By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
"What we've learned through the course of this
program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health care system to
be run."
That was Gary Cohen, director of the Department of Health
and Human Services' Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. He
was talking about the apparently surprising need to halt enrollments in a
program designed as a temporary bridge for people with pre-existing conditions
who couldn't wait to be covered by the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare)
when it fully kicks in next year. The program was allocated $5 billion, but
some estimate it would take $40 billion to fund the effort.
Such surprises are becoming routine. The New York Times
has reported that many small and midsize firms may be opting out of Obamacare
entirely. "The new health care law created powerful incentives for smaller
employers to self-insure," Deborah J. Chollet of Mathematica Policy
Research told the paper. "This trend could destabilize small-group
insurance markets and erode protections provided by the Affordable Care
Act."
It turns out that Obamacare actually makes self-insurance
less of a gamble because you can always throw workers on public exchanges
without penalty. Naturally, the administration's response is to look for ways
to tighten the ratchet and make self-insurance harder. It's a typical response.
The shortcomings of a wildly ambitious law only justify more regulatory
strong-arming.
As Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center
notes, the NYT never paused to ask why it's OK that "a design flaw in the
law somehow empowers" regulators to punish private employers. But this is
typical of so much press coverage of Obamacare; it's a given that it is the
government's job to make sure the law is seen as successful, no matter what.
Although it's true that we collectively spent a lot of
time shouting about Obamacare, we spent precious little time actually debating
it. Most of the media covered the discussion as if it were a spectator sport,
with the Democrats the hometown favorite. And much of the remainder seemed to
assume that health care reporting amounted to explaining why Obamacare was a
good idea. The facade of objectivity was often maintained by citing carefully
crafted CBO projections that reflected political assumptions. Garbage in,
garbage out.
Reality is teaching the propeller-heads a lesson. Despite
President Obama's promise that his plan would not add "one dime" to
the deficit, the Government Accountability Office announced last week that it
would more likely add 62,000,000,000,000 dimes (or $6.2 trillion) over 75
years.
Obama also promised that "if you like your health
care plan, you can keep your health care plan." Estimates for how many
Americans will lose their existing plans vary. The CBO says 5 million to 20
million. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. says about 30 percent of
employers will push workers onto the public system.
Even the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters have started to freak
out over the gold-plated benefits many of their members will lose, thanks to
the guy they helped re-elect. Another irony: While the president rode to
re-election hyping a mythical GOP "war on women," incentives to drop
spouses from employee coverage under his plan will only increase, a particular
concern for mothers with small kids. The good news is that if they keep their
coverage, it will cover birth control pills.
Also, while Taco Bell and Wendy's are demoting many
full-time workers to part-time work, some of Obama's core constituencies --
universities and state governments -- are cutting hours too. For instance,
Stark State College in Ohio sent a letter to faculty saying that "to avoid
penalties under the Affordable Care Act ... employees with part-time or adjunct
status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week."
Virtually all of these problems and many others were
predicted by conservatives, but the media rolled their collective eyes in
response. The Iraq war justifiably led to a lot of media soul-searching about
how journalists were too credulous of the Bush administration's arguments. A
similar discussion about how we got stuck in the Obamacare quagmire seems long
overdue.
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