On March 15, 2011, a subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on the topic of the waivers issued by HHS to more than 1,000 unions and companies, exempting their insurance plans from the annual coverage limits under ObamaCare.  AHEC has previously detailed the problems with the waivers including, most recently, how ObamaCare does not grant Secretary Sebelius waiver authority.  Instead, HHS is using waiver authority because HHS gave HHS waiver authority in the regulations it issued, Congress never did. 

At the hearing, Edmund Haislmaier of The Heritage Foundation, provided testimony that confirmed what AHEC has said about how HHS is improperly using waivers despite no statutory authority to issue waivers.  Haislmaier stated: "The first problem is that it appears HHS has exceeded its statutory authority in creating this waiver process. The statute does not explicitly grant HHS authority to waive the application of this provision."

He continued about the problems associated with HHS waiver approach, saying:

Previous posts on this blog, Prescription for Disaster, have detailed how HHS Secretary Sebelius has used waivers to give special treatment to several of the Obama Administration's favored groups, like labor unions.  A new analysis by Philip Hamburger, a law professor at Columbia Law School, calls into question whether Sebelius even has the legal authority to issue these waivers.

Section 2711(a) of ObamaCare prohibits insurers from imposing lifetime coverage limits and "unreasonable annual limits" on insurance policies. HHS issued regulations on June 28, 2010 that established the annual coverage limits.  The statute does not give the Secretary any authority to waiver these coverage limits.  So how is it that the Secretary has issued 1,040 waivers affecting 2.6 million?  In an Insurance Standards Bulletin, HHS's Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight said. "the regulations also provided that these restricted annual limits may be waived by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)." 

What does that mean?  It means that, according to HHS, Secretary Sebelius gave herself waiver authority.  She wrote regulations that give her more authority than the statute gives her.  Congress did not provide Sebelius waiver authority.  The word waiver appear 97 times in the law - but not in relation to annual coverage limits.  If Congress had intended her to be able to waive annual limits, Congress could have given her the authority to waive the limits. 

This power grab on the part of the Secretary should be deeply disturbing to every American. If ObamaCare stands for the principle that unelected bureaucrats can give themselves powers by regulatory fiat, and without regards to Congressional delegation, then ObamaCare has caused us to lose far more than previously thought - it means we have also lost America's republican form of government.

The Obama Administration has recently announced a new round of waivers granting a "one-year exemption from a new coverage requirement" included in ObamaCare.  This latest waiver brings to 1,040 the total number of waivers affecting more than 2.6 million people who would otherwise have likely lost their insurance in 2011 due to dramatically higher prices brought about as a result of ObamaCare.  These waivers affect so-called "mini-med plans."

HHS continues to tout the waivers as if HHS, and ObamaCare, was helping to ensure that people can keep their insurance. The fact is that there would be no need to "save" people's insurance if ObamaCare did not exist in the first place. The House Ways & Means Committee released a statement that the growing numbers of waivers was, "another admission that the Democrats’ health care law is unworkable," and asked the following question, "if the Obama Administration itself admits that the best way to help Americans keep what they have is to give them a waiver from the Democrats' health care law, isn’t that a pretty good indication that the law is not working and should be repealed?"

AHEC has created a summary of the waivers issued through the first week of March 2011.



Specific details can be found here:
Association Health Plans
Insurance Issuers
Multi-Employer Plans
Non-Taft-Hartley Union Plans
Reimbursements
Self-Insured Employers
State-Mandated

As America nears the one-year anniversary of ObamaCare becoming law, AHEC has released a new document entitled: "A Policymaker's Primer on ObamaCare: The Myths, the Costs and a Practical Guide to Defunding the Government Takeover of Healthcare in the 112th Congress."

The following is the Primer's Abstract:

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is commonly referred to as ObamaCare. This law includes a series of provisions that will have a dramatic impact on America’s healthcare system, including: (1) increased taxes and compliance burdens imposed on small businesses; (2) changes to HSAs that make them less useful to individual consumers and increased fines for non-qualified distributions; (3) deep cuts to Medicare Advantage, the free-market portion of Medicare; (4) a significant expansion of Medicaid, which will threaten state budgets; and (5) an unprecedented use of the Constitution’s commerce clause to justify the imposition of an individual mandate requiring individuals to carry health insurance or face serious tax penalties. Supporters of the law have made a series of promises about this law, including that it will reduce costs and expand access to insurance. Opponents of the law, however, note that these promises have proven false, and that the law will actually increase insurance costs, increase federal budget deficits, and damage the U.S. economy. In response to the clearly negative impact the law will have on businesses, individual consumers, and America as a whole, this primer concludes that it is necessary to repeal ObamaCare and recommends a course of action for state and local policymakers to achieve that objective.

The document is available on AHEC's website here and can also be found in the Policy & Analysis area of AHEC's website.

Be sure to follow AHEC on Twitter @TheAHEC and at Facebook.com/TheAHEC.

The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced new regulations that could have a devastating affect on the insurance plans relied on by millions of college students.  According to The Wall Street Journal, "college health-insurance plans must comply with the central provisions of the health-care overhaul, ending any speculation that the nation's colleges and universities would be permanently exempted from the new law."

These plans, known as "mini-med plans," have annual caps on coverage limits (usually around $30,000) in order to keep the premium costs low.  These plans offer an affordable option for many college students who are generally much healthier than the population as a whole.

Some people have criticized mini-med plans for not offering enough coverage but the critics overlook the fact that these plans fill a market niche for many consumers.  The end results of the new regulations is that the federal government is imposing a one-size-fits-all, Washington-knows-best policy that will reduce consumer choices.  College students are very likely to see higher premiums as a consequence of this regulation. 

In a case of ultimate hypocrisy, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is fighting against the McConnell amendment to the FAA bill that would repeal ObamaCare.  They are lobbying hard to defeat the amendment.  But as The Hill has noted – a number of the SEIU’s locals have applied for and received waivers from the more onerous, and expensive provisions of ObamaCare.  It seems the SEIU only cares about the cost of its own insurance premiums, not anyone else's.

As of Wednesday, HHS granted 500 new health care waivers to US companies, The Hill reports. According to an HHS release entitled "Helping Americans Keep the Coverage They Have and Promoting Transparency," the total number of waivers for 2011 now stands at 733, exempting 2.1 million people from ObamaCare. Kathleen Sebelius maintains the waivers are necessary to keep the insurance market stable until the state-run exchanges begin in 2014.

Qualifying companies are those that provide more limited health care benefits to employees. These "mini-med" plans do not reach the $750,000 minimum annual limit required by ObamaCare. Yet for many companies changing the nature of their health insurance by increasing the annual limit would be cost prohibitive for their employees and jeopardize their coverage. To avoid this, a waiver from this portion of ObamaCare is granted.  

Interestingly, HHS's explanation of the need for these waivers refutes two key promises made by ObamaCare, namely that the reform law will by itself lower costs and also allow Americans the option to maintain their current insurance. Yet the department's rationale for the waivers suggests otherwise: "Waivers only last for one year and are only available if the plan certifies that a waiver is necessary to prevent either a large increase in premiums or a significant decrease in access to coverage." In other words, the 733 firms receiving waivers have proven to HHS that their employees will experience the opposite of what the ObamaCare promises - i.e. either higher costs or an inability to keep their current access to health care insurance - should they be forced to adhere to the legislation's guidelines.

In fairness to HHS's pledge to promote transparency, they do list all of the organizations given waivers as do they provide a bulletin detailing the waiver-granting process. They have not, however, released anything about the organizations that have been denied waivers.

The Heritage Foundation has a new analysis that details many of the consequences that will befall consumers as a result of many of the ObamaCare benefit mandates.  Mandates are bad, bad stuff.

That analysis can be found here.

AHEC's Executive Director, Shonda Werry, writes today in A Line of Sight about how ObamaCare eliminates mini-med health insurance plans, which currently cover more than 1 million Americans.  HHS Secretary Sebelius has issued hundreds of waivers to companies across the country to avoid a political disaster.

The article is available here: ObamaCare Waivers and HHS Hypocrisy