Obamacare opponents have a problem these days: to wit, the Obama administration keeps making it harder and harder to successfully describe what Obamacare currently is. Case in point: one of the more hated (I’d say most hated, but there are too many lumps of failure mixed into this walking disaster of a healthcare law to crown any particular one as worst) parts of the Affordable Care Act* is the individual mandate. Well, guess what? The administration just more or less delayed it!
Let me summarize that WaPo link: ‘honor system.’ That’s right, the administration is going to take Americans’ words for it that they tried to sign up, but couldn’t. Mind you, after mid-April (the ostensible new deadline) people will no longer be able to get an extension online. Instead, they’ll have to call up, and then use one of a number of handy excuses:
At that point, the grounds for an extension will become narrower, matching rules for special enrollment periods that have existed for the past few months. Those include people who have a new baby, are getting a divorce, lose a job with health insurance or had a technical problem signing up for coverage through HealthCare.gov.
…and they’re not going to check that, either! Honor system. Don’t tell them the real reason why you don’t want to sign up (“because I don’t wanna”), and they won’t ask you for the real reason. So, hey, problem solved! – Except for the suckers who actually signed up already for bad insurance policies, and the self-employed who have to estimate their future 2014 tax right now, and anybody who trusted this administration in the first place, and of course the insurance companies (I will understand if your sympathy for that last group is muted) who will really take this ruling in the neck.
Then again, it’s not like Barack Obama ever has to run for anything, ever again: and thanks largely to Joe Biden he’s impeachment-proof. All Barry has to do is get through the next three years with as few people as possible screaming at him, and that’s only because the screaming might distract him from his golf game.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: It would appear, by the way, that Lefty groups who thought that the mandate wasn’t being brought up because signups were just jim-dandy (thus not requiring an extension of the signup period) were, ah, incorrect. This should surprise nobody paying attention.
*I only used that term because I wanted to do some SEO. The Affordable Care Act neither provides care, nor is particularly affordable. For that matter, it’s barely an Act.
Insurance companies? Can you say “risk corridor”? Can you remember whose full-throated roar helped pass this slime puddle into law? Can you see the fingerprints all over this abomination?
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Wall Street can. Aetna, Humana, and United Health are all up just under 50% year-on-year.
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The only ones who get it in the neck, as usual, are the ones who have to pay for this nonsense. That is, us.
My insurance company called me to talk about my renewal notice and ask if I had any questions regarding the increase in premium. I told him he could put directly in my file that if they move me to an Obamacare plan I would drop them so fast their heads would spin. He reassured me that my plan was grandfathered in so I had no worries. So I asked him a direct question: Since the HHS can change the rules at their whim, what makes him think that when the enrollment numbers do not line up with what they want that HHS will not cancel out the grandfathering clause and force all those people to have to go to an exchange instead of not being counted since they’ll need the additional people to sign up to include them? He was silent as he had not considered this.
My insurance company knows that if that happens, I’ll take the fine. And that if they raise my premium anymore, I’m done, especially as their CEO at a stockholder meeting stated they would be asking for the taxpayer bailout.
I did ask if he was running into more people upset or if people were okay with the whole deal and he stated that he was running into more people upset rather than satisfied. Not really a scientific poll, but telling.
Seem to recall hearing that there’s a way to self-insure using very-short-term renewable plans that effectively dodges both the fine and the rate hikes.
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Don’t recall where it was written about, though.
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Mew
“I signed up for Obamacare but I lost my paperwork in a tragic canoe accident” ?
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Mew
You lost the beer too, didn’t you? That has always been my definition of a tragic canoe accident.
But of course.
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Mew
Too bad about any firearms you might have had in your possession at the time.
Please let me know which ones you loaned to me so I can report those as lost at sea too.
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Truly, a tragic accident.
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Mew
I too had a tragic Ocare accident when I tried to sign up. It involved space aliens and probes. I really don’t want to talk about it. Thanks Obama, for being so understanding.
I was walking down the street and got hit in the head with a piece of balogna and fell into a pit of piranhas. Or hit in the head with a piece of frozen hamburger and run over by a bus full of nuns!
These are just as valid! I hope they publish the excuses.
Since no one else has complimented Mr. Lane for the excellent knife-twisting in the headline: my compliments, Mr. Lane.
“Then again, it’s not like Barack Obama ever has to run for anything, ever again: and thanks largely to Joe Biden he’s impeachment-proof.”
I don’t know why people say this. Slow Joe’s a longtime Beltway insider. He’s not nearly as into the idea of reducing American prestige and power as 0bama is.
Neither is my cat, and I wouldn’t let it anywhere near the nuclear football, either.
I’d make sure, Moe, that you empty your shoes before putting them on after making this comparison…
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Not sure if your cat reads your blog, but if so .. you could be on the receiving end of some “special gifts”.
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Mew