She Dreamed Obamacare Was Harmless

Obamacare is working, and it’s not costing any jobs.

Shhh…keep quiet, or you’ll wake Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from her dream.
“There is absolutely no evidence, and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act,” she said on Monday.
In the land of the waking, Heritage’s James Sherk an economist who doesn’t fall under “every economist,” according to Sebelius plainly states that “The Affordable Care Act has discouraged companies from creating jobs and workers from accepting them.”
There are mountains of evidence from businesses’ reports to the Federal Reserve to this list compiled by Investor’s Business Daily. And the stories keep coming: Just yesterday, an industry trade group estimated that Obamacare’s medical device tax has killed 33,000 jobs.
Obamacare’s job vise squeezes Americans from both sides: the employer side and the employee side.
Employers
Despite delays of the employer mandate, Sherk and Jacob Deveney write, “Employers are responding to the uncertainty of the Obamacare rollout by slashing hours and limiting their new hires.” That includes state and local governments, too.
Why? Sherk explains:
Obamacare will also encourage businesses to create part-time jobs instead of full-time jobs. Employers only pay the penalty on full-time workers. If they cut workers’ hours to part-time status, they owe no fines. So full-time jobs will become harder to come by when the penalties kick in.
Employees
While employers might not be hiring (or might be hiring only for part-time positions), would-be employees have a say in this equation, too. And Obamacare actually encourages them to work fewer hours.
The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the law’s health care subsidies would push the equivalent of 2.3 million workers out of the workforce. Simply put, making less money means you can qualify for more taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies. But if you start making more, your subsidy drops.
These Americans find working more does not pay if it means fewer benefits. So they either drop to part-time or drop out of the labor market. They would prefer to work, but not if the government claws back three-quarters of what they would make through greater taxes and reduced benefits.
Perhaps Obamacare is actually a match made in heaven it makes employers want to hire for fewer hours and employees want to work fewer hours. But that’s acceptable only if unemployed Americans sound like a dream come true.

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Wallace Grills Dem Rep over Whether Obama has Authority to Delay Obamacare

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace sat down with Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) for a debate over where President Barack Obama derives the authority to delay key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Wallace grilled Becerra over why Congress is allowing Obama to do this and Lee over why Republicans do not take the president to court over these delays.

“If this were against the Constitution, someone would have sued by now,” Becerra said of the series of delays. “The reality is, the president has used his executive powers less often than almost every president before him.”

Wallace asked why Becerra, “as a congressman,” seems content to allow the president this broad authority. “The president has never said I’m going to go it alone,” Becerra said. He added that Congress has refused to perform and it is incumbent on Obama to act where Congress won’t.

Wallace interrupted Becerra and insisted that the Constitution says that the president does not have the authority to reinterpret law as broadly as he appears to be. “I would hope that we would never have a chief executive who would twiddle his thumbs because Congress can’t get its act together,” Becerra replied.

RELATED: The Media’s Outrageous Enabling of Obama’s Lawlessness

Wallace turned to Lee and noted that Obama has used executive orders less than the last four two-term presidents. He asked why the president cannot be taken to court.

Lee replied by noting that “it’s difficult” to identify a plaintiff who could assert standing before a court in order to bring a case against the president.

Wallace asked why a legislator cannot demonstrate standing by insisting that Obama is ignoring existing law. Lee did not disagree with this assertion. He added that it was “wrong” for the president to be reinterpreting the law.

Source: Mediaite
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GOP Sen. Mike Lee: Obamacare Delays a Shameless Power Grab by Obama

During an extended discussion on Fox News Sunday about where President Barack Obama derives the authority to unilaterally delay provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told Fox anchor Chris Wallace that he believed the president’s delays amount to a “shameless power grab.”

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) told Wallace that Obama altering aspects of the law are within his discretion and they are designed to help Americans to more effectively comply with the law.

Lee disagreed. “This is a shameless act, a shameless power grab that is designed to help the president and his political party achieve a particular outcome in a partisan election,” the senator asserted. “The Constitution doesn’t give the president that power.”

RELATED: Wallace Grills Dem Rep over Whether Obama has Authority to Delay Obamacare

“The solution is for the president to come to Congress and make the case to Congress on the policy merits of this question that Congress needs to act,” Lee continued. “It is not the president’s prerogative to simply make this the law by the stroke of the executive pen.”

Source: Mediaite
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Obamacare Is Murdering Jobs

Fewer Americans either have or are looking for jobs today than at any point since 1978 and President Obama’s health care law is about to make this problem much worse.
The Congressional Budget Office just estimated the Affordable Care Act will eliminate the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs a year. Obamacare is reducing both the supply of and demand for workers.
On the demand side, the law’s regulations have made employer-sponsored health insurance more expensive. Many businesses have seen their health insurance costs skyrocket. If they do not provide “qualifying” benefits, however, they must pay stiff penalties.
Over time, businesses will pass most of these costs on to their workers through lower wages and smaller raises. In the short term, however, many businesses must eat these costs. So they have held back on hiring.
Gallup polls find two-fifths of small-business owners reporting Obamacare caused them to hire less. Federal Reserve Banks hear similar concerns from their contacts. Recent Fed reports on the economy contain repeated variations on this theme: “Employers continued to express concern about potential cost increases related to the Affordable Care Act.”
In short, the Affordable Care Act has made health care less affordable. Businesses have responded by hiring less.
Obamacare will also encourage businesses to create part-time jobs instead of full-time jobs. Employers only pay the penalty on full-time workers. If they cut workers’ hours to part-time status, they owe no fines. So full-time jobs will become harder to come by when the penalties kick in.
The recent CBO report also finds Obamacare will strongly discourage many Americans from working. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes health insurance premiums. As workers’ incomes rise, their subsidies fall a lot. The health insurance premiums for a family of four double when their income rises from one and a half to twice the poverty level. These higher premiums come on top of additional taxes owed.
University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan, whose work the CBO relied on, finds that Obamacare will raise the effective tax rate on workers with median incomes to 47 percent. Each additional dollar earned will raise their income by just 53 cents. The rest goes to taxes and higher health insurance premiums.
Lower-income workers, who qualify for more benefits, will face effective tax rates exceeding 75 percent. Not surprisingly, the CBO projects this will cause millions of Americans to work less, or not at all.
Obamacare’s defenders have spun this as good news: People who do not like their jobs can now leave the labor force without losing health care. They should temper their enthusiasm. Aside from the perversity of celebrating idleness (even the Soviet constitution required comrades to work), this feature makes the poverty trap worse.
Working less is a very rational short-term response to Obamacare’s incentives. Few Americans at any income level would work much at 75 percent tax rates. Why work 40 hours a week if you can make almost as much after-tax and after-health premiums working part time? Why work if it adds almost nothing after tax and premiums to your spouse’s income?
In the short term, Obamacare makes working less a very sensible choice. But in the long term, this makes it much harder to gain the skills and experience necessary to get ahead. The government heavily penalizes Americans who work hard and try to lift themselves out of poverty. Nobody should celebrate such a system.
Reduced labor supply will also hurt the broader economy. Fewer workers and fewer jobs mean less wealth in the economy. This hurts the government’s finances, too. Payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare. Encouraging workers to stop working puts more stress on America’s retirement programs.
The Affordable Care Act has discouraged companies from creating jobs and workers from accepting them. No doctor should prescribe such a policy to an already weak economy.

Source: Heritage
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Kirsten Powers: I'm Tired of Having to Defend This President over Obamacare

KIRSTEN POWERS: Well, I think his explanation is probably the true explanation, that they need to do this, but at the same time, it's now gotten to the point where it seems like there's an exemption made for pretty much everybody except for individuals. A lot of people who have really been screwed over by the law, you know, who are left without insurance or with extremely expensive insurance. So, I think that Ron Fournier of The National Journal wrote something that ran today about --

BRET BAIER: This was after he expressed himself last night on the panel.

POWERS: The headline is why I'm getting tired of defending Obamacare. And I'm going to say amen, brother, because it's exactly how I feel. People who have supported the law, who support universal health care, are constantly put in the position of having to defend this president, who has really incompetently put this together, rolled it out, and that's why he has to do this. It's why he has to keep doing this, because it's not working.

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S.E. Cupp Challenges David Plouffe on Obamacare Report This Spin on This Is Incredible

CNN contributor S.E. Cupp was not impressed with former White House senior advisor David Plouffe’s response to the Congressional Budget Office’s report this week on Obamacare’s influence on the labor market, which projected that new healthcare incentives would cause a reduction of hours equivalent to 2 million jobs.
“The spin on this is incredible,” Cupp said on This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “What has never been controversial in the past is that disincentivizing work is bad, economically and culturally and socially. Economists have made it their project for the past century to develop welfare programs that disincentivize work the least, because disincentivizing work has been a bad idea. Now for Democrats it’s suddenly ‘freedom.’ I think the American public sees through that. It’s a pretty transparent effort.”
RELATED: Pretty Much Everybody Messed Up the CBO’s Report on Obamacare
“If you’re running for office,” Plouffe advised. “You say, ‘Here’s what the CBO report said: it would reduce the deficit, it’s gonna reduce unemployment, it helps the economy, and it gives workers more flexibility.’ It’s not that complicated.”
ABC News political correspondent Jeff Zeleny thought it might be. “I went up to a few Democrats who were running, in trouble, Mary Landrieu (D-LA), possibly, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) from New Hampshire. The look on their face when you ask them about the CBO report, is a look that just validates the fears out there.”

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AOL CEO says ObamaCare adding $7 million to costs

Remember when Democrats sold ObamaCare as a system that “bends the cost curve downward”? Tell that to employers, who face a make or break decision point this year when the employer mandate comes into full force for 2015. Do companies dump health insurance in order to control their costs, or pay the higher costs and pass them along to employees as reductions in compensation? Tim Armstrong explains to CNBC that employers — even one as large as AOL — can’t avoid what is a $7 million question to him (via Daniel Halper):
“We have to look at our benefits programs very seriously,” said Armstrong. “In the CEO chair, let me give you an example of the decisions we have to make as a company: Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as a company. So we have to decide whether or not to pass that expense to employees or whether to cut other benefits.”
Speaking of bending cost curves, a lot of people have noticed that their new and supposedly oh-so-much-better insurance has a lot fewer choices when it comes to providers. In Covered California, some have found that they have nearly no choice, for example. The Obama administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill are threatening insurers to restore provider networks, but the insurers say they have no choice if they want to keep premiums low:
Insurers are facing pressure from regulators and lawmakers about plans that offer limited choices of doctors and hospitals, a tactic the industry said is vital to keep down coverage prices in the new health law’s marketplaces.
This week, federal regulators proposed a tougher review process for the doctors and hospitals in plans to be sold next year through HealthCare.gov, a shift that could force insurers to expand those networks. …
A spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s main trade group, said narrower provider networks are “one way health plans can help to preserve benefits and mitigate cost increases for consumers” as health-law changes take effect.
Narrower networks can help keep down costs partly because providers agree to lower their fee in exchange for the volume of business they expect with fewer competitors.
Some 70% of new plans under the health law offer relatively narrow networks compared with many current plans, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Co. The consulting firm found that plans with smaller choices of hospitals had significantly lower premiums than similar plans offering a broader choice.
The narrow networks have drawn protests, lobbying and some legal challenges from doctors and hospitals.
Insurer networks are providers who agree to a reimbursement schedule from the insurer. The tighter those reimbursements, the narrower the provider network will become as providers decline to join on those price schedules. In order to make a network broader, insurers would have to offer better reimbursements — which would force premiums to go up. This is nothing more than Risk Pool 101, or even more basically, the law of supply and demand.
It’s also a demonstration of the difference between price and cost. One can easily bend price curves downward, but not without serious distortions to product/service and delivery, and to the larger market overall. And even then, consumers will see very quickly through the illusion of price manipulation, especially since those manipulations are unsustainable.
So far, these disasters have been confined to the individual-plan markets. When they hit the employer-provided group markets, the disaster will amplify exponentially. Either employees are going to get hit with massive increases in insurance costs, or will get kicked out of their group plans altogether. AOL won’t just eat that $7 million, and neither will anyone else’s employers.

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Conservatives Seize On Report To Argue Obamacare Is A Job Killer But The Author Says They're Wrong

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf

On Wednesday, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Doug Elmendorf refuted the claim that the Affordable Care Act is a job killer a misleading takeaway from his agency’s new report that is being touted by Obama care critics.
Testifying before the House Budget Committee on the CBO’s newly released economic projections for the next decade, Elmendorf addressed the report’s finding that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the labor participation rate and the total number of hours worked by an equivalent of 2 million jobs in 2017. According to Elmendorf, that statistic is being taken out of context to suggest that Obama care will eliminate jobs.
“The reason we don’t use the term ‘lost jobs’ is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control and people who choose not to work,” he explained. “If someone comes up to you and says, ‘The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,’ any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, ‘I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,’ they don’t feel bad about it they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”
Even Budget Committee Chairman and former GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan conceded that point in part. “Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off,” said Ryan at the beginning of the hearing.
In fact, the CBO report explicitly states that the estimated reduction in labor “stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor” and that “there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of ACA.” Those notions are further supported by economic data on full- and part-time employment trends over the last several years. Simply put, the report finds that Obama care will reduce the number of people who are forced to work a job merely for the sake of health insurance.
Elmendorf also noted that the ACA is actually expected to boost the economy in the near-term by making health insurance and medical care affordable for the poorest Americans, giving them the freedom to spend money in other areas of the economy. “On balance, CBO estimates that the ACA will boost overall demand for goods and services over the next few years,” states the report.

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What The Next Decade Of Obamacare Will Look Like

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released revised economic projections for the next decade, including a rash of new data about the Affordable Care Act. There are a few big takeaways from the new report:
1. Obamacare’s so-called “insurance company bailout” will actually save the government billions.
Congressional Republicans are contemplating taking the economy hostage unless Democrats agree to repeal a temporary program built into the law called “risk corridors.” The is actually a financial shock absorber meant to shield consumers from premium hikes stemming from insurance industry uncertainty during the health law’s first three years, and Republicans have previously supported more generous versions of the program for Medicare. Now, they’re slamming it as a “taxpayer-funded bailout” of insurance companies under the ACA.
But CBO’s new report finds that the provision will actually save taxpayers and the government a considerable amount of money. Under the risk corridor program, the government takes a cut of the profits from insurance plans that set their premiums too high and redistributes it to insurers that set their premiums too low so that those companies won’t be forced to raise consumers’ monthly rates. According to CBO, “risk corridor payments from the federal government to health insurers will total $8 billion and the corresponding collections from insurers will amount to $16 billion, yielding net savings for the federal government of $8 billion.”
CBO had previously estimated that risk corridors would be budget neutral. Now, the agency predicts that insurance companies are likely to set their monthly premiums too high relative to how much they will have to pay out in medical costs.
2. Obamacare premiums are lower than originally expected.
The Obama administration argued last year that ACA marketplace premiums would be lower than the CBO originally expected. The organization confirmed that on Tuesday, reporting that current marketplace premiums are actually 15 percent cheaper than it predicted last year.
A recent analysis by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that the most Silver, Gold, and Platinum plans sold through ACA marketplaces are anywhere from $61 to $1377 cheaper than the average employer-sponsored health plan. An Obamacare Silver plan could be close to $2500 per year cheaper than an employer policy, according to PwC.
3. Obamacare will lower the number of Americans forced to work for health coverage.
Affordable Care Act critics were quick to pick up on a statistic in the new report finding that the health law will cause a reduction in the labor force that amounts to a decline of about two million full-time jobs by 2017. But anything more than a cursory look at the report shows that this is actually a benefit of the ACA.

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