There Are Now More than 1,000 ObamaCare Waivers

Historic. The President's signature legislation is so wonderful and so necessary that over 1,000 waivers from its burdensome requirements have been granted.

HHS posted 126 new waivers on Friday, bringing the total to 1,040 organizations that have been granted a one-year exemption from a new coverage requirement included in the healthcare reform law enacted almost a year ago. Waivers have become a hot-button issue for Republicans, eager to expose any vulnerabilities in the reform law.

Democrats spent over a year claiming there was a moral imperative to do away with the mini-med plans that now routinely get a waiver from the Obama Administration. So, were they lying then or are they immoral now?

Could be both:

The department also said the number of waivers has been steadily decreasing. HHS approved more than 500 in December, which it attributed to most plan years starting Jan. 1. It then approved 200 waivers in January and 126 in February.

It's hard to tell if that's just bad reporting (remember, reporters are generally stupid creatures) or if HHS really did tell him that the number of waivers has been decreasing. I'm going to go with the former, though, because that paragraph looks like it was plucked and poorly paraphrased from the official talking points on the ObamaCare website. The number of waivers has not been decreasing. In fact, the number of waivers just increased to a record 1,040. What the reporter meant, and failed to convey, was that the rate of the increase in healthcare waivers has been decreasing. English iz hard.

So who got waivers in this bunch? Several unions, including an SEIU local, some school districts and county governments, and several private companies, including the parent company of Pizza Hut and KFC, got a reprieve from ObamaCare.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 07:21 AM

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