The White House Pressed the Panic Button on ObamaCare Yesterday
The best way to convince someone that ObamaCare isn’t working may not be to look at the disastrous headlines, higher prices, and lost coverage that the President’s healthcare law is generating. Instead, take a look at what the White House is doing to try and mitigate the train wreck.
Yesterday, the Health and Human Services Department quietly announced that it was making yet another round of delays and edits to ObamaCare, hoping to patch up the bursting dam before January 1, when the nightmare truly begins and the law kicks into high gear.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to work, and each White House misstep only reminds voters of the Democrats’ incompetence. As National Review’s Yuval Levin put it, this latest round of delays should serve as “bright, red, flashing warning lights.”
From National Review:
Some of what they announced is frankly bizarre and slightly crazy. Beside extending the high-risk pool program (which isn’t nuts, just a strong indication that they’re not ready for January at this very late stage), they are asking insurers to pay claims for consumers who haven’t paid their premiums, to treat out-of-network doctors and hospitals as though they were in-network, and to pay for prescription drugs not actually covered by the plans they offer.
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To “strongly encourage” insurers to take these kinds of steps (to use the Orwellian phrase of the HHS announcement), and to do it just a couple of weeks before the new system is supposed to start, suggests that the administration’s health experts mapped out how January is shaping up and had a collective heart attack. They seem especially worried about people forced out of old coverage and into new encountering horrible surprises and about the extremely low payment rate so far among people who have chosen new insurance plans on the exchanges. About two weeks before the deadline (after which, if they have not paid their first premium, people’s coverage will be voided) it looks like only about a fifth of the people who have signed up for exchange coverage have paid their first premium. If far more don’t do so soon, the (already very low) enrollment numbers the administration is looking at will fall far, far lower. And the Christmas season (with many distractions, and an overstressed postal system) isn’t a great time to squeeze all those invoices and checks into.
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With this latest step, they’re pushing what appear to be huge problems off by a couple of weeks (in some cases days), and it’s not clear why they think things will be very different at that point.