It’s the conservative conspiracy theory that wouldn’t go away. For months Republicans and conservative foes of the new health care law have raised warning flags about its “waiver” process. The legislation gives the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to issue waivers to providers with the goal of implementing the full law in 2014 as smoothly as possible. In particular, providers of group health insurance — including businesses and labor unions — have been exempted from new rules requiring health care plans to cover $750,000 in costs per year.
This, suspicious Republicans believed, was a recipe for cronyism. Without data detailing who got the waivers and who did not, they alleged that the waivers were part of scheme to reward administration allies and punish administration enemies with no oversight.
But that all changed when Congress tasked the Government Accountability Office with auditing the waiver program as part of spending legislation President Obama signed in the spring to avoid a government shutdown. That report was released earlier this month and the results were…quite unexceptional.
The administration granted the vast majority of waiver requests in full, and even more of them in part. Of nearly 1500 requests, only 40 were fully rejected. Over 1,300 were fully approved. And of the few dozen requests that were denied? A majority of them were for insurance plans covering union workers.
That should be the end of the story. But in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t world of politics, the report became evidence of a different problem critics claim to have with the law: there’s no rhyme or reason to the waiver process!
Actually, that’s false too. The report also concludes that the HHS agency tasked with processing the waiver requests granted them by and large if applicants could show that the annual limit requirement would force them to raise premiums by more than 10 percent, and significantly reduce benefits.
But no matter. The administration was cowed — or at least appears to have been cowed — into drawing the waiver program to a close. In a conference call last week, administration officials said they would no longer accept applications after September — companies who have received waivers will be able to keep them until 2014 when the law is fully implemented. Everyone else must apply by then or be shut out. Steve Larsen, the official who runs the waiver process claims it’s because all of the providers who need waivers have already applied.
“For the vast majority of plans that would need a waiver, those are the ones that would have applied and did apply this year,” he said.
That may finally put an end to the claims of favoritism, but then it’s on to the next one.
