WASHINGTON, D.C. – If President Trump obeys the law and stops Treasury from diverting funds to pay Obamacare subsidies that Congress refused to fund, Obamacare will self-destruct almost immediately.
A key date is May 12, 2016. That was the day when U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, in the case U.S. House of Representatives v. Burwell, (130 F. Supp. 3d 53, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), ruled against Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell.
Judge Collyer decided HHS Secretary Burwell had no constitutional authority to divert funds Congress appropriated to one section of the ACA to fund Obamacare subsidy payments to insurers under another section of the ACA, Section 1402 – the clause defining the insurer subsidies – when Congress specifically declined to appropriate any funds to Section 1402 for paying the insurance subsidy.
“Paying out Section 1402 reimbursements without an appropriation thus violates the Constitution,” Judge Collyer concluded. “Congress authorized reduced cost sharing but did not appropriate monies for it, in the Fiscal Year 2014 budget or since.”
The Obama administration appealed the District Court decision in U.S. House of Representatives v. Burwell to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Obama administration on its own authority decided to continue paying the ACA insurance subsidies that Congress refused to fund, while the case was under appeal.
Knowing Congress had refused to fund the insurance subsidies, the Obama administration was never forthcoming in answering directly whether the ACA insurance subsidy payments came from the Fannie/Freddie NWS, or from other sources in the Treasury taxpayer general funds.
The point is that if the Trump administration simply decided to drop the Circuit Court appeal in Burwell, the District Court decision would become established law.
The result would be the Trump administration would be forbidden from diverting federal funds to pay the ACA insurance subsidies, with the result Obamacare would implode.
“The Obama administration appealed the decision, but if the Trump administration were to drop that appeal, the subsidies would disappear,” commented Julie Rovner, Kaiser Health News, in an article published on April 9, 2017.
If insurance companies were forced to take a loss by absorbing the cost above what low-income insured could afford to pay for the insurance coverage required under Obamacare, no insurance company could afford to provide health insurance to low-income insureds under the ACA.
On March 13, 2017, Infowars.com published a detailed analysis of the Treasury Department’s financial report for Fiscal Year 2013 demonstrating how the Treasury used the Net Worth Sweep to confiscate all profits from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, placing the funds into line items on the Treasury balance sheet so the funds could be swept into Obamacare on the sly.
The problem is that Congress specifically declined to appropriate any funds to Section 1402 to pay for the insurance subsidy the ACA required for low-income individuals and families to afford the insurance the ACA provided.
If the low-income insurance subsidies cannot be paid, what the Obama administration understood is that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare, would implode immediately.
The point is Obamacare depends on Congress funding enough taxpayer money to pay the insurance companies subsidies that are the difference between what their health insurance truly costs and the minimal amount low-income families can afford to pay.
Joshua Rosner, a managing director of the New York-based independent research firm Graham Fisher & Co., also concluded the Obama administration likely had diverted the Fannie/Freddie Net Worth Sweep to pay Obamacare insurance subsidies, based largely on a detailed analysis of the public record and the 45 documents released in litigation brought forward by the Government Sponsored Entities’ (GSEs’) investors.
Rosner argues that the Trump administration could easily make public the remainder of the 11,000 total documents the Obama administration sealed by simply removing Obama’s claim of executive privilege.
Rosner further believes the Obama administration fought to keep these documents from public inspection because the documents likely show the step-by-step machinations the Obama administration went through behind closed doors in their scramble to avoid having to negotiate with the Republicans on the debt ceiling and on sequestrations, while the Obama administration searched frantically to find a way to defy the will of Congress by finding funds somewhere to divert to Obamacare.
“Given that the Obama Administration sought to fund $130 billion of unappropriated monies to health insurers beginning in FY2013, one must wonder if the decision to amend the Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement in August 2012 and sweep GSE profits of $130 billion in 2013 ($82.4 billion from Fannie Mae, and $47.6 billion from Freddie Mac) was an attempt to circumvent Congress on the single most important policy priority of the White House,” Rosner concluded.
That the Trump administration has not decided to stop diverting funds to pay the ACA insurance subsidies was made clear by a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in January 2017, examining how repealing various parts of the ACS would affect health insurance coverage and premiums.
Here, the CBO estimated eliminating the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility and of the subsidies for insurance purchased through the ACA marketplaces would increase the number uninsured in the firs new plan year following enactment of the bill by 18 million, with the number to increase to 32 million by 2026.
Infowars.com has reported that a key proponent for continuing the NWS has been Tennessee’s Republican Sen. Bob Corker, derisively referred to by those seeking to save Fannie and Freddie as the “Senator for Wells Fargo,” given the dominance of Wells Fargo versus other commercial banks in the mortgage market, as well as the key role Wells Fargo loans have played to Corker’s political success and the millions of dollars in personal net worth he has managed to amass.
In a letter dated March 29, 2017, Corker rounded up four other U.S. Senators, including Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner to write a letter to Melvin Watt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, asking the Trump administration to continue the Obama NWS without interruption.
But Corker and Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner do not want Freddie and Fannie to recapitalize because this would be directly counter the “housing finance reform” legislation Corker and Warner have co-sponsored since 2013.
That legislation aims to complete the Obama administration plan to create a “bank-centric” market, shut down Fannie and Freddie, and squeeze out small independent lenders and community banks, while handing over all U.S. mortgage finance to Wall Street and to big banks, like Wells Fargo.
Corker and Warner, with their proposed legislation, have schemed to advance what leaked Geithner-era Treasury documents published by Infowars.com prove was an Obama administration plan to end “home ownership” as part of the American Dream.
These leaked documents show Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner lead a series of among Obama administration officials and outside real estate “experts” that were closed to the press, aiming to “wind down” Fannie and Freddie, knowing full well that closing Fannie and Freddie would turn the U.S. middle class into a nation of “well-housed” renters, with bank owners/masters, on the model of the European Union.
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