The Obama administration is facing a slew of healthcare challenges as the winter holidays approach.
While this fall has been a far cry from last year, when HealthCare.gov was melting down, 2014 has brought wholly unexpected problems to the fore for federal health officials and the White House.
Take the conflict surrounding Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare consultant whose suggestion that a “lack of transparency” and voters’ “stupidity” helped the law pass, went viral.
Though Democrats have sought to distance themselves from Gruber, his remarks have become a new flashpoint in debate over healthcare reform, invigorating GOP critics as the party prepares to take control of the Senate.
Gruber has agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Dec. 9, in a final hearing for outgoing chairman and relentless administration antagonist Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
The gathering, also set to include Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Marilyn Tavenner, is sure to prove a distraction for the White House as officials try once again to keep a lid on opposition to the law.
Here are four additional challenges that the administration faces on healthcare this winter.
U.S. CEOs threaten to pull tacit Obamacare support over ‘wellness’ spat
By Sharon Begley 4 hours ago
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Leading U.S. CEOs, angered by the Obama administration’s challenge to certain “workplace wellness” programs, are threatening to side with anti-Obamacare forces unless the government backs off, according to people familiar with the matter.
Major U.S. corporations have broadly supported President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform despite concerns over several of its elements, largely because it included provisions encouraging the wellness programs.
The programs aim to control healthcare costs by reducing smoking, obesity, hypertension and other risk factors that can lead to expensive illnesses. A bipartisan provision in the 2010 healthcare reform law allows employers to reward workers who participate and penalize those who don’t.
Record Number of Americans Put off Medical Treatment Due to Costs
Cost Still a Barrier Between Americans and Medical Care
by Rebecca Riffkin
In U.S., 33% have put off medical treatment because of cost More put off treatment for serious conditions than non-serious More with private insurance put off treatment in 2014 than 2013
WASHINGTON, D.C. — One in three Americans say they have put off getting medical treatment that they or their family members need because of cost. Although this percentage is in line with the roughly 30% figures seen in recent years, it is among the highest readings in the 14-year history of Gallup asking the question.
Since 2001, Gallup has asked Americans each November if they have put off any sort of medical treatment for themselves or their families in the past 12 months. Last year, many hoped that the opening of the government healthcare exchanges and the resulting increase in the number of Americans with health insurance would enable more people to seek medical treatment. But,despite a drop in the uninsured rate, a slightly higher percentage of Americans than in previous years report having put off medical treatment, suggesting that the Affordable Care Act has not immediately affected this measure.
Among Americans with varying types of medical coverage (including no coverage), uninsured Americans are still the most likely to report having put off medical treatment because of cost. More than half of the uninsured (57%) have put off treatment, compared with 34% with private insurance and 22% with Medicare or Medicaid. However, the percentage of Americans with private health insurance who report putting off medical treatment because of cost has increased from 25% in 2013 to 34% in 2014.
Thirty-five percent of lower-income Americans — those with annual household incomes under $30,000 — report putting off medical treatment in the past 12 months, down from 43% in 2013. More upper-income Americans, on the other hand, report delaying treatment, with percentages rising from 17% in 2013 to 28% this year. The percentage of middle-income Americans who have put off medical treatment remains roughly the same as last year, at 38%.
Americans More Likely to Put Off Treatment for Serious Conditions
Those who indicate that they have put off medical treatment in the past 12 months are asked to rate the seriousness of the underlying condition or illness. This year, 22% of Americans say they have put off medical treatment for a “very” or “somewhat serious” condition. This is double the 11% who say they have put off treatment for a non-serious condition. Furthermore, the percentage who have put off treatment for a serious condition has increased slightly since 2013.
Jonathan Gruber, the former ObamaCare adviser in hot water for his comments about the “stupidity of the American voter,” has agreed to testify at a House panel next month, setting up a healthcare showdown in what could be the final week of this Congress.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will also hear from Obama administration official Marilyn Tavenner, who is under fire this week for using inflated enrollment figures for the healthcare law.
“Both Mr. Gruber and Administrator Tavenner have agreed to testify,” committee spokeswoman Caitlin Carroll told The Hill.
Both figures have played a role in major political headaches for the Obama administration, which is facing new allegations of “repeated transparency failures and outright deceptions” from Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be grilled for a number of speeches he has given since 2010 that blame the Obama administration for intentionally obscuring details of the healthcare law in order to assure its passage.
Issa calls Gruber to testify before Oversight
By Sarah Ferris – 11/21/14 09:47 AM EST
The House Oversight Committee is asking embattled former ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber to testify at a hearing next month on the “transparency failures” of the administration’s healthcare law.
Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent a letter to Gruber on Thursday, about two weeks after videos surfaced in which the adviser suggested that a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” helped Congress pass ObamaCare.
The chairman also invited Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), whose own investigation found that the Obama administration had inflated its enrollment numbers by about 400,000 people, helping to lift it past the much-touted 7 million goal.
“The American people deserve honesty, transparency and respect from those who forced the federal government into their healthcare,” wrote Issa in a statement Friday.
“I expect Mr. Gruber and Administrator Tavenner to testify publicly next month about the arrogance and deceptions surrounding the passage and implementation of ObamaCare,” he added.
The hearing will take place December 9, the last week of the lame-duck Congress, in what would likely be the outgoing chairman’s last Oversight hearing.
Under Obama, U.S. personal freedom ranking slips below France
BY JASON RUSSELL | NOVEMBER 18, 2014 | 12:48 PM
Americans’ assessments of their personal freedom have significantly declined under President Obama, according to a new study from the Legatum Institute in London, and the United States now ranks below 20 other countries on this measure.
The research shows that citizens of countries including France, Uruguay, and Costa Rica now feel that they enjoy more personal freedom than Americans.
As the Washington Examiner reported this morning, representatives of the Legatum Institute are in the U.S. this week to promote the sixth edition of their Prosperity Index. The index aims to measure aspects of prosperity that typical gross domestic product measurements don’t include, such as entrepreneurship and opportunity, education, and social capital.
Obama praised ‘bright ideas’ of health-care architect who called voters stupid
By Marisa Schultz
November 18, 2014 | 2:26am
WASHINGTON — The videos Democrats never wanted to see keep coming.
A day after President Obama tried to distance himself from a top health-care architect who said voter “stupidity” led to ObamaCare’s passage, a video surfaced of Obama praising the offensive professor for his bright ideas.
The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a video from 2006 of Obama telling a Brookings Institution panel he had “stolen ideas liberally” from MIT professor Jonathan Gruber.
Then-Sen. Obama praised Gruber and other academic and policy experts as the “brightest minds.”
The health law’s allies are trying to distance themselves from the economist’s remarks about the deception involved in passing the law. But they’re only proving him right.
Peter Suderman | November 18, 2014
In the space of a week, Jonathan Gruber has become a non-person in Washington. Until last Monday, the MIT health economist was widely and uncontroversially cited as an “architect” of the Affordable Care Act, a go-toexpert regarding the law’s politics and mechanics. But after multiple videos surfaced in which Gruber said or implied that the bill’s backers relied on deception and an assumption of voter stupidity in order to pass it, Obamacare’s backers moved swiftly to distance themselves from Gruber and downplay his role in the creation of the law.
Asked about Gruber’s videotaped declaration that “lack of transparency” provided “a huge political advantage,” Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responded dismissively. “I don’t know who he is,” she said. “He didn’t help write our bill.” A Wall Street Journal item by Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a former administration staffer, opened by insisting that Gruber “did not make policy, nor did he work for the White House, HHS, or any congressional committee.” Jay Angoff, the former overseer of the health law’s implementation at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told Politico that Gruber was neither a legislator nor a staffer. “He’s like 300 million other Americans who can have their opinion.”
Even the president himself weighed in. Responding over the weekend to questions about Gruber’s statements, President Obama pushed back on Gruber’s role, labeling him “some adviser who was never on our staff.” Gruber’s remarks, Obama said, were “not a reflection on the actual process that was run” when crafting and passing Obamacare.
WASHINGTON — As Americans shop in the health insurance marketplace for a second year, President Obama is depending more than ever on the insurance companies that five years ago he accused of padding profits and canceling coverage for the sick.
Those same insurers have long viewed government as an unreliable business partner that imposed taxes, fees and countless regulations and had the power to cut payment rates and cap profit margins.
But since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, the relationship between the Obama administration and insurers has evolved into a powerful, mutually beneficial partnership that has been a boon to the nation’s largest private health plans and led to a profitable surge in theirMedicaid enrollment.
The insurers in turn have provided crucial support to Mr. Obama in court battles over the health care law, including a case now before the Supreme Court challenging the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low- and moderate-income consumers. Last fall, a unit of one of the nation’s largest insurers, UnitedHealth Group, helped the administration repair the HealthCare.gov website after it crashed in the opening days of enrollment.
THE OBAMACARE SHOW, STARRING JOHNNY GRUBER – H-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E’S JOHNNY!
NOVEMBER 18, 2014 LEAVE A COMMENT
By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog
For a guy as smart as Jonathan Gruber, he sure is dumb. In the Internet age, where everything you say or do is recorded for posterity and available in three seconds via Google, did he really think he could call us names and get away with it – over and over again?
Last week, several videos were released that document Gruber’s blasé contempt for the American voter. In the first one of several discovered by a Philadelphia-area investment consultant who lost his health insurance because it didn’t meet Obamacare standards, Gruber blithely confesses that the president’s healthcare plan was conceived in secret double-shuffle trickery and dedicated to the proposition that the American people are too stupid to understand when they are being conned (the juicy part starts at the 20:25 mark and runs for one minute):
To hear that the funding scheme was deliberately made confusing to hide the fact that it’s a tax – “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” – and that the geniuses who cooked it up figured it would be easy to put one over on those of us in the great unwashed – “stupidity of the American voter” – by itself should be sufficient to outrage the average voter.
But there’s more. Throughout the week on a daily basis, similar videos starring Gruber at a number of venues around the country spanning a couple of years surfaced. You can see them here (31:00 minute mark “too stupid to understand the Cadillac tax”), here (29:00 minute mark again on the Cadillac tax, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry called “a hero” and “lack of economic understanding on the part of the American people”), here (22:00 minute mark on the Obamacare taxation con game and phony “cost control” sales pitch) and here (1:26 clip where Gruber laughs at and mocks Obamacare concerns of a Vermonter as “adolescent”).
Lest you think he is a one-hit wonder, week two of Gruber releases started out with a slide presentation he prepared wherein he said America’s senior citizens “do a terrible job” selecting health care plans. What will tomorrow bring?
MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber’s gaffes could derail Obamacare
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber — the MIT brainiac caught on video admitting the law’s “lack of transparency” was meant to dupe a gullible American public — could end up becoming Obamacare’s demolition man, with congressional Republicans threatening to hold hearings and experts saying his bombshell comments could impact the Supreme Court case challenging the Affordable Care Act.
“They can subpoena him and call him to testify about the way he used federal money because he got an awful lot of it,” said Dennis Hale, a Boston College political science professor, referring to reports yesterday that Gruber received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants to help states implement Obamacare. “If he shows up to testify, it’s going to be pretty ugly.”
“This is the gift that keeps on giving,” Hale said. “If you’re selling a product that people don’t want to buy and then tell them they’re stupid because they don’t want to buy it, you get into trouble.”
Gleeful Republicans, who will dominate the House and Senate come January, have pounced on Gruber’s comments that the Obamacare law “passed because the American voters are too stupid to understand the difference.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post, “We may want to have hearings on this.” And Arizona Sen. John McCain said the controversy “gives us ammunition to make fundamental changes to the law.”
The Gruber firestorm comes just a week after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging whether states enrolled in the federal HealthCare.gov portal — rather than creating their own exchanges — can dole out Obamacare subsidies.
Rick Jensen: Could Obamacare architect be prosecuted? MTN3:39 p.m. CST November 14, 2014
Victims are millions of Americans who lost their major medical insurance due to Obamacare
Deceit. Fraud. Premeditated felonious theft from millions of Americans.
Now that Jonathan Gruber, known as “The Architect” of Obamacare, has been publicly revealed as a joyful con artist in a YouTube video, are his actions prosecutable?
The victims are the millions of Americans who lost their major medical insurance policies due to Obamacare, lost their doctors, their children’s doctors, their family’s cancer specialists and coverage at children’s hospitals and cancer clinics because of a law that was sold to Americans as being just the opposite.
The victims are the millions of Americans whose premiums increased so dramatically that they are forced to drop their coverage.
A video recently posted of the MIT professor speaking in 2013 as an academic panelist is a criminal confession in which he gleefully bragged that the ironically-named “Affordable Care Act” was written in such a way as to obfuscate the true nature of the bill’s effects and hide from the American public and the Congressional Budget Office the fact that if they told the truth the bill would not pass.
In Gruber’s own words: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass … Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”
Liberal elites nod their heads at this, agreeing that the American people are too stupid to know what’s good for them. The elites feel compelled to tell you and me how we should live. After all, it “was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
Obamacare : State, federal insurance sites face first-day hiccups
Jayne O’Donnell and Laura Ungar, USAToday10:51 p.m. EST November 15, 2014
Open enrollment on the federal HealthCare.gov site kicked off relatively smoothly in many parts of the nation Saturday, although there were reports in some areas that consumers and brokers had problems logging into accounts.
Healthcare.gov launched amid much anticipation after last year’s botched rollout.. Department of Health and Human Services reported more than 23,000 people had submitted applications in the first eight hours.
Just as the federal log in issues appeared resolved Saturday afternoon, issues on state-run sites cropped up.
Across the U.S. state-run exchanges were having mixed success enrolling people. Washington state had to take its exchange offline to resolve a problem in which 2015 tax credit amounts were being incorrectly calculated for customers. In Colorado, plans that include cost-sharing subsidies weren’t showing up for broker Louise Norris, who also got frequent error messages as she navigated the site.
At least she was able to enroll customers. Brokers at the Health Insurance Store of Louisiana in Baton Rouge weren’t able to do that until early afternoon. Owner Will Chapman says none of the 10 agents or their clients could log into accounts until about 1 p.m. CT Saturday.
“We’d go in with an e-mail account, set up an account, verify it and create a password, but when go back to actually log in with that information, it says your password is invalid,” says Chapman.
After a lengthy wait on hold for the call center around midday, Chapman says, they were told the problem was systemwide.
“The vast majority of users are having a smooth experience during the first day of Open Enrollment on HealthCare.gov as they fill out applications, browse and enroll in plans,” HHS spokesman Aaron Albright said in an e-mailed statement. “We expect to experience the normal issues that any other complicated technology project does upon launch and have seen a small number so far.”
Albright said the department “will continue to work every day to make the consumer experience simpler and easier.”
The disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act was the catalyst for my party’s midterm thumping.
By
Burke Beu
Nov. 13, 2014 6:00 p.m. ET
I grew up in a Democratic family. I have been a registered Democrat since age 18, a Democratic candidate for statewide office in Colorado and a party precinct captain in that caucus state. I’ve volunteered for numerous Democratic candidates and contributed to party causes and campaigns. The 2014 election results were extremely disappointing for me, but hardly a surprise.
I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, then lost my job in the Great Recession. I was lucky; my brother lost his job and his house. I survived on part-time jobs while paying out-of-pocket for my health insurance.
I voted for President Obama again in 2012, then received a cancellation notice for my health insurance. This was due to ObamaCare, the so-called Affordable Care Act. However, I couldn’t afford anything else.
Midterm elections in the second term of a presidency are difficult on the president’s party, and the Obama administration’s crisis-of-the-month headlines weren’t helpful. Ultimately, though, ObamaCare was the catalyst for my party’s midterm thumping.
President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.
In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.
The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.
“He’s at his best when his back is against the wall,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. “Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Scott Brown’s election in 2009, after the first debate in 2012 — he comes back and tends to fight pretty hard.”
“He’s a fourth-quarter player, and he’s in the fourth quarter of his presidency,” Shrum added.
The moves are also prompting questions about whether Obama is shifting to the left in his final two years in office, or if the moves are meant to cushion the blow when he moves to the center to negotiate with a Republican-controlled Congress.
The question is weighing heavily on members of both parties, particularly ahead of Obama’s decision on whether to take expansive executive actions on immigration.
