Obamacare's 'liar' subsidies and other implementation failures
Now we've got Obamacare-subsidized lies! What'll they think of next?
WSJ: The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws it helped to write. On the heels of last week's one-year suspension of the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to offer insurance to workers, the Administration is now waiving a new batch of its own ObamaCare prescriptions.
These disclosures arrived inside a 606-page catch-all final rule that the Health and Human Services Department published on July 5—a classic Friday news dump, with extra credit for the holiday weekend. HHS now says it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information consumers provide is accurate.
Remember "liar loans," the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s? ObamaCare is now on the same honor system, with taxpayers in tow.
People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either.
HHS calls this "a slight technical correction" though it is much more than that. The exchanges will not only start dispensing benefits "based on an applicant's attestation" about his employment insurance status. HHS is also handing the exchanges "temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification."
In other words, anyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects. This change has nothing to do with the employer mandate, even tangentially.
And here's more evidence that this 'train wreck' was never intended to work as it was sold...Heritage fills us in on at least a dozen more Obamacare implementation failures...
- The CLASS Act: ABANDONED, THEN REPEALED
- Exchanges: MISSED DEADLINES
- HHS mandate: DELAYED; UNDER LEGAL CHALLENGE
- Small business plan choice: DELAYED
- Child-only plans: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
- Basic health plan: DELAYED
- High-risk pools: UNDERPERFORMING; FUNDING LOW
- Early retiree reinsurance: BROKE
- Waivers: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
- Co-ops: DEFUNDED
- “Employee free choice”: REPEALED
- Medicaid expansion: REJECTED BY MANY STATES
Bouncing back to the WSJ conclusion...this all fits Obamacare's entire bloody-minded history...
Democrats were determined to make their rendezvous with the liberal destiny of government-run health care, so they imposed this debacle on the country on a partisan vote and despite public opposition. Now that they are discovering how difficult it is to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, they are rewriting the law as they go and telling Americans they have no choice but to live with the consequences.
And not just that, but I guess WSJ still hasn't gotten that this is all by design in anticipation for a single-payer takeover.
