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Earlier this year, the Huffington Post published a Kaiser Health News story scoffing at the notion that Obamacare could make it more difficult for patients to see primary care physicians: TWEETS ON LINK But, as tweeter @back_ttys has found, HuffPo should be feeling pretty foolish right about now: TWEETS ON LINK Whoops!

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, says he has every intention of voting to repeal Obamacare with a new GOP majority in January, but also said people should be realistic about what to expect in the way of repeal with President Obama still in the White House. “We certainly will have a vote on proceeding to a bill to repeal Obamacare. … It was a very large issue in the campaign,” Mr. McConnell told Roll Call. “We’re certainly gonna keep our commitment to the American people to make every effort we can to repeal it. “It is a...

A D.C. resident who gained healthcare coverage under ObamaCare will sit alongside the administration’s former adviser Jonathan Gruber during Tuesday’s high-profile hearing. Democrats have picked Ari Goldmann, an independent contractor who lives in D.C., to help defend ObamaCare during a hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a Democratic aide told The Hill. Goldmann will testify alongside Gruber and Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS), at a hearing that the GOP hopes to use to refire attacks at the president's healthcare law. His appearance goes against the Obama administration’s request that Tavenner appear...

On Dec. 24, 2009, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed President Obama’s healthcare law with a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, triggering a massive backlash that propelled Republicans to control of the House the following year. On the Senate side, going into this year's midterm elections, 25 senators who voted for Obamacare were already out or not going be part of the new Senate being sworn in next month. After Democratic losses on Nov. 4 and Saturday's defeat of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., the number has risen to 30. In other words, half of the Senators who voted for Obamacare will not be part...

Republicans are ramping up for a fresh fight against Obamacare in the new year, banking on Democratic support to repeal a key component of the law. Republicans have slowed their anti-Obamacare drumbeat in recent months, with their success in the midterm elections, President Obama’s executive action on immigration, government funding and end-of-year business dominating the GOP agenda. But come early 2015, Republicans will restart their push to repeal the 2.3 percent tax on medical devices that kicked in last year as part of the Affordable Care Act. And with the GOP controlling both chambers of Congress in January — and...

A civil war has opened up inside the Democratic Party over Obamacare. With half of all Senate Democrats who voted for Obamacare no longer in office, top Senate Democrats Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and outgoing Tom Harkin (D-IA) have begun trashing Democrats' decision to embrace the deeply unpopular Obamacare program. Indeed, even progressive New York Times columnist Tom Edsall now concedes that Obamacare is partly to blame for working-class Americans' all-time low 27% approval rating of Democrats, which Edsall says has now nosedived to "dangerous levels." [Snip] "If more Democrats had been willing to defend the best thing they've done in...

Newly Insured Struggle to Find Primary Physicians "When Olivia Papa signed up for a new health plan last year, her insurance company assigned her to a primary care doctor. The relatively healthy 61-year-old didn't try to see the doctor until last month, when she and her husband both needed authorization to see separate specialists. She called the doctor's office several times without luck. "They told me that they were not on the plan, they were never on the plan and they'd been trying to get their name off the plan all year," said Papa, who recently bought a plan...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is asking lawmakers not to seat ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber next to Medicare's top official when the two testify on Capitol Hill next week. HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation Jim Esquea wrote to the House Oversight Committee with the request, stating that government witnesses are "almost always afforded an opportunity" to sit alone or with other federal officials. “The accommodation of separate panels for government witnesses reflects important comity in congressional-executive relations,” Esquea wrote. “The relatively few exceptions to this practice reinforce the seriousness of this accommodation.” The Oversight panel, led by...

Members of the GOP are asking the Supreme Court to take up another case against ObamaCare, this time challenging a controversial medical board that the party has called “a death panel.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) and several other Republicans will file an amicus brief Thursday urging the court to reconsider a case against a piece of the healthcare law called the Independent Payment Advisory Board. “Because the law frees [the board] of any checks and balances, waiting could be dangerous. The Supreme Court should hold that the time to answer these constitutional questions is now, not...

Democrats are arguing among themselves about whether to focus on the poor, who are not reliable voters, or the middle class, who have started to turn to the Republican Party.Influential Democrats who have strongly defended Obama-Care for years are now publicly questioning whether the law was worth the political fallout. Passage of the Affordable Care Act marked the start of a political unraveling for the Democratic Party, which lost huge majorities in Congress and control of a majority of state governorships in the last four and a half years. Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic...

(CNSNews.com) – The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) allowed corporations to reduce their health care costs by rewarding employees for voluntarily participating in workplace “wellness” programs to help them lose weight or stop smoking. But now three of those programs are the target of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which says they are neither voluntary nor legal. EEOC recently filed its third wellness lawsuit, claiming that Honeywell International, Inc.’s ACA-approved wellness program violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Honeywell recently informed employees and their spouses who were enrolled in the company’s health benefits plan that...

In filling in for Rush Limbaugh on his Friday show, conservative commentator Mark Steyn scoffed at the notion Republicans would handle impeachment well enough to even attempt. The author of “The Undocumented Mark Steyn” responded a caller’s question about impeachment and acknowledge that Obama penalizes the lawful, while incentivizing the lawless, but was skeptical congressional Republicans would do anything about it. As it pertained to impeachment, he pointed to the impeachment proceedings against former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and explained that based upon the Republican Senate leadership’s handling of impeachment at the time, there is no reason to...

The Obama administration is facing a slew of healthcare challenges as the winter holidays approach. While this fall has been a far cry from last year, when HealthCare.gov was melting down, 2014 has brought wholly unexpected problems to the fore for federal health officials and the White House. Take the conflict surrounding Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare consultant whose suggestion that a "lack of transparency" and voters' "stupidity" helped the law pass, went viral. Though Democrats have sought to distance themselves from Gruber, his remarks have become a new flashpoint in debate over healthcare reform, invigorating GOP critics as the party...

MADISON, Wis. — The “architect” of Obamacare who suggested the “stupidity of the American voter” helped pass President Obama’s signature health-care reform law hauled in $200,000 from Wisconsin taxpayers for his analysis of the potential costs and impacts of the Affordable Care Act on the Badger State, according to the state Department of Health Services. In total, taxpayers spent $443,718 for MIT economist Jonathan Gruber and a firm to analyze the actuarial and economic impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Wisconsin health insurance markets, according to records obtained by Wisconsin Reporter. The remaining $243,718 went to Gorman Actuarial LLC,...

Sen. Chuck Schumer upbraided his own party Tuesday for pushing the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010. While Schumer emphasized during a speech at the National Press Club that he supports the law and that its policies "are and will continue to be positive changes," he argued that the Democrats acted wrongly in using their new mandate after the 2008 election to focus on the issue rather than the economy at the height of a terrible recession.(snip) The third-ranking Senate Democrat noted that just about 5 percent of registered voters in the United States lacked health insurance before the...

Thanks to the FDA’s calorie labeling regulations announced Tuesday, major changes will soon be coming to the food and restaurant industries. The regulation itself is nothing new; it became law in 2010 as a provision attached to the Affordable Care Act, but final rules were delayed for the past few years, thanks in large part to heavy opposition from grocery stores, pizza chains, vending machines, convenience stores, and movie theaters. Although some concessions were made, none of these industries were fully spared. By November 2015, these establishments will be forced to post calorie information on menus and menu boards, which...

Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) comments on Wednesday about Democrats’ misguided focus on health care in President Barack Obama’s first term prompted backlash from top Democrats and left-leaning groups, who accused him of being politically craven. At a speech before the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday, Schumer said Democrats made a mistake by entering into a fight over health care after they passed the 2009 economic stimulus. His reasoning: Democrats were targeting the uninsured, a population that he said makes up only about 5 percent of registered voters. Only about one-third of the uninsured, he said, are registered...

Democrats made a strategic mistake by passing the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said Tuesday. Schumer says Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in the 2008 elections, a Democratic landslide, by focusing on healthcare reform instead of legislation to boost the middle class. “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus,” he said. He said the plight of uninsured Americans caused by “unfair insurance company practices” needed not be addressed but it wasn’t...

While President Obama campaigned on a promise that his universal health care plan would lower premiums, his controversial adviser and plan architect was privately warning the state of Wisconsin that Obamacare was poised to massively increase insurance costs for average residents, internal documents show...... [MIT economist Jonathan] Gruber’s study predicted about 90 percent of individuals without employer-sponsored or public insurance would see their premiums spike by an average of 41 percent. Once tax subsidies were factored in, about 60 percent of those in the individual market were projected to see their premiums go up 31 percent, according to his analysis.......

CASEY MULLIGAN, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1993. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University and Clemson University, and is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, and the Population Research Center. He has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and is the author of three books, including Side Effects: The Economic Consequences of the Health Reform....