Tag: Obamacare

How Firms Will Adapt to Avoid ObamaCare’s Mandates (and Drive up Its Cost)

By
Michael F. Cannon

An oped in today’s Wall Street Journal explains:

How big can a company get with just 50 employees? We’re about to find out.

Thousands of small businesses across the U.S. are desperately looking for a way to escape their own fiscal cliff. That’s because ObamaCare is forcing them to cover their employees’ health care or pay a fine—either of which will cut into profits and stymie future investment and growth…

“Going protean” offers a better strategy for many businesses. Owners of protean companies create a core of strategic employees who manage the big-picture elements of the enterprise—the culture, business model, product mix, vision, strategy, etc. This core then outsources the business tasks to other corporations…

Non-core tasks could include things like accounting, marketing, product development, manufacturing, IT, PR, legal, finance, etc. There is almost nothing that cannot be outsourced…

These new contracts will be a mix of large corporations, small businesses, micro-corporations and even nano-corporations (an individual doing business as a corporation). But to be a protean solution, it must involve a corporation-to-corporation relationship…

In the context of ObamaCare, a small business could go protean by offering current employees contracts for doing their current work as a corporate entity instead of as an employee…

[A]s government continues to impose itself into the marketplace and reduce the freedom of the commercial sector through statist programs like ObamaCare, businesses will have to look for creative solutions to survive. Going protean is only one way, and others will emerge.

Keeping the core company below 50 full-time employees will allow such companies to avoid the employer mandate. But it will also drive up ObamaCare’s cost, because most of the workers in the new corporate entity will be eligible for government subsidies through ObamaCare’s health insurance “exchanges.” This will drive up the cost of ObamaCare wherever those subsidies exist.

Topics: 
General, Health Care, Regulatory Studies

Debate Challenge to Jonathan Gruber and Any Other ObamaCare Supporter

By
Michael F. Cannon

My coauthor Jonathan Adler and I have been educating state lawmakers about how ObamaCare allows them to block the law’s employer mandate, and to exempt collectively 15 million taxpayers from its individual mandate. So far, 32 states have exercised those powers, exempting all of their employers and 10 million residents from those punitive taxes. In Mother Jones, MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber calls our interpretation of the law “screwy…nutty…stupid.” (This issue is currently being litigated in Oklahoma.) 

In this Cato video, I challenge Prof. Gruber (and any other supporter of the law) to a debate on the powers Congress grants states under ObamaCare.


Topics: 
Health Care

Wait, Didn’t the Fiscal Cliff Deal Originate in the Senate?

By
Ilya Shapiro

If you thought the policy side of the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012” is bad, did you notice that there’s a constitutional problem too? I’m sure there’s more than one, actually, but this one was easy to spot without even digging into the gory details.

Recall that the fiscal cliff bill was first passed by the Senate in the wee hours of New Year’s Day, and then seconded by a vote of the House some 20 hours later. And yet, Article I, Section 7, Clause 1—known as the Origination Clause—states: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” 

Far from being “archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil”—as Georgetown law professor Mike Seidman claimed as part of his argument for throwing out the Constitution altogether—this provision serves, or at least is supposed to serve, the very real and timeless purpose of keeping the taxing power as close to the voters as possible. Mindful of the potential for abuses of this awesome power (see, e.g., John Roberts on Obamacare) the Constitution’s authors chose to give it to the congressional body that is elected every two years directly by people in local districts (the House), instead of the one whose members serve alternating six-year terms and weren’t initially directly elected (the Senate). As Cato adjunct scholar Tim Sandefur explains in a forthcoming law review article (footnotes/citations omitted):

When the Anti-Federalist “Brutus” warned that the taxing power, “exercised without limitation,” will “introduce itself into every corner of the city, and country” and “light upon the head of every person in the United States” crying “GIVE! GIVE!” the Constitution’s supporters answered that this risk was minimized by the political checks over the taxing power. “The exclusive privilege of originating money bills [belongs] to the house of representatives,” wrote Alexander Hamilton.  This would ensure that the power to tax belonged to “the most popular branch” of the government, “the favorite of the people.” James Madison reiterated this point: the “principal reason” why the House was given the power “of originating money bills” was that the Representatives “were chosen by the people, and supposed to be the best acquainted with their interest and ability.” Perhaps the point was put best by George Mason, who considered the Senate “[a]n aristocratic body” which “should ever be suspected of an encroaching tendency,” and believed that “[t]he purse strings should never be put into its hands.”

So what happened last week? Did Harry Reid, John Boehner, and Barack Obama simply agree to ignore the Constitution? (Specifically here, I mean—we know they do generally where federal power is concerned.) Were the House and Senate parliamentarians overruled by a naked political deal?

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Tax and Budget Policy

Might the Washington Post Be Partial to ObamaCare?

By
Michael F. Cannon

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:

Thirty-two states have issued a stunning vote of no confidence in President Obama’s health care law by refusing to finance and operate the new regulatory bureaucracies (“exchanges”) at its core. This development threatens to delay implementation of the law, at the very least.

Post readers learned of this once-unimaginable rebuke in an article that gave top billing to those states’ critics [“Critics Slam GOP States over Health Exchanges,” Dec. 14, A1]. The article further claimed, “there’s no question that federal officials will wield substantially more power” in those states, when in fact that highly disputed opinion is at the center of the entire debate.

This followed an article hailing an Obama administration decision to abandon a measure designed to reduce federal Medicaid spending as a “silver lining” [“A Supreme Court Silver Lining?: How Medicaid Dodged the Deficit Debate,” Dec. 12]. The article quoted six sources who supported the administration’s move, but none of the administration’s critics.

Post readers would be better served by less partial health policy coverage.

Topics: 
Health Care

Wall Street Journal Responds to Conservatives Counseling States to Establish ObamaCare ‘Exchanges’

By
Michael F. Cannon

An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal notes the reason more than half of the states have declined to create an ObamaCare “exchange” is that operating them would be a nightmare for states:

The conservatives telling the states to join ObamaCare are disconnected from this reality. Otherwise sane people like the budget expert Doug Holtz-Eakin and former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt argue that exchanges are a good idea and states are giving the federal government more power by not developing one. Their reasoning (we use the term loosely) managed to peel off Idaho Governor Butch Otter and a few other Republicans.

We also held out this hope when ObamaCare was more abstract, but HHS is taking a hard line on rules and mandates. Governors aren’t giving up control; they never had control in the first place.

Topics: 
Health Care

Bloomberg: ObamaCare Doubling Premiums for Individuals & Firms Spurs Talk of Delaying Rollout

By
Michael F. Cannon

Bloomberg reports:

Health insurance premiums may as much as double for some small businesses and individual buyers in the U.S. when the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions start in 2014, Aetna Inc. (AET)’s chief executive officer said.

While subsidies in the law will shield some people, other consumers who make too much for assistance are in for “premium rate shock,” Mark Bertolini, who runs the third-biggest U.S. health-insurance company, told analysts yesterday at a conference in New York. The prospect has spurred discussion of having Congress delay or phase in parts of the law, he said.

“We’ve shared it all with the people in Washington and I think it’s a big concern,” the CEO said. “We’re going to see some markets go up as much as as 100 percent.”…

Premiums are likely to increase 25 percent to 50 percent on average in the small-group and individual markets, he said, citing projections by his Hartford, Connecticut-based company.

Industry analyst Robert Laszewski comments:

[F]or the vast majority of states there will be rate shock.

I can also tell you that, so far, I have detected no serious effort on the part of Democrats to delay anything. Frankly, I think hard core supporters of the new health law and the administration are in denial about what is coming.

I expect more health insurers to be echoing the Aetna comments in coming weeks.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

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