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 CBO report, as with other prior analyses, assumed that eliminating the cost-sharing reductions—used to reimburse insurers for providing discounted deductibles and co-payments to certain low-income households—would lead insurers to raise premiums, but only for certain plans. Because the law requires insurers to lower cost-sharing regardless of whether the federal government provides separate reimbursement payments for that, insurers would “load” those reductions on to silver insurance plans—but only on insurance exchanges. This change would exempt plans sold off the exchanges, where individuals do not qualify for subsidies, from the higher premium effects.
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.
Given their own party’s history with the mandate, liberals’ sudden insistence on its “enforcement” sounds more than a bit rich. Democrats were the ones who, when faced with the fact that non-compliance with the mandate could lead to jail time, expressly wrote the law to prevent the use of such enforcement mechanisms. And the last administration was, if anything, far too liberal with hardship exemptions to the mandate, giving them to individuals who received a notice from a utility threatening to shut off service, or those who had a close family member die in the past three years.
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?
The federal government shouldn’t need to spend millions of dollars every year pestering people into enrolling in coverage, not least because insurance companies can and should do that themselves. President Trump should enforce the law as it’s written—a novel task compared to his predecessor, who seemingly relished in re-writing it unilaterally—but sabotage? Democrats sabotaged the law themselves when they passed it seven years ago, and no amount of opportunistic (and disingenuous) rhetoric can change that fact.
