Up Next: Obamacare’s Thanksgiving Turkey
According to online sources, on Wednesday President Obama plans to pardon the White House turkey in an annual Thanksgiving ceremony. But before that happens, later today Secretary Sebelius plans to serve the American people a turkey – more regulations implementing Obamacare. Among the possible items on “Aunt Kathy’s” Thanksgiving menu:
- “Essential” benefits – as defined by government bureaucrats – that will raise individual health insurance premiums by $2,100 per family per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office;
- Actuarial value standards that could cause millions of individuals with Health Savings Account plans to lose their current insurance; and
- Standards for Exchanges that dictate to the states what requirements Washington will force them to meet.
Reading through all these mandates and requirements is enough to give anyone a serious case of indigestion, which explains why the Administration is releasing them so close to Thanksgiving. They don’t want the American people to read the regulations implementing the bill, just like they didn’t want the American people to read the bill itself. Thus the spectacle of a Cabinet secretary who sat idly by as an “author” of Obamacare admitted he hadn’t read it (because Democrats had to “make judgments very fast”) engaging in a real-life version of “Take Out the Trash Day” by dumping out massive – and costly – regulations two weeks after the election, and two days before a major holiday. It does raise one obvious question: If Obamacare is so popular, why did these major regulations implementing Obamacare sit on a shelf until after the election? What has HHS been hiding?
Then-Speaker Pelosi spoke the truth when she famously said we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. That statement is just as true with the regulations implementing the bill as it is with the 2700-page measure itself. But a general clue about what’s to come will arrive in the form of the entrée on many Americans’ tables this Thursday.