Obamacare News of the Day

The Arkansas Project: REPORT: Medicaid Enrollment To Surpass Private Employment In Arkansas

• Medicaid currently consumes 22% of our state budget (a total of $4.45 billion)
  • Under expansion, by the year 2022, Medicaid will consume 31% of our budget
  • Arkansas’s budget grew by 65% over the past ten years, excluding Medicaid
  • Even without expansion, Arkansans will need an additional $15.9 billion in revenue in 10 years to meet budget demands, if current spending trends continue.
  • Medicaid has grown 52% in the last ten years, an increase of $3 billion
• Each privately employed Arkansan supports 1.15 recipients on welfare
• Under Medicaid expansion, enrollment in Medicaid will exceed total private employment in the state of Arkansas

Investor's Business Daily: Obamacare Enrollment Slows to Crawl, State Data Show

• With less than seven weeks of open enrollment to go, ObamaCare enrollment — and payments — have slowed to a near-crawl in some states.

Wall Street Journal: Some Small Firms See Little Relief in Latest Health-Law Delay

• Small and midsize businesses stand to benefit the most from the latest delay in the health law's employer insurance requirement. But farm co-owner Laura Pedersen doesn't plan to take advantage of it.
• The Obama administration on Monday delayed that requirement until 2016 for companies with 50 to 99 full-time workers. Still, Ms. Pedersen, who owns Pedersen Farms with her husband Rick Pedersen, said she doesn't plan to hire more workers since it would create an administrative burden for eventually complying with the law.  "We're going to continue to stay under the 50 people," she said.
• OperationsInc LLC, a human-resources outsourcing firm in Norwalk, Conn., has more than 800 clients, most with between 30 and 75 employees. While all offer employee health insurance, David Lewis, president of the firm, said about 25% wouldn't be in compliance with the employer mandate if it were in effect today, either because they don't offer enough coverage or they don't contribute enough toward premiums. He's telling clients to sit tight after the latest regulatory change "because we expect things will change yet again," he said.

Washington Post: Insurers now outspending Kochs' group on Obamacare ads

• Companies such as Cigna and Kaiser Permanente poured about $40 million into television ads specifically related to Obamacare between Dec. 1 and Feb. 8, according to ad tracking firm Kantar Media. That is far more than AFP, which as of last week had dropped about $27 million on ads since August attacking politicians who supported the program.

CBS (SF Bay Area): ConsumerWatch: Some Doctors Surprised To Be On Covered California Provider List

• ConsumerWatch revealed confusion over which physicians are accepting patients under Covered California, some doctors who did not want to accept patients on the exchange said they were surprised to find out they were on the exchange’s list of providers.
• Independent physicians across California say they can’t afford to participate in Covered California’s insurance plans because the reimbursement rates are too low, and they say they don’t have the clout doctors with larger medical groups have to negotiate higher rates. They also warn that could mean a shortage of doctors in areas largely served by independent physicians.

POLITICO: REPORT: INSURANCE TAX COSTS STATES UP TO $13.9B [Obamacare taxes states – via Medicaid – nearly $14 billion over 10 years. Under Obamacare's circular taxing squad, the law also taxes the federal government about $24 billion]

• The health care law’s tax on insurance will cost states using Medicaid managed care between $13.3 billion and $13.9 billion over the next decade, according to a new Milliman report commissioned by Medicaid Health Plans of America. Because of matching funds, the feds will tax themselves about $24.1 billion over the same period, Milliman said. That translates to a 1.6 percent increase in Medicaid managed care premiums, but states contracting exclusively with for-profit managed care organizations will see a 2.8 percent increase, according to the report.

National Review: Adhocracy

• We have here a written statute that levies a fine on large employers who fail to provide insurance coverage as a benefit to their employees. It defines a large employer as “an employer who employed an average of at least 50 full-time employees on business days during the preceding calendar year,” provides a relatively detailed set of criteria for applying that definition, and states that the provision “shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” We have already seen that latter date pushed back by a year without obvious legal authority, and now we see it pushed back by another year for some affected employers while the requirement is loosened for others.
• If this kind of selective enforcement of a public law is legitimate, then how exactly would the president describe the limits of his ability to engage in such selection? Is he bound in some definable way to the particulars of statutes as written and passed by Congress, or does he merely take them as suggestions for how he might proceed?