In interpreting a key Department of Health and Human Services announcement, the New York Times reported that so far, 30 insurers, employers, and union plans, responsible for covering about one million people, have been given one-year waivers by the government on the new rules that phase out annual limits on coverage for limited-benefit plans, also known as “mini-meds.” In the words of the Times, “the waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.”
This action highlights one of the great dangers of ObamaCare, which is that every health-care decision now has to run through the federal government. Private companies have to bow before its throne, asking for waivers and massively complicating their own lives. The federal government is now in a much stronger position to pick winners and losers and rig the game. This is the kind of expansion of federal power that many people feared and warned about – and it’s happening within weeks of the law taking effect.
The waivers are also the Obama administration’s attempt to minimize the negative impact of ObamaCare less than a month before the midterm election. It’s now clear that the new health-care law was very poorly constructed and is having enormous implementation problems. To issue waivers to undo the damaging effects of a new law is a very bad sign. No wonder so few Democratic candidates are running on their support for ObamaCare – and why so many Republican candidates are running hard against it.
This story is part of a broader, unfolding one: the collision between Obama’s promises on health care and reality. Promise after promise – including bending the health-care cost curve down, the cost of premiums being lower, and no person being forced to give up their existing coverage – is being shattered. On almost every particular, what Obama said would happen not only isn’t coming to pass; the opposite is occurring. I discussed some of this on my appearance on Special Report with Bret Bair last night.
The waivers are real trouble for Obama on health care – but they are also damaging his credibility. When the gap between what one says will happen and what actually happens becomes the size of a canyon, it has an acidic effect on one of the most important things an American president relies on: his trustworthiness, the belief that his word is good and he can be counted on.
