Free Republic

The legacy news media are once again doting on the porcine Affordable Care Act with an extravagance not lavished on a pig since P.G. Wodehouse created the immortal Empress of Blandings. If you are unfamiliar with the latter, she was a gigantic Berkshire sow who was treated by her aristocratic owner with a level of reverence that caused his friends and family to question his grip on reality. Likewise, after an all-too-brief flirtation with fact-based journalism inspired by the bungled rollout of Healthcare.gov, mainstream reporters have reverted to coverage of Obamacare that suggests they, too, may be delusional. Most voters...

In late November, Stephanie Van Dyk got a cryptic call from her boss at Google. She noticed Mikey Dickerson, a site reliability engineer, hadn’t been at their Mountain View, Calif. office lately. Now he was calling her from an unknown location with this request: “Your country needs you.” Ms. Van Dyk, who is from Vancouver, jokingly said: “I don’t think you’re talking about my country.” He laughed, then said: “Fine, fine — the President needs you.” That’s how Ms. Van Dyk became one of three Canadians who were part of the so-called “tech surge”: a group of the best and...

RICHMOND— Gov. Terry McAuliffe plans to expand Medicaid by executive action, he said Friday, sidestepping a Republican-controlled General Assembly that has blocked expansion through legislative action. McAuliffe also said he will veto sections of the state budget, including language meant to block expansion by fiat. His administration is looking at a number of options - which the governor did not detail - and expects to have a formal plan by September. The move leads Virginia into complex legal ground on arguably the most divisive political issue in the state. The governor said he'll allow most the spending plan to become...

There are hundreds of aspects of Obamacare that people argue over. But there’s one question that matters above all others: does the Affordable Care Act live up to its name? Does it make health insurance less expensive? Last November, our team at the Manhattan Institute published a study indicating that Obamacare had increased the underlying cost of individually-purchased health insurance in the average state by 41 percent in 2014, relative to 2013. We’ve now redone the study on a county-by-county basis, complete with a brand-new interactive map. Depending on where you live, the results may surprise you.

For months, there have been assertions that the mechanisms embedded in Obamacare, designed to offset losses that insurance companies will take this year on their exchange business, amount to a bailout of the insurance industry. At the same time, it wasn’t clear where the money to pay for these “risk adjustments” would come from in the first place. Now we know where the “bailout” money is going to come from. It will be paid for by a new tax levied on the insurance companies. Since Obamacare health plans were prevented from pricing products to reflect true risk, they were always...

If you could pick any healthcare system in the world, it probably wouldn’t be the U.S.’s. According to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund, titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 2014 Update: How the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally,” the U.S healthcare system is the most costly in the world, but it ranks poorly compared to other countries on most measures of performance.Among the 11 nations assessed by The Commonwealth Fund — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the U.S. — the U.S. ranks last, as it did in four...

Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, running to be Louisiana's next governor, is leaving the door open to a possible expansion of the state's Medicaid program to cover more of the working poor, as allowed under the federal health care law. Vitter said Monday that he's not opposed to the expansion if Louisiana can improve the performance of its Medicaid program and if the expansion doesn't draw state resources away from other spending priorities like higher education.

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...