Ten Question about ObamaCare
Here are the ten issues in one place.
10. What impact does the Medicaid expansion, including to inmates have on the ability of the program to care for the nation's most vulnerable?
The PPACA was a wagon loaded up with all sorts of goodies, including a massive expansion of the
Medicare program. The subcommittee
wrote Oct. 9 to Comptroller General Eugene L. Dodaro requesting the cost of the programs expansion to three or four million inmates. At the same time, Pitts and Upton sent letters to state Medicare directors requesting to know the impact of the expansion of a program already struggling to meet its mission.
9. What legal authority does the administration have to issue payments through the risk corridor program?
The
risk corridor program is the PPACA's backstop for insurance companies. The last authorizes Health and Human Services to subsidize insurance companies for their losses as they adjust to Obamacare. The problem is that the money was never appropriated. It is a distinction often lost, but in Congress a budget item is a goal, a wish or a promise and an appropriation is cold cash.
8. What is the effect of the employer mandate on businesses?
Neither Treasury nor HHS have responded in testimony before the committee or to
letters requesting how the Obama administration calculated the costs of PPACA mandates on businesses with more than 50 workers and more than 100 workers to provide health insurance.
The committee is still waiting for information from both departments regarding the administration's decision to use the president's pardon authority to delay the mandates.
7. What will the health law's cuts to Medicare mean for seniors?
Congressmen from the full committee sent a May 12 letter to the
Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the HHS' Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, asking for a status report on how the cuts, really funding raids, to Medicare and Medicare Advantage are hurting seniors.
"Unfortunately, because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act cut more than $300 billion from the Medicare Advantage program and spent the money on new programs outside of Medicare, seniors' access to their Medicare Advantage plans is under threat," the congressmen wrote.
6. What happened to the healthcare exchanges in Oregon? Massachusetts? Maryland?
The Obama administration has not given any explanation to the committee as the FBI investigates how Democrats in
Oregon spent $300 million in federal grants to build their exchange and did not sign up a single customer.
Obama called
Massachusetts the
model for the rest of the country and in October, when it became public knowledge that the PPACA rollout was a disaster, the president said: "It's going to be smoother in places like Maryland." The Maryland site has be scrapped and it being rebuilt from scratch.
5. What is the status of healthcare.gov?
In a
November hearing, the full committee learned that the security backend of healthcare.gov were not built and that the website was held together with twine and bandages. There was also testimony that it would cost $121 million to finish the job.
The full committee wrote a
Feb. 20 letter asking Accenture, the contractor hired to fix the website and finish the job, requesting an update--and the company to produce correspondence between the company and the administration that could explain how the company was given its contract without competition.
4. How many people will lose their insurance as the PPACA moves forward?
The committee determined that six million received cancellation notices from their insurance company. At a May 7 hearing,
Rep. Cory S. Gardner (R.-Colo.) asked: How many new cancellations are Obama administration expecting?
3. What will premiums look like next year?
At the
same May 7 hearing, committee member
H. Morgan Griffith (R.-Va.) asked a panel of insurance executives and corporate advocates if there was any chance families will see their
annual premiums drop by $2,500, as the president promised.
2. Who has paid for their insurance through the healthcare exchanges? Of the people who paid up, who was previously uninsured?
The Energy & Commerce Committee and its Health subcommittee report that they have been blocked from any access to information about the actual paid participation in ObamaCare. The committee requested
answers from the insurance providers.
Not all providers responded, but from the responses, the committee determined that 67 percent of participants were paid up. Although the administration ridiculed the figure, it has declined to provide its own numbers. In fact, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: "
We don't have hard, concrete numbers, but we dispute them.
1. What else is the administration going to delay or change without consulting Congress or being transparent with the American people?
In a
Feb. 12 letter to
Treasury Secretary Jacob J. "Jack" Lew, Pitts and other committee members requested all documents, analysis and correspondence relating to the employer mandates for companies with 50 workers and 100 workers and how the government
decided to waive the mandates.
The letter details how
the administration has missed deadlines, botched the
healthcare.gov launch and ignored whatever sections of the law suited them.
Yet: "Treasury has not provided any memoranda related to its legal, statutory or constitutional analysis for the delays," the members wrote. "It is time for Treasury to provide the legal and factual information underpinning is decisions to delay key provisions of the PPACA."
Much of congressional business is a function of calendar. The truth is that nothing is going to happen on Capitol Hill until after the election. Yes, the release of these 10 unanswered questions is posturing. But, it is posturing for the new Congress that sits in January 2015.
Even if the Republicans come in with the same number of seats, there will be at least 20 new faces as some win, others lose and safe seats held by retiring Republicans are replaced by the new guy. Well, all these new guys are going to be more conservative than the leadership and more afraid of Tea Party primaries in 2016.
Certainly, Speaker John A. Boehner will win re-election to the House, but there is no way he keeps the gavel.
The chances are dead even that Boehner will be replaced by conservative, and that is a bigger chance now than there was six months ago. Last September, conservatives stepped up to stop ObamaCare at the end of the fiscal year. Instead of joining them, GOP leaders in both chambers chose to support the PPACA and join Obama in blasting the conservatives. That bill will come due.
Even if an establishment Republican becomes speaker, he will have had to made peace with the conservatives, which means ObamaCare goes.
With a GOP lock on both chambers, this 10-point list will be the script.
