Labor unions primary beneficiaries of Obamacare waivers

From the Daily Caller:

Labor unions continued to receive the overwhelming majority of waivers from the president’s health care reform law since the Obama administration tightened application rules last summer.

Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation since June 17, 2011.

By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.

The Department of Health and Human Services revised the rules governing applications for health reform waivers June 17, 2011, amid a steady stream of controversial news reports, including The Daily Caller’s story that nearly 20 percent of last May’s waivers went to businesses in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district in California. . . . .

Michael Barone: Obama's Gangster Government

Michael Barone doesn't mince words:

Most important, it requires the General Accounting Office to conduct an audit of the waivers from the Democrats' health care bill that are being issued in large numbers by the secretary of health and human services.
This will raise an uncomfortable question. If Obamacare is so great, why are so many trying to get out from under it? And, more specifically, why are so many Democratic groups trying to get out from under it?
The fact is that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has granted more than 1,000 waivers from Obamacare. Many have been granted to labor unions. Some have been granted to giant corporations like McDonald's. One was granted to the entire state of Maine.
By what criteria is this relief being granted? That's unclear, and the GAO audit should produce some answers. But what it looks like to an outsider is that waivers are being granted to constituencies that have coughed up money (or, in the case of Maine, four electoral votes) to the Democrats.
If so, what we're looking at is another example of gangster government in this administration. The law in its majesty applies to everyone except those who get special favors.
The GAO has also been ordered to produce audits on the effect of Obamacare on health insurance premiums. This is likely to reveal that the president did not keep his promise that you could keep your current health insurance if you want to.
And there will be an audit of the comparative effectiveness bureaucracy established in the 2009 stimulus package. Comparative effectiveness is supposedly an objective study of which medical techniques are most effective. But anyone who looks closely finds that the experts are constantly changing their minds, which suggests that this is more alchemy than science -- and maybe political favoritism, as well.
All of which tends to undercut the thrust of Obama's obviously-aimed-at-the-2012-campaign message: We can continue to fund Medicare and Medicaid indefinitely if we just tax rich people a little more. . . .

10 Obamacare Fumbles

There have been a lot of justifications offered for delaying the employer mandate.  In particular, supporters point out that it helps the administration focus on getting other parts of the program right.  But two points: 1) the administration really didn't have the right to delay implementation and 2) they have already delayed a lot of the law.  The list is from The Hill newspaper (though I have added a couple reasons that they forgot):

1. The CLASS Act - long term care act could not be implemented as written 

2. The federal insurance exchange - no budget whatsoever for the federally run exchanges 

3. The employer mandate - delayed for a year 

4. The small-business exchange - delayed for a year 

5. Waivers - HHS approved more than 1,200 waivers, let Republicans point out that the law was unworkable, and waivers given out to Obama's friends 

6. 1099 - first ObamaCare provision to be repealed, mandate compelled businesses to report nearly all transactions worth more than $600 to the IRS 

7. Child-only plans - insurers quit writing new policies just for children rather than bear the additional costs. 

8. PCIP - the pre-existing conditions program first ran into problems because people weren't joining the program.  The Obama administration dramatically lowered the insurance premiums and was able to bribe people to join the program so as not to make it look like there wasn't a need for it. 

9. The Basic Health Plan - delayed implementation until 2015 for a provision that would let states bargain directly with insurance companies to create a scaled-down plan for people who aren’t eligible for Medicaid but might not be able to afford the more expensive private plans sold through the exchanges.  Not allowing this helped guaranteed higher prices. 

10. ObamaCare for congressional staff

Note some of the collateral problems caused by these delays.  For example, as Rich Lowry notes:

it’s “full steam ahead” with the health-care exchanges this October. Never mind that determining eligibility for the exchanges depends on employers reporting their insurance offerings — reporting that now won’t happen. . . . 

Obama ignores law and exempts unions from Obamacare tax

Special political favors and ignoring what the law actually says in one stroke.  From the WSJ:

But don't expect ObamaCare favors unless you helped to re-elect the President. In an aside in a Federal Register document filed this month, the Administration previewed its forthcoming regulation: "We also intend to propose in future rulemaking to exempt certain self-insured, self-administered plans from the requirement to make reinsurance contributions for the 2015 and 2016 benefit years." . . . 

There's no conceivable rationale—other than politics—for releasing union-only plans from a tax that is defined as universal in the Affordable Care Act statute. Like so many other ObamaCare waivers, this labor dispensation will probably turn out to be illegal. . . .  

Count all of this as one more illustration of the way that ObamaCare has put politicians in control of health care. Some people get taxed but others don't, some people get subsidies but others don't, and some have to pay more so Mr. Obama can deliver favors to his political constituents.

President violates oath and doesn't enforce the law, that is OK; State tries to help enforce federal law (which the Federal government doesn't have to deport or punish illegals), not OK

Charles Krauthammer as a useful piece in the Washington Post:

And there’s the rub: the Obama administration’s inability to distinguish policy from law. This becomes particularly perverse regarding immigration when, as Justice Antonin Scalia points out, what the administration delicately calls its priorities is quite simply a determination not to enforce the law as passed.
This is what makes so egregious the Obama claim that Arizona is impermissibly undermining federal law. “To say, as the court does,” writes Scalia regarding those parts of the law struck down by the majority, “that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.”
Consider this breathtaking cascade: An administration violates its constitutional duty to execute the law by deliberately refusing to enforce it. It then characterizes its non-enforcement as simply establishing priorities. It then tries to strike down a state law on immigration on the grounds that it contradicts federal law — by actually trying to enforce it! . . . 

The same is true with other issues.

Obama’s presumption is Olympian. He takes America into a war in Libya with U.N. approval but none from Congress. Yet that awful Bush had the constitutional decency to twice seek and gain congressional approval before he initiated hostilities. The Department of Health and Human Services issues Obamacare regulations treading so heavily on the free-exercise rights of Catholic institutionsthat Obama’s own allies rebel. The new regulation concocted to tame the firestorm blithely orders private insurers to provide free contraceptives to employees of the objecting religious institutions. By what possible authority does a president order private companies to provide free services? To say nothing of the 1,200 Obamacare waivers granted with royal arbitrariness according to the (political) whims of an HHS secretary. . . .

Strassel has this piece in the WSJ (the whole piece has lots of examples):

Put another way: Mr. Obama proposes, Congress refuses, he does it anyway. 

For example, Congress refused to pass Mr. Obama's Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for some not here legally. So Mr. Obama passed it himself with an executive order that directs officers to no longer deport certain illegal immigrants. This may be good or humane policy, yet there is no reading of "prosecutorial discretion" that allows for blanket immunity for entire classes of offenders. 
Mr. Obama disagrees with federal law, which criminalizes the use of medical marijuana. Congress has not repealed the law. No matter. The president instructs his Justice Department not to prosecute transgressors. He disapproves of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, yet rather than get Congress to repeal it, he stops defending it in court. He dislikes provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, so he asked Congress for fixes. That effort failed, so now his Education Department issues waivers that are patently inconsistent with the statute. 
Similarly, when Mr. Obama wants a new program and Congress won't give it to him, he creates it regardless. Congress, including Democrats, wouldn't pass his cap-and-trade legislation. His Environmental Protection Agency is now instituting it via a broad reading of the Clean Air Act. Congress, again including members of his own party, wouldn't pass his "card-check" legislation eliminating secret ballots in union elections. So he stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with appointees who pushed through a "quickie" election law to accomplish much the same. Congress wouldn't pass "net neutrality" Internet regulations, so Mr. Obama's Federal Communications Commission did it unilaterally. 
In January, when the Senate refused to confirm Mr. Obama's new picks for the NLRB, he proclaimed the Senate to be in "recess" and appointed the members anyway, making a mockery of that chamber's advice-and-consent role. In June, he expanded the definition of "executive privilege" to deny House Republicans documents for their probe into the botched Fast and Furious drug-war operation, making a mockery of Congress's oversight responsibilities. . . .

"SEIU fights healthcare repeal after obtaining waivers from law"

This is great. Obamacare should be a mandate for everyone but the unions who fought hard to have it enacted. To claim that there is a waiver option and thus it is perfect natural that the union be given a waiver is not exactly true. If that was the case, the legislation would have allowed one out without having to rely on the pure discretion of the federal government. It is like the distinction between a may issue and a shall issue concealed handgun permit.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is lobbying hard against the amendment offered by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to repeal the healthcare reform law.

SEIU has sent e-mails to Senate offices urging lawmakers to vote against the proposal to unwind President Obama’s signature domestic initiative.

“A vote in support of this amendment is a vote to raise out-of-pocket healthcare costs for working families and takes away critical consumer protections provided to Americans for the first time,” SEIU urged senators, according to a copy of the e-mail obtained by The Hill.

The lobby informed senators that a vote for McConnell’s amendment would count against them on its legislative scorecard.

SEIU’s outspoken defense of the law has prompted charges of hypocrisy from Republicans, given that some of the union’s chapters have sought waivers exempting them from a key provision of the law requiring the phaseout of health plans with low caps on annual benefits.

Proponents of the law argue that some limited-benefits health plans should be exempted temporarily from phaseout because it would cause low-income and part-time workers to lose insurance or see their premiums rise.

A spokesman for SEIU referred questions about the union waivers to a fact sheet on its website.

According to SEIU, the overwhelming majority of its members are covered by health plans that comply with the law’s requirements.

Some of its chapters have obtained waivers, the union concedes, but notes the waivers were anticipated by Democrats who passed the law. . . .

Number of organizations given temporary exemptions from Obamacare now exceeds 1,000

From The Hill newspaper:

The number of temporary healthcare reform waivers granted by the Obama administration to organizations climbed to more than 1,000, according to new numbers disclosed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS posted 126 new waivers on Friday, bringing the total to 1,040 organizations that have been granted a one-year exemption from a new coverage requirement included in the healthcare reform law enacted almost a year ago. Waivers have become a hot-button issue for Republicans, eager to expose any vulnerabilities in the reform law.

In order to avoid disruption in the insurance market, the healthcare overhaul gives HHS the power to grant waivers to firms that cannot meet new annual coverage limits in 2011. The waivers have typically been granted to so-called "mini-med" plans that offer limited annual coverage — as low as $2,000 — that would fall short of meeting the new annual coverage floor of $750,000 in 2011. . . .

Charles Krauthammer on Obama's lawlessness

Here is a partial list of lawless actions by Obama.  It isn't an issue of whether one agrees with the changes Obama wants.  It is a question of how those changes are being made.  From the Washington Post:

. . . On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence— for example, the amount of dope involved. 

In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. . . .   

 . . . Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation. 

Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off. 

Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare:the employer mandate. 

Which followed hundreds of Obama­care waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions and other well-lobbied, very special interests. . . . 

In 2012, the immigration service was ordered to cease proceedingsagainst young illegal immigrants brought here as children. Congress had refused to pass such a law (the DREAM Act) just 18 months earlier. Obama himself had repeatedly said that the Constitution forbade him from enacting it without Congress. But with the fast approach of an election that could hinge on the Hispanic vote, Obama did exactly that. Unilaterally. . . .

Click on the obamalawless tag below to get a longer list of Obama's lawless behavior.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, Obamacare supporter, looking at Waiver for New York

Too bad Obamacare didn't make it easy to get these waivers. If even a liberal Democrat from NYC is looking at waivers, it is clear that Obamacare is having problems.

Obama Scandals number #5 and #6 just since the presidential election

As Glenn Reynolds described four of them this way: journalist-snooping scandal, IRS scandal, Benghazi, and the Sebelius Shakedown.  Of course, all this ignores Fast and Furious and some other earlier scandals.  I am just counting the scandals that have come to light since the presidential election.

Now there are two other new scandals:

1) The EPA

. . . The allegations concern the Environmental Protection Agency, which is being accused of trying to charge conservative groups fees while largely exempting liberal groups. The fees applied to Freedom of Information Act requests -- allegedly, the EPA waived them for liberal groups far more often than it did for conservative ones. . . .
Research by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, claims that the political bias is routine when it comes to deciding which groups are charged fees. Christopher Horner, senior fellow at CEI, said liberal groups have their fees for documents waived about 90 percent of the time, in contrast with conservative groups that it claims are denied fee waivers about 90 percent of the time.
"The idea is to throw hurdles in our way," charged Horner, who says he decided to look into the fee structure after the EPA repeatedly turned down his group for waivers. . . .

This reminds one of the waivers that the Obama administration gave out for Obamacare.  If the Obama administration is giving conservatives a hard time with these fees, how hard of a time do you think that the administration has given conservatives with respect to their regulatory decisions?

2)  Secret email accounts for top Obama officials

There has been the recent secret emails by Lisa Jackson at the EPA to avoid reporting requirements (see here, here, and here).  But now the AP reports that this desire to skirt the law apparently covers many other many Obama appointments.

Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.
The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses. . . .
The practice is separate from officials who use personal, non-government email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged - but often happens anyway - due to laws requiring that most federal records be preserved.
The secret email accounts complicate an agency's legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.
"What happens when that person doesn't work there anymore? He leaves and someone makes a request (to review emails) in two years," said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, an open government group. "Who's going to know to search the other accounts? You would hope that agencies doing this would keep a list of aliases in a desk drawer, but you know that isn't happening."
Agencies where the AP so far has identified secret addresses, including the Labor Department and HHS . . .

Drive perceptions that "government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions"?  Seriously, just the perceptions.  Lisa Jackson denied even having this alternative account.  Her real mistake was using an EPA email account.  If she hadn't used this, it might never have been discovered.  How would one even know how many additional email accounts that these officials might have?  The AP can't even get information on the number of these accounts.

UPDATE: Here is a note that Politico has.

Agency spokespeople generally assert that such alias accounts are searched when the public, law enforcement or Congress asks for information, but some experts doubt they are consistently searched or will be after officials leave. . . .

Can someone bring a lawsuit to force the Obama administration to actually stay on schedule for Obamacare?

From the WSJ:

. . . Which brings us to the dubious legality of this delay. The Affordable Care Act's Section 1513 states in black-letter law that "(d) Effective Date.—The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013." It does not say the Administration can impose the mandate whenever it feels it is politically convenient. 

This selective enforcement of laws has become an Administration habit. From immigration (the Dream Act by fiat) to easing welfare reform's work requirements to selective waivers for No Child Left Behind, the Obama Administration routinely suspends enforcement of or unilaterally rewrites via regulation the laws it dislikes. Now it is doing it again on health care, without any consultation from, much less the approval of, Congress. President Obama probably figures business and Republicans won't object because they don't like the law anyway. . . .

It is interesting how many reporters are saying that the Obama administration is hoping to get political benefits from pushing off the start of the mandates for companies until after the 2014 elections.




Great, it is nice to know that members of the Obama administration are willing to be so open about their political motives for delaying the damage done by Obamacare until after the next election.


ABC's Rick Klein says that the timing of this comes across as more than coincidental.  He also makes the point about the politics of this change.

Can't someone quickly bring a lawsuit to force the law to be followed.

UPDATE: Even Roll Call has this headline: "Obama Skips Past Congress Again With Health Mandate Delay."

President Barack Obama’s latest legal end run around Congress — delaying enforcement of the employer health mandate — has sparked more questions about whether he’s abusing his executive discretion under the Constitution.
The move announced late Tuesday was the latest in a string of decisions where the president, facing a divided Congress unable to get much done beyond keeping the government running, has taken matters into his own hands.
Where a previous president might have asked for a legislative fix if a mandate was proving too onerous for business, the Obama administration put out a couple of blog posts saying that, in listening to the business community, it decided not to enforce a key part of the 3-year-old health law for another year. . . .
In March, Issa complained in a Washington Examiner op-ed that the Obama administration was interpreting the health care law to provide tax credits in health exchanges even if states refused to set them up — contrary to the law’s text.
The fact that most states refused to set up their own exchanges “does not justify the administration’s effort to ignore the plain language of the law,” Issa wrote.
That dispute is currently the subject of a lawsuit filed by the state of Oklahoma. . . .
Turley cited the president’s decision not to enforce immigration laws with respect to young immigrants as a particularly egregious example — and one that was cheered by top Democrats.
“The president disagreed with Congress on immigration law. His response was to effectively negate the law.  . . .  That rocks our system to the core,” he said. . . .

On the one year anniversary of Obamacare being signed into law

Here are some stories from The Hill newspaper to consider.

Number of healthcare reform law waivers climbs above 1,000

Judges' agreement on healthcare penalties not being a tax is key

Another state wants health reform waiver

Sen. Conrad worries Democrats by calling to revisit the healthcare debate

DC appeals court fast-tracks review of health reform challenge

Medicare actuary says that Obamacare will raise national health care costs by $311 billion through 2019

From the Hill newspaper:

The Obama administration on Wednesday rekindled a feud with the Medicare program's chief actuary after he again questioned the healthcare reform law's savings.

In his analysis of the law last April, and again during testimony before the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, Rick Foster said the law would increase national healthcare spending by $311 billion through 2019 and questioned whether Medicare savings called for in the law are sustainable. . . .

Here were some other bombshells dropped during the hearing today:

Foster was asked by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., for a simple true-or-false response on two of the main assertions made by supporters of the law: that it will bring down unsustainable medical costs and will let people keep their current health insurance if they like it.
On the costs issue, "I would say false, moreso than true," Foster responded.
As for people getting to keep their coverage, "not true in all cases." . . .

The number of unions and companies granted temporary waivers under the new health care law has grown to 729.