Igor Volsky Archive

Obama administration officials announced on Thursday that health care premiums for policies available through the Affordable Care Act will increase slightly on average in 2015, growing at a far slower rate than they did before President Barack Obama signed reform into law in 2010.

Premiums will decrease, on average, in at least 14 of the 35 states where the federal government has established a health care exchange. In the remaining 21 states, premiums will fluctuate between a two percent increase in Utah and Wisconsin to a 28 percent spike in Alaska. On average, the report concludes that premiums for the second-lowest cost policy will rise “by 2 percent on average this year before tax credits, while premiums for the lowest-cost silver plan will increase on average by 5 percent.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has reached a compromise with House Republicans on a package of tax breaks that would permanently extend relief for big multinational corporations without providing breaks for middle or lower-income families, individuals with knowledge of the deal tell ThinkProgress.

Under the terms of the $444 billion agreement, lawmakers would phase out all tax breaks for clean energy and wind energy but would maintain fossil fuel subsidies. Expanded eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit would also end in 2017, even though the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that allowing the provisions to expire would push “16 million people in low-income working families, including 8 million children into — or deeper into — poverty.” The proposal would help students pay for college by making permanent the American Permanent Opportunity Tax Credit, a Democratic priority.

The Supreme Court’s surprising decision to take-up a case challenging the government’s authority to provide tax credits to individuals receiving health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s federally-run insurance marketplace could result in serious implications for Obamacare beneficiaries and the 36 states that have refused to establish their own exchanges. In fact, should the Supreme Court eliminate the tax credits for the millions who have enrolled in coverage through the federally-run marketplaces, the consequences wouldn’t be too dissimilar from stripping out the law’s individual mandate — something the justices refused to do in 2012.

To summarize, the plaintiffs in this case — who are mostly Republican operatives or conservative ideologues seeking to gut the law — are arguing that the ACA never intended to provide subsidies to federally-run exchanges in order to cajole states to establish their own marketplaces. They highlight two places in Obamacare where the subsidies appear to be tied to “an Exchange established by the State under 1311” and not the federal government.

A year after shutting down the government, a group of Senate Republicans are pressuring House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to oppose any funding bill in the lame duck session that includes appropriations for a small program contained in the Affordable Care Act, potentially triggering another showdown.

The group of 14 lawmakers, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), have taken aim at the risk-corridor component of the health care exchanges, a temporary program designed to prevent premiums from skyrocketing during the early years of Obamacare implementation. Under this provision, the federal government will give insurers who under-estimated how much they’d have to pay out in claims a portion of the profits from insurers who overestimated their costs and set their premiums too high. The goal of the measure is to stabilize the health care market and keep premiums level.

Most business people who run for public office emphasize their record of creating private sector jobs for the people they hope to represent. But David Perdue, Georgia’s Republican candidate for Senate, is taking an entirely different tact: bragging about the jobs he sent overseas.

Responding to reporters on Monday about revelations that he outsourced jobs during his career as a corporate executive, Perdue argued that offshoring is “a part of American business, party of any business,” adding “I’m proud of it.”

According to a July 2005 deposition obtained by Politico, Perdue admitted that he “spent most of my career” outsourcing jobs and shifting “manufacturing operations to lower-cost foreign factories, especially in Asia” while serving as CEO of a North Carolina textile manufacturer called Pillowtex Corp. Perdue added that he also moved parts of the manufacturing process to Asian countries while working with Kurt Salmon Associates, Gitano, and Sara Lee.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) seemed to echo Mitt Romney’s infamous claim that 47 percent of Americans are “takers” who suck up government benefits during a speech at a conservative Washington D.C. think tank on Thursday. Addressing the American Enterprise Institute, Boehner suggested that President Barack Obama’s economy has lulled many unemployed people into a sense of dependence on government.

“This idea that has been born, maybe out of the economy over the last couple years, that you know, I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around. This is a very sick idea for our country,” he said.

“If you wanted something you worked for it,” Boehner said, adding, “Trust me, I did it all.”