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But until the GOP advances an alternative that can provide the answer to Wasserman Schultz’s question, the Democrats can be confident that, while Obamacare might get tweaked, changed, or “fixed,” it won’t get repealed. Four years after the Democrats passed Obamacare in clear defiance of public opinion, it still remains to be seen which Republican(s) will take the lead on repeal — by championing a well-conceived alternative that can bring it to fruition. Just because Republicans don’t have an answer to Wasserman Schultz’s question, however, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Indeed, the 2017 Project has advanced a conservative alternative to...

Doctors groups fear their members won’t get paid because of an unusual 90-day grace period for government-subsidized health plans and are urging physicians to check patients' insurance status before every visit. “This puts the physician and their patients in a very difficult situation,” said Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, president of the American Medical Association (AMA), which advised physicians Wednesday about how to minimize their risk. “If a patient is being treated for a serious illness, that requires ongoing care,” she said. “The physician is having to assume the financial risk for this. That’s the bottom line.” If an enrollee in...

EDITED Health industry officials say ObamaCare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country, countering claims recently made by the Obama administration. The expected rate hikes will be announced in the coming months amid an intense election year, when control of the Senate is up for grabs. The sticker shock would likely bolster the GOP’s prospects in November and hamper ObamaCare insurance enrollment efforts in 2015. Political operatives will be watching premium increases this summer, most notably in states where there are contested Senate races. In Iowa, which hosts the first presidential caucus in the nation and has a...

Participants in the federal high-risk pool created in the health law will have another month to find coverage, the Obama administration announced Friday. This is the third extension for the program, known as PCIP, which was previously set to close Dec. 31, 2013. Existing funds will be used to cover the extension. In a notice posted on the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan website, officials announced that program enrollees who have not yet purchased coverage through the health law’s online marketplaces, or exchanges, could keep their current coverage until April 30 while they continue their search. But they must enroll in...

The Obama administration is requiring health plans in Obamacare insurance marketplaces to include a more robust offering of care providers in 2015 after some early backlash over limited networks in the health care law's first year. Health plans selling on the federal marketplaces in 2015 must include 30 percent of area "essential community providers," which are usually health centers and other hospitals serving mostly low-income patients. That's up from a 20 percent requirement in 2014, the first year of expanded overage under the health care law. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the marketplaces, will also...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I've got so much stuff here today, folks, and I'm trying to figure out which I want to do first. Here's Obama with deportations, and here's Obama with determining who gets overtime, all of this is a distraction. It's all a distraction from what's happening with the economy and with Obamacare. I guess this is the big deal to me. We have this massive electoral victory on Tuesday in Florida, Florida 13. And I'll be damned if the Republican establishment is not doing its best in high gear to tell everybody, "Hey, don't think that Obamacare was...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Sunday that Republicans will repeal the controversial healthcare law after President Obama leaves office in 2017. Cruz became of the face of an unsuccessful effort to eliminate the healthcare law last year that resulted in a government shutdown. Most Republicans backed off the repeal-or-shutdown position after sustaining political damage during the two-week standoff in October, but Cruz promised on Sunday during an appearance on ABC News’s “This Week” to continue trying to get rid of Obamacare during the remainder of the president’s term. “I’ll give you one scenario where it could [be repealed before Obama...

ATLANTA, Mar. 3, 2014 – Today, the Georgia state house of representatives passed a bill which bans the state from participating in significant portions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). House Bill 707 (HB707), introduced by Rep. Jason Spencer, pushes back against the ACA in five ways. It passed the house in a late-night vote of 115-59. Specifically, HB707: 1. Prohibits any state agencies, departments or political subdivisions from using resources or spending funds to advocate for the expansion of Medicaid. This provision works hand-in-hand with HB990 to make it more difficult to expand Medicaid. HB990 would require legislative approval...

**SNIP** The distraction of Ukraine and the media’s numbness to the stream of Obamacare travails is providing time and a smokescreen for Obama to prepare a big announcement for after March 31, 2014: The BIG PUNT, i.e. a delay in the individual mandate. The White House and their Democratic allies must realize that they are on a trajectory to lose the Senate in 2014 and are likely coming to terms with the idea that delaying the individual mandate is one way to attempt to change that path. Look for the president to bite the bullet and give in to the...

If you’d like the government to change something about Obamacare, give the White House a ring. They’re in a flexible mood. President Obama this week approved yet another delay to provisions in the Affordable Care Act, giving insurers until 2016 to sell a type of insurance policy that’s supposed to be banned under the health-reform law. The ban, which was supposed to begin this year, would prevent insurers from selling bare-bones plans that might be affordable but don’t abide by 10 “essential service rules” required under the new law. When insurers began canceling such coverage last year, however, several million...

The Obama administration is dropping some new hints about how it has moved money around to fund Obamacare without Congress — but not nearly enough to put the controversy to rest. Forced to reveal more details under a provision tucked in this year’s bipartisan budget deal, the Department of Health and Human Services declared Friday how it used Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s authority to move about $1.6 billion in departmental funds around last year — the Cabinet secretary’s version of looking for change under the couch cushions and hitting the jackpot. But HHS didn’t say exactly how it spent the money,...

A Republican congressman is calling for the federal government to hire a full-time watchdog for ObamaCare, amid ongoing concerns about fraud and mismanagement. Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., introduced a bill on Thursday that would create a "Special Inspector General for Monitoring the Affordable Care Act (SIGMA)." He told Fox News the position is needed to follow the money. "There's very specific criteria that the special inspector general is required to produce and follow up on," Roskam told Fox News. "But the point is it needs to be done holistically and in a larger context. It's just a common sense approach...

The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway so far in signing up Americans who lack health insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal. A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one — and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look. Taken together, the snapshots shown by the surveys provide preliminary answers to what has been one of the biggest mysteries since HealthCare.gov and...

The White House’s 2015 budget proposes spending $5.5 billion next year on an ObamaCare program that Republicans have labeled a “bailout” of the insurance industry. The Affordable Care Act creates a temporary pool of money, known as risk corridors, to pay insurers who enroll a higher-than-expected number of sick patients through 2016. The exchanges appear to be attracting older consumers, who tend to be sicker. The Health and Human Services Department has said that 25 percent of those who had signed up for ObamaCare coverage between October and December were between the ages of 18 and 34. That’s far below...

States across America have been waiting patiently for Washington to remember that there are Tenth Amendment curbs on federal power. The administration has willfully violated states’ turf and Congress has shown no will to counter these violations of federalism. When it comes to Obamacare, given the administration’s litany of insults to the legislative process and underlying disrespect for the separation of powers, it’s hard to know whether Congress really is working to repeal, replace, or reform the ACA. After 47 attempts to do something about the law, Congress hasn’t even been able to stop executive revisions that both pander to...

Obamacare, and its barrage of over $1 trillion new taxes, is creeping into your paycheck. These taxes aren’t just affecting those who make over $250,000. The majority of these taxes are hurting the middle class. While these "stealth taxes" were designed to be taxes on businesses, they're actually transferred directly to ordinary citizens. "Many of those [hidden] taxes, especially those on hospitals, insurers and medical device manufacturers, will ultimately be passed on through higher health costs," said Michael Tanner, an expert on the healthcare law.

The Obama administration will let people with health insurance plans that don't comply with Affordable Care Act standards keep them through October 2017 if their states allow it, officials said Wednesday in announcing a series of final Obamacare rules. New rules also simplified the paperwork that larger employers will have to file when the the mandate obliging them to offer affordable health insurance to workers begins next year. And the rules gave a financial break to the types of self-insured health plans run by many unions, excluding them for two years from the $63-per-capita "reinsurance contribution" assessed for each enrollee....

(CNSNews.com) – In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan. The examples...

So how about this simple 2014 campaign idea: The Republicans, as a party, tell the voters that if they keep the House and recapture the Senate, they will immediately push for a three-year moratorium on Obamacare. On all of it: The mandates. The time extensions. The taxes. The regulations. The job losses. The reductions in hours worked. The part-time hiring. The website. The potential taxpayer bailout of insurance companies. The verification of income. The lack of personal security and threat of ID theft. And the whole wet blanket that Obamacare has thrown over the economy and the health-care system. The...

Washington, DC—Representative James Lankford (R-OK), Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, today introduced the House Joint Resolution legislative proposal for the Health Care Compact, a breakthrough governance reform that allows states to clean up the health care mess created by the federal government. “The Health Care Compact is a way for states to protect their residents from the top-down, one-size-fits-all health care ‘solutions’ that have been imposed from Washington DC, including Obamacare,” said Lankford. “The compact transfers health care decision-making authority and responsibility from the federal level to member states. Those member states are then free to implement their...