“[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seemed to be alluding to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” (pass the cake first, then cut it) as she urged passage of Obamacare, a bill with whose contents very few members of Congress were even familiar.
The result has been a series of unpleasant surprises, which kept coming throughout the summer.
Paperwork Increase Act: In an effort to squeeze as much blood as possible out of small businesses that are already reeling in a bad economy, Obamacare trebles the number of tax forms each one has to fill out.
The bill requires even the smallest firms to draw up and send IRS 1099 forms to every vendor with whom they do more than $600 in business. Did you buy office furniture this year? A laptop?
Better find the seller’s taxpayer identification number and address, fill out the paperwork, and mail it in duplicate. The provision won’t raise much money, but it will treble compliance costs for 30 million U.S. businesses and the amount of paperwork the Internal Revenue Service processes.
When Congress returns next month, this will probably be the first part of Obamacare to be repealed.
Abortion: How many times did President Obama promise that his health care law would not fund abortions? Quite a few, but an explicit ban on the procedure never made it into law. When Obamacare passed in late March, Obama signed an executive order on the topic which commentators on both sides noted was entirely toothless — “a big nothing-burger,” as the liberal David Corn put it.
In July, FactCheck.org confirmed that the Obamacare law, as pro-lifers had contended all along, does not protect the taxpayer from funding abortions. Pennsylvania and New Mexico, in complete compliance with the letter of the law, released the details of their high-risk pools, which showed they would cover any abortion legal under state law — in other words, any abortion.
To stem the controversy, the federal Department of Health and Human Services announced it would not allow abortion funding except in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother.
But abortion rights advocates point out correctly that this restriction has no statutory basis. It will probably expire as soon as Planned Parenthood can get it in front of a judge.
Children: Obamacare was intended to require coverage of children right away regardless of their pre-existing health conditions. Despite drafting errors in the bill, the requirement is being honored by insurers.
But it threatens ruin for those insurers if the parents of extremely sick children start signing them up for cheaper, separate policies in the individual insurance market. Under Obamacare’s rules of “guaranteed issue” and “community rating,” they cannot be turned away or charged substantially higher prices.
So insurers began refusing to issue individual policies for any children at all. The Hill reported last month that this was already occurring in at least three states, and that it would most acutely harm “middle-class families with healthy children, who don’t have access to public programs.”
The administration responded by letting insurers restrict when parents can enroll children to one month out of the year — meaning that you’ll have a harder time now enrolling your healthy child in such a plan, in the event that insurers are still willing to sell them.
Which reinforces the problem most Americans have with Obamacare. If it had simply sought the taxpayers’ help for the poorest and sickest, it might have been popular, as such programs (SCHIP, for example) tend to be. Instead, it is creating new problems for those who never had them, living up to its opponents’ worst fears.
David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
