38 AND COUNTING: OBAMACARE DELAYS
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303325204579463493933733888?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop&mg=reno64-wsj#
Liberals say they believe in a living Constitution, and apparently they think the Affordable Care Act is a living document too. Amid one more last-minute regulatory delay, number 38 at last count, the mandate forcing nuns to sponsor birth control is more or less the only part of ObamaCare that is still intact.
On Tuesday evening, the Health and Human Services Department announced that the six-month open enrollment period for ObamaCare insurance that began in October 2013 and was supposed to end on the last day of March would be extended indefinitely. As long as people self-attest and check a box that they had some difficulty signing up on with the 36 federal insurance exchanges, the deadline will no longer obtain.
This delay is particularly notable because HHS factotums denied up and down that it was ever the remotest possibility and even that the agency lacked any legal basis to do so. The statute directed HHS to declare an enrollment period by June 2012 and provided for no ex post facto rewrites.
HHS spokeswoman Julie Bataille told reporters on a March 10 conference call that, “We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period. In fact, we don’t actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.” Texas Republican Kevin Brady asked HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a March 12 House Ways and Means hearing “Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31?” She replied categorically, “No, sir” and “There is no delay beyond March 31.”
What a difference two weeks makes. Any time Ms. Sebelius assures Congress or the public that something won’t happen, a solid bet is that it will.
The expanded enrollment period was slipped into a legal crevice related to “exceptional circumstances” signing up such as natural disasters including “an earthquake, massive flooding, or hurricane.” The exceptional circumstances now include HHS’s own errors on the exchanges, “which hindered enrollment completion.” But haven’t we been told over and over that Healthcare.gov’s technological problems are fixed?
By the way, as part of this delay HHS will make no attempt to verify real enrollment problems and will instead rely on what the agency calls “the honor system.” No one will be asked why they need an extension.
All of this is an invitation for people to game the system and wait until they become ill or are injured to sign up for insurance. Much like the rules that destroyed the individual insurance markets in states like New York, Washington and Kentucky, ObamaCare’s mandates prevent Americans from being accountable for their own health-care decisions. The new delay ensures that the uncertainty will be built into higher premiums, and insurers must act on incomplete information.
This pattern of dishonesty and political improvisation has come to define ObamaCare, which is the law for some people, sometimes, except when it isn’t. Nothing HHS claims can be trusted, and little that the President of the United States promised about his signature law has turned out to be true.
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