Free Republic

The reason your insurance premiums have skyrocketed during the past year is that Obamacare requires all health plans to provide “free” annual wellness visits and 15 associated preventive services for which they cannot charge the patient a copayment. According to a key architect of PPACA, however, “the annual physical exam is basically worthless.” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, last heard from claiming that he wants to die at 75 in order to avoid becoming a burden on society, writes in the New York Times that “screening healthy people who have no complaints is a pretty ineffective way to improve people’s health.” The...

More than half of the 2014-2015 enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, best known as Obamacare, is in the books, and the enrollment figures on the surface look very encouraging. To be clear, Obamacare is about more than just enrollment figures. For one thing, in order for the health reform law to be successful, it'll need people that enroll to actually continue paying their premium. This is the only way that medical care costs get spread out over a greater swath of the public, which is needed to control medical care cost inflation. However, between April and mid-October,...

Russell Wilson and Richard Sherman appear in a new government video flacking for Affordable Care Act-brokered medical insurance plans But the NFL provides one of the best health insurance plans in America with tiny deductibles and millions in payouts Some Obamacare plans have family deductibles as high as $12,700, causing some policyholders to avoid treatment and stay sick Sherman has a four-year $56 million contract, while Wilson earns a paltry $2.4 million but is expected to sign a $100 million deal in the off-seasonTwo Seattle Seahawks mega-stars are flacking for Obamacare, but they won't need government-brokered medical insurance themselves –...

Harvard not only educated the president but has steadfastly supported not only him and even his more controversial policies, until now. “For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost,” Robert Pear reported in The New York Times on January 5, 2015. “But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.” “Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that...

Turns out there’s no free lunch, even if you’re among those lucky few dining at the Harvard Faculty Club. The New York Times is feasting on the delicious uproar created by Harvard professors who are now outraged to be hit with higher health care costs as a result of ObamaCare. I hardly know where to start on this one. Perhaps with the fact that the article appears in the New York Times? I will let that one go for the moment. Here’s what’s clear: Health care costs at Harvard are going up. Immediately. And they are rising directly as a...

Back in 09–when Obamacare advocates castigated those who worried that Obamacare would lead to rationing–Jonathan Gruber said get the law passed first, then refuse treatment later. From the Daily Caller story: “Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control,” [Gruber said] Gruber also said that the only way to control costs is to effectively deny treatment. “The real substance of cost control is all about a single thing: telling patients they can’t have something they want. It’s about telling patients, ‘That surgery doesn’t do any good, so if you want it you have to pay the full...

WASHINGTON — For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar....... In addition, some ideas that looked good to academia in theory are now causing consternation. In 2009, while Congress was considering the health care legislation, Dr. Alan M. Garber — then a Stanford professor and now the provost of Harvard — led a group of economists who sent an open letter to Mr....

House GOP seeks to change Affordable Care Act full-time work definition from 30 hours to 40House Republicans will hold a vote this week to change Obamacare’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours a week to the traditional 40, setting up an early test to see how many Democrats are willing to buck President Obama and his signature overhaul now that they are in the minority. It’s part of the early agenda taking shape on Capitol Hill, where the GOP in both the House and Senate is planning votes on issues that have earned bipartisan support before, but which stalled...

link only: http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/nation/2015/01/01/middle-class-workers-struggle-to-pay-for-care-despite-insurance/19841235/

The repeal of ObamaCare is the priority of the Republican party, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said on Sunday. “There will be a vote on repeal. The president, in the White House, will veto that,” he said of the symbolic gesture offered by GOP lawmakers still unsatisfied with the healthcare legislation. However, Barrasso told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that there would also be other bills that strike at other parts of the Affordable Care Act – some of which have gained bipartisan support – including a repeal of the medical device tax and the employer mandate. There is...

Companies with more than 100 full-time employees need to comply or face fines. ... Companies with more than 100 full-time workers must offer affordable health insurance to at least 70% of their staff. This "employer mandate" was supposed to take effect in 2014, but the Obama administration delayed it to this year. And those that don't comply face hefty penalties. Companies will be fined if they don't offer coverage and even just one of their workers gets subsidized insurance on an Obamacare individual exchange. For 2015, the fine is $174 a month times the number of full-time employees (minus 80...

There's a bizarre reason why millions of Americans saw their health plans cancelled in 2013 and, as explained in a new video featuring Robert Graboyes of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, millions more will lose their plans in years to come.

Group asks High Court to affirm the limits on the executive branch’s ability to disregard federal statutes, reaffirm separation of powers (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on December 24, 2014, it filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the IRS and the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Treasury over a decision by the agencies to ignore a key provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The lawsuit seeks specifically to prevent the IRS from providing refundable tax credits to individuals who purchase health care coverage through...

Jonathan Gruber, sage of MIT and proud champion of the Affordable Care Act, may well have had the worst year in American public life. His repeated demonstrations of arrogance, contempt for the American people and smug self-satisfaction brought mortification to his party and president. His glib references to the redistributionist aspects of the Affordable Care Act gave the lie to the Democratic Party's dubious claim that the mandate was not a tax, along with the excruciating (to Democrats) acknowledgment that -- presidential oaths to the contrary notwithstanding -- Democrats regard "nontransparency" as their friend. So, all hail the verbally incontinent...

Health care reform advocates who struggled for decades to pass Obamacare left the job half-undone. They failed to sell it. They also underestimated the unrelenting intensity and duration of the opposition that makes the law so vulnerable to legislative and legal challenges even now, nearly five years after its passage. The White House and its allies are trying fresh messaging strategies for 2015 enrollment, including a lower-key sales pitch and narratives from real people who are happy with their coverage. Those success stories didn’t exist before coverage began one year ago. Yet the messaging missteps and rhetorical guerrilla war since...

About seven out of every eight Obamacare insurance customers who enrolled between November 15 and mid-December are poor enough to qualify for taxpayer-funded subsidies designed to lower their monthly premiums. The Department of Health and Human Services reported that number Tuesday, saying it's up from 80 per cent a year ago. Americans who participate in government-brokered medical insurance can get subsidies from the federal treasury if their households earn less than four times the government's official 'poverty' level. That situation describes 64 per cent of all U.S. residents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But far more are qualifying, suggesting...

Red Tape: With businesses' one-year reprieve from financial penalties under ObamaCare ending, the horror stories of complying with the costly health care law already are trickling in. The worst is yet to come. ObamaCare Hits Small Business Hard in '15 Starting Jan. 1, employers with 100 or more full-time workers face hefty increases in their health insurance costs as they comply for the first time with the mandate. They must now offer the government's comprehensive coverage — including "free" preventive care — for all employees working 30 or more hours a week, or risk being fined $2,000 per employee per...

The Obama administration announced new rules under Obamacare on Monday that target nonprofit hospitals’ efforts to get paid by their patients.Nonprofit hospitals, which serve a charitable purpose and are often religiously affiliated, will now be subject to strict rules on when and how they can collect payments from customers, thanks to regulations included in the health-care law. As a condition of their tax-exempt status, these hospitals must “take an active role in improving the health of the communities they serve,” Treasury Department deputy assistant secretary for tax policy Emily McMahon wrote in a blog post Monday. Under the new IRS...

Some 87 percent of people who just signed up for Obamacare are getting financial assistance to lower their premiums, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. That is a jump from 80 percent during the last open enrollment period. ... includes more than 3.4 million people who selected a plan in the 37 states that are using the HealthCare.gov platform for 2015 Full Title: Tax dollars at work: 87% of new Obamacare users given federal aid

While states debate expanding their Medicaid programs under Obamacare, they're wrestling with a looming 2017 deadline — when their taxpayers begin paying for the cost of the expansion. Beginning in 2014, states that agree to expand Medicaid to persons with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty line will have the federal government pay 100 percent of the cost. But beginning in 2017, the federal share will fall to 95 percent, and it drops to 90 percent in 2020. This has officials — many of them in Republican-dominated states across the country — worried that they will not...