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Following the poor new homes sales report in the US and economic weakness in developing countries, we see gold and silver rising this morning. Gold: gold082313 Silver: silver082313 And the USD/EUR is plunging. usdeur666 And the USD/JPY is doing likewise. usdjpy082313 The 10 year US Treasury yield is down 8 basis points. ust10082313 Stay tuned!

Paul Bunyan seldom is thought of as an insurance salesman. But the Minnesota icon and his sidekick, Babe the Blue Ox, play lead roles in a new $9 million campaign to promote a state-operated health insurance exchange, where roughly 1 million residents will be encouraged to obtain coverage over the next several months. On Sunday, executives with the state's insurance marketplace, which is called MNsure, unveiled an awareness campaign that features the folklore characters suffering humorous mishaps while waterskiing, ice skating and chopping trees. The injuries are meant to lightly illustrate the campaign's tagline, which calls Minnesota the "Land of...

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Minnesota's health insurance exchange is seeking a $55 million federal grant to pay for its operations next year. The board of directors of MNsure met Wednesday to review the grant request. Five previous federal grants to Minnesota's exchange added up to $110 million. The $55 million request would cover salaries for about 166 full-time employees who would work on MNsure operations, and would also cover spending on technology, marketing, customer service, administration and other items. The director of MNsure says that by 2015, the exchange is expected to be able to cover its own operating costs through a...

Two of the three largest health insurers in Wisconsin — UnitedHealthcare and Humana — will not participate in the state’s online marketplace under the Affordable Care Act, but 13 insurers are considering selling to individuals and nine insurers have indicated an interest in selling to small businesses.

Perhaps you’ve heard the radio or TV commercials sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services urging seniors to report instances of Medicare fraud. There’s a number to call, along with cheerful suggestions. The intent here seems benign enough — saving taxpayer money by catching the dishonest. One might even be tempted to praise it, were it not for what the Obama administration is doing with the other hand — issuing an engraved invitation to commit fraud when signing up for the health-care exchanges. Obamacare is proving too unwieldy even for the greediest of big-government centralizers in the Obama...

Surprised by the recent waivers from the Obama administration on the Affordable Care Act? Get ready for more, writes Margot Sanger-Katz at National Journal, because the employer mandate is far from the only piece of ObamaCare that’s not ready for prime time. In fact, it might be easier to select the few components that might be ready for the implementation target date than to number those that won’t: If you’ve been reading all the Obamacare stories lately, you might get the impression that the administration has just realized it will not be able to implement the massive health reform as...

(Aetna will exit California...)The nation's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group Inc., is leaving California's individual health insurance market, the second major company to exit in advance of major changes under the Affordable Care Act. UnitedHealth said it had notified state regulators that it would leave the state's individual market at year-end and force about 8,000 customers to find new coverage. Last month, Aetna Inc., the nation's third-largest health insurer, made a similar move affecting about 50,000 existing policyholders. Both companies will keep a major presence in California, focusing instead on large and small employers.(Health Care Law comes to California)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - About 550,000 people in Oregon do not have health insurance, and Aaron Karjala is confident the state's new online insurance exchange will be able to accommodate them when enrollment under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform begins on October 1.What Karjala, the chief information officer at "Cover Oregon," does worry about, however, is what will happen if the entire population of Oregon - 3.9 million - logs on that day "just to check it out," he said. Or if millions of curious souls elsewhere, wondering if Oregon's insurance offerings are better than their states', log on, causing...

Millions of Californians who contact the state's new health exchange to buy insurance will be given the opportunity to register to vote, too, a move that some Republicans fear could benefit Democrats. Secretary of State Debra Bowen made California the first state to designate its health exchange as a voter registration agency Wednesday, but others are expected to follow suit, said Shannan Velayas, Bowen's spokeswoman. "This is about making sure that all eligible Californians are offered the chance to register to vote," Velayas said Thursday. A 1993 federal law requires states to designate their agencies and offices that provide public...

LOS ANGELES — A California law that created an agency to oversee national health care reforms granted it broad authority to conceal spending on the contractors that will perform most of its functions, potentially shielding the public from seeing how hundreds of millions of dollars are spent. The degree of secrecy afforded Covered California appears unique among states attempting to establish their own health insurance exchanges under President Barack Obama's signature health law. An Associated Press review of the 16 other states that have opted for state-run marketplaces shows the California agency was given powers that are the most restrictive...

Setting up insurance exchanges — the centerpiece of President Obama's healthcare reform law — is costing the Health and Human Services Department a whole lot more than it originally expected. According to budget documents released Wednesday, the department expects to spend $4.4 billion on exchange grants to the states by the end of this year — double its estimates a year ago. The HHS is also asking Congress for another $1.5 billion to set up a federal exchange in 26 states. The department has cobbled together money from other programs to get started, but officials said they need another $800...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) talk about who can and cannot be health insurance exchange "navigators" in a new batch of proposed regulations. In the proposed regulations, "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Exchange Functions: Standards for Navigators and Non-Navigator Assistance Personnel" (CMS-9955-P) (RIN 0938-AR75), CMS officials also talk about the rules that will govern "non-navigator consumer assistance programs," such as "in-person assister" programs. Officials at CMS -- an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- said HHS eventually might require every Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange to set up...

Legislation to create a Minnesota marketplace for buying health insurance cleared a final hurdle Monday, March 18. The state Senate voted 39-28 along party lines to send the DFL-sponsored bill for a health exchange to Gov. Mark Dayton for his expected signature. The exchange is meant to make it easier for people to buy coverage, all while helping increase the number of people with insurance. The 2010 federal health care overhaul law of 2010 calls on state-level exchanges to be operating by October. "This is a cornerstone of the federal Affordable Care Act," said Sen. Tony Lourey, DFL-Kerrick, before the...

Democrats in the state House of Representatives pushed forward a key provision of the federal health care overhaul by voting Monday, March 4, to create a health insurance exchange for Minnesota. The federal law, which was passed in 2010, calls for the creation of state-level health exchanges where individuals and small businesses can purchase coverage beginning in October. The marketplaces are meant to make it easier for consumers to comparison shop for health insurance. Federal subsidies will be available for many shopping on the exchange, and should thereby fulfill the federal law's goal of increasing the share of Americans with...

A federal lawsuit has revealed one of Obama's rationing plans. The Administration says states can cut Medicaid payments to doctors and other providers to hold down costs -- until they decide not to and states are stuck with the bill. This is a breathtaking statement. President Obama's signature law, Obamacare, adds 16 million people to Medicaid. It offers states the "opportunity" to expand Medicaid at no cost for the first two years, and then offers to pay 90% of the cost in perpetuity of all individuals eligible under the expansion. The law also increases payment to primary care doctors for...

MN Legislative Update on Obamacare Exchange & privacy-gutting bills Please begin now contacting your legislators about the Obamacare Exchange bills which are likely to be voted on March 4 in the House and March 7 in the Senate. They want the final bill to Gov. Dayton on March 22.

As the final deadline for creating state health insurance exchanges passed Friday, New Jersey, Tennessee and Florida said they would not work with the federal government on establishing insurance markets required under ObamaCare. Exchanges are online markets required under the federal health care law where consumers will be able to buy individual private policies and apply for government subsidies to help pay their premiums. In his announcement Friday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said his administration is committed to complying with ObamaCare, but "only in a manner that is the most effective and efficient for the residents of New Jersey,...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday quietly raised the 10-year cost of ObamaCare´s insurance subsidies offered via the health law´s exchanges by $233 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office review of its latest spending forecast. The CBO´s new baseline estimate shows that ObamaCare subsidies offered through the insurance exchanges — which are supposed to be up and running by next January — will total more than $1 trillion through 2022, up from $814 billion over those same years in its budget forecast made a year ago. That´s an increase of nearly 29%.

Being a good, Democrat-run state, Minnesota has decided to build an ObamaCare exchange, turning all healthcare rights and choices of its citizens over to the tender mercies of federal death panels and untrained, IT technicians in Washington, DC. But if anything, that’s the GOOD news for unsuspecting Minnesotans! For all information currently considered “personal” will, at the stroke of a keyboard, become known to countless bureaucracies throughout the State and federal governments. As the Citizen’s Council for Health Freedom explains it: “Buried in the text of the Minnesota Obamacare Exchange bill (MNHIX) [is] a tiny but controversial section allowing free-flow...

Section 7 of House File 5 reads: Sec. 7. [62V.06] DATA. (a) The definitions in section 13.02 apply to this section. (b) Government data of the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace on individuals, employees of employers, and employers using the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace are private data on individuals or nonpublic data. The Minnesota Insurance Marketplace may share not public data with state and federal agencies and other entities if the exchange of the data is reasonably necessary to carry out the functions of the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace. State agencies shall share not public data with the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace if the exchange...