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Citing ObamaCare as a reason, the the University of Virginia has announced that spouses of University employees who have access to health insurance through their own jobs will no longer be eligible for health insurance coverage. In its announcement, President Obama's healthcare plan is specifically mentioned by UVa as a reason for the rising costs that forced the university to drop working spouses. ObamaCare is expected to add $7 million to the university's health care costs. UVa was also a public supporter of ObamaCare: Working spouse provision: Starting Jan. 1, spouses who have access to coverage through their own employer...

Thanks to the delayed employer mandate in ObamaCare, we are now sixteen months away from enforcement of those statutes, even though they go into effect in four months. Are employers taking a break from ObamaCare prep? Not hardly. Today we have three new stories about how the perverse incentives of the ACA will impact workers, starting with UPS, which has just announced that it will stop offering health-care coverage to spouses — and explicitly cites ObamaCare as the reason (via Jim Geraghty and Jeryl Bier): United Parcel Service Inc. plans to remove thousands of spouses from its medical plan because...

The latest casualty of Obamacare may be a low-cost New Jersey health-care policy. Though President Obama promised “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period,” that will not be the case for approximately 106,000 New Jersey residents whose plans will disappear under the law.Known as the “basic and essential,” or B&E, health-care plans, the policy costs as little as a couple hundred dollars per month and is the choice of 71 percent of New Jersey residents on the individual insurance market. It provides minimum coverage for things such as doctor’s visits...

Barack Obama's increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week's news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality. Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act, he said: "I didn't simply choose to" ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide...

Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The White House dismisses such examples as "anecdotal." Jason Furman, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, said, “We are seeing no systematic evidence that the Affordable Care Act is having an adverse impact on job growth or the number of hours employees are working. … [S]ince the ACA became law, nearly 90 percent of the...

“Looks like Obamacare is more “on track” than “train wreck,” gloated the experts on Barack Obama’s Think Progress website as they reported the Master’s healthcare scheme was literally forcing America’s insurers to lower their premiums. (1) The glad tidings arose back in May after Oregon providers Providence Health Plan and Family Care Health requested premium rate reductions from the state-run ObamaCare exchange. (Actually, the state just gets to PAY for the exchange. It’s RUN by Kathleen Sebelius at HHS.) Naturally this was big news for Affordable Care Act fans. After all, what could be better than private insurers wanting permission...

NEW YORK (MainStreet)—"Be careful what you wish for," goes the old saying. After all, you might just get it. Apparently, this choice advice was was forgotten by some major labor union leaders. These union bosses campaigned vigorously for President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) to be passed by Congress into law. They did so despite warnings from those opposed to the ACA – commonly referred to as Obamacare - that the plan would be problematic. Nonetheless the chiefs of the ...

(CNSNews.com) – Comparing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, to a “flesh-eating bacteria, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said the health care law should not be funded by Congress when it votes on a short-term budget after the summer recess. “Obamacare is not the typical political virus that we’re accustomed to that spreads from Washington, D.C., infecting the body politics,” Perkins said at a press conference Thursday at the Capitol for the launch of the “You Fund it, You Own It” campaign to stop the implementation of ACA. “This is a rare strain of flesh-eating bacteria that...

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- The White House has approved a deal that will exempt members of Congress and their staff from some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, Politico reported late Thursday. Under the law, popularly referred to as Obamacare, lawmakers and their aides were required to source health insurance "created" by the law or offered through one of its exchanges, and without the subsidies they currently enjoy, the members of Congress would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year, the report said.

What the [Un]affordable Care Act Has Already Accomplished Keith Smith, MD What the [Un]affordable Care Act Has Already Accomplished Jul 29, 2013 By Keith Smith, MD http://www.SurgeryCenterOK.com Lest we get too excited about all of the bad news surrounding the unworkability of what I call the Unaffordable Care Act (UCA) or ObamaCare, we should remember that this law has already achieved much of what its architects intended—if you agree with me that the purpose if the law was to: line the pockets of certain connected cronies create an industry-wide consolidation in the insurance and hospital business inject mass chaos into...

Documents obtained from the Health and Human Services Department through a Freedom of Information Act request show that on the day the Affordable Care Act became law, the agency received fast-track authority to hire 1,814 new high-level employees to put Obamacare into practice, at a likely cost of more than $159 million per year. The hiring request was approved by the Obama administration's Office of Personnel Management despite a government-wide hiring freeze. Judicial Watch, a nonprofit that has told MailOnline it files 'hundreds' of such FOIA requests, showed MailOnline the documents on Thursday. They show that HHS designated the hiring...

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law. National Treasury Employees Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law. The union leaders are providing members with a form letter to send to the congressmen that says “I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act.”

We have a president who loves to give campaign speeches to adoring crowds, but who doesn't seem to have much interest in governing. That was apparent Wednesday, when Barack Obama delivered the first of several promised "pivot to the economy" speeches at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he spoke eight years ago as a newly elected U.S. senator. The hour-long speech started off with some characteristic self-referencing -- he didn't have gray hair then, he noted, or a motorcade -- and ended with a quotation from Galesburg native Carl Sandburg. But in between there was not much in the...

The alleged motivation behind the deceitfully named “Affordable Care Act” is that there are millions of medically uninsured in the US. Of course the appropriate solution would be to address that need without crashing healthcare for the rest of the population. But somehow that approach was overlooked. What if there was a concept by which we could treat those millions, providing them with better care, shorter wait times, less bureaucracy and an improved doctor/patient relationship, all while reducing Medicaid spending by $1 billion or more per state per year? Not only is this possible, but the type of facility which...

Expecting to get a raise next year? It could be eaten up by your health care bill. In an effort to meet the affordability requirement of the Affordable Care Act, which kicks in next year and requires that workers spend no more than 9.5% of their income on premiums, more employers are turning to insurance plans in which premiums vary based on a person’s salary, rather than having all workers pay a flat rate. That way, employees who make more money pay bigger premiums. Some 12% of companies used salary-based premiums in 2012, up from 10% in 2011, according to...

The vast majority of Americans, 81%, say they are aware of the 2010 Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) requirement that most Americans must carry health insurance or pay a fine. Americans who are currently uninsured -- those most directly affected by this requirement -- are much less likely to be aware of the provision, with 56% saying they know about it and 43% saying they are unaware. The results are based on a June 20-24 Gallup poll, which asked a series of questions on the ACA, the comprehensive healthcare reform bill signed into law by President Obama in 2010. Many of...

"It's a morass of regulations and requirements, and everyone's trying to figure out what their exposure is," says Eric Belcher, president and CEO of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services. Adds Mark Goldstein, CEO of Entertainment Partners, which has held 16 seminars to help studios understand ACA: "It's going to be a very big deal." Determining the exact nature of the new laws has been difficult, given that many ACA terms have yet to be worked out. Hollywood productions, for instance, might find it irksome simply trying to categorize employees as full- or part-time, seasonal or variable, and it's important that...

Presumably due the increasing unpopularity of Obama’s controversial “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA), U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, will be responsible for $54 in funding to support a large contingent of health care officials known as, “navigators,” who will be tasked with assisting citizens with the complexity of the 906 page healthcare regulation act. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives at the time, famously justified rushing the bill through Congress at the time as a necessary procedure, because it was necessary to”pass the bill so that you can find...

The Affordable Care Act is So Unaffordable, Members of Congress and Their Aides are Quitting Because They Can't Afford It! BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, this is truly outrageous. There's a headline in The Politico today: "Obamacare? We Were Just Leaving..." And when I saw the headline, I thought it was gonna be an article about how Democrats are afraid of losing their seats because of all the skyrocketing costs of health premiums and all the other negatives associated with Obamacare. But that's not what this story is about. What this story's about is congressmen worried about themselves. In...

(CNSNews.com) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Thursday that health insurance premiums will go up under Obamacare because people who did not buy insurance before, and thus had no premium at all, will now be forced to buy insurance. She also urged people to be “optimistic” about Obamacare. “You just see,” Pelosi said. “I mean be optimistic about it. It is a very, very exciting enterprise.”