◼ The Fiasco That Is Obamacare - JAMES C. CAPRETTA/Weekly Standard
On Friday, the Obama administration dropped another health care implementation bombshell.
In a 606-page regulation, issued the Friday after July 4, the administration announced that income and employment verification in the state-run exchanges in 2014 will be based on the “honor system.” That is, the state exchanges will not be required to secure independent verification of the household incomes of the applicants, nor will they have to track down whether or not applicants were offered qualified coverage by their employers. On both counts, the state exchanges can simply accept whatever is claimed by the applicants as accurate, and then pay out subsidies accordingly.
This announcement is another indicator—as if we needed one—of the complete fiasco that is Obamacare implementation.
◼ OBAMACARE: DEFUND AND REPEAL - David Limbaugh /Human Events
Could the boondoggle we call “Obamacare” be a bigger disaster? Is there any better example of the arrogance, incompetence and remorselessness of top-down central planning?
The very name of the law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a deceptive euphemism, as it neither protects patients nor makes health care more affordable.
The law was born in hell. The premises upon which the bill was based, the promises its proponents made and the corruption and high-handedness in its legislative process tainted it from the outset.
◼ ObamaCare 'Honor System' To Determine Eligibility - Independent Journal Review
As reported by ◼ the Washington Post:
The Obama administration announced Friday that it would significantly scale back the health law’s requirements that new insurance marketplaces verify consumers’ income and health insurance status.
Instead, the federal government will rely more heavily on consumers’ self-reported information until at least 2015, when it plans to have stronger verification systems in place.
(Roughly translated: They’ll pretty much believe anything you tell them so as to get as many people dependent on government handouts as possible. [See: food stamps (SNAP)].
◼ THE OBAMACARE EXCHANGE SINGULARITY - John Hayward/Human Events @Doc_o
Bloomberg News ◼ explains how financially troubled cities are looking to dump retirees into those train-wreck ObamaCare public exchanges:
With U.S. cities facing rising benefit costs and billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, more municipalities will consider moving retirees off city rolls and into the exchanges, even if they continue to subsidize the coverage, said Neil Bomberg, a program director at the National League of Cities inWashington.The worse the system malfunctions, the more it will cost… and the more politically difficult serious reform will become… until the long-awaited day arrives that ObamaCare can be pronounced an utter failure, not by the critics who were right all along, but by the former ObamaCare boosters who will force single-payer nationalized health care upon us. The black hole forming at the heart of ObamaCare was the true purpose of the program all along.
“Cities and towns will be looking at ways to reduce those costs, and the exchanges may provide a very viable mechanism,” Bomberg said in an interview.
Coverage for about 7 million people expected to enroll in health exchanges next year will cost U.S. taxpayers about $26 billion, the Congressional Budget Office says. That figure nearly doubles a year later, and exchange coverage is expected to total $1.1 trillion through 2023. A spokeswoman for the agency, Deborah Kilroe, said in an e-mail that it has no estimate of how many people in exchanges will be retirees....
◼ AFP Launches Ad Campaign Against Obamacare - Leah Barkoukis/Townhall
