Administration drops controversial proposed Medicare changes

The Obama administration says it's pulling the plug on proposed changes to the Medicare prescription program that ran into strong opposition on Capitol Hill. 
Among other changes, the regulation proposed to remove three classes of drugs from a special protected list that guarantees seniors access to a wide selection of critical medications. 
The three classes of drugs facing removal were antidepressants, antipsychotics and drugs that suppress the immune system to prevent rejection of a transplanted organ. 
The administration hoped to save a total of $729 million by 2019 with the change. But patient groups including the National Kidney Foundation and the National Alliance on Mental Illness pushed back hard. 
Medicare administrator Marilyn Tavenner said Monday in a letter to Congress that the administration will not move forward with the changes.

Immigration change gives legal status to undocumented relatives of US military

Immigration reform may be stalled in Congress, but a new Obama administration policy is extending legal status and military benefits to thousands of illegal immigrants who are the spouses, parents and children of American military members. 
Supporters say the policy -- which applies to active-duty military, reservists and veterans -- is long overdue. 
"Those veterans and those men and women who serve in the National Guard certainly deserve the peace of mind that their family members will not be deported," immigration attorney Faye Kolly said. 
But critics say the policy is tantamount to backdoor amnesty. 
"A whole class of aliens with no right to be in the United States are suddenly going to be allowed to live and work here on the basis of their relationship with military and veterans," said Dan Cadman, with the Center for Immigration Studies. 
The exemption, called parole in place, came in the form of a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services "policy memorandum." It was not submitted to or approved by Congress, and the regulations were not published in the Federal Register, which allows for public comment prior to a rule taking effect. 
"I don't want to overstate it, but it sounds very similar to imperial decree if you ask me," Cadman said. "The public had no chance to comment on this new policy. I believe the way this was done was illegal." 
Obama administration officials say the new rules do not require congressional action because they're based on existing statutes. 
"It's clearly within the president's authority to enforce the law and choose which immigrants he thinks are the priority," said Brent Wilkes of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "These folks aren't threats. They've got a relative that's serving our nation." 
One face of this new policy is Christian Gonzalez, a retired Marine who has been recommended for a Purple Heart. He was attacked five days in a row by improvised explosive devices (IED's) in Afghanistan. The last one nearly claimed his life. 
"For a brief period, I was paralyzed from the waist down. I suffered a pretty traumatic brain injury from that," said the San Antonio resident, sitting alongside his wife Laura, who was brought to the U.S. illegally as a child. 
"Without her, you know, I'd be lost with my disabilities. Critics only look at her as an illegal alien. They're not looking at her as the spouse of a veteran," he said. 
Christian and Laura met in middle school. He enlisted in the Marines during high school. They got married when he returned from multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the new policy, tens of thousands of illegal aliens like Laura will be offered a green card and legal residency. 
As the wife of a veteran, she would be entitled to his health care, education and survivor benefits, as well as simple things like a Social Security number and driver's license. 
"I'm covered, my kids are covered, but the woman that runs the house, she's not covered. So that's probably the hardest part," Gonzalez said. "Now she'll be able to get a job, go to school. It would make her feel like she contributes more to the family."

‘Gaming the system’? States use trick to undo food stamp cuts

Bailey Comment: "The three states that are doing this crap have a large Democratic majority of Voters."

States are using what critics call a "perverse" legislative maneuver to partly undo congressional cuts to food stamps, despite efforts by some U.S. lawmakers to stop it. 
The Washington Post reported Monday that three states so far are finding a way to avoid or minimize the cuts. The bill passed by Congress last month was supposed to save $8.6 billion over the next decade in food stamps. But New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania have figured out how to trigger additional spending anyway. 
The trick, as many states have discovered, is for them to devote a relatively modest amount of funding to home-heating assistance. Under the law, states that give a certain amount to families could then qualify those families for additional food stamp money. 
Lawmakers, reportedly concerned that states were "gaming the system," had raised the threshold in the new law -- but states have responded by simply spending more money on home-heating assistance. In turn, this triggers more food stamp funding. 
The move, which supporters hail as a way to keep feeding families in need, also threatens to undermine the savings from the hard-fought farm bill. Fiscal conservatives have long worried that food stamp funding -- formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -- has surged to dangerous levels, reaching nearly $80 billion last year. 
According to the Post, it's not clear how long the latest gambit will last. 
"Some states will be able to do it, some states will not be able to. No one knows for how long they'll be able to do it," Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told the Post. "They have jumped into the breach where the federal government abdicated its responsibility." 
But so far, New York State reportedly raised home-heating spending by $6 million, resulting in an extra $500 million in federal food stamp money. 
Connecticut and Pennsylvania took similar steps. 
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, told the Post that lawmakers would have expressly prohibited this if they had expected it. He called the move "perverse," despite being legal.

ObamaCare will hasten income inequality, union report says

A new report from a major U.S. union says ObamaCare will hasten income inequality.
Although it defends the intent behind the Affordable Care Act, the report, entitled “The Irony of ObamaCare: Making inequality worse,” concludes that the law will transfer a billion dollars in wealth to insurance companies, uneven the playing field in the market, force employers to cut back on hours and result in pay decreases, Ralston Reports said.
“The promise of Obamacare was the right one and the hope for extending healthcare coverage to the un-and under-insured a step in the right direction,” the report says. “Yet the unintended consequences will hit the average, hard-working American where it hurts: in the wallet.”
The report says it’s “ironic” that the Obama administration is publicly discussing income inequality though it has yet to make the changes to ObamaCare that Unite Here believes are necessary to avoid exacerbating income disparity.
“Having already made efforts to accommodate businesses, churches and congressional staff, it is ironic that the administration is now highlighting issues of economic inequality without acting to preserve health plans that have been achieving the goals of the ACA for decades,” the report concludes. “Without a smart fix, the ACA will heighten the inequality that the Administration seeks to reduce … We cannot sit idly by as the politicians carve up our health plans while they carve out exceptions for themselves and every special interest feeding at the trough in Washington.”
The report comes about three weeks before the enrollment deadline for ObamaCare. While officials say 4 million have signed up for private insurance on the exchanges so far, the program is still short of its unofficial 7 million goal.

Even Obama seems to be losing faith in Obamacare

 

If you’d like the government to change something about Obamacare, give the White House a ring. They’re in a flexible mood.

President Obama this week approved yet another delay to provisions in the Affordable Care Act, giving insurers until 2016 to sell a type of insurance policy that’s supposed to be banned under the health-reform law. The ban, which was supposed to begin this year, would prevent insurers from selling bare-bones plans that might be affordable but don’t abide by 10 “essential service rules” required under the new law.

When insurers began canceling such coverage last year, however, several million Americans were forced off plans they had chosen, with most alternatives being more expensive. That undermined Obama’s frequent claim that “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it,” and turned into one of the most controversial elements of a law that hardly lacks detractors.

In November, Obama announced a one-year delay in the ban on “substandard” plans, as he used to call them. Now, extending the delay to 2016 will “provide consumers with choices so they can decide what is best,” the government says. Yet these limbo plans — temporarily allowed but bound to vanish at some point — defy the whole intent of Obamacare, as if the president is losing faith in his own plan. “This is a political move to minimize the impact of this as an argument against Democratic candidates,” says Sean Nicholson, a management professor at Cornell University.

Obama and his fellow Democrats certainly need some political cover as the November midterm elections approach. Support for the ACA has never risen above 45% and it actually weakened as the law went into effect. A recent Gallup poll shows 23% of Americans say they’ve been hurt by the law, while only 10% say they’ve been helped. That may overstate the ACA’s actual impact — since 16% of people said the ACA harmed them a year before it even went into effect — yet the negative impression alone is a big problem for Democrats who voted for the law and now must defend it as they run for reelection.
People with bare-bones insurance plans tend to be healthy enough to feel comfortable skimping on coverage. Yet it’s critical to get such people to enroll in the new federal program, so the premiums they pay will help offset the cost of older, sicker enrollees. If the ACA exempted everybody who wanted a cheap, limited plan, it could thwart the whole program, since it would include too many costly patients and premiums would be prohibitively high.
Obama now seems to be backing off one of the key planks of the whole reform effort. Yet many of the people “allowed” to keep a substandard plan will be forced to enroll in Obamacare anyway. The pressure, however, comes from three sources other than the federal government:
States. Insurance commissioners in each state must explicitly allow insurers to offer the limbo policies, and only about half of the states have said they will. So people in many states won’t be able to get a limbo plan even though Obama has said they can.

Insurers. Insurance companies spent three years preparing for the onset of Obamacare, including the ban on bare-bones plans. While reinstating old policies might earn them a few extra bucks, it’s also a hassle to cancel policies, then reinstate them only to cancel them again in a couple of years. “I would expect insurers that have already decided not to offer these are not going to change their minds in great numbers,” says Tim Jost, an expert on health law at Washington & Lee University law school.

Healthcare consumers. Bare-bones plans are the type consumers drop most frequently, as they get new jobs that offer better coverage, go onto a spouse’s plan or simply drop their insurance. Since insurers are only allowed to carry over plans that were offered in 2013 — not offer new ones — turnover alone should quickly reduce the number of people who have such plans, diminishing the importance of limbo plans.

The change means Democrats will be able to say Obamacare really does let you keep your insurance plan (wink, wink). But Jost says even that strategy carries risks. “By delaying it until 2016, that means some people might get cancellation notices right before the next presidential election," he says. “That doesn’t seem very smart.”

Of course, Obama could always extend the deadline.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback To Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.

 

Issa

‘Game the system’? Nonprofits, including Farrakhan-tied group, enjoy windfall from farm subsidies

Several nonprofits that have little to do with farming or are in poor standing with their local governments have been receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm subsidies over the past decade, federal records show.
They include an Islamic charity tied to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a Midwestern group devoted to waterfowl habitat, and a major conservation group with few farms to its name.
The group tied to Farrakhan, called the Three Year Economic Saving Program, has received nearly $160,000 in farm subsidies since 2002. The program was incorporated on Sept. 12, 2001, and is listed as “Not in Good Standing” by Illinois’s secretary of state.
The program has no record of ever being a charity with the Illinois Attorney General Office, which oversees the state’s 501(c)(3) nonprofits. The program nevertheless funded an operation called Muhammad Farms, purchased by Farrakhan in 1995. While Muhammad Farms consists of about 1,500 acres in Georgia, its farm subsidies are received at Farrakhan’s Chicago home.  
The Savings Program’s goal, according to its website, is “to provide at least one meal per day, according to the teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad for the 40 million black people in America.”
Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com and former Republican candidate for governor of Illinois, questioned the subsidies.
“’Not in good standing’ doesn’t seem to trouble the Cincinnati office of the IRS,” he said. “Why is Farrakhan’s charity allowed to receive federal money? This is no longer about farm policy, it’s merely a transfer mechanism from one set of Americans who pay taxes to another set who know how to game the system.”
OpenTheBooks.com displays taxpayer dollars given to the charity since 2008, and FoxNews.com reviewed raw data since 1995 in the database run by Andrzejewski’s group. 
The Savings Program has been listed as “Not in Good Standing” since September of last year. According to the Office of the Illinois Secretary of State, the nonprofit was “involuntarily" dissolved by the State of Illinois on Feb. 1 following its failure to file an annual report within six months of its due date. “Sooner or later, the [Illinois] Department of Revenue will catch up with them during tax time,” said an employee of the Illinois Secretary of State’s Business Services office, who commented on the condition of anonymity. The employee could not comment on the legality of the program’s continued acceptance of donations under the auspices of being a 501(c)(3).
As with other nonprofits accepting subsidies, they ostensibly benefit from their government status in two ways – both by receiving the subsidies and by enjoying tax-exempt status.
The Muhammad Farms website says supporters can donate “tax deductible contributions” to the Three Year Economic Saving Program. Yet the IRS’s public database of 990 forms (which can prove a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status) shows no such listing for either Muhammad Farms, the Nation of Islam or the Three Year Program. Some religious organizations are exempt from filing 990 forms, which may allow the Three Year Economic Program to evade disclosing its assets. Through the Freedom of Information Act, nonprofits are required to provide the past three years’ 990 forms on request, and the Nation of Islam has not returned calls requesting the forms or comment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the Nation of Islam a “black separatist group” and Farrakhan’s rhetoric “deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay,” stating that the Nation of Islam’s theology includes “innate black superiority over whites.”
Chicago Ducks
About $3.4 million in taxpayer funds have gone to foundations based in Chicago that seek to conserve waterfowl at the Putnam County, Ill., Dixon Waterfowl Refuge. Since 2001, seven waterfowl habitat foundations have received roughly $50,000 per year. Each foundation is an arm of the Wetlands Initiative, a program that, according to its website, is “dedicated to restoring the wetland resources of the Midwest.” 
Each of the seven separate foundations is run out of the same downtown Chicago high-rise office, has the same agent, shares the same IRS 990 filer and receives subsidies from the same USDA county office. Subsidies flow from the Putnam USDA office because the money goes to a waterfowl refuge overseen by the Wetlands Initiative in the same county.
The seven foundations are each dedicated in name to the Pintail, Ringbill, Blue-Wing Teal, Green-Wing Teal, Wood, Mallard and Gadwall ducks— none of which are endangered. Each of these ducks’ situations is labeled “of the least concern” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.  Only two of these ducks are in the Midwest year-round; the other five migrate briefly through the Midwest or are there for one season annually at most.
According the finance manager of the Wetlands Initiative, the seven foundations are named for ducks seen at Hennepin’s Dixon Waterfowl Reservation, which is owned nearly entirely by the seven foundations, and their subsidies are set to expire in October 2015. The Ringbill Habitat Foundation, according to the manager, has the most assets as it owns the most land. The finance manager did not respond to questions regarding why there are seven foundations, and not one.   
Group Compensated for Lamb Slaughter, Tobacco Loss
The National Audubon Society, a conservation-focused nonprofit headquartered in downtown Manhattan, has pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in federal payments.
The society is the largest recipient of farm subsidies in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, having collected roughly $763,000 over the last decade.
The group’s payment recipients span eight states. Since 1995, about 90 percent of the foundation’s $932,801 in farm subsidy payments have gone to conservation, while about $114,000 was dedicated to crop and livestock payments.
The National Audubon Society’s benefits include crop payments for corn, barley, oats, sorghum, soybeans, cotton, wheat, oilseed, burley and sunflowers. The foundation received a $30 lamb meat slaughter subsidy in 2003 and has received $576 for tobacco loss assistance since 1995. The tobacco loss assistance program was introduced to help farmers regain money lost due to slashed U.S. tobacco quotas and acreage.  
In the eight states the payments flow to, just one farm affiliated with the society could be found during a review by FoxNews.com. Dayton, Ohio’s, Aullwood Farm has received no more than $3,224 of the $114,000 in payments since 1995. The farm does raise lamb, which could explain the lamb slaughter subsidy.  The farm also raises grass crops, which could cover some, but not all, of the payments the National Audubon Society has received.
The Minnesota chapter of the Society has received over $6,000 in various payments over the last decade, but the National Audubon site does not list any centers or sanctuaries in the state.
According to its 990 form, the foundation’s 26 “key employees” are collectively compensated with more than $8 million each year. The society’s president earns a salary of over $460,000.
The National Audubon Society did not return requests for comment.

ObamaCare in peril? Questionable sign-ups, delays mar launch

Three weeks out from the ObamaCare enrollment deadline, the president's signature health care law is facing ever-increasing challenges which go far beyond the program's troubled exchange websites. 
Raising questions whether it's a crippled law that's near impossible to implement along its mandated timetable, key elements of the act continue to unilaterally be pushed off by the administration. Lawmakers are raising concerns about the security of the ObamaCare websites, even as the many "glitches" that blocked would-be enrollees are fixed. 
And at the heart of the Affordable Care Act's problems is the question of whether it will do what President Obama said -- cover a large swath of the country's 47 million uninsured. 
The numbers the administration is using to tout its progress to that end are coming under the microscope. While officials say 4 million have signed up for private insurance on the exchanges so far -- still short of the unofficial 7 million goal by the end of March -- it's unclear how many of them were previously uninsured. 
A new pair of studies suggests not very many, meaning Obama's target audience largely has not been reached. 
A startling study by McKinsey & Co. showed that of the uninsured eligible to sign up for an ObamaCare private plan, just 10 percent said they had done so. Further, it found that just a quarter of those who did sign up for coverage in the marketplaces were previously uninsured. That suggests the bulk of those signing up are simply switching from one plan to another, some facing higher premiums in the process. 
Further, the administration apparently has no idea how successful the program is when it comes to the core goal of signing up the uninsured. The National Journal reported that Gary Cohen, the health official at the helm of the insurance marketplaces who will soon be stepping down, said the administration is not really tracking that. 
"That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way," Cohen reportedly said. 
Health agency spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News on Friday that they are now "looking at a range of data sources" to figure that out. 
Reports of slow sign-ups and rising premiums have only emboldened Republicans fighting against the law. Four years after its passage, the law's defeat was still the central rallying cry at the Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington this week. 
"When ObamaCare was debated in Congress, we screamed from the rooftops that it just wouldn't work -- that it would be a job killer; that it would absolutely make health care more expensive and less accessible for millions of Americans," Sen John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Friday at the conference. "We were accused of somehow being heartless and misinformed. But now, four years later, our predictions have come true." 
The other chunk of ObamaCare-related sign-ups comes from Medicaid, which was expanded under the health care law. But while the administration recently touted that nearly 9 million were found eligible since the October launch, new estimates show just about 3 million of them were newly registered because of the health care law. 
The central concern at this stage is whether the insurance industry is seeing enough sign-ups -- insurers were relying on an infusion of young and healthy customers in order to offset the cost of insuring everyone else and complying with other provisions in the law. 
Without the proper mix of customers, premiums could rise. Asked about the McKinsey study, America's Health Insurance Plans spokesman Robert Zirkelbach said that what "ultimately matters" is who signs up, not necessarily how many sign up. 
Meanwhile, other implementation problems threaten to exacerbate the industry's concerns. 
The administration this week announced that it would let people keep plans that would otherwise be out of compliance for another two years. This was an extension of a "fix" Obama made for all those whose policies were canceled, after he was accused of misleading voters in claiming anyone who liked their health plan could keep it. 
But that potentially deprives insurers of even more revenue. Insurance industry consultant Robert Laszewski reportedly said this week that insurers are "very worried" now about the sign-ups. 
Hanging over all of these implementation problems is the 2014 midterm elections, and a sizeable group of Democrats nervous about the law's more unpopular provisions going into that vote. 
Lead among them would be the individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance. In the latest dose of bad news, The Wall Street Journal reported that, according to the Tax Policy Center, the penalty for not buying insurance could be a lot higher than the $95 fine Americans usually hear about. 
The House voted Wednesday to delay the tax penalty for one year, with more than two-dozen Democrats supporting the bill. 
In another looming confrontation, House Republicans plan to tie the so-called "doc fix" to a decade-long postponement of the mandate. The "doc fix" is a semi-routine patch by Congress to prevent doctors from seeing a massive cut in their Medicare reimbursement rate. The current one runs out at the end of this month. 
A spokesman for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called the GOP plan a "new low."