NEWT GINGRICH; Obamacare and the Spirit of the Fourth of July Callista and I hope you are having a wonderful Fourth of July weekend. This weekend is a good time to rethink Obamacare and its implementation. What better time to reexamine this enormous bill than the week we celebrate our Declaration of Independence and the concept of limited constitutional government, in which the citizen not the bureaucrat has primacy. Putting Obamacare in the context of the Fourth of July makes its absurdity vividly evident. Obamacare is a complex bill with enormous regulatory requirements and government decisions, definitions and rules that will run into tens of thousands of pages. It is virtually impossible for any one person to understand all the intricacies of this effort to establish centralized Washington bureaucratic control over all the nation’s health system. This week’s announcement that the Obama Administration has postponed the employer mandate for companies with over 50 employees was probably illegal (how does the President arbitrarily suspend a portion of a law?). It also favors companies over individuals (the individual mandate is not postponed) which is the opposite of the rhetoric of the 2012 Obama campaign. However the bigger insight that comes from the collapse of the business mandate is the hopelessness of the IRS administrative challenge. The IRS is supposed to check the individual application against the company employment records. Since there will be no employment records, the Obama Administration is suggesting the IRS is going to rely on “attestation”. Applying the honor system to getting money from the government is an astonishingly dumb thing to do. The IRS administration of the Earned Income Tax Credit has a 21 to 25% error rate. That is $11 to $13 billion a year of our tax money wasted on one program by an incompetent bureaucracy. Now that incompetence is going to be extended to an “honor” system for getting federal money. Sometimes President Obama’s fantasies seem so absurd it’s hard to imagine even he believes them. Individual insurance is going to skyrocket in cost. In California insurance companies are pulling out, shrinking the competitive environment and threatening to leave Californians without options. Many states will not have Medicaid expansion leaving many Americans without options. The cost of insurance for healthy younger Americans will rise dramatically in the next few months. The postponement of the employer mandate simply extends for a year the uncertainty which is slowing down new employment and weakening the economy. Hospitals are beginning to build momentum toward undermining another aspect of Obamacare. This new announcement is a good time for Congress to begin systematically revising Obamacare and moving toward a sound, decentralized, patient centered model which expands freedom and choice rather than bureaucracy and regulation. This would apply the spirit of the Fourth of July to the largest segment of our economy. Your Friend, Newt
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:43:48 +0000
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