Free Republic

Health Reform: After years of singing the praises of universal health care, college professors are now shocked at how badly it has turned out — for them. Adjunct professors are steamed at the way their employers are interpreting the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate, which forces them to cover full-time but not part-time workers. Typical of liberals, they blame their employers instead of the job-killing law they supported. Starting Jan. 1, ObamaCare makes employers offer all full-time workers health insurance or pay a fine. In response, hundreds of colleges have simply cut instructors' course loads to dodge coverage. Others are...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has yet to endorse a candidate in the Tennessee primary, but incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander has already recruited him for an event in his state. The two senators will host a healthcare roundtable discussion in Nashville on June 30 with Tennessee healthcare executives and professionals to discuss the effects of Obamacare. Although the discussion is closed to the press, the two senators will hold media availability after the event. As he faces primary challenger Joe Carr in the fall, Alexander has touted his work with Sen. Paul in campaign ads – particularly on the Freedom to...

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius acknowledged Friday that she made mistakes leading up to the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, worrying too much about whether there’d be a market for Obamacare and spending “too little time clearly on the technology side.” “I sure made some mistakes along the way in terms of focusing on some things and not on others,” she said at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

"If a judge is told by a party to decide his cases in a certain way, or one party can threaten the judge’s job if the case is not decided in that party’s favor, then this central pillar of our democratic society is corroded,” Petersen said at a recent hearing called by the Senate Law and Justice Committee.

Most Obamacare customers will face serious premium hikes next year unless they change their health insurance again, according to a Thursday study from Avalere Health. Most Obamacare customers are receiving some level of taxpayer subsidies to take the edge off high premium rates, but the plans that determine the amount of subsidies available will be changing significantly, according to Avalere.

Climate change is happening, and with that will come more deaths from heat-related illness and disease, according to a report released Tuesday. The report, spearheaded and funded by investor and philanthropist Thomas Steyer, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, examines many of the effects of climate change for business and individuals. "One of the most striking findings in our analysis is that increasing heat and humidity in some parts of the country could lead to outside conditions that are literally unbearable to humans, who must maintain a skin temperature below 95°F in order to...

Hospitals across the country are struggling to deal with a shortage of one of their essential medical supplies. Manufacturers are rationing saline — a product used all over the hospital to clean wounds, mix medications and treat dehydration. Now drug companies say they won’t be able to catch up with demand until next year. ...“The Most Expensive Drug Shortage in History” The burden ultimately falls on hospitals, clinics, and dialysis centers to come up with their own workarounds. And all that staff time adds up. Hospitals spend $216 million a year on the labor costs of managing drug shortages, according...

Enrollment: ObamaCare loyalists are trumpeting a new Kaiser Family Foundation survey finding that more than half of those who enrolled had been uninsured. But the survey's findings are nothing to cheer about. First, nobody knows exactly how many ObamaCare enrollees were previously uninsured, because the administration didn't bother to ask for that information when people signed up. So it's been up to pollsters to figure out what happened, and previous surveys showed that only a small percentage of ObamaCare sign-ups came from the ranks of the uninsured. The new Kaiser survey, in contrast, found that 57% of those getting coverage...

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...