Free Republic

President Obama on Tuesday made an emotional plea to protect the Affordable Care Act just weeks before the law could face its biggest legal challenge to date. In a half-hour speech to the Catholic Health Association on Tuesday, Obama expressed deep disappointment in the many legal and political attacks against the law, which he described as “ceaseless, endless partisan attempts to roll back progress.”“It seems so cynical to want to take coverage away from millions of people, to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now become part of the fabric of America,” he told the crowd...

[Obama's Death Panels law] hangs in the balance in the Supreme Court for the second time in three years, but the public has rendered a judgment ahead of the court's ruling. By a margin of 55 percent to 38 percent, more people say the court should not take action to block federal subsidies in states that didn't set up their own exchanges, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll..... ....The survey finds opinion on the health-care law among the worst in Post-ABC polling; 54 percent oppose, up six percentage points from a year ago. Support ties the record low...

Last week Americans For Tax Reform released new information showing that during Hawaii's special Obamacare enrollment period, zero people enrolled. The total state cost for the exchange sits at more than $200 million. While Hawaii enrolled zero individuals and is the worst performing state, it is not alone. Vermont signed up only 97 households, while Rhode Island enrolled just 25 households. Hawaii’s dismal performance should not be surprising. The website cost taxpayers $205 million but could only enroll 8,592 individuals in year one. Cost to taxpayers per enroll: $23,899. The state legislature recently rejected a $28 million bailout for the...

Live FoxNews Video Presser.

Don't expect your doctor to stand up and protest about how the Affordable Care Act is responsible for so many of the health care problems that patients face today. As a physician and a dentist in private practice, we have spent the past five years making the case that the ACA is harming our patients. While we get many varied and complex questions from them, the one question always asked is a simple one, but one with a more complex answer: "Why aren't more doctors speaking out?" The primary reason is fear. Doctors are afraid of their new bosses —...

When Barack Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill first rolled out ObamaCare, conservatives warned that the program was so badly designed that it couldn’t possibly be on the level. Instead, people assumed that Democrats intended ObamaCare to fail — so that the only possible choice would be a single-payer system of socialized medicine. Even after Democrats reluctantly eliminated the “public option,” opponents insisted that the intended end game was failure so bad that it would destroy private insurance and leave nothing but the federal government to pick up the pieces.The problem with that strategy, if indeed that was the...

Earlier this year, the Obama administration boasted that well over 11 million people had signed up for an ObamaCare plan by the end of the second open enrollment period.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Alabama health insurance providers who offer plans on the ObamaCare exchange are seeking significant price increases this year, after healthcare costs took a sharp upward turn. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama is reportedly requesting an average of a 28 percent increase for its individual plans, as well as a 73 percent increase for its platinum plan. Small group plans could also increase by nearly 14 percent. UnitedHealthcare is seeking a 24.5 percent increase for its 2016 rates.

Hold onto your wallets ... many insurers want to substantially hike rates on Obamacare policies for 2016. Many are proposing double-digit premium increases for individual policies, with some companies looking to boost rates more than 60%, according to a list posted Monday by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Insurers say they want to hike rates because enrollees are going to the doctor, getting lab work and filling prescriptions more than they had originally anticipated. "We've seen a great pent-up demand for services," said Aaron Billger, spokesman for Highmark, a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee offering plans in...

HONOLULU – State Insurance Commissioner Gordon Ito today issued the following statement regarding HMSA’s request filed with the Insurance Division to raise premiums for individual Affordable Care Act (ACA) health plans for 2016: “This is the highest premium increase ever requested by HMSA. The requested increase for an average of 49.1 percent for the ACA individual plan will be closely scrutinized. “The Insurance Division will actively seek reductions to the proposed request, where possible, to ensure fairness to all parties involved. “If medical expenditures paid out for healthcare services under the ACA individual plan are too high, the division’s ability...

Insurers are planning double-digit rate hikes ahead of Obamacare’s third year, eliciting a told-you-so outcry from the law’s opponents who said the health law is to blame for boosting the price of care and forcing those costs onto consumers. A major insurer in New Mexico is seeking a 50-percent rate increase for 2016, one in Tennessee wants to raise its premiums for a mid-level silver plan by 36 percent, and proposed hikes in Illinois range from about 13 percent to well above 30 percent in some cases, according to data published this week. The figures, posted on the federal HealthCare.gov...

Two insurance carriers on the Obamacare exchange are attributing proposed double-digit premium increases to next year’s private-market alterations to the New Hampshire Medicaid program. Minuteman Health Inc. has requested rate increases ranging from 42 to 51 percent for next year, according to healthcare.gov. Maine Community Health Options asked for premium increases between 19 and 22 percent. Both companies attributed their proposed increases in part to the Premium Assistance Program, the name for the Medicaid expansion program that is scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1. Maine Community estimated that claims from the Medicaid patients will be 61 percent higher...

Affordable! ObamaCare rate hikes range from 30-to-50 percent in 2016If you don’t recognize there’s something inherently cockeyed about the federal government passing a law that presumes to make a product or service “affordable,” then you don’t understand how market forces work. I’ll oversimplify it for the purpose of brevity: Providers have to price a product or service in a way that reflects the cost of providing it, as well as the level of demand for it, because if they don’t they will soon find themselves incapable of meeting the demand. The premium rates announced when ObamaCare went into effect were...

Dozens of health insurers say higher-than-expected care costs and other expenses blindsided them this year, and they’re going to have to hike premiums for individual policies well-beyond 10 percent for 2016. The proposed double-digit hikes would apply to plans sold on the health insurance exchanges created under President Barack Obama’s law, as well as individual coverage sold through brokers and agents. Insurers point to costs from customers they gained under the health care overhaul’s coverage expansion and the rising expense of prescription drugs among other reasons for their planned increases, according to preliminary rate information released Monday on the federal...

In March, the federal government removed the latest vaccine injury court statistics—more than a year’s worth of data—from one of its publicly reported charts. It was an abrupt departure from the normal practice of updating the figures monthly. Wiping the latest data means the “adjudication” chart on a government website no longer reflects the recent, sharp rise in court victories for plaintiffs who claimed their children were seriously injured or killed by one or more vaccines. Since January of 2014, twice as many victims have won court decisions than the previous eight years combined.

During the past few days the legacy media and the internet have been flooded with news articles, editorials and blog posts with titles like “Overhead costs exploding under ObamaCare.” This all-too-predictable phenomenon has been breathlessly reported by outlets as different in their ideological perspectives as the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Kos. Sadly, when liberal and conservative publications are equally enthusiastic about breaking a story, it usually means the latter have been duped into promoting progressive propaganda. This case is no exception. The basis for these reports is a “study” produced by a couple of notorious lefty data diddlers....

State ObamaCare exchanges are fast running out of cash because of higher-than-expected costs and lower-than-expected enrollment. In an attempt to keep their heads above water, many exchanges are considering combining some of their operations with those of other states — a tactic that may prove as difficult as setting up the exchanges in the first place and that raises the specter of fully nationalized health insurance.The Obama administration, under the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), disbursed about $5 billion in subsidies to states to get their exchanges up and running. After that, the exchanges were supposed to be...

Five years after the passage of ObamaCare, there is one expense that’s still causing sticker shock across the healthcare industry: overhead costs. The administrative costs for healthcare plans are expected to explode by more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade, according to a new study published by the Health Affairs blog. The $270 billion in new costs, for both private insurance companies and government programs, will be “over and above what would have been expected had the law not been enacted,” one of the authors, David Himmelstein, wrote Wednesday. Those costs will be particularly high...

There is a strange expectation that Medical Tourism holds the answer to what is wrong with American medicine: long waits, shortages of doctors, costs that are completely out of control, poor treatment and a sharp decline in the number of doctors who are willing to go into medicine. It’s true. Doctors are leaving medicine in droves while the corporations make more money than ever at the expense of both the patient and the doctor. We have written about this extensively. There is plenty wrong with healthcare in America. Hardly surprising, the overhead costs under Obamacare are expected to explode by...

Citing higher-than-expected costs, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico wants to raise premiums by an average of 51.6 percent on individual Affordable Care Act plans in 2016. The company made the request in a preliminary rate proposal filed with New Mexico Insurance Superintendent John Franchini. Blue Cross and Blue Shield – which insures an estimated 600,000 people statewide – said the proposal affects an estimated 35,000 customers who signed up for qualified individual health plans through the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange, but also those who bought the same plans off the exchange. Franchini has the final authority...