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House Speaker John Boehner and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, outlining their legislative vision for the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, are vowing to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Republican House speaker from Ohio and incoming Senate majority leader from Kentucky noted that a commitment to creating jobs “means renewing our commitment to repeal Obamacare, which is hurting the job market along with Americans’ health care.” The ACA remains a politically divisive issue, and further attempts at repeal would surely be met with significant Democratic opposition and a White House veto.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is planning to make ObamaCare a priority in his first weeks as leader of the Senate, vowing a sustained effort to dismantle the law piece-by-piece. Instead of a full repeal, McConnell said the GOP will tackle unpopular aspects of the law such as the individual mandate, the medical device tax and the 30-hour workweek requiring employers to provide insurance. “These are the kinds of things that I believe there is a bipartisan majority in the Senate to approve,” he said in the interview with Time magazine published Wednesday. The only other priority he listed was the...

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says he would be willing to repeal Obamacare with a simple majority if he takes over as majority leader in January, his spokesman told the Washington Examiner on Thursday. The announcement comes just days before Tuesday's midterm congressional election, in which Republicans have a strong chance of seizing the upper chamber from the Democrats and putting the Kentucky senator in charge. "Leader McConnell is and has always been committed to the full repeal of Obamacare, and he'll continue to lead efforts to repeal and replace it with patient-centered reforms that enable greater choice at lower costs....

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) thinks it's time for Republicans to let go of their efforts to repeal Obamacare. Speaking to an NBC affiliate in Portland on Thursday, Collins argued that the GOP has missed its chance to get rid of the health care law entirely. She noticeably did not say whether she would vote to repeal or defund Obamacare, despite being asked. "You know at this point, I think we’re past that," Collins said. "I think it would’ve been much better if there’d been a bipartisan bill crafted in 2008 that had provisions that both parties could agree on, such...

The bill is coming due for ObamaCare and it’s a whopper. According to Medicare Care’s own actuaries U.S. health care spending is about to rocket. Federal meddling in what was once the finest and cost-effective health care system on the planet is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, many Americans paid for doctor and hospital services out of pocket or through modestly priced private insurance. Health care spending was about 6 percent of GDP. Enter President Johnson and Medicare. He bought millions of votes by giving seniors free health care that they never paid for through payroll taxes during their...

Fox News is reporting that employer-provided health care plans may be a thing of the past. Former Obama health adviser Zeke Emanuel predicted that Obamacare will replace 80 percent of employer-provided health plans will disappear in 10 years. “It’s going to actually be better for people. They’ll have more choice,” Emanuel said. “Most people who work for an employer and get their coverage through an employer do not have choice.” …

<p>Washington (CNN) – Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday forcefully argued that Obamacare is not here to stay and pledged that he would continue working to dismantle the health care law in 2014 and 2016.</p> <p>“I think those elections should be about many, many things,” the Texas Republican said, listing jobs and growth as examples. “But they should be about repealing every bloody word of Obamacare.”</p>

Obamacare’s emphasis on cost-benefit has apparently granted permission for the medical technocrats to conjure all kinds of healthcare rationing schemes.And the Medical Establishment is apparently playing along. From, “The Cancer Death-Panel App,” by Robert Goldberg in the NY Post: The latest innovation in cancer care isn’t a medical breakthrough but an app to ration new drugs. It’ll measure care in terms of what it costs health plans, instead of what it means for patients’ lives.That it’s being developed under the auspices of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, or ASCO, the world’s leading oncology association, is a grim warning about...

Buried in a largely overlooked government audit of the Obama-Care exchanges is a finding that casts still more doubt on the reliability of the 8 million enrollment number commonly cited by the administration and the press. In a section titled "Other Issues," an inspector general report released last week found that the HealthCare.gov marketplace couldn't show it had been reconciling its monthly enrollment numbers with insurance companies. That's despite the fact that the law specifically calls for this reconciliation, and the fact that, as the IG report notes, "the federal marketplace obtained the services of a contractor to reconcile enrollment...

WASHINGTON — Federal officials can’t resolve 85 percent of 2.9 million “inconsistencies” on applications for ObamaCare even after nine months of trying, according to new data provided by the administration. Most of the problems involve certifying citizenship and income, key components of the national health plan. But some of the problems are downright nutty. One unidentified state-run marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children were “erroneously identified as incarcerated, according to federal data,” the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department revealed Tuesday. Just 425,000 problematic applications have been resolved out of 2.9 million that states...

“Today, liberty is under assault,” declared conservative firebrand Ted Cruz before an adoring audience Friday at the Republican Party of Texas State Convention. The GOP senator and Tea Party darling left virtually no red meat unthrown, calling for a return to the Constitution – “the most extraordinary document crafted in history” – a resurrection of American leadership abroad – where “bullies and tyrants are laughing at [us]” – and a rebuilding of jobs and economic growth at home, through adhering to free market principles, supporting “the American energy renaissance,” abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and repealing “every blessed word of...

<p>LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but he would not say Friday what that would mean for the 413,000 Kentuckians who have health insurance through the state's health care exchange.</p>

Self-shackled with a tremendously unpopular overhaul of American medicine that they passed without a single Republican vote, Democrats are now clinging to the hope that voters will offer them a chance to “fix” what they have wrought. For three major reasons, however, that hope is likely to prove futile. One, Democrats have shown no genuine interest in fixing Obamacare. Their talk about fixing it is merely that: a talking point. Two, they have no ideas for fixing it (aside from adding another metal to the list of government-dictated insurance options). Three, and most important, Obamacare isn’t fixable. Like a...

Health insurers are now openly admitting that with Obamacare’s reforms, patient choice can no longer be a priority for Americans. “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” Marcus Merz, CEO of Minnesota insurer PreferredOne, told The New York Times Tuesday. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.” With boatloads of mandatory services provided each and every customer whether they’re wanted or not, health insurers’ costs are going up. If insurance companies are going to keep prices at a manageable level, narrow networks are one of their...

A trio of liberal groups is looking to mobilize liberal voters on ObamaCare.  Planned Parenthood Action, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and MoveOn.org are teaming up in an effort to boost the law, and to boost officials who backed it. The groups are launching campaigns that will highlight popular parts of the law, according to The Washington Post. That includes the law's expansion of Medicaid, free contraception coverage and the ban on insurers denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

California Obamacare patients are finding it more affordable to drive to Tijuana, Mexico for health care treatment than to use their high-deductible Obamacare plans. Irma Montalvo tells USA Today seeing a Tijuana doctor only costs $15 and that she likes her Mexican doctor better. "She listens to me," said Montalvo, a U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico, said in Spanish. "I come here feeling really bad, and three days later I am better." The Obama administration has lamented the fact that Latino Obamacare enrollments remain surprisingly low. However, according to USA Today, "Mexican immigrants living in California, Arizona, Texas...

The Internal Revenue Service this week will publish a final rule requiring Obamacare health insurance exchanges to hand over key personal data to the IRS, which will use the information to implement the tax aspects of the controversial health care law. The IRS rule covers health exchanges that sell insurance to individuals, and it takes effect this year. That means people enrolled in an Obamacare exchange this year will have their information given to the IRS as soon as it’s needed for tax purposes. Information to be handed over from Obamacare exchanges includes names, addresses, taxpayer identification numbers, insurance premium...

Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services Status: Plaintiff appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Apppeals on Jul. 5, 2013. Briefing completed Dec. 20, 2013. Oral argument scheduled for May 8, 2014. Summary: Pacific Legal Foundation has launched a new constitutional cause of action against the federal Affordable Care Act. The ACA imposes a charge on Americans who fail to buy health insurance — a charge that the U.S. Supreme Court recently characterized as a federal tax. PLF’s amended complaint alleges that this purported tax is illegal because it was ntroduced in the Senate rather than...

Two years ago, when the Supreme Court declared Obamacare's penalty to be a tax, it doomed the healthcare reform act as an "unconstitutional violation of the origination clause," columnist George Will says. This Thursday, the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals, the nation's second-most important court, will hear arguments on whether the Affordable Care Act adheres to the Constitution's "origination clause," which declare that "all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills," Will writes in his column in The Washington Post Saturday. Will points...

If the president wants to witness a refutation of his assertion that the survival of the Affordable Care Act is assured, come Thursday he should stroll the 13 blocks from his office to the nation’s second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. There he can hear an argument involving yet another constitutional provision that evidently has escaped his notice. It is the origination clause, which says: “All bills for raising reveornue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.” The ACA passed the Senate on a...