures, especially among women, was a burning national crisis that demanded immediate attention. The administration never raised this as an issue because there was no such crisis. Contraceptives have long been readily available and inexpensive in this country. The federal government subsidizes large numbers of clinics that provide these products essentially at no direct cost to consumers or for very low cost.

You can read the rest of the piece here at NRO.

Though the law’s supporters believe the threat of the mandate is critical to forcing people into the Obamacare exchanges, they don’t want to admit this directly to voters. So the mandate is mentioned often in policy circles, but seldom by supporters when communicating in the media or directly to voters. Every once in a while, though, when pressed in more public settings on why they think the young will sign up for coverage, they are forced to admit that it’s due in part to their faith in the mandate — as Zeke Emanuel did on Fox News Sunday over the weekend.

The ambivalent embrace of the mandate by Obamacare’s authors is reflected in the law’s construction. Initially, the mandate’s year-by-year penalties were set at much higher levels, but they were lowered by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee to protect themselves from political attacks by Republicans. As enacted, the mandate’s penalties are very low, especially relative to the premiums charged by insurers in the exchanges, and especially in the first two years. In 2014, the penalty, or tax, is the greater of (a) a per-person tax of $95 per adult and $47.50 per child, up to a maximum of $285, or (b) 1 percent of total household income. The tax rises to 2 percent of household income in 2015. A typical household of four people with an income of $40,000 will face a mandate tax of $400 in 2014. That compares with premium payments of $1,500 to $3,000 for the typical low-cost insurance offerings, even after the federal subsidies are netted out of the premium costs.

You can read the rest of the column here.

Further, multiple media reports indicate that insurers are still not receiving accurate enrollment information in many cases. Fully one-third of the sign-ups in October were corrupted, meaning that there are already several thousand Americans who think they have signed up successfully for health insurance but really have not. And the administration now admits that, even after the supposed fixes to the system over the past month, there is still a ten percent error rate in the transmission of enrollment applications to insurers. If that holds in the coming weeks, and the administration keeps beating the bushes to get more people to sign up through the website, there will be hundreds of thousands of Americans who think they have health insurance come January 1 but do not. The backlash from these botched enrollments will only add to the legend of the Obamacare implementation fiasco.

And then there is the still unresolved issue of insurance cancellations. The administration is pleased that there were supposedly 29,000 people enrolling in coverage in the first two days of December through healthcare.gov. But that per day rate implies 345,000 sign-ups by December 23rd through the federal website—well short of the five million who have received notices indicating their insurance will terminate effective January 1. The president’s half-hearted and lawless attempt to allow these people to keep their old policies in 2014 may reduce those facing a break in coverage somewhat, and others are likely to purchase new plans outside of the exchanges. Even so, if only 2 million people are facing a break in coverage on January 1, that is still 85,000 people per day through online enrollment—well above anything experienced to date at the federal and state-run websites.

You can read the rest of the column here.

The CEA paper attempts to make the case for Obamacare by looking at trends from the most recent release of National Health Expenditure (NHE) projections.  The NHE data, compiled by the independent Office of the Actuary in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), does show a slowdown in health spending in recent years.  NHE spending growth per capita has averaged 3.1 percent since 2010, down from 5.9 percent in the previous decade. 

But the slowdown did not start abruptly in 2010.  In 2002, NHE spending per capita rose 8.5 percent and then began to slow over the ensuring years.  In 2008, NHE spending per capita rose just 3.7 percent – two years before Obamacare was enacted.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

The first order of business remains thinking through what to do about canceled individual-market policies. Prior to last week, it would have been unthinkable that the White House would unilaterally adopt a policy allowing millions of people to stay in their individual-insurance plans in 2014. After all, notwithstanding that famous presidential pledge, a major focus of Obamacare is the termination of the individual insurance market and the shifting of that market’s participants into the Obamacare exchanges in 2014. An escape route that allows large numbers of current individual-insurance enrollees to avoid the exchanges in 2014 (even one with its own set of traps) raises the very real possibility that the exchanges will falter before they ever get started.

This does not mean that the GOP should be applauding the White House’s supposed “fix.” For starters, the administration’s plan is completely lawless, as many others have noted. The president has not altered any regulations or asked Congress to provide a carve-out for the 2013 insurance plans. He instead announced he would not enforce the law for a year, which the administration claims should be enough for state regulators and the insurance industry to reopen the canceled plans.

Of course, this is not the way to run the government. In the near term, it’s not at all clear that states and insurers aren’t still exposed legally. What if an insurance enrollee sues an insurer for not providing an Obamacare-required benefit? Would that have standing in court? Who knows?

You can read the rest of the column here.