We had this clip on the videos page yesterday, but I think it merits some additional attention. Here's a young woman from Oregon explaining why she can't afford health insurance for herself and young son under the so-called "Affordable" Care Act:
The "loophole" she cites is an issue we began writing about way back in 2011. Nancy Pelosi famously said, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," and she was right. Here's one of the unhappy surprises embedded within the hastily-written, $2 trillion law:
At issue is a so-called “firewall” in the law that denies subsidies to workers whose employers offer quality, affordable coverage...In calculating the bill’s cost last year, Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) took the law to mean that employers and their families aren’t eligible for subsidies as long as the individual plan is affordable — regardless of the price of the family plan. This means the costs to an employee for covering his or her family could be too high to afford for many working families.
In other words, if spouse X is offered individual coverage at work, the rest of his or her family is ineligible for Obamacare subsidies -- even if the family plan through spouse X's employer isn't attainable. (Low wage workers are discovering similarly maddening restrictions in buried in Obamacare's fine print). In this Oregon family's case, the husband has an affordable employer-based plan that is too expensive to extend to his wife and child. But because he's covered, none of them can receive taxpayer assistance to offset the costs of obtaining coverage though the Obamacare exchange. Obviously, the unsubsidized price tag of the various Obamacare plans were unattainable for this family, too. Kate Holly and her son aren't alone in their plight; families from coast to coast are being harmed by the Obamacare:
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Republicans aren't "obsessed" with repealing and replacing Obamacare because of some political vendetta against the president. They're focused on the task because the law has violated virtually every major promise it was built upon and is actively hurting millions of Americans. Recent polling shows a majority of Americans would support scrapping the 2010 law -- with a sizable majority preferring the pre-Obamacare system to the new regime. A whopping two-thirds of all Americans back a one-year delay of the entire law, including the widely loathed individual mandate. The Obama administration last month implemented a unilateral one-year enforcement delay for any American (a) whose coverage was dropped because of the law's mandates, and (b) who claims a self-reported "hardship" waiver, due to new coverage being too expensive. Will Democrats agree to extend a similar offer to all uninsured Americans? If not, why not?
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