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Hillary Rodham Clinton will begin filling in details this week of her proposal to tweak the Affordable Care Act, and she will attempt to use Republican presidential candidates’ opposition to the health-care-expansion law against them. The focus on health care represents a shift for national Democrats and a full embrace of a law that had a troubled rollout and has not always polled well. Unlike in the 2012 election, when many Democrats tiptoed around their support for Obama’s namesake law, Clinton is making it a central part of her argument that she should succeed him. Clinton frequently praises the 2010...

A sluggish economy has kept young Americans unemployed and underemployed as our nation's high school and college graduates find they have inadequate skills for a dynamic and increasingly global economy. And it's no secret that the enrollment rate for ObamaCare has been disappointing: Of a projected 35 million enrollees, only 16.2 million have actually enrolled. The White House knows the president's health spending law is untenable unless 40% of the enrollees are between the ages of 18 and 34, because this age group is significantly healthier than all other age groups. This age group now comprises a mere 24%, meaning...

The White House has said it will appeal the decision. Constitution 1; Obama 0. That was the score Wednesday as a federal judge gave House Republicans the go-ahead to proceed with their lawsuit to block President Obama’s budget-busting healthcare law. “This suit remains a plain dispute over a constitutional command, of which the Judiciary has long been the ultimate interpreter,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, who said that House Republicans have legal standing to sue. The Constitution, Collyer wrote, “could not be more clear: ‘No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of Appropriations...

US District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer ruled Wednesday against the Obama administration's motion to dismiss the case. Collyer said House Republicans do have the standing to pursue their challenge, which argues that the Obama administration violated the US Constitution by spending money on the law that had not been appropriated by Congress.

Abortion rights activists have long cheered Barack Obama's presidency as a "historic victory for women's health." But the reality has been rather different. Since 2010, getting an abortion in America has become significantly harder. States passed a record 205 abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2013, more than the entire 30 years prior. As a result, many abortion providers are closing down. One survey, from pro-life group Operation Rescue, estimates that 87 separate locations ceased to perform surgical abortions in 2013. These changes are a clear result of pro-life mobilization in the Obama era. ... There's a clear catalyst behind the...

Of the many places from which to observe the Irish health service, the flat of your back is one of the worst. Too often at this moment, when patients are at their most vulnerable, the system lets them down. It certainly failed Rose O’Halloran. The 101-year-old spent more than 24 hours trapped on a trolley at the Adelaide and Meath Hospital, in Tallaght, on the Monday of the June bank holiday. […] At least O’Halloran eventually got the treatment she needed. In Portlaoise and other towns, babies have been dying or suffering disablement in maternity units in circumstances that vary...

Opponents of a national health care plan unveiled last month by Gov. Scott Walker took their message to Hudson last week. From the balcony of the Hudson Library, Members of Citizen Action of Wisconsin said the backdrop of the St. Croix River represented a line of demarcation between a progressive health care system in Minnesota and one proposed by the Wisconsin governor who’s seeking to become president. Robert Kraig, executive director of Members of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, said Minnesota has lower premiums because it has taken advantage of provisions in the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA). “And Wisconsin does...

Hundreds of thousands of veterans listed in the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system died before their applications for care were processed, according to a report issued Wednesday. The VA's inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records stalled in the agency's system for managing health care enrollment, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past. In a response to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs' request to investigate a whistleblower's allegations of mismanagement at the VA's Health Eligibility Center, the inspector general also found VA staffers incorrectly...

In the battle between bureaucrats and veterans, the Obama administration stands with the bureaucrats. Last week the White House threatened to veto the VA Accountability Act, a bill that would moderately streamline the process for firing incompetent Department of Veterans Affairs employees. Under the terms of the act, the VA secretary can’t place employees on paid administrative leave for more than 14 days per year, employees’ initial-hire probationary period is extended to 18 months, and terminated employees have seven days to file an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. But these streamlined termination provisions — which still provide far...

Graduate students at MU will demonstrate for larger stipends and university-subsidized housing and child care. Professors plan to cancel classes in order to attend the rally in support of their teaching assistants. An upcoming rally by graduate students at the University of Missouri (MU) demanding increased pay and benefits will likely provide undergraduate students with an unexpected break from their classes. Several MU professors plan to cancel classes Wednesday—just two days after the beginning of the fall semester—in order to attend the rally in support of their teaching assistants, who are demonstrating for larger stipends and university-subsidized housing and child...

When insurance companies began discussing the necessary premium hikes for the third year of ObamaCare coverage, the White House was quick to dismiss the requests. State auditors would surely force insurers to admit that these requests were overblown. Barack Obama himself told a Nashville audience last month that he couldn’t see why insurers needed to hike premiums by more than a third in Tennessee, the Wall Street Journal recalls: At a July town hall in Nashville, Tenn., President Barack Obama played down fears of a spike in health insurance premiums in his signature health law’s third year.“My expectation is...

One out of four U.S. employers may soon face a steep new Obamacare tax on the insurance coverage they offer workers, unless they take steps to reduce overall spending on the plans. A new analysis released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 26 percent of employers offer health benefits that could be subject to the Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac" tax on high-cost plans when it starts in 2018. The tax kicks in when the total spending on a health plan — including the employer and employee premium contributions — exceeds $10,022 for an individual or $27,500 for a...

Remember the hue and cry when it looked like the Supreme Court could deny ObamaCare subsidies to millions of people? Looks like it could happen anyway, thanks to the law's tax complications. Fully 40% of taxpayers who received ObamaCare subsidies last year haven't filed their taxes yet and are at risk of losing their subsidies for next year, according to the American Action Forum. An update on ObamaCare that the IRS recently sent to Congress said that out of the 4.5 million taxpayers who got ObamaCare's "advance payment" subsidies last year, only 2.7 million had filed the required tax forms...

Perhaps today will mark the beginning of a new phase in the long campaign for the GOP nomination for president in 2016. That’s possible because two of the leading candidates — Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Florida senator Marco Rubio — have offered serious plans for replacing Obamacare in its entirety. (In Senator Rubio’s case, he reiterated in an op-ed the principles of a plan he outlined several months ago.) They, along with Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, are now the candidates who can speak most credibly about what’s wrong with Obamacare, because they have actual plans to do something about...

Scott Walker is putting forward a plan to replace Obamacare that conservatives and voters generally ought to find very attractive. It takes a scythe to Obamacare’s regulations: The plan restores states’ pre-Obamacare role as the lead health-care regulators. The individual and employer mandates would vanish. The federal government would no longer determine which benefits are “essential” for everyone’s health insurance. At the same time, the plan would enable anyone who wants catastrophic health coverage to get it. The plan has four key parts. First, Obamacare’s regulatory centralization would be reversed. Second, tax credits would be provided to enable people to...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is jump-starting a debate on ObamaCare with the hope of getting out in front of his GOP rivals on one of the party’s toughest topics. Walker on Tuesday became the first leading presidential candidate to put forward a detailed replacement plan for the healthcare reform law, a move that will put pressure on his rivals to release their own plans. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who has trailed in the polls, is the only other candidate with a full plan, which focuses on grants to states. The move could give Walker an edge with conservative voters...

Conservatives have been battling Obamacare for more than six years now, roughly the same amount of time it took American revolutionaries to get from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown. But as Thomas Paine wrote during that earlier struggle, “Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” Across these past six years, spanning from when Obamacare was first taking shape to today, many conservatives have kept their eye on the prize, while many center-right pundits and office-holders have grown impatient...

The Office of Inspector General for Veterans Affairs just found staffers with the Los Angeles VA Regional Office improperly shredded numerous disability claims, tossing them in the trash rather than giving them proper review. ... The IG report also stated: “The shredding of these documents would have prevented the documents from becoming part of the veterans’ permanent record and potentially affect veterans’ benefits.” Examples of the documents that were shredded included disability-compensation claims submitted by two homeless veterans, and a letter from a medical provider confirming a veteran was unemployable due to “service-connected post-traumatic stress disorder,”

“As far as single payer, it works in Canada, it works incredibly well in Scotland.” — Donald Trump I was criticized for inviting Donald Trump to speak at FreedomFest this year because “he’s not a libertarian.” True enough, but we’re a big tent in the freedom movement, and our 2,500 attendees wanted to hear what he had to say, whether they agreed with him or not. I invite you to watch the full speech. In that speech, Trump adopted his typical stance about preventing other countries’ criminals from entering the United States illegally across the Mexican border. I agree with...

Let’s be honest. Obamacare was nothing more than a bait and switch. But Americans never took the bait. In 2010, as President Obama and his fellow Democrats were trying desperately to ram Obamacare down our throats, they made one false claim after another. They told us health-care premiums would go down. They insisted if you liked your health-care plan you could keep it. They guaranteed Obamacare wouldn’t include any tax increases for the middle class. Americans didn’t buy these lofty promises then, and they certainly don’t now, given that each and every one of them has been broken. Five years...