Since the Affordable Care Act’s passage in 2010 there have been 54 changes to Obamacare, as tracked by
Forbes, mainly because of low enrollment rates and other legislative kinks.
While the Supreme Court is responsible for Obamacare’s most recent change, the Obama administration has made most of changes to the law, about 34. Congress has contributed to 17 of the alterations.
The most recent change, prompted by the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in King v. Burwell, enables the IRS to provide tax credits via federal exchanges, even though the law originally only allowed for tax credits to stem from state-created health insurance exchanges.
The case was the third time the Supreme Court ruled on, and ultimately changed, the Affordable Care Act.
The Obama administration was behind the other two most recent changes. The first came to light when Andy S. Grewal, University of Iowa College of Law professor, testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight on June 4 to bring awareness to the fact the Obama administration has been allowing the Affordable Care Act to issue subsidized insurance to people who were also receiving employer-sponsored plans.
“Under Section 4980H(a), a business can face severe penalties if it fails to offer health insurance coverage and even one of its employees receives a premium tax credit. Thus, the invalid extension of the tax credit, even when made to a sympathetic individual, can trigger adverse consequences,” said Grewal, according to Forbes.
The original Obamacare law mandated the Department of Labor to require employers with more than 200 employees to enroll in employer-sponsored plans but did not provide credits to employees in such plans.
The second most recent change allows states with their own health care exchanges to do outreach and education to promote enrollment on the federal dime. On June 8, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that states can now use federal Obamacare grants for “outreach and education, including in-person assistance, to support increasing total enrollment… for the viability of the marketplace.”
This change is also contrary to the original Affordable Care Act, which only permitted federal grants to states to set up the their health insurance exchanges.
Chris Jennings, former White House health care adviser, justified the relatively discrete changes to Obamacare.
“Though the president largely welcomed (or at least could tolerate) everything he signed into law, he knows that hyping such changes don’t help the rare constructive (or at least not destructive) interactions with the [Republicans] on this subject,” he told the
Examiner in February.
Other recent changes catalogued by the
Galen Institute involve exempting unions from fees, delaying the sign-up deadline, and bailout funds and policies.
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