One economic risk few have noticed: Obamacare repeal

[gwb-trading]

One economic risk few have noticed: Obamacare repeal
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-economic-risk-nobody-has-noticed--obamacare-repeal-192517550.html

Volatile oil prices, financial turmoil in Greece, Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. These are the main risk factors investors are trying to gauge as 2015 gets rolling.

Another potential shock, however, is hiding in plain sight, even though there hasn't been much chatter about how it might affect the stock market or the economy. In early March, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that could upend the entire law if the court sides with the plaintiffs.

The decision, due by early summer, will come with little advance warning but could promptly suck billions of dollars out of the consumer economy. “The individual insurance market would become very unstable,” says Christine Eibner, a Rand senior economist. “There’d be a massive decline in enrollment, which would have a very destabilizing effect.”

The plaintiffs in the case, known as King v. Burwell, contend that the language of the ACA does not allow the federal government to offer insurance subsidies to people in states that don’t operate their own exchange for purchasing insurance. Defenders of the law argue that the suit hinges on a technicality that’s at odds with the intent of the law. At least some of the justices clearly feel otherwise (given that they agreed to hear the case in the first place), and if they side with the plaintiffs, Obamacare could enter a so-called death spiral in which millions lose subsidies and bail out of the program, costs skyrocket for the remaining enrollees and the ACA basically collapses.

(More at above url)

 

[BSAM]

ACA is one legal mistake after another.
If this unconstitutional, worthless junk gets repealed, there should be a memorial erected in Washington, D.C. to commemorate that great day and to forever remind the people to never elect another tyrant to the oval office.

 

[Scataphagos]

One economic risk few have noticed: Obamacare repeal
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-economic-risk-nobody-has-noticed--obamacare-repeal-192517550.html

Volatile oil prices, financial turmoil in Greece, Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. These are the main risk factors investors are trying to gauge as 2015 gets rolling.

Another potential shock, however, is hiding in plain sight, even though there hasn't been much chatter about how it might affect the stock market or the economy. In early March, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that could upend the entire law if the court sides with the plaintiffs.

The decision, due by early summer, will come with little advance warning but could promptly suck billions of dollars out of the consumer economy. “The individual insurance market would become very unstable,” says Christine Eibner, a Rand senior economist. “There’d be a massive decline in enrollment, which would have a very destabilizing effect.”

The plaintiffs in the case, known as King v. Burwell, contend that the language of the ACA does not allow the federal government to offer insurance subsidies to people in states that don’t operate their own exchange for purchasing insurance. Defenders of the law argue that the suit hinges on a technicality that’s at odds with the intent of the law. At least some of the justices clearly feel otherwise (given that they agreed to hear the case in the first place), and if they side with the plaintiffs, Obamacare could enter a so-called death spiral in which millions lose subsidies and bail out of the program, costs skyrocket for the remaining enrollees and the ACA basically collapses.

(More at above url)

More Leftist scare rhetoric.

Yeah, there would be problems.... temporary ones. Not a viable excuse to keep Obamacare.

 

[Tsing Tao]

This is the third or fourth time I've heard "volatile oil prices" as an "economic risk". Risk to whom, exactly?

 

[Ricter]

Anyone remember when Obamacare was going to destroy our economy?



Fewer People Are Having Trouble Paying Medical Bills, Thanks To Obamacare
The Huffington Post | By Emily Cohn
Posted: 01/15/2015 2:58 am EST Updated: 01/15/2015 2:59 am EST

The number of Americans struggling to pay medical bills fell last year for the first time in nearly a decade -- the latest sign that Obamacare is making health care more affordable.

Sixty-four million people, or approximately 35 percent of the U.S. population, said they had trouble paying bills or were stuck paying off medical debt in the past year, according to a new survey by the Commonwealth Fund released on Thursday. That was down from 75 million people, or 41 percent of the population, in 2012. This marks the first time that figure has fallen since 2005, when Commonwealth started keeping track.




Commonwealth attributed the drop partly to expanded access to affordable health insurance made possible by Obamacare. The survey found that the number of uninsured Americans dropped to 29 million people last year, or 16 percent of the population, from 37 million, or 20 percent, in 2010.

The Commonwealth survey, which polled 6,027 U.S. adults in the second half of 2014, is in line with several other studies finding that the uninsured rate is falling.

“These declines are remarkable and unprecedented in the survey’s more than decade-long history,” Sara Collins, the lead author, said in a press release. “They indicate that the Affordable Care Act is beginning to help people afford the health care they need."

As the chart from Commonwealth shows, the percentage of Americans reporting problems paying off medical bills or medical-related debt rose from 2005 to 2012. Rising health-care costs, stagnant income growth and the aggressiveness with which providers go after people who haven't paid their bills all contributed to this growth, according to Commonwealth Fund president David Blumenthal.

The Affordable Care Act has reversed what had been a "deterioration" of the American health-care system, according to Blumenthal.

The survey also found that, for the first time since 2003, there has been a decline in...

More>>

 

[Ricter]

Ted Cruz’s Obamacare Nightmare Comes to Life
By Jonathan Chait

In the summer of 2013, with the Affordable Care Act about to begin enrolling its first customers in the new health-care exchanges, Ted Cruz warned Republicans that they were facing one final chance to kill the law. Once Americans had grown accustomed to the sweet comfort of affordable health insurance, Cruz foresaw, they would never give it up: “[Obama’s] strategy is to get as many Americans as possible hooked on the subsidies, addicted to the sugar. If we get to Jan. 1, this thing is here forever.”

Cruz may have been completely misguided in his belief that this logic dictated that Republicans instigate a government shutdown, but on the political economy of Obamacare, he was completely right. Indications of Cruz’s prescience are popping up everywhere.

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In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell — who had vowed publicly and privately to “repeal this monstrosity” — was asked whether he would repeal the insurance exchange in his own state, and replied with word salad (“I think that’s unconnected to my comments about the overall question here”). When asked about repealing his state’s Medicaid expansion, he replied, “I don’t know that it will be taken away from them.”

Unpopular Pennsylvania Republican Governor Tom Corbett recently agreed to accept Medicaid expansion. Four more Republican governors — in Tennessee, Utah, Indiana, and Wyoming — have taken steps toward following suit. In Washington, the river of attacks against Obamacare issuing from Republicans has slowed to a trickle. (The number of Congressional news releases attacking the law has fallen by 75 percent this summer from last.) The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Anderson is warning darkly of an “anti-repeal wing” within the party. “Root and branch repeal is starting to look more like twig and leaf,” concedes Reason’s Peter Suderman.

A representative cross-section of America. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
As the law shocked detractors last spring by exceeding its enrollment targets, the anti-Obamacare community fixated on a final hope: that consumers looking to enroll this fall for next year would encounter soaring premiums. Not only has the hoped-for premium shock failed to materialize, rates seem to be coming in actually lower than this year. In a market where annual large price hikes have occurred for decades, the result is almost unfathomably positive.

A more telling development may be a behind-the-scenes fight within the Republican Party over a simple message vote. This National Review editorial, which is an attempt to persuade Congressional Republicans to stiffen their anti-Obamacare spines, contains the only reporting I’ve seen about this episode. The subject of the fight is a prospective Republican bill to repeal something called “risk corridors,” which are a temporary program to balance out the actuarial risk insurance companies face. If an insurer turns out to enroll disproportionately healthy customers, the risk corridors force them to pay back some of their profit to the government; if their consumers turn out to be disproportionately sick, they get money back from the government. Risk corridors are based on a similar program created by George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion, which was uncontroversial then and now. Since it’s part of Obamacare, conservatives have attacked it as a sinister corporate plot...

More>>

 

[DHOHHI]

Sure, anyone who is getting someone else to pay for their healthcare would be happy. And thus why most of them continue to be fat slobs. Handouts is a way of life for many people. I pray that the subsidies will be ruled illegal and this POS comes crashing down. Then we'll see who has trouble paying their medical bills.

 

[Ricter]

Sure, anyone who is getting someone else to pay for their healthcare would be happy. And thus why most of them continue to be fat slobs. Handouts is a way of life for many people. I pray that the subsidies will be ruled illegal and this POS comes crashing down. Then we'll see who has trouble paying their medical bills.

There's something quite strange about insurance... why does it work better when more people participate?

 

[DHOHHI]

There's something quite strange about insurance... why does it work better when more people participate?

Uhhhh, it's working 'better' because more people are NOT having to pay. Medicaid is exploding, 90% of Odumbocare signups are getting subsidies. But in the end taxpayers pay.

And Odumbo continues with his idiotic stuff with his 2 years of free college proposal.


Not to mention this:

WASHINGTON — President Obama will announce Thursday that he is directing federal agencies to give their employees up to six weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, a benefit he wants to extend to all American workers.

He will also call on Congress to pass a bill that would allow workers across the United States to earn up to seven paid sick days a year and would create a $2 billion incentive fund to help states pay for family leave programs, officials said late Wednesday.

But for Odumbo money apparently grows on trees.

 

[Ricter]

Uhhhh, it's working 'better' because more people are NOT having to pay. Medicaid is exploding, 90% of Odumbocare signups are getting subsidies. But in the end taxpayers pay.

And Odumbo continues with his idiotic stuff with his 2 years of free college proposal.


Not to mention this:

WASHINGTON — President Obama will announce Thursday that he is directing federal agencies to give their employees up to six weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, a benefit he wants to extend to all American workers.

He will also call on Congress to pass a bill that would allow workers across the United States to earn up to seven paid sick days a year and would create a $2 billion incentive fund to help states pay for family leave programs, officials said late Wednesday.

But for Odumbo money apparently grows on trees.

Jaysus, six weeks, that's it!? Canadian women get a year of maternity pay, lol.