President Barack Obama made more changes to his signature healthcare law over the Thanksgiving holiday, says health policy expert Betsy McCaughey.
"Over this Thanksgiving holiday, the president slipped into the federal register, another 334 pages of changes he's making to the law," McCaughey, the former New York lieutenant governor, told J.D. Hayworth and Nick Tate on "America's Forum" on
Newsmax TV Monday.
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"Some of them are regulatory changes, but some of them actually lawlessly change Obamacare itself," she explained.
"For example, changing the rules, the legal requirements for large employers — another one requiring that insurance companies cover out-of-network doctors as if they were in-network doctors for a period of time — that's not in the law," she said.
"Requiring that people with high-risk pool insurance is now going to be considered minimum essential coverage," she added.
According to McCaughey, "a lot of these [changes] are in the weeds, but they're actual changes to the law, and . . . the high court is going to be watching this because it wasn't just one example of presidential lawlessness, the justices are seeing it again and again and again."
The Supreme Court picked up an Obamacare lawsuit alleging that the Obama administration violated the healthcare law by
offering subsidies through the federal
marketplace, when such subsidies are only supposed to be allowed via the state-run exchanges.
"The Supreme Court will be considering the fundamental issue — can the president change the text of the law by himself? Does he have the power to replace Congress and govern alone?" she contends.
"That's really the fundamental issue in this new Supreme Court case because the text of the law says that subsidies can only be offered to make health plans look affordable in the state exchanges, but most states never set up an exchange," she explained.
"Most people who are signing up for Obamacare are doing it on the federal exchange and the law doesn't permit subsidies to be offered on the federal exchange," she said.
"Without those subsidies, the price of the so-called affordable plans will suddenly be 400 percent higher than they currently are," she added.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, recently
openly criticized Obamacare, saying it was a mistake to pass the healthcare law overall.
McCaughey told Newsmax that "it's obvious that Schumer" and other Democrats "want to distance the party as much as possible from Obamacare."
"Many Democrats in Congress who see their colleagues already politically dead on the battlefield because of Obamacare are not going to martyr themselves for Obamacare or for Obama," she explained.
"What's going to happen is that these Democrats in Congress are going to be very willing to step up and support bipartisan repeal of large chunks of this law," she said.
"There's going to be movement on several fronts — movement to repeal the bailout provision, movement to repeal the employer mandate, movement to repeal the independent payment advisory board that rations Medicare for seniors," she added.
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