For some reason, the administration is considering reappointing Obama holdout Mark Pearce to the National Labor Relations Board. Pearce helped author some blatant give-aways to labor unions under the Democrat majority, including one a court found simply “legally unsupportable.” A group of free market organizations, including mine, has urged the President to stop this reappointment. You can see our letter here.
TYLER O’NEIL: Judge Foils ‘Deep State Bureaucrats’ in Obamacare Case, Demands IRS Return $839M to 6 States.“Busting a bureaucrat ‘money laundering scheme’.”
On Tuesday, a federal district court judge in Texas ordered the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to return more than $839 million that bureaucrats effectively stole from six states in a violation of the plain text of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
“This is a prime example of how the administrative state works — and how difficult it can be to unravel the work of deep state bureaucrats,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murrill, who helped argue the case, told PJ Media.
In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had unlawfully required six states — Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Texas, and Wisconsin — to foot the bill for health care providers, paying a fee that Obamacare clearly exempted them from.
Obamacare mandated that more Americans purchase health insurance. In order to avoid enriching health care providers — known as managed care organizations or MCOs — the law levied a health insurance provider fee (HIPF). Due to an actuarial rule established under Alex Azar, secretary of the department of Health and Human Services, states had to pay the HIPFs to the tune of hundreds of millions.
“The law expressly forbids imposing the fee on states,” Liz Murrill told PJ Media. “It was intended to basically take back some of the profits insurers would achieve from the expansion of insurers and the associated increase in premiums (projected to come from a less sick, younger population).”
Instead, the deep state bureaucrats forced the states to foot the bill.
h/t SG