My local ABC affiliate interviewed our US Congressman and aired a thirty minute interview.
One of his points was Obamacare care funding. He said 90% of it (or maybe 87% I don’t recall the exact number) was written into the law. Totally outside the control of the budget. All the headlines we see about funding Obamacare only effect that 10% or 12%.
If true then articles like this from CBS are terribly misleading. Removing 10% funding is nothing more than an annoyance. It doesn’t stop implementation of the program.
This is a GQ question. Can we confirm with a cite that the congressman’s statement is correct? That the majority of Obamacare’s funding is written into the law and not part of the budget that Congress approves?
I imagine those are basically open-ended offers - if you qualify for medical treatment, we promise to pay the doctor all qualifying amounts for your treatment. (The US government, in its wisdom, does of course have the option to default on its obligations.)
I assume then that each portion is its own piece.
The funding to cbuild and arrange the exchanges - I though I read somewhere they were hitting up the medical insurance companies to fund those (in part?) so that a cut-off of government funding might not effect them.
The collection of “taxes” for those failing to meet their obligations is simply the job if the IRS, and what could congress do? Defund the IRS enforceent branch? As long as it’s the job of the IRS to collect taxes, unless there’s a separate enforcement group for ACA, I don’t see much option.
A recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor says that defunding won’t stop it.
It references a study done by the Congressional Research Service on behalf of Senator Tom Coburn M.D. (R-Oklahoma) this last July.
Senator Coburn released a four page summary of the CRS report. Perhaps this explains why the Senate Republicans don’t seem to back the House bill passed today.
Perhaps that bill contains extra language to cut off the ACA, but it seems like a lot of the funding is already made or immune to simple defunding or government shutdown.
No, both CBS and the congressman are correct, and neither are misleading. The first is saying that passing the House funding bill will defund Obamacare, the second is saying that not passing any funding bill will not defund Obamacare.
The other problem is that a lot of the provisions are rules for the medical insurance industry or employers to follow. The government does not need money to mandate that all insurers not have different rates or exclude pre-existing conditions. If the government is not funded to enforce this in the courts, there’s a plague of lawyers on contingency fee ready to take up the fight for affected patients… and the insurers or employers would end up on the hook for the costs they tried to avoid.
Can the IRS, for example, weasel around a defunding provision (“spend no tax dollars on chasing employers who fail to meet health care regulations”) by any allocating fines collected into a pool that is dedicated to further enforcement? Maybe the IRS is to honest and principled to pull something like “we’ll be auditing the heck out of the rest of your expenses until you agree to pay the outstanding ACA taxes and fines…”