CBO Report Shows Bogus Nature of “Sabotage” Charges
If you need any additional evidence as to the trumped-up (pardon the pun) charges of Obamacare “sabotage” leveled against the current president, look no further than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report about cost-sharing subsides released yesterday. In the report, CBO concluded that ending subsidy payments—which the law never appropriated to begin with—would keep premiums roughly constant for most individuals, increase spending on insurance subsidies, and increase the number of insured Americans modestly.
Which one of those outcomes do Democrats oppose? Exactly none. Which illustrates why all the self-righteous indignation about President Trump “sabotaging” Obamacare is as much about the individual inhabiting the Oval Office as it is about health care policy.
Check the Cost-Sharing Analysis
The higher premiums for silver plans on exchanges would lead to higher spending on insurance subsidies, which Obamacare links to the second-lowest silver premium. And those richer subsidies would attract some more individuals to insurance markets, reducing the number of uninsured by about one million.
Democrats may seize upon CBO’s finding that this scenario would increase the deficit as reason to oppose it. But if Democrats cared about protecting taxpayers, they would have objected to the Obama administration’s actions—actions that the Government Accountability Office concluded last year violated the statute—placing insurance companies ahead of ordinary taxpayers in receiving reinsurance payments. They didn’t object on behalf of taxpayers then, so why object in this case? Is it really about policy, or is it just crass politics?
Liberal Hypocrisy on the Individual Mandate
Likewise, liberals charge that the president could refuse to enforce Obamacare’s individual mandate, encouraging healthy people to drop coverage and causing insurance markets to deteriorate further. In reality though, his room for maneuver is more limited. If the president decided to issue blanket exemptions to the mandate, or not enforce it, insurers likely would sue the administration for failing to execute its constitutional duties—and they could, and should, win. Under our Constitution, the president can, should, and must enforce all the laws, including the mandate, not just the ones he agrees with.
So is the issue with President Trump’s supposed non-enforcement of the mandate, or the fact that he’s the one making decisions on exactly how the mandate will be enforced?
Pester People into Enrolling
The Trump administration could certainly influence insurance markets through outreach efforts. Liberal groups have spent weeks complaining that the Department of Health and Human Services has not solicited them for this fall’s open enrollment season.
But put things into perspective. A Politico story in January noted that the Trump administration reduced television advertising by about $800,000 per day for the last four days of open enrollment—a few million dollars. If Obamacare—entering its fifth open enrollment period this fall—is so fragile that losing a few million dollars of advertising will tank insurance markets, what does that say about the stability, let alone the wisdom, of the law in the first place?
This post was originally published at The Federalist.