Heritage ^ | 3/13/2014 | Amy Payne
It’s getting difficult to take any part of Obamacare seriously.
The Obama administration has altered or delayed it so many times—who can be
sure what the law is at this point?
The individual
mandate stating that every American has to purchase government-approved
health coverage or pay a fine is supposed to kick in on March 31. That’s the
deadline to sign up for coverage, supposedly to avoid this year’s penalty.
But Obamacare is never “settled
law,” as the president and others have called it, because Health and Human
Services (HHS) keeps writing more regulations.
Most recently, the administration extended the “hardship
exemption” from the individual mandate for those who had their previous
policies canceled because of Obamacare until October 2016.
To qualify, your plan must have been canceled because it wasn’t compliant
with Obamacare, and you just have to tell the government you “believe” that
other insurance policies are unaffordable.
The exemption means people who meet these criteria are free from the
individual mandate. But if they want to buy coverage, they are given the special
option to buy a “catastrophic” health insurance plan, which is not eligible for
subsidies and typically would be available only to those under age 30.
When the exemption was first announced in December, Heritage experts Alyene
Senger and Robert Moffit said
this “is not going to simplify anything. Rest assured it is going to create even
greater confusion for health insurers trying to sell these products. Also, don’t
expect the unhappy consumers who’ve just lost their previous coverage to
understand clearly which plan they can pick and be legally qualified to pick
it.”
Due to the utter confusion and the underperforming signups on HealthCare.gov,
reporters asked HHS this week whether the agency would simply extend the
deadline for people to buy coverage. An HHS official responded
that, “In fact, we don’t actually have the statutory authority to extend the
open enrollment period in 2014.”
This administration hasn’t let a detail like legal authority stop it from overstepping
its bounds multiple times. And as Heritage’s Senger and Moffit put
it, “issuing more government rules to correct the consequences of their
unworkable government rules is the only thing they seem to know how to do.”
DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this fine day and read posts from around the world. The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it! You may leave your opinion, but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!
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