Free Republic

Gigantic losses put exchanges on the brink, send program careening into chaos Remember when everyone watching ObamaCare was focused on how many people had signed up? First they needed 7 million, then 11 million, and on it went as new targets replaced the old. These weren’t meaningless - at least it didn’t appear that way. The targets represented the critical mass the Obama Administration itself said the program needed to be economically sustainable. Insurance, they told us, is about risk pools. If you’ve got enough people in the risk pool, you’d have enough premiums being paid in to cover those...

CHICAGO--Health insurance premiums for Illinois residents who buy coverage through the Affordable Care Act's marketplace could increase by as much as 45 percent according to proposals submitted by insurers and made public Monday. The leading insurer on Illinois' exchange, Blue Cross Blue Shield, is proposing increases for 2017 ranging from 23 percent to 45 percent for individual health care plans, according to proposals posted by Heathcare.gov. Another insurer, Coventry Health Care of Illinois, proposed rate increases as high as 21 percent. Harken Health Insurance Company has proposed a nearly 29 percent hike in individual premiums and Health Alliance Medical Plans...

Aetna, Inc., the third largest health insurer in America, will not expand its Obamacare coverage into New Jersey next year as originally planned and is reassessing its participation in the Obamacare program. In a conference call following the company's earnings announcement, CEO Mark Bertolini said that the firm has halted its plans to expand into two new states' exchanges in 2017 and is looking into the reasons for losses in the exchanges it is currently participating in. "In light of the disappointing year to date performance and updated 2016 projections for our individual on and off exchange products, combined with...

I've just been notified by my long-term health care insurance program that they're increasing my monthly premium from $198 to $441 beginning in November due to "the severity of certain medical conditions, expected lifespans, returns on investment, and overall program expenses." The insurer is John Hancock Life & Health Insurance Company. I'll have to pay the full premium increase in order to keep my annual 5% benefit increase. Or I can pay "only" $318 per month and drop to a 3.9% annual benefit increase. Or I can retain the current premium and drop to a 2% annual benefit increase.

Even the best intentions cannot reverse the insidious effects of a wrong policy. When those who advocate for assisted suicide cite a benevolent desire to relieve suffering, the horrifying results of such a practice still lie just beneath the surface. Recently, an elderly Vermont woman found herself repeatedly pressured to commit assisted suicide. Her grave ailment? Only a broken wrist. Nevertheless, staff at her rehab center “repeatedly asked the elderly woman if she was in pain or depressed; then they would remind her that she could commit doctor-prescribed suicide under the new law.” Advocates of assisted suicide have blown off...

Islamic supremacy is arriving in medical settings using stealth means, or what is often referred to as creeping sharia. Common themes include Muslim health care workers refusing to uphold infection control protocols, Muslim medical students refusing to study topics they deem forbidden according to Islamic law, Muslim visitors in hospitals ignoring hygiene guidelines to protect patients, and hospitals bending over backwards (or is it forwards?) to accommodate Muslim demands above and beyond anything done for members of any other religious or demographic group. Also covered are outright acts of violence perpetrated by Muslim men who attack hospital personnel. Islamic supremacy...

The big rate increases announced last week for health insurance policies sold by California’s version of the federal health reform are the latest evidence that the Affordable Care Act, despite its name, cannot do much to tame the rise of health care costs.

President Obama said in an interview with CBS airing Sunday that honesty was “absolutely necessary” for a president in order to build trust with the American people. Obama has endorsed his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to succeed him in the White House. In the wake of her private email scandal and the FBI’s revelation that she was “extremely careless” with classified material, Clinton’s honesty numbers with the public are dismal. The FBI also refuted Clinton’s constant claim that she never sent or received classified material on her server, which she has dismissed as a mere “mistake.” “FDR and...

Humana, one of the largest health care providers in the country, has made the decision to eventually leave the vast majority of the Obamacare markets. Out of the 23 Obamacare co-ops that were established only seven remain, virtually all of them under threat of folding by the end of this year.

Senior Obama administration officials took a series of decisions beginning in late 2013 that ranged from the reckless to the illegal in an effort to keep insurers participating in health insurance exchanges. A report issued last week jointly by the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees explores how the administration came to unlawfully funnel $7 billion in unappropriated money to insurers through a single ObamaCare program.

President Obama joined the chorus of Democrats calling for the creation of a government run health insurance program as Obamacare is facing growing problems. In an article published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the president called for Congress to revisit the "public option" for Obamacare in areas where few insurers offer coverage. "Some parts of the country have struggled with limited insurance market competition for many years, which is one reason that, in the original debate over health reform, Congress considered and I supported including a Medicare-like public plan," Obama wrote in the piece. A public...

The nation’s health care tab this year is expected to surpass $10,000 per person for the first time, the government said Wednesday. The new peak means the Obama administration will pass the problem of high health care costs on to its successor. The report from number crunchers at the Department of Health and Human Services projects that health care spending will grow at a faster rate than the national economy over the coming decade. That squeezes the ability of federal and state governments, not to mention employers and average citizens, to pay. Growth is projected to average 5.8 percent from...

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has ruled that consumers must be allowed to buy certain types of health insurance that do not meet the stringent standards of the Affordable Care Act, deciding that the administration had gone beyond the terms of federal law. The court struck down a rule issued by the Obama administration that barred the sale of such insurance as a separate stand-alone product. “Disagreeing with Congress’s expressly codified policy choices isn’t a luxury administrative agencies enjoy,” the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said on Friday in a decision that criticized...

For a product that is supposed to be so great -- and that was supposed to be in such high demand -- ObamaCare is having trouble getting people to buy it, or keep it.

About 1.6 million people who signed up for coverage this year under President Barack Obama’s health care law dropped out by the end of March, according to administration figures released late Thursday. The report from the Health and Human Services department said some 11.1 million people were still signed up. But that’s a drop of nearly 13 percent from the 12.7 million who initially enrolled for subsidized private coverage this year. Those dropouts failed to seal the deal by paying their premiums. …

The partial withdrawal of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota from the ObamaCare marketplace, driven out by staggering financial losses, is another important milestone in the collapse of the ill-conceived and inaccurately named Affordable Care Act. Providers have been bailing out of ObamaCare across the land, but not Blue Cross/Blue Shield providers. It’s not a total departure from the market, as CEO Michael Guyette took pains to explain at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: In a sign of continuing tumult in the health insurance industry, the state’s largest insurer said Thursday it will no longer offer its traditional suite of flexible...

The Obama administration said Tuesday it will herd uninsured Americans into Obamacare plans this fall by targeting young adults and working with the IRS to root out people who paid a penalty for lacking coverage last year. Officials said people who were fined under the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate can expect to receive a paper notice that explains their coverage options on the law’s web-based exchanges. The state of Massachusetts is already working with its revenue agency to locate the uninsured, and the Obama administration said those efforts appeared to be working. The Health and Human Services Department said...

Under the guise of “reform,” President Obama is dismantling Medicare — dooming seniors to needless pain and disability and shortening their lives. The stakes are high, because Medicare and the access it gives patients to medical innovations have transformed aging. Before Medicare, older folks languished in nursing homes or wheelchairs with crippling illnesses. Now, seniors dodge that fate, thanks to hip and knee replacements, cataract operations and heart procedures — all paid for by Medicare.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to expand Obamacare to cover illegal immigrants, but now it’s up to the Obama administration to determine if the nation’s largest state will get an exemption related to a specific promise the president made when trying to sell the health care law. The Golden State will be asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a “State Innovation Waiver” under Section 1332 of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. This would allow illegal immigrants in the state to purchase private health insurance plans from the California exchange, Covered California,...

DENVER — A Colorado state representative and candidate for the state Senate recently revealed to The Denver Post that she and her colleagues are under strict orders not to take a public stance on the increasingly contentious debate on Amendment 69, the socialized medicine ballot measure that would double the state’s budget and drastically increase taxes. Rep. Lois Court, D-Denver, a candidate for Senate District 31, recently participated in The Denver Post’s Voter Guide, a biannual question-and-answer platform that the newspaper offers to all candidates running for state and federal offices in Colorado. In her answers, Court revealed a stunning...