Hold off Obamacare
Chicago Tribune
July 14, 2013
You’ve already heard that the White House let employers off the hook for a year on their Obamacare duties. They won’t have to offer coverage or pay a penalty in 2014.
But if you don’t have insurance you will still have to get it by next year or pay a fine, in most cases, under the law.
Republicans are pushing the White House to stall enforcement of the individual insurance mandate, just as the White House did for business. Don’t force people to buy it. Don’t fine scofflaws.
That’s only fair. Under the complicated (and arcane) rules of Obamacare, most businesses have to cover their workers. The workers accept coverage or pay a fine, but their coverage costs will be reduced by the company’s subsidy. Taxpayers would subsidize the coverage of others.
But now companies don’t even have to report whether they offer employees insurance or who accepts coverage when it is offered. That’s important because people are eligible for government subsidies only if their employers don’t offer coverage. But if employers don’t report who had access to or accepted insurance, how can the individual mandate be enforced?
It can’t. It needs to be put on ice.
Of course, one more delay in one more provision of Obamacare won’t fix the inherent problems in the law.
Many people are expected to buy health insurance through exchanges being set up across the country. Some people will be eligible for a federal subsidy, depending on their income. But less than three months from the Oct. 1 opening of the exchanges, Obamacare is chock full of problems. Deadline panic has set in.
The employer mandate was pushed off because, The Wall Street Journal reported, “the federal government hadn’t written key rules guiding employers … and computer systems that were supposed to run the program weren’t operational.”
Enforcement of the insurance mandates depends on complex electronic systems to check various federal databases to ensure that people and companies are abiding by the law. But officials recently disclosed that they’ll scale back the review of many applicants’ income reporting. That is important because insurance subsidies will be pegged to income levels. There will be a strong incentive for people to underreport income.
Exchanges will still check income claims, HHS officials say. But now, the 17 state-run exchanges (Illinois isn’t one of them) will have “expanded discretion” to accept the word of many applicants in cases where there are large discrepancies. Many people will be on the honor system. Or as a Forbes headline said: “Not qualified for Obamacare’s subsidies? Just lie.”
The feds promise they will keep a tight rein on the system. Experts note that the Internal Revenue Service can claw back improper subsidy payments at tax time. But you don’t need much imagination to see the potential for mischief is high.
Here in Illinois, you don’t need any imagination. Just look at the state’s efforts to scrub its Medicaid rolls of thousands of people who don’t qualify for the benefit. Thousands have been tossed off the rolls because they don’t live in the state, or their income is too high, or they just didn’t bother to respond to requests that they respond. Illinois had never made much of an effort to check if people getting benefits qualified for those benefits. Once you were on the rolls, you stayed on.
Those problems will probably look quaint next to the not-ready-for-prime-time rollout of Obamacare.
The criticism and concerns are growing, and they’re not just coming from critics of the White House. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers warned last week that the law could jeopardize the coverage many of the union’s members receive through multi-employer plans.
Obamacare needs to be put on hold.