Free Republic

The Texas judge who ruled Obamacare unconstitutional earlier this month agreed Sunday to stay his decision from taking effect until it can be appealed. Federal Judge Reed O’Connor said he didn’t believe 17 state attorneys general, led by California’s Xavier Becerra, would prevail in their challenge of his blockbuster ruling. “But because many everyday Americans would otherwise face great uncertainty during the pendency of appeal, the Court finds that the December 14, 2018 Order declaring the Individual Mandate unconstitutional and inseverable should be stayed,” he wrote in the 30-page order.

In a ruling sure to be appealed to Supreme Court, Texas court says the ACA, also known as Obamacare, can no longer stand without the penalty against the uninsured. A federal judge in Texas struck down the Affordable Care Act on Friday night, ruling that former President Barack Obama's signature domestic legislation has fallen down like a losing game of "Jenga." But the White House said that with the ruling expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the law will remain in place for now.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was struck down by a Texas judge on Friday, a move that could suddenly disrupt the health insurance status of millions of Americans. The decision comes amid a six-week open enrollment period for the program.

A spokesperson from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services told Fox News early Saturday that open enrollment for Affordable Care Act’s health insurance will continue despite the federal judge's ruling that the law is unconstitutional and must be "invalidated in whole.” U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, a federal judge in Texas appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that last year's tax cut bill knocked the constitutional foundation from under Obamacare by eliminating a penalty for not having coverage. The rest of the law cannot be separated from that provision and is therefore invalid, he wrote. The decision came...

(Bloomberg) -- Obamacare was struck down by a Texas federal judge in a ruling that casts uncertainty on insurance coverage for millions of U.S. residents. The decision Friday finding the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional comes just before the end of a six-week open enrollment period for the program in 2019 and underscores a divide between Republicans who have long sought to invalidate the law and Democrats who fought to keep it in place. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that he had to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act,...

Barack Obama is doing everything in his power to encourage average Americans to sign up for the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare. In fact, he's doing everything he possibly can to keep the legislation that has been deemed his legacy, from dying. On Monday, Obama shared a video, reminding Americans to sign up in case they get "very sick" in 2019. No jump shots. No ferns. No memes. Not this time. I’m going to give it to you straight: If you need health insurance for 2019, the deadline to get covered is December 15. Go to https://t.co/ob1Ynoesod...

...sign-ups through HealthCare.gov, the federal Affordable Care Act exchange, are down 11 percent through the first five weeks compared with the same time last year -- and experts say final numbers are on track to be lower overall at the end of enrollment. ... ...Get America Covered, published an analysis predicting total enrollment on the federal exchange would fall by 800,000. There are also fewer people enrolling for the first-time in the marketplaces. ew consumers were down about 18 percent compared with last year, and the number of people visiting Healthcare.gov down almost 21 percent. “You look for explanations, is...

Brian Kemp’s election as governor likely means that full-fledged Medicaid expansion will remain off the table in Georgia, at least for a while. Republican Kemp, who will take office in January, opposed Medicaid expansion during the campaign, while Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams strongly supported it. Gov. Nathan Deal and his fellow Republicans who control the Georgia General Assembly have resisted expansion since it became an option for states several years ago. But there may be other health care ideas coming under a Kemp administration that can bring coverage to more Georgians. And those ideas come under the general heading of...

A little more than 1.9 million people signed up for health insurance in the first three weeks of the Affordable Care Act open enrollment for 2019 coverage. That compares with almost 2.3 million during the first three weeks of open enrollment last year, which included an additional day. Americans are signing up for coverage through the federal marketplace at a slower rate this year, but the CMS numbers don't include enrollment in states that operate their own exchanges. It also does not include those who will be automatically enrolled in plans during the last week of open enrollment, which ends...

The Obamacare Supreme Court ruling seemed strange. Chief Justice John Roberts’ reasoning was incoherent. The conservative’s dissent read like it was originally meant to be a majority opinion. Now, we know why. According to Jan Crawford of CBS News, John Roberts switched sides in May, withstanding a “one-month campaign” from his conservative colleagues to change his mind.

I keep up with the events and politics. I am reading the book Kids These Days - Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris and it gave me a very different perspective on student Debt. Chapter Two called Go to College, discusses student debt, its design not to be discharged via bankruptcy, and the use of future earnings of millennials to fund current healthcare debt IE Obamacare and education capitol construction projects for the foreseeable future. This puts a different spin on what happened to these kids who have been encouraged to voluntarily take on debt that...

At the time of this writing, six “Gruber videos” have been released and “gone viral,” as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever. Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article: Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget...

(this story is 1 year old) Evidence shows that John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was “hacked” by a Deep State surveillance operation overseen by Obama administration CIA director John Brennan and Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper. Roberts, the Bush appointee who made the decisive vote to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare before the 2012 election, was allegedly the victim of the same Deep State surveillance program that spied on President Donald Trump. (continues at source)

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in an op-ed accusing President Trump of lying about "Medicare for all," starts out with a whopper of his own. "It would guarantee everyone could get the healthcare they need without going into debt at far lower cost than the current dysfunctional system," Sanders writes in USA Today. The problem with his pie-in-the-sky statement, and the op-ed that follows, is that it fails to recognize the natural tradeoffs between access and cost in healthcare policy. In doing so, he also ignores the value of individual choice and the distinction between public and private that is central...

When President Trump declared in a USA Today op-ed that the Democrats' "Medicare for all" proposal would "outlaw" private health insurance, CNN's Jim Acosta indignantly tweeted that this was "false." But reading the text of the leading proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders makes clear that Trump's op-ed was correct. "It is right there in their proposed legislation: Democrats outlaw private health plans that offer the same benefits as the government plan." This is, in fact, 100 percent accurate. The plan would require, in four years time, for individuals to be enrolled in the new government plan at birth. At that...

This is an absolute classic out of the Dem/MSM playbook. Take a huge, expensive, inefficient, government program. Find someone with a heartwrenching story who is helped by it. Highlight that story as if it represents the essence of the program in question. Bonus points if you can get someone to choke up on camera. Reporters noticed that after Kavanaugh was confirmed, the Democrats shifted the agenda to health care as the central issue of the midterms. And thus it was that today's Morning Joe featured a segment in which NBC reporter Morgan Radford traveled to Ohio ahead of President Trump's...

A Republican allegation that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis invested in a company benefited by his work as a congressman is now a formal complaint. Former Secretary of State Gessler, a GOP candidate for governor in 2014, filed the complaint Tuesday with the Secretary of State’s Office on behalf of Kristina Cook, a Denver County Republican Party official and conservative radio personality. She and Gessler allege that Polis failed to disclose in his official paperwork that he had invested between $5 million and $25 million in BridgeHealth Medical Inc. “This failure to report his interest in BridgeHealth is not a...

The Senate on Wednesday defeated a Democratic measure to overrule President Trump’s expansion of non-ObamaCare insurance plans as Democrats seek to highlight health care ahead of the midterm elections. The Democratic measure would have overruled Trump’s expansion of short-term health insurance plans, which do not have to cover people with pre-existing conditions or cover a range of health services like mental health or prescription drugs. It was defeated on an extremely narrow, mostly party line 50-50 vote, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voting with Democrats in favor of overturning the short-term plans. Republicans argue the short-term plans simply provide a...

Republican lawmakers have made it clear they have no intention of repealing Obamacare in the current Congress. Republicans in the nation’s top lawmaking body have never really wanted to get rid of Obamacare. They would prefer to present the program, which David Horowitz correctly describes as “the greatest assault on individual freedom and individual choice in our lifetimes,” as a villain and whip up sentiment against it and run against it every election. They view Obamacare as good for the business of politics. They may chip away at it from time to time or tinker with it at the margins,...

Despite numerous promises from congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama when they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the health care law has created far more problems than it has solved. Premiums, deductibles, and health care choices have all worsened since Obamacare went into effect, and there’s no sign America’s health insurance system will improve anytime in the near future. President Trump inherited a health insurance crisis when he took office in January 2017, so he and congressional Republican leaders immediately began to work to implement their plan to replace Obamacare with a more market-centered approach to improving the...