It appears that nobody knows exactly what this means for the ACA at this moment. The ruling will be appealed, so this lawsuit (started by Texas Attorney General and self-described Tea Partier Ken Paxton) will probably end up before the Supreme Court. The White House put out a statement saying that “Pending the appeals process, the law remains in place.” (Buttercup himself, of course, has put out nothing but wackadoodle gloaty tweets that betray no understanding of the legal issues involve.) But for right now, there’s this:
“It was not immediately clear what the legal path will be from here. Technically, O’Connor granted summary judgment to the lawsuit’s plaintiffs — the Texas attorney general, with support from 18 GOP counterparts and a governor. Because the judge did not grant an injunction, as the plaintiffs had asked for, “it’s unclear whether this is a final judgment, whether it’s appealable, whether it can be stayed,” said Timothy Jost, a health-law expert who is a professor emeritus at Washington and Lee University. Jost, an ACA proponent, predicted that a stay would lock in the law during appeals, saying that, otherwise, “it’s breathtaking what [O’Connor]’s doing here on a Friday night after the courts closed.”
“
Yeah, it is kind of breathtaking, but at least now we’re used to it.
And thus the court is required to invalidate the whole ACA.
Bagely writes:
What the case does, instead, is force the Trump administration to decide whether it will defend the ACA from constitutional attack. The Justice Department has an entrenched, longstanding, and bipartisan commitment to defending congressional statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense. It’s a bedrock convention of our constitutional structure, one that prevents the executive branch from using litigation strategy to undo Congress’s handiwork.
“In a brief filed in a Texas federal court and an accompanying letter to the House and Senate leaders of both parties, the Justice Department agrees in large part with the 20 Republican-led states that brought the suit. They contend that the ACA provision requiring most Americans to carry health insurance soon will no longer be constitutional and that, as a result, consumer insurance protections under the law will not be valid, either.
protection against refusal to provide insurance because of pre-existing conditions
control over premium increases
an end to lifetime and yearly limits on coverage
an end to insurance companies canceling your health insurance because you get sick
coverage of young adults under 25
guaranteed right to appeal your plan’s denial of payment
and end to denial of coverage for emergency care outside your health plan’s network
birth control coverage
~*~
Bagley writes,
But declining to defend the ACA could have implications for whether the Trump administration chooses to enforce it. That’s a question that has become urgent with Idaho’s decision to flout the law. Unless HHS intervenes, other states will likely follow its lead. It’d be much harder for HHS to step in if the Justice Department takes the position that the whole law is unconstitutional.
If you haven’t already heard, Donald Trump has slashed funding for advertising the Affordable Care Act enrollment period by 90%. He has also cut the funding for local organizations that help consumers navigate the buying process by 41%. The time period to enroll has also been cut in half, giving people only 6 weeks to sign up between: November 1, 2017 – December 15, 2017.
These cuts mean that less people will be aware of the enrollment period and less people will be insured. Less people uninsured will also mean a drive up in premiums, making insurance unaffordable for many more. This is an intentional move to make good on his promise to let the Affordable Care Act “implode,” but it will hurt many people in the process. Many people will unknowingly miss the enrollment period and we cannot let this happen.
Since the president is unwilling to inform the citizens we must take action into our own hands. Spread awareness about open enrollment. I made the image above so you can save it and share it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever other forms of social media you might use. Tell your family and friends. Do whatever you can to make sure that people who need this information get this information.
If you’re like me and do things last minute: be prepared before the deadline. To apply, you need things like:
Who is in your family, their identifying info, including SSNs if they have them.
Tax returns and other financial documents to estimate the household income from everyone on the house/family.
If anyone in the family is enrolled in employer or state funded insurance plans like Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare, military or VA healthcare coverage, you’ll need that info and their policy numbers.
If anyone in the family’s employers offer health insurance that they and your family are eligible to enroll in.
If anyone in the family is covered by an employer based health plan, you will need to fill out a separate form and get information from their employer for it.
I am never going to tell you not to look into something for yourself.
I will, however, suggest that if you are going to dig into this bill,
maybe also set aside some time for a palate-cleanser, like Oliver
Twist, or The Hunger Games. What you need to know is that yes, it
is that bad. If you see a headline or snippet and think “pft,
that seems a little dramatic” then you should probably be
suspicious that the source is underselling it.
Find out who your member of Congress is and how they voted. If they
didn’t support the bill, then you can donate to one of the groups who are working to flip the house in 2018, such as Swing Left, Daily Kos, or the DCCC. This will help them fund Democratic
challengers, and it might help scare some Republicans into line.
If you’re not involved in a local activist group, look up the Town
Hall Project and Indivisible groups in your district.
It’s also worth being ready to push your senator. Watch The Center
for American Progress (@amprog on Tumblr doesn’t seem to be
frequently updated, but they’re also on Facebook and Twitter), or Indivisible on Facebook or Twitter. They’ll tell you when it’s time to
move.
And, as ever, when one of your dumber friends starts yelling about
WHY DIDN’T THE DEMOCRATS STOP THIS!! say “because Democrats are
in the minority, because people like you don’t bother to show up
for midterms.”
Risk corridors = the first ten years after ACA was implemented, insurance companies were expected to lose money because of the influx of sick people who had not had insurance previously.
The ACA promised to reimburse those loses for the first 10 years in order to get insurance companies on board.
Rubio and other Republicans refused to fully fund risk corridor reimbursement in 2015, so by 2016:
So the insurance companies did the only things they could. In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether. This has left some states with only one single insurer left. In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.
It all hit the fan in the fall of 2016, right before the election.
Rubio’s October Surprise was extraordinarily effective. October 2016 saw an explosion of stories in the news about how health insurance companies were either pulling out of ACA exchanges, or jacking their prices up wildly.
It’s still in litigation now, but some of the effects can’t be mitigated.
Meanwhile, federal judge Thomas Wheeler of the US Court of Federal Claims, ruled recently (as reported last month by Forbes) that the feds actually have to pay back – to the tune of about $8 billion – the moneys lost by health insurance companies operationg in good faith.
But it’s way too late; dozens of nonprofits started to provide health insurance through the exchanges have already gone bankrupt, and the health insurance giants are both subsuming their smaller competitors and merging like there’s no tomorrow. Additionally, Wheeler’s ruling is certain to be appealed – meaning it’s in limbo for the moment.
Consolidation among health insurance giants means that there is little to no competition – regardless of whether or not you introduce competition across state lines. Which sets the stage for the giants increasing premiums.
So, yet again, the GOP is quite happy to throw their constituency under the bus in order to achieve their aims.
So, now that it appears that the ACA will remain in place, Trump’s executive order from January 20th relaxing the individual mandate becomes relevant again.
Sean Williams Feb 27, 2017 at 8:27AM
In 2014 and 2015, … the IRS had made it clear that any Form 1040s (the standard tax form) filed for the 2016 calendar tax year without line 61 filled in – the line that would demonstrate to the IRS if you had health coverage or paid the SRP – would be rejected.
But Trump’s executive order changed everything.
According to Yahoo Finance, the IRS will once again be accepting electronic and paper tax returns for calendar year 2016 without line 61 filled in.
Now here’s where things get tricky. On one hand, the ACA is still the health law of the land, even if it seems to be living on borrowed time. This means the individual mandate is still law, and those who choose not to purchase health insurance should be paying the SRP, unless they’re exempt. On the other hand, without line 61 filled in, the IRS has no guarantee that the taxpayer paid the SRP or was even insured in 2016.
The IRS has suggested that if it has a question about a particular tax return it’ll follow up with those taxpayers after the filing process is over. However, the IRS has also previously said that it wouldn’t garnish wages or go after a person’s property for not paying the SRP. In effect, Trump’s executive order has made it nearly impossible for the IRS to collect the SRP or to concretely verify an individuals’ health insurance status.
The individual mandate broadens the health characteristics of the people in the insurance pool, and so keeps premiums down.
If the administration does nothing, chaos ensues over the next several weeks as taxes come due. Which sounds about right for this administration. You know that enough someones somewhere will test whether or not the IRS is going to enforce the individual mandate.
The individual mandate will be law, but I’m betting that the administration is not going to enforce it. Both this administration and the GOP are invested in the ACA imploding, and I’m sure they will do so by undermining the individual mandate under the cover of claiming to give the people back “choice.” But choosing between insurance you can’t afford because the premiums have risen too high because of market forces, and insurance you can’t afford because the government’s insurance tax breaks overwhelmingly go to people who make over $200,000, is no real choice.
But there’s a reason the GOP was pushing a bill that would have taken
everything people don’t like about the healthcare system and made it
worse. That’s the fact that it would have allowed them to pass two
permanent tax cuts for the rich. Anyone, you see, can pass a tax cut
that expires after ten years. But if you want to make it last—and you
don’t have 60 votes in the Senate—then you need to find a way to pay for
it (or at least look like you did). Taking health insurance away from
poor and sick people would have done that just for the Obamacare taxes,
which primarily hit people in the top 1 or 2 percent. Indeed, as you can
see below in the chart from the Urban Institute,
the combination of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor
that was the GOP healthcare plan would have been a reverse Robin Hood
that redistributed income from people making $50,000 or less to
mostly those making $200,000 or more.
Now, the crazy thing is that this first tax cut for the rich (in the
form of Obamacare “repeal and replace”) would have made a second one
(this one coming in the form of “tax reform”) look more affordable.
That’s
because, due to parliamentary rules, tax reform can’t lose any revenue
outside the 10-year budget window if it’s going to be permanent. The
question, though, is lose any revenue compared to what. If
Republicans had repealed Obamacare’s $1 trillion worth of taxes before
they did tax reform, that’s $1 trillion less they’d have to come up with
to make it look like tax reform wasn’t losing any money. Now, without
those phantom savings, tax reform, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan admitted, will be “more difficult.”
A new interactive tool from the KFF enables users to create side-by-side comparisons of major ACA alternative plans
According to the Kaiser site, their tool also allows for comparisons with Ryancare-less (trademark to be registered just as soon as they decide about that hyphen).
So, click on the link to get this tool and educate yourself. It’s time to prepare for MAXIMUM PUSHBACK against the INFERIOR plans being proposed by all those TOOLS in Congress.
Hearseeno 