Free Republic

Despite fury from lawmakers the day before, Colorado’s health exchange board voted on Thursday to collect millions of additional dollars from all Colorado health insurance customers, even those who have nothing to do with the exchange. On top of that “broad market assessment,” the board also voted to more than double the user fees levied on people who buy insurance through Colorado’s exchange. .. The higher broad market fee is projected to allow Connect for Health Colorado to scoop up about about $20 million in 2016. It has been set at $1.25 per member per month on all health insurance...

At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied: "I came up with things like, you know, health care." Ah, yes. "Health care." Remember when the president's signature Obamacare health insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars and Legos all rolled into one? The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run "marketplaces" were supposed to put the...

Hawaii’s Obamacare exchange website will soon shut down because it is not financially viable, Americans for Tax Reform reports. The exchange website will be shutdown despite $205 million in federal taxpayer funds. The migration to a federal exchange will cost taxpayers another $30 million. [Snip] According to ATR, with only 8,592 enrollees, the state spent $23,899 on each individual.

Ladies and Gentlemen, a little history is appropriate for those of you who have not been following the tragic murder of my son at Bumrungrad International Hospital in 2006. A three year investigation led me back to the United States where I was amazed to see what a tangled web the corporate medical mafia has spun at the expense of the people who, at the start of our democracy, delegated rights to the government to protect and preserve liberty, freedom and justice. It was a republic—which has now mostly been bought and sold into oblivion—and is still called a democracy...

Hawaii state insurance exchange to shut down Hawaii Health Connector never achieved financial sustainability May 11, 2015 | By Brian Eastwood The Hawaii Health Connector will shut down operations on Sept. 30, InsuranceNewsNet reported. The exchange site will cease new enrollment this week, discontinue its outreach programs at the end of May and transfer its technology assets to the state by Sept. 30, the article said. The exchange's 37,000 enrollees can re-enroll on the federal Healthcare.gov exchange for the 2016 plan year. Hawaii Health Connector has faced financial problems from its inception. A report issued earlier this year found that...

One in three Americans with private health insurance has been hit with a surprise medical bill, according to a new survey by Consumers Union. The study of 2,200 individuals also found consumers overall are confused when it comes to how to fight a surprise bill. Among the surprises: bills that were for higher amounts than customer’s expected, bills for out-of-network services that customers believed were in-network, and bills from doctors they did not expect would send them a bill. Betsy Imholz of Consumers Union says few people who receive surprise bills ever file a complaint with a state agency. “Nobody...

Health-care experts call it D.C. insiderism at its worst. The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from Obamacare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies. The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the...

Waste: After spending billions on state-run ObamaCare exchanges, the federal government is only now writing clear rules on how that money can be spent, while half of the exchanges head toward bankruptcy.

Gov. Rick Scott issues executive order to look at hospitals' books TALLAHASSEE – Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order Tuesday calling for a panel to look at the finances, political contributions, lobbying efforts and quality and cost of care provided at hospitals funded with taxpayer money. The Commission on Healthcare and Hospital Funding will consist of members appointed entirely by Scott. The move comes after a stalemate between the House and the Senate over healthcare spending led to the end of the legislative session last week without any of his priorities accomplished. Scott’s goals of $673 million in tax...

A Colorado Springs mom is the latest target of a scam going after military families in Southern Colorado. The scammers pretend to be with TRICARE to try to get victims' personal information. 11 News first learned about the scam earlier this year, but we keep hearing from more people in the community who are getting these calls. Penni Schacherer lives in Colorado Springs, and says she was in the middle of homeschooling her son when her phone rang. The caller claimed to be with TRICARE and offered her a special cream that relieves pain. Schacherer tells 11 News she was...

The parent company of Assurant Health said Tuesday that it will sell or shut down the Milwaukee health insurer — which employs 1,200 people in the area — by the end of next year. Assurant Health has struggled to adjust to changes in the health insurance market imposed by the Affordable Care Act and is expected to report an operating loss of $80 million to $90 million in its first quarter. That comes after it lost $64 million last year. The company, whose headquarters is in downtown Milwaukee, specializes in health insurance for small employers and individuals, the two market...

Health Reform: Providing still more evidence of how ObamaCare is "working," most enrollees learned this year that they had to pay back a huge chunk of their insurance subsidies. So much for "affordability."

IT HAS BEEN the hallmark of socialism in Venezuela: free, high-quality medical care. Late President Hugo Chávez changed the constitution to guarantee such right to all Venezuelans. But that same health care system is now crumbling under the weight of an economic crisis, causing a severe shortage of normal medical care and many avoidable deaths. Venezuela has grown increasingly alienated from the United States and its Central American neighbors, but its political estrangement doesn’t justify the lack of urgency from the international community. Although many places call out for medical intervention, Venezuela’s growing medical collapse deserves a significant dose of...

Health Reform: Voters who handed Republicans control of the Senate, largely on the promise of killing ObamaCare, must be wondering why they bothered. Senate leaders now want to protect the law for the next two years.

A new study this week found no link between vaccines and autism. It instantly made headlines on TV news and popular media everywhere. Many billed it as the final word, “once again,” disproving the notion that vaccines could have anything to do with autism. What you didn’t learn on the news was that the study was from a consulting firm that lists major vaccine makers among its clients: The Lewin Group. That potential conflict of interest was not disclosed in the paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine; the study authors simply declare “The Lewin Group operates with...

Hospital staff broke the news to a Tacoma, Wash. woman that her operation to remove a tumor from her breast would not be happening. Medical benefits tied to her retired husband’s U.S. Army service had expired just 12 hours before, a detail on the 41-year-old woman’s benefits card that no one noticed until she was already prepped for surgery at Madigan Army Medical Center, according to a KING-TV report. Patricia Zuniga described the bearers of bad news as “upfront” about the awkward discovery. “You’re not having your surgery today. You do not have health care. You do not have benefits,”...

Health Reform: Back in 2013, ObamaCare supporters couldn't talk enough about how California was a showcase for how the law would succeed. Isn't it funny that nobody is making such claims any more?

The Texas Medical Board views rules it adopted April 10 as “expanding telemedicine opportunities,” but business and industry groups insist they’ll instead serve to “drive a stake through the heart” of telemedicine in the Lone Star State. At the center of the issue is whether a video consultation is enough to establish the requisite doctor-patient relationship for physicians to prescribe medication or provide a diagnosis. That convenience is critical if an overarching goal of telemedicine is to deliver care to the underserved, particularly in rural areas where geography and provider shortages create access issues. The board’s rules, however, require either...

Nearly everyone knows the dangers of identity theft, where someone steals your credit cards, bank information, or Social Security number to rip you off. But a new kind of crime is rising that could put you in even greater danger. It’s medical identity theft, and it’s on the rise in the U.S. According to report this month by the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance, which tracks such crimes, 2.3 million Americans were victimized by medical ID thieves in 2014 — with total damages adding up to $20 billion. That represents a 22 percent increase in the number of cases in just...

In 49 states, there are basically two options for public health insurance programs: Medicaid for the very poor, and subsidized private health insurance on the Affordable Care Act's exchanges for everyone else. Minnesota is the exception. Unlike every other state, it has a third option in the middle: MinnesotaCare. Created in the 1990s, MinnesotaCare covers people who earn too much money for Medical Assistance (Minnesota's Medicaid program) but not enough to qualify for MNsure, the state's health insurance exchange.