The Obamacare Failure Rolls On

In today’s #Obamacarefail news, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius confessed that many employer-sponsored health care plans will also be terminated because of “nonconformity” with the new rules.  So it won’t be just the 5 percent of individual health insurance purchasers who may lose the health care plan they have, and Jay Carney will need to come up with a new bogus talking point.  Hmm: be interesting to see what happens if a significant portion of reporters in the White House pool have their employer-provided plans canceled.  My guess is HHS will conveniently find a way to provide a waiver to AP, ABC, the New York Times, etc.  They’re even more important than unions to this administration.

But get a load of this reported two days ago in the New York Times:

Strategic Move Exempts Health Law From Broader U.S. Statute

By Robert Pear

WASHINGTON — The Affordable Care Act is the biggest new health care program in decades, but the Obama administration has ruled that neither the federal insurance exchange nor the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low-income people are “federal health care programs.”

The surprise decision, disclosed last week, exempts subsidized health insurance from a law that bans rebates, kickbacks, bribes and certain other financial arrangements in federal health programs, stripping law enforcement of a powerful tool used to fight fraud in other health care programs, like Medicare.

The main purpose of the anti-kickback law, as described by federal courts in scores of Medicare cases, is to protect patients and taxpayers against the undue influence of money on medical decisions.

Got all that?  It means we have a program designed to accommodate fraud and prevent accountability.  One wonders whether this was a pre-emptive move to stave off a scandal down the road involving Obama insiders who got special contracts to work on, or benefit from, Obamacare.

JOHN adds: The fact that many employer-sponsored plans will be terminated under Obamacare is, of course, what the Obama administration predicted in 2010. They estimated up to 69% of employer-sponsored plans would terminate within the first year after Obamacare went into effect, and the rest at some point thereafter, as we noted here. How that admission remained unknown for the next three years, given that it was published in the Federal Register, is a mystery I can’t solve.

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