Free Republic

While President Obama diverts the nation's attention with his other myriad scandals, the Obamacare Express continues to careen off the rails, leaving a wide path of destruction and rendering its supporters defenseless. The latest outrage, in a yearslong string, is that at least 4 million of the 8 million total Obamacare sign-ups contain flawed applications, according to a report by House Republicans. But this isn't some arbitrarily divined number chosen by Republicans for political purposes. It is based on a chart prepared by federal Obamacare contractor Serco that shows more than 4 million application discrepancies as of May 27. These...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Why did Democrats give Obamacare an annual marriage tax of up to $11,028 per couple? In front of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Obama administration argued that Obamacare is a tax.According to the Obamacare calulator, Obamacare places an annual tax on married couples for being married instead of single. The amount of this tax depends upon the ages, incomes, and parental status of the married couple.According to the Obamacare calculator, the extreme case of this tax occurs with a 60-year-old married couple with no children, where the two spouses have identical incomes totaling $62,041 per year....

At least 4 million Obamacare sign-ups have flawed applications out of the 8 million total applications, according to a report released Wednesday by House Republicans. The Energy and Commerce Committee documents double the claims made in an Associated Press report released earlier on Wednesday, which found that according to a May 8 federal slideshow, 2.1 million Obamacare applications had “inconsistencies” in income, immigration and citizenship data. (RELATED: Obamacare Data Flaws Jeopardize Coverage For 1 in 4 Sign-ups) Federal Obamacare contractor Serco compiled a chart for the committee which displays over 4 million application discrepancies by May 27. The inconsistencies include...

Obama is driving the country to ruin By Michael Goodwin If you think of the United States of America as a store, its recent decisions and scandals resemble a sale, perhaps a fire sale. Or maybe even a “Going Out of Business” sale. The list of dramatic markdowns is breathtaking. They include trading away five murderous terrorists for a likely Army deserter, an open invitation to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to cross the Mexican border, and a decision to recognize the terrorist group Hamas as part of the Palestinian government. On the home front, environmental regulations will cost...

In Vermont, the rate increases announced Monday range from 9.8 percent to 18.3 percent. Kentuckians will pay up to 17 percent more in 2015, and in Virginia rates will rise as much as 22 percent. These increases are the direct result of the Obamacare scheme to make health care “more affordable,” and the increases could have a considerable impact on the November congressional elections. The state-by-state drip, drip, drip of bad news for Democratic candidates can be good news for the rest of us if it encourages voters to shake up Washington. The shake-up starts with getting the government out...

National insurance giant UnitedHealthcare plans to cut up to 700 Massachusetts doctors from its physician network for seniors enrolled in its private Medicare plan as a way to control costs, according to company officials. For elderly patients enrolled in the plan, the cuts mean they will have to find a new doctor or eventually switch to a new health plan that covers their current doctor. The move, effective Sept. 1, follows similar cuts made by the insurer to its Medicare Advantage provider networks in 11 other states... There is also pending legislation in Congress to prevent health plans from cutting...

This is a re-post of an article I wrote in 2012.  I am re-posting it to demonstrate that recent stories about doctor shortages and wait times are absolutely inevitable results of government interventions in the health care economy.My son is in Freshman econ 101, and so I have been posting him some supply and demand curve examples.  Here is one for health care.  The question at hand:  Does government regulation including Obamacare increase access to health care?  Certainly it increases access to health care insurance, but does it increase access to actual doctors?   We will look at three major...

The Left finally abandons one of its dumbest ideas.Conservatives have long known that Obamacare’s employer mandate, if implemented, will create harmful distortions in the labor market and damage the economy. The mandate will force small employers to rebuff workers they would hire in its absence, and it will incentivize large employers to replace full-time employees with part-timers. When conservative policy experts and business groups first pointed this out, however, Obamacare supporters robotically recited the usual canards about close-fisted capitalists who value profit more than healthy employees. But a funny thing happened on the way to the midterms — the President...

Ineptitude: Millions of people could be in for a rude surprise later this year when they discover they aren't eligible for ObamaCare, or are getting too big a subsidy, thanks to another failed ObamaCare promise. In early September, administration officials declared that the ObamaCare "data hub" was ready to roll. This hub was central to making ObamaCare work, since it was supposed to verify citizenship, income and other information needed to determine eligibility and the level of insurance subsidies available. More important, it was all supposed to happen in real time, right when people were filling out their online application...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A huge new paperwork headache for the government could also be jeopardizing coverage for some of the millions of people who just got health insurance under President Barack Obama's law. A government document provided to The Associated Press indicates that at least 2 million people enrolled for taxpayer-subsidized private health insurance have data discrepancies in their applications that, if unresolved, could affect what they pay for coverage, or even their legal right to benefits. The final number affected could well be higher. According to the administration the 2 million figure reflects only consumers who signed up through...

The federal government may reimburse doctors for talking to Medicare patients and their families about “advance care planning,” including living wills and end-of-life treatment options — potentially rekindling one of the fiercest storms in the Affordable Care Act debate. A similar provision was in an early draft of the federal health care law, but in 2009, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin took to Facebook to accuse President Barack Obama of proposing “death panels” to determine who deserved life-sustaining medical care. Amid an outcry on the right, the provision was stripped from the legislation. Now, quietly, the proposal is headed...

Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare. They might just get it. Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out. That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states. The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding...

Here’s your Orwellian Phrase for the Week: Individual shared responsibility payment. Yeah… Go ahead and try to wrap your brain around that amalgamation of contradictory concepts. The phrase is not gleamed from some glossy DNC spin-office, or a Harvard professor’s latest psychobabble posing as an academic paper. Apparently the phrase is the IRS’s fancy (new) term for the Obamacare Mandate tax that individuals will have to pay if they fail to get health insurance this year. As reported by Americans for Tax Reform: If you (or any of your dependents) do not maintain coverage and do not qualify for an...

Translation: If you disliked our plan, you still have to keep our plan. The Obama administration took a victory lap based on dubious-at-best enrollment figures after the deadline passed to sign up for ObamaCare, but Americans aren’t running alongside. Public opinion remains largely fixed, Gallup reports, more than a month later (via Taegan Goddard): Although the Obama administration is boasting higher-than-expected enrollment for the Affordable Care Act, Americans’ attitudes toward the healthcare law have changed only marginally since the open enrollment period ended for 2014. A steady 43% of Americans approve of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as...

CAMP MEEKER (CBS SF) — A Sonoma County man battling more than a dozen tumors in his body is fighting a new battle with his insurance carrier, who has denied coverage for his treatments. Jeffrey Rusch of Camp Meeker knew the news was bad when an MRI found 20 tumors in his brain. Two days later, a C-T scan at Sutter medical center in Santa Rosa brought another devastating blow, discovering a large tumor in his lungs, and more in his liver and bones. Doctors told Jeffrey he would need to be hospitalized immediately. “My husband was having a lot...

Question for any retired medicare ATT Freepers that are being dumped by ATT on to AON Hewitt. Have you been to any meetings and if so how bad are we going to take it. Have you spoken to the "licensed insurance rep" for you area? I haven't been to any thing as yet but trying to get a feel for this and get more info but its all reallll vauge and I am sure we are going to take it up the wazoo real bad. Freepmail me if you like. Thanks

Nancy Pelosi says that she’d like to see Obamacare improved by moving to a public option or a single-payer system:

There are multiple levels of irony in this New York Times report on the impact of ObamaCare on poor patients in the nation’s hospitals. Congress demanded the power to revamp the health-insurance industry and expand Medicaid in order to help the poor get better medical care for less money. In reality, the opposite appears to be happening, as hospitals attempt to force the poor into ObamaCare: Hospital systems around the country have started scaling back financial assistance for lower- and middle-income people without health insurance, hoping to push them into signing up for coverage through the new online marketplaces...

Nick and Rachel Robinson were excited about the possibilities that Obamacare offered them when they found out they were expecting a third child. “It’s one of those times where you hear the news and there’s this immediate sense of joy and excitement like, ‘Yay, a new kid. That’s awesome!’” Nick Robinson told NPR. But the happy news also came with a new set of worries. “What are we going to do? How are we going to pay for this? This is intense.” When the option of the Affordable Care Act became available, the Robinsons believed it was the answer to what they...

WASHINGTON — Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange with a tax-free contribution of cash to help pay premiums, but the Obama administration has squelched the idea in a new ruling. Such arrangements do not satisfy the health care law, the administration said, and employers may be subject to a tax penalty of $100 a day — or $36,500 a year — for each employee who goes into the individual marketplace.