Free Republic

Is the ineptitude of ObamaCare authors and directors really a function of good old-fashioned government incompetence? Or is a widely ignorant American public being taken in by precisely what members of the radical left WANT to be brought about by the Affordable Care Act? Could the daily disasters–the suspended employer mandate, “honor system” reporting of income, previously unannounced taxes, doctors refusing to treat ObamaCare policy holders, the ludicrous Healthcare.gov website, the baldfaced lies about keeping your insurance and your doctors–could these extraordinary failures actually mean that the rollout of the ACA is proceeding exactly according to plan? “Obamacare is the...

President Obama is back on the offensive when it comes to promoting the Affordable Care Act. But White House aides may want to hit the spell-checker next time before they get carried away promoting the president’s message. On Thursday, the White House tweeted a picture of Obama holding a sign with the Twitter hashtag “#GetCovered Because.” The message on the president’s sign read: “Nobody should go broke just because they get sick.” The photo immediately launched a small social media tidal wave, with people creating their own “GetCovered” images. But the White House may have unintentionally created one of the...

Consumers who are scrambling to finalize medical coverage by the start of the year are getting some breathing room as the Obama administration moved on Thursday to address problems stemming from the botched rollout of the president's health care law. The measures announced by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are intended to ensure that consumers don't lose coverage on Jan. 1, give them temporary access to their doctors who are out of network and allow them to refill prescriptions from previous plans. The administration has been criticized for policy cancellations of millions of consumers and technical glitches that...

"The only alternative that Obamacare's critics have is, well, 'let's just go back to the status quo,'" said President Obama last week, "because they sure haven't presented an alternative." It's an argument Democrats make all the time — often, these days, to divert attention from the ongoing problems of their troubled national health care scheme. But still — why haven't Republicans presented an alternative to Obamacare? GOP leaders would protest immediately: They have come up with dozens of health care bills, only to see them rejected by Democrats. But the fact is, Republicans have not united behind a single health...

ObamaCare Fail: An urgent mass email to all Senate staff warns not to trust any confirmation from the D.C. health exchange and they may not have insurance come January. Why aren't the rest of us being warned? We have chronicled the fact that ObamaCare, the increasingly unaffordable Affordable Care Act, has caused many with pre-existing conditions like stage-four cancer, the very people it was supposed to help, to lose their insurance at a critical point in their lives. For others, the skyrocketing premiums and often five-figure deductibles have made having insurance almost irrelevant. If you can't afford the premiums or...

Last month, while Minnesota's new health insurance exchange site was scrambling to fix glitches and under fire from critics, its director was on vacation. MNsure director April Todd-Malmlov took a two-week vacation to Costa Rica around Thanksgiving. Gov. Mark Dayton defended her right to take a pre-scheduled trip, but critics of the fledgling health insurance exchange pounced. The conservative group Watchdog.org put out a press release Thursday, condemning her absence while "thousands of frustrated Minnesotans were notified about glitches and errors in their applications on the state insurance exchange."

Yet another calculated, ObamaCare assault on healthcare providers has been ferreted out of the 2700 impenetrable pages (plus revisions) of Barack Obama’s signature achievement. Doctors and hospitals nationwide can already expect to be paid a pittance for their services to ObamaCare patients. And now, yet another financial blow to providers has been discovered. “The Affordable Care Act created a 90-day grace period before insurers can drop policy holders who fall behind on premiums. So, delinquents who obtain tax-subsidized health insurance through an Obamacare health insurance exchange have three months to settle up their bills prior to their policy being canceled.”...

This will be the skeleton key for unlocking health benefits... To an unbiased observer, it should be clear that 70 – 90% of the civil servants (not including elected officials) in this country are likely ardent supporters and card carrying members of the Democrat party. The next time you are at the DMV, for example, try to identify the person there that is likely to vote Republican or even as an independent; good luck with the exercise. To the point, however, these people know and need not be told what’s in their interest and naturally, it is the continued existence...

It comes as no surprise to that the implementation of ObamaCare is doing nothing to make medical care better. In fact, it's having the opposite effect and making things worse. I guess I should preface that statement with the observation that those of us who actually are capable of using logic and reason are not surprised by the effects of ObamaCare. Only those "low-information voters" who worship Obama as a prophet and believe that they'll no longer have to pay their mortgage or other bills whilst also talking on their free Obama-phone are being caught unawares. It's now being found...

More than 30 House Republicans are requesting to meet with President Obama to “discuss real health care reform alternatives to ObamaCare.” “Since the inception of the ACA in 2009, many of us have offered countless alternative healthcare reform proposals,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Obama on Tuesday. “While we understand your desire to preserve your signature piece of legislation, it is a false choice to say that the [Affordable Care Act] is the only way to reform health care.” Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark.) spearheaded the letter, signed by 33 Republicans, and has been actively trying to change or...

Despite being one of the bluest states in the country and one of the first to implement state based Obamacare exchanges, doctors in California are boycotting Obamacare...a whopping 70 percent of them. An estimated seven out of every 10 physicians in deep-blue California are rebelling against the state's Obamacare health insurance exchange and won't participate, the head of the state's largest medical association said. So why exactly the push back? Under Obamcare, doctors are practically expected to work for free. “We need some recognition that we’re doing a service to the community. But we can’t do it for free. And...

If you like your medicines, you may not be able to keep them under Obamacare. The President famously promised that you could keep your health plan and doctor. For many people, both of those pledges are turning out not to be true. And now, you might not be able to keep your drugs, either. There are two reasons why. The first issue has to do with the higher out of pocket costs patients will face. The second issue may be far more severe. Simply put, many drugs may not be covered at all, and the costs patients incur by buying...

Surprising Findings: - Traditional hospitals, according to 57% of people, will be obsolete in the future - Majority of people (84%) would be willing to share their personal health information to advance and lower costs in the health care system - More than 70% of people are receptive to using toilet sensors, prescription bottle sensors and swallowed health monitors - 72% of those surveyed would be willing to see a doctor via video conference for non-urgent appointments - 66% of people say they would prefer a care regimen that is designed specifically for them based on their genetic profile or...

"....... question is whether insurance companies believe in the website enough to put their advertising money where their mouthpieces were before its launch on October 1. “The big tell of if/when people finally believe it’s working is when you see the states, insurance companies, etc., restart their ad buys and outreach programs that they put on hold to drive people to the site,” a Democratic observer of health-care issues told NBC’s First Read. “Once it’s established that you can go from typing in the words ‘HealthCare.gov’ to getting a confirming e-mail saying you’re covered with reasonable ease, then I think...

It was only 10:30 a.m., and already, we were too cold to move, let alone get out of our SUV to tailgate. We’d been parked outside Notre Dame’s football stadium in South Bend, Indiana, in the alumni lot for more than two and half hours, ahead of the university’s last home game of the year against Brigham Young. Normally, cars line up in the wee hours of the morning to claim the best tailgate spots, but today, the stadium parking lot was a ghost town, with only one other vehicle in sight.

The University of Minnesota had to make its healthcare plans worse in order to avoid Obamacare-related penalties. The Affordable Care Act levels an excise tax on high-value health coverage plans, and UM would have to pay $48 million with its existing plans. Instead, the university is lowering the quality of its coverage. “The Office of Human Resources announced in a July email that it was making changes to the UPlan, the employee healthcare program, including adding a deductible and increasing copays for primary and specialty care,” according to the Minnesota Daily. “The email said the cost increases were necessary to...

Americans who are buying insurance plans over online exchanges, under what is known as Obamacare, will have limited access to some of the nation’s leading hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centres. Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centres, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country. Experts say the...

Representative Tom Price of Georgia has come up with an alternative to Obamacare, and it would save the country nearly $2.34 trillion in 10 years. The legislation is called the Empowering Patients First Act, H.R. 2300. The proposed legislation would “provide Americans with tax incentives for maintaining health insurance coverage, improve access to health savings accounts (HSAs), reform Medicare and Medicaid, and allow consumers to purchase plans across state lines. It would also guarantee coverage for roughly 1% of Americans with pre-existing conditions.” A former director of the CBO estimated that these reforms would reduce health insurance premiums across the...

“Would you consider an ATM machine to be functional if it created a lifelike experience but no money comes out, no deposits get credited, no transfers actually work?” asked Jonah Goldberg of National Review. The Obama administration “has erected a Potemkin village online — a facade that temporarily conceals the lack of architecture behind it,” said Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. Perhaps Mr. Obama imagines he can talk his way out of anything. But his isn’t a “messaging” problem. Obamacare has done too much harm to too many people for reality to be spun or ignored.

The real problem, as dozens of thoughtful commentators have concluded, is the law itself. Obamacare is a massive policy experiment that seeks to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy – a body that’s so fantastically complex, with so many players and so many moving parts, that nobody can possibly understand how they all interact. ... Even Max Baucus, the Democratic Senate finance chairman, has warned that implementing a law so complicated could be a “train wreck.” Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. It’s not just that he looks incompetent – it’s that he looks deceitful. He told people they...

"....Obama shut down the federal government rather than delay UFA's individual mandate provision though he keeps exempting new favored blocs and delaying various provisions. Instead he's cranked up the propaganda machine, particularly the stuff aimed at the young. The efforts have been ridiculous, a clear sign, I suppose of how little regard he has for the intellectual capacity of those who voted disproportionately for him (a point on which he and I are in rare agreement}.By way of example, HHS named as a winner of their video propaganda outreach one entry which is titled "Forget About the Price Tag."In a...

LOS ANGELES – The California health exchange says it's been giving the names of tens of thousands of consumers to insurance agents without their permission or knowledge in an effort to hit deadlines for coverage. The consumers in question had gone online to research insurance options but didn't ask to be contacted, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. Officials with Covered California, the exchange set up in response to the federal health law, said they began providing names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses if available this week in a pilot program. They said they thought it would help people...

Raising concerns about consumer privacy, California's health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn't ask to be contacted. [Snip] State officials said they are only trying to help potential customers find insurance and sign up in time. But some insurance brokers and consumers who were contacted said they were astonished by the state's move.

‘Uh-oh.” That’s the sound being uttered in doctors’ offices and hospitals across the country as medical providers realize they’re getting stuck with another bottomless Obamacare bill. While the White House desperately tries to pivot from the havoc wrought by the Affordable Care Act, its hidden regulatory bombs keep exploding. I heard about the latest problem this week from an eye-doctor friend who received a letter from a Colorado-based insurer informing her that she’s essentially on the hook for Obamacare’s payment grace period for debtors. The optometrist is bracing for a flood of similar letters from other insurers. Like countless other...

In 1970 the eccentric but insightful economist Albert Hirschman published a book called "Exit, Voice and Loyalty." It explored how people respond when a private firm's or a government agency's performance is deteriorating. Some people choose to leave, buying another product or service or leaving the government's jurisdiction. Others use voice, complaining about defects or lobbying for change. Hirschman tended to deplore exit and exalt voice, and urged firms and governments to nurture loyalty so consumers and citizens would stick around and improve things. There's obviously some relevance here to a current government program now performing far below even its...

The head-scratching continues over the failure of the Obamacare rollout and how the president allowed this to happen. Sebelius, Obama More News Obama, Sebelius never met BuzzChatter Friday: KC-area pols bid farewell to Mandela When it comes to political donations, the Koch Brothers trump all Kansas and Missouri battle for Boeing with incentives Clinton notes that he never exactly DENIED smoking dope Read more The Buzz Here’s a new theory: Not enough meetings. Politico points out on Friday morning that President Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius simply never met in private meetings. Get this: Between July...

President Barack Obama recently asserted, "Thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act, also known as 'Obamacare,' the cost of health care is now growing at the slowest rate in 50 years." So, you may be losing your health care coverage, and you may end up paying more -- but, hey, rising costs are slowing overall "in part" because of Obamacare. True, as Obama says, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- the agency that administers Medicaid and Medicare -- "estimated that ... (in) the three years since Obamacare passed, we've seen the slowest growth in health care costs...

On Nov. 26, Senate staff received a mass email with instructions on how to confirm their enrollment after selecting a program through the site. Confirmation was a point of contention during the question-and-answer portion of a Nov. 19 briefing for staff, who complained they kept encountering internal error messages.Open enrollment for members of Congress and their designated staff ends at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 9, and both chambers appear to be scrambling to help users confront DC Health Link glitches. Briefings continue as the clock ticks toward what’s been described as a “hard deadline” by representatives of the District-operated insurance...

<p>SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): One of the most disturbing aspects of the Obama presidency is the willingness of this president to disregard the law, to ignore the law. You know, we were talking a few minutes ago about Obamacare. And you mentioned it’s the law of the land. If it’s the law of the land, the president shouldn't keep ignoring the law.</p>

The rise of nonphysician providers will enable more team care. Skilled health aides will monitor patients at home and alert a doctor if certain medical parameters decline. Nurses will provide wound care to diabetic patients, adjust medications like blood thinners and provide the initial management of chemotherapy side effects for cancer patients. Pharmacists will provide more counseling and urgent care. Physicians will remain essential to the proper diagnosis and treatment of disease, but will be backed up by teams who will help manage the more routine features of chronic illness.

Former Rep. Mike Kreidler (D-Wash.), the Washington state insurance commissioner, testified on Wednesday that the administration’s proposal to allow people to keep their existing coverage won’t work. Kreidler, a healthcare law supporter, has declined President Obama’s offer to allow states to continue offering plans that don't meet ObamaCare's mandated requirements for an additional year. He argued that allowing the discontinued plans back into the marketplace at this late date would create “uncertainty and disruption” for his state’s exchange, could lead to a premium spike in 2015, and would contribute to prolonging a “failing system” whereby insurers can gouge consumers with...

Washington (CNN) -- Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of Obamacare's architects and staunchest supporters, is also the only top congressional leader to exempt some of his staff from having to buy insurance through the law's new exchanges.

Health Reform: A cancer patient who spoke out against the cancellation of his insurance by ObamaCare now faces an IRS audit he may not live to see, and says he'll pay the fine rather than burden his family. Bill Elliott knows the meaning of the adage that the only two things that are certain are death and taxes, for he is now staring both in the face. Like the Tea Party before him, Elliott faces an IRS audit for speaking out against the ObamaCare that canceled his insurance coverage he liked and was promised he could keep. He appeared recently...

Maybe the 10th time will be the charm for President Obama and his health care law. "The bottom line is this law is working, and will work into the future," Obama said Tuesday in a speech kicking off a month-long PR blitz for his signature legislation. "We're not going back." Obama went on to highlight benefits he regularly touts, such as free preventive care, prescription drug savings for seniors, and the like. And he attacked the GOP for pushing for repeal. This is the 10th time the president has made public remarks defending ObamaCare since its disastrous launch on Oct....

Some people getting switched to new expensive health insurance plans under Obamacare might not even be aware of it — until it’s too late. If you have an insurance plan that isn’t compatible with the Affordable Care Act, your insurance company might be automatically rolling you into the plan “most similar” to your own. For one Washington state resident interviewed by The Daily Caller, his new “Bronze” plan is 80 percent more expensive for him and his wife. His wife is paying $220 more and he’s paying $150 more with higher deductibles. Be sure to check all the mail you’re...

The Obamacare insurance marketplace is even more vulnerable to security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov, according to a cyber security expert. Health and Human Services (HHS) released a progress report on Sunday following its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to repair the website, saying that the “team has knocked more than 400 bug fixes and software improvements off the punch list.” The administration said that the “site capacity is stable at its intended level,” though the site continued to crash on Monday. The eight-page report made no mention of the website’s numerous security flaws, which experts say put Americans’ personal...

I'm not sure which the Obama administration is better at, deceiving the American people into accepting its initial policy changes or conning them into accepting, after the fact, the lowering of expectations for these failed policies. Just look at this president's miserable track record on both counts. His administration predicted his exorbitant stimulus package would create boatloads of "shovel-ready" jobs (not to mention reduce unemployment), but it didn't even come close. In response, Obama insisted the economic circumstances he inherited were far worse than he had imagined. He also cynically joked away his promise to generate shovel-ready jobs -- as...

President Obama will name a new individual to oversee the ObamaCare website after the departure of Jeffrey Zients at the end of the year, the White House said Monday. "That is an important role and we have seen in the way that Jeff has worked in that role that kind of management position needs to be filled," press secretary Jay Carney said at his afternoon briefing. Zients was appointed last month to oversee repairs to the website after a botched rollout plagued by technical glitches prevented many consumers from purchasing coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges. But before taking the position,...

CMS Turns A Deaf Ear to the Pleas of Aged, Infirm, Disabled and Dying Americans... “There is no way,” he continued, “that CMS can claim they did not know their actions would result in regulatory mandated bankruptcies. The regulations issued by CMS are therefore confiscatory, depriving patients of an opportunity to do business with Medicare without due process of law. CMS’s decision has the collateral effect of making it impossible for the states to comply with the Olmstead decision of 1999. In this groundbreaking ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court instructed the states that patients have the right to be cared...

Coburn says he has a rare type of prostate cancer and that he has given a lot of thought to whether he wants to stay in the Senate for the next three years. Q: The safety net would be for people with pre-existing conditions ... A: Or people who are very, very poor. And so you create a safety net. That's a function of government that it can do, but it can't be managed from Washington. You know Oklahoma could run Medicaid a whole lot better than they're running it now if we get the (federal) government out of it....

Skeptical Republicans and hopeful Democrats alike brushed aside the glowing report card on repairs to HealthCare.gov issued by the Obama administration Sunday, with lawmakers on both sides acknowledging the president’s team has tougher work ahead. The Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday that it met the Dec. 1 deadline imposed by President Obama to fix major glitches plaguing HealthCare.gov. since the website’s nationwide debut two months ago. ... But lawmakers — even Democrats — were wary. “Clearly, the rollout has been a disaster, and it’s still a work in progress,” former Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana Democrat, said on...

As millions of Americans see their health-insurance premiums increase, have their coverage dropped as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and are unable to use the federal exchange, Oklahoma has sued the Obama administration. The Sooner State and several others are trying to stop the government from imposing tax penalties on certain states, businesses and individuals in defiance of the law. If these legal challenges are successful, the deficit spending associated with the new health-care law could be reduced by approximately $700 billion over the next decade. While the president's health law is vast and extraordinarily complex, it is...

One of the things for which I’m thankful this Thanksgiving is that I’m not Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. That Ms. Sebelius is still HHS secretary is remarkable. If they’d presided over a fiasco like the Obamacare rollout, the CEO of every corporation anywhere in the world would have been fired long ago. Ms. Sebelius is fortunate she works in government, where there is no accountability. And in the Obama administration, where there is no integrity. [Snip] Panicky Democrats warned the White House last week that if Healthcare.gov isn’t fixed by Nov. 30, as President Obama promised, they...

"........Medicare's open enrollment period for 2014 ends Saturday. Most people who fail to pick coverage by then will get locked into their current coverage for another year. The Humana survey reinforces how complex their choices can be — particularly when the health care marketplace is in such turmoil. Hospitals and medical practices are forming new alliances. Insurance companies are compressing provider networks. The Obamacare marketplace — though it does not directly affect people on Medicare — has sown confusion. It has later enrollment deadlines, and they have changed due to the rollout problems. But again — the Medicare deadline is...

After two months of massive glitches and bugs on the healthcare.gov website, the Obama administration says they met their self-imposed deadline of getting the site running smoothly. The administration said Sunday the site is now working for just about everyone but warned it still needs more fixes. Valley Health's health insurance enrollment campaign in Barboursville, WV proved that while the site has improved many problems, there are still kinks that need to be fixed. During Thanksgiving weekend, Valley Health helped those in need of health insurance sign up at the Huntington Mall in Barboursville, WV. In three days, certified assisters...

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely? A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s older sister. We started exchanging documents. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing. It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the...

The basic conservative position is that the more you let market forces operate, the better the outcome will be. "More markets" is the answer to everything: Let people buy insurance across state lines. Make it virtually impossible to sue for medical malpractice. Create more health savings accounts. But where do you think the problems of America's health care system came from? It wasn't government that gave us nearly 50 million uninsured Americans and denials for pre-existing conditions. Every one of our peer nations has a system with more government control than ours, ranging from almost completely socialized systems like Great...

A month after emerging from a government shutdown at the top of their game, many Democrats in Congress newly worried about the party’s re-election prospects are for the first time distancing themselves from President Obama after the disastrous rollout of his health care overhaul. At issue, several Obama allies said, is a loss of trust in the president after only 106,000 people — instead of an anticipated half million — were able to buy insurance coverage the first month of the new “Obamacare” websites. In addition, some 4.2 million Americans received notices from insurers that policies Obama had promised they...

Health-exchange plans’ limits shock shopper Many insurers offering plans through the Washington Healthplanfinder, the exchange marketplace where shoppers can apply for subsidies, are using narrow provider networks. These networks are not the broad, include-all-providers networks that many big employer plans currently enjoy. By Carol M. Ostrom and Amy Snow Landa Kenneth Pick and his wife, Bev Marcus, compare health plans in their Ravenna home. When Bev Marcus began shopping recently for a health-insurance plan, she found one from Premera Blue Cross on Washington’s online insurance exchange that seemed to offer good coverage at a reasonable price. Marcus assumed the individual...

Today is the administration’s self-imposed deadline to roll out a properly functioning HealthCare.gov website. Is the site now free of those “glitches” that kept so many from being able to sign up? Now that poor HealthCare.gov Splash Page Stock Photo Girl has long gone missing, here is the perfect replacement model.