Obamacare News of the Day

Washington Examiner: Obamacare youth sign-ups at or below 25% in 15 states

• ...This is far below the 40 percent threshold White House officials initially said was required to ensure healthy insurance exchanges…nationally, about 28 percent of those signing up through the exchanges were aged 18 to 34. But national numbers are only a rough indicator of the state of play on the exchanges, because in reality, the insurance market is made up of 51 different risk pools - one for each state, plus the District of Columbia.
• A further breakdown of the numbers reveals that a number of states did especially poorly in signing up younger participants. West Virginia was the worst performing state, with just 19 percent of sign-ups coming from the younger age group. In Hawaii, 20 percent were from the younger demographic. The percentage was 21 in Arizona and 22 in Oregon, Vermont, and Maine.
• On the flip side, Washington, D.C., was the only exchange to exceed the original target of the Obama administration with 45 percent of sign-ups coming from the younger demographic, as it got a boost from a flood of Capitol Hill staffers who were required to get their insurance through the exchange.

The Hill: HUD investigated for promoting ObamaCare

• According to the nonpartisan government accountability organization, Cause of Action (CoA), the HUD Inspector General’s office notified the group Friday it was investigating whether the agency misused resources to promote the president’s new healthcare law. Last month, CoA asked inspector general's from HUD and Health and Human Services to begin probing the matter.

The Wall Street Journal: Employers Must Notify Laid-Off Workers of Health-Care Options, New Rule Says

• Employers must inform laid-off employees that they are eligible to buy health-care coverage through new online insurance exchanges as an alternative to paying full premiums for their old employer policies, the Obama administration said Friday.
• Under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, or Cobra, workers who lose their jobs have long had the option of staying on their company insurance as long as they pay their share of the premium, as well as the share their employer had been paying for them. Since employers often pay the majority of workers' premiums, the cost of continuing coverage often came as a shock to people, although some elected to bear the expense anyway because they needed to continue receiving care.
• The Department of Labor and Department of Health and Human Services set new guidance for employers on Friday requiring them to tell workers who lose their employer-sponsored insurance about new options to get coverage on their own, as well as their eligibility for Cobra.

Washington Post: Obamacare's doom

• If the president wants to witness a refutation of his assertion that the survival of the Affordable Care Act is assured, come Thursday he should stroll the 13 blocks from his office to the nation’s second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. There he can hear an argument involving yet another constitutional provision that evidently has escaped his notice. It is the origination clause, which says: “All bills for raising reveornue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.”
• The ACA passed the Senate on a party-line vote, and without a Democratic vote to spare, after a series of unsavory transactions that purchased the assent of several shrewdly extortionate Democrats. What will be argued on Thursday is that what was voted on — the ACA — was indisputably a revenue measure and unquestionably did not originate in the House, which later passed the ACA on another party-line vote.
• The ACA’s defenders say its tax is somehow not quite a tax because it is not primarily for raising revenue but for encouraging certain behavior (buying insurance). But the origination clause, a judicially enforceable limit on the taxing power, would be effectively erased from the Constitution if any tax with any regulatory — behavior-changing — purpose or effect were exempt from the clause…Two years ago, the Supreme Court saved the ACA by declaring its penalty to be a tax. It thereby doomed the ACA as an unconstitutional violation of the origination clause.

National Journal: The Cook Report: Why Democrats Shouldn't Be Celebrating The Affordable Care Act's enrollment numbers mean less about the midterms than Democrats think.

• The fact that 8 million is less than 3 percent of the 313.9 million people in the United States seemed lost in the shuffle. My impression at the time was that this sounded a bit too much like whistling past the graveyard. Now an array of new polling from a variety of sources suggests that Democrats have no reason to be encouraged at this point.