One cannot help but be struck by the monstrous incongruities between the hopes Obamacare engendered and the grubby realities of its passage, implementation, and results. The ACA was sold with messianic visions and utopianism. Nancy Pelosi promised Obamacare would free us from work – we could all quit our jobs and take up the violin. But these were just tactics, deliberate strategies to neuter opposition to the bill. In this series, the Truth Squad exposes the methods used to pass Obamacare (the lies, the deceit, the orgy of lobbying). We also hold Obamacare’s proponents accountable for the results (e.g., the botched roll-out). It was not the “stupidity of the American voter” that allowed Obamacare to pass. We had a huge game run on us by masters of deceit who should never be trusted with public policy again.
The page references are from the 2015 book America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill.
Part 1 – Special Interests
Part 2 – Deceit
Part 3 – Botched Rollout
Part 4 – Other Perversities
Other Perversities
- Dirty Tricks – Obamacare was intentionally cast as a tax and finance bill to allow use of the budget reconciliation process (which only needed 51 votes in the Senate instead of the usual 60) and avoid a possible Republican filibuster. (pp. 81,190)
- Hiding the Ball – Sen. Schumer advocated for keeping Obamacare penalties low and not having them kick in until after the 2014 midterm elections to minimize political fallout. (p. 168) Similarly, implementation of the law was put off until after the 2012 presidential election to help Obama’s chances of reelection.
- Rammed Through – Senator Baucus initially wanted bipartisan support but the law was passed without a single Republican vote. (p. 75)
- Hiding the Ball (II)– The practice of hiding the ball persisted after Obamacare was passed:
- President Obama and others kept saying that Obamacare was bringing down prices when in reality it was the subsidies making everything look cheaper.
- “The political team was still gun-shy about touting how much of a welfare program Obamacare actually was.” (p. 309)
- Coercion - People seeking insurance are slammed into mandatory Medicaid if they have variable income which falls below Obamacare insurance thresholds. (p.375)
- Clawbacks – People receiving subsidies are on the hook if they underestimate their income. The IRS can take years to send notification of a problem. Now the tail wags the dog: advisers tell people to take time off and not to work overtime so as not to incur Obamacare’s subsidy clawbacks. (p. 397)
- Ordinary People Can’t Function Without the Assistance of the Federal Government – It is extremely difficult to divine the details of Healthcare.gov plans without the aid of a federally-approved assistant. (p. 377)
- Chase-Your-Tail Regulation – Insurers got busy dreaming up ways to game Obamacare’s Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) rules, one way being to reclassify administrative expenses to ‘care’ in order to preserve profits. (p. 121) Issue a regulation and people will look for ways around it. Try to rein them in with a new regulation, they will find ways around that, too.
- Waste and Abuse – In the first four years of Obamacare, only 37 percent of the Comparative Effectiveness Board’s research funding was actually used to compare treatments. The rest disappeared into ‘education’ and ‘communication’. (p. 392)
- Rube Goldberg Contraption – Obamacare is so convoluted that CBO has given up trying to score the monetary impact of rule changes. (p. 395)
- Lawlessness – The Obama administration unilaterally delayed the employer mandate a year. The mandate entailed complex employer and insurer reporting requirements and the Treasury Department had failed to complete its instructions in a timely fashion. Companies were tied into knots trying to figure out how to comply. The postponement would cost the government $12 billion, according to CBO. (p. 290-92) The employer mandate was delayed a second time, from 2014 to after 2015. (p. 394) [Note – this was just one of the Obama administration’s three dozen lawless unilateral changes to Obamacare.)
- Lack of Accountability – In an interview with the author, President Obama refused to comment on the narrow networks problem endemic in Obamacare exchange plans. (p. 462)