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When Franklin D. Roosevelt established Social Security, he created generations of loyal Democrats. When Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law, he built on that legacy, particularly with older Americans. And when George W. Bush instituted a new prescription drug benefit for Medicare, it helped reclaim elderly voters for Republicans. But President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the $1.4 trillion effort to extend health insurance to all Americans, is challenging the traditional calculus about government benefits and political impact. Even as Mr. Obama announced that eight million Americans had enrolled in the program and urged Democrats to embrace the law, those...

It has been a triumphant month for liberal journalists who have lived and died with the fortunes of the Affordable Care Act since its passage in March 2010. Ezra Klein and Jon Cohen have declared victory, describing an amazing recovery for the program and for President Obama since the dark days of near-total failure among people trying to sign up on the federal exchanges in October and November.To listen to Obamacare supporters, Kathleen Sebelius leaves her post as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services with her head held high, as her legacy now includes shepherding across...

Can Obamacare be fixed? Vulnerable Democrats are pot committed to this idea. They say most Americans do not want to repeal Obamacare and therefore the only way to make it work is to reform it. They accuse Republicans of not having a viable alternative and wasting billions of dollars on failed efforts to defund it. As a consequence, some Democrats are urging the party to stand firm on this issue, and to stop running way from a law many of them voted for. The AP reports: Republicans already were pushing their luck by vowing to "repeal and replace" the health...

WASHINGTON — Driven by a last-minute flood of enrollments, particularly in California, sign-ups for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s online marketplaces hit 8 million in the law’s first year, President Obama announced Thursday. That beats the forecast by 1 million people and caps a remarkable comeback from a disastrous rollout last fall that gave rise to predictions the law would collapse in its maiden year. Instead, the health law, often called Obamacare, has helped bring about the largest increase in insurance coverage in the U.S. in half a century. “This thing is working,” Obama said from the White...

WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.

Failure: ObamaCare fans are cheering the latest Congressional Budget Office report, which appears to show that it will cost less and cover more people than expected. But that's true only if you ignore reality. We don't always agree with the CBO, but we have long respected it as a credible source of budget numbers. Sure, its projections almost never turn out to be true. But simply too many variables are at play for anyone to guess such things perfectly, and it provides a more or less independent source of information on highly charged, partisan issues. But the CBO's latest report...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans increasingly think Democrats have a better plan for healthcare than Republicans, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after the White House announced that more people than expected had signed up for the "Obamacare" health plan. Nearly one-third of respondents in the online survey released on Tuesday said they prefer Democrats' plan, policy or approach to healthcare, compared to just 18 percent for Republicans. This marks both an uptick in support for Democrats and a slide for Republicans since a similar poll in February. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius stepped down last week after...

Changes to this year's census will make it difficult to assess how many people gained health insurance as a result of ObamaCare's first year of open enrollment, according to a report. The reported overhaul of census questions on health insurance arrives as politicians, journalists and researchers await official data on how many people gained and lost coverage in the last year. The changes are reportedly intended to improve the survey's accuracy. They will likely mark a "break in trend" for census health insurance data, making it hard to compared the 2014 report to past reports. The revisions and their potential...

Nine of 10 doctors discourage others from joining the profession, and 300 physicians commit suicide every year. When did it get this bad? By the end of this year, it’s estimated that 300 physicians will commit suicide. While depression amongst physicians is not new—a few years back, it was named the second-most suicidal occupation—the level of sheer unhappiness amongst physicians is on the rise. Simply put, being a doctor has become a miserable and humiliating undertaking. Indeed, many doctors feel that America has declared war on physicians—and both physicians and patients are the losers. Not surprisingly, many doctors want out....

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear had ten days to veto the General Assembly’s agreement to defund ObamaCare in Kentucky and start a huge fight for today and tomorrow, but he didn’t do it. Now, he must accept reality and start taking down the Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange. At the top of page Page 124 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act it states “No federal funds for continued operations … In establishing an Exchange under this section, the state shall ensure that such Exchange is self-sustaining beginning on January 1, 2015, including allowing the Exchange to charge assessments or user...

Betsy McCaughey, who knows as much about Obamacare as anyone who wasn’t involved in writing it, offers a preview of the new disasters about to unfold as the health care law kicks in. If the law were a disaster film, her article could serve as the trailer for part 2.She expects a wave of premium defaults, and explains why even the AMA, a big proponent of the law, is worried: First-time insurance purchasers, especially those living paycheck to paycheck, will be shocked by ObamaCare’s high deductibles, about $3,000 for the silver plan (the most commonly selected) and $5,000 for the...

Outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says the administration's own predictions that the new health care law's online sign-up system would be ready by Oct. 1 were "just flat out wrong." Sebelius told NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview airing Sunday the health care website's launch was "terribly flawed and terribly difficult." She says that eight-week period was her low point of her tenure. Sebelius last week announced her resignation. She says she wanted to give President Barack Obama enough time to bring in a new health chief.

Doctors in Texas are showing us what a medical system without comprehensive insurance might look like. The NYT profiles the rise of Texan “direct primary care” practices that don’t accept insurance. Instead, patients pay flat fees out-of-pocket. In return, doctors save both time and money that they can then pass on to patients. But there’s a catch here, as the article points out. Concierge medicine isn’t a new trend—we’ve covered it here before. But now that Obamacare is swelling the ranks of the comprehensively insured, doctors who don’t take insurance are increasing the pressure on the system. There’s a hint...

What is most missing from the Republicans is not so much the lack of an alternative to ObamaCare. It is the lack of a clear vision. Even if you can understand what their various proposals (and friends and close allies often cannot), it is almost never clear why they want to implement them. Here is the sad truth: Even though the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is a Rube Goldberg contraption that no one can explain and even though its rollout has been a complete disaster and even though the delay of one provision after another makes it seem as though...

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system. But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best. But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that...

Sylvia Burwell, whom President Obama is expected to nominate to replace Kathleen Sebelius as the secretary of health and human services, has a long professional career in business and consulting, but lacks substantial professional or political experience with health care. Her résumé​, according to Dan Diamond of the Advisory Board, only includes a stint as a board member at the University of Washington Medical Center. “Burwell’s track record in health care is not well-established,” Diamond writes in a briefing for the Advisory Board, a health-care consulting firm. Her predecessor, Secretary Sebelius, served as Kansas state insurance commissioner for eight years,...

The City of Boston this week is rolling out a new program that’s whimsically known as “Prescribe-a-Bike.” Part medicine, part welfare, the initiative allows doctors at Boston Medical Center to write “prescriptions” for low-income patients to get yearlong memberships to Hubway, the city’s bike-share system, for only $5. These are not prescriptions in the legal sense. Rather, they are a kind of physician’s letter, says Alan Meyers, a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center. “A clinician working with a patient or family could generate this form and then a hospital parking office which is right on the campus could enroll the...

aira Murillo is just one of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country who was specifically excluded from signing up for the Affordable Care Act, but it wasn't until recently that she found a way around the system. "I didn't realize that as a DACA recipient, I would also be eligible to receive health insurance. It was thanks to a professor who told me and other undocumented students about our eligibility for Medi-Cal," Murillo told CNN en Español. Deferred status, or DACA, refers to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program enacted in 2012. It grants some undocumented youths temporary...

When the Obama administration announced on April 1 that an estimated 7.1 million had signed up for ObamaCare by the end of March, it seemed a nearly impossible achievement. In every month before, sign-ups lagged behind the administration's original forecast by wide margins and had fallen 1.4 million behind by the end of February. In mid-March, the AP said that it would take "close to a miracle" just to reach 6 million. And a Rand survey out this week puts enrollment by early March at less than 4 million. To reach 7.1 million, sign-ups had to rocket up by 67%...

Bias: The media are cheering a survey that, they say, shows ObamaCare is working miracles. It shows nothing of the kind. Meanwhile, they're ignoring another report that finds ObamaCare-induced premium spikes. 'Millions More People Are Getting Health Insurance Because Of ObamaCare," screams a headline on the left-wing Huffington Post. Countless other major news outlets more or less echoed this line, calling it a big win for ObamaCare. They and others are all talking about a Rand Corp. survey that, in fact, finds no such thing.

President Obama took a victory lap on Tuesday, celebrating 7 million Obamacare enrollees. Let’s take a look at this success. President Obama and the Democrats pushed through their signature domestic policy stating the “Affordable” Care Act would cover “every American.” They have used the figure of “48 million uninsured Americans.” To date, Obamacare has then enrolled less than 2 percent of those uninsured Americans. “It’s working!” exclaimed the president. The Rand Corporation crunched the numbers and discovered only 858,000 people of the 7 million enrollees have actually paid their premiums, which is required to actually be covered.

My mother, a doctor's daughter who became a doctor herself, sometimes accompanied her father when he made house calls in the Livermore Valley of California during the Great Depression. Her job was to open and close the gates at the ranches and farms they visited. In those tenuous times, as she later recalled, her father occasionally provided his services without a fee or in return for whatever unsolicited payment-in-kind the rancher or farmer produced. Medicare and Medicaid did not exist in those days. Nor were there massive for-profit insurance companies or hospital chains. But America had good doctors and good...

The top 1% of 825,000 individual medical providers accounted for 14% of the $77 billion in medicare billing in 2012, according to new federal data reported by the WSJ. The data shows a very small number of doctors and medical providers account for a huge amount of the costs for treating the elderly... One researcher summed it up, "There's all sorts of services that are low-value for patients, high-revenue to providers," and leaves us wondering, once again, how the government will manage as Obamacare's "success" washes ashore. A doctor who treats a degenerative eye disease in seniors was paid $21...

News about the disastrous implementation of Obamacare has become so widespread that, to be honest, we’re having a hard time keeping up with all of it. We’ve written extensively about the canceled plans that failed to meet Obamacare coverage requirements, and we’ve written about how Sen. Mark Udall tried to cover it all up. Now, we’re seeing reports that if you weren’t one of the unlucky souls whose small group plan was cancelled because of Obamacare, your premiums have likely increased by 29 percent instead. Colorado is among the top ten states seeing the biggest increases in health insurance premiums...

A caveat right off the bat: RAND’s estimate only runs through March 28 whereas the actual deadline for signing up was March 31st. Given the crush of traffic on Healthcare.gov in late March, many more people could have signed up over those last three days than were captured by these numbers. On the other hand, the White House was claiming six million sign-ups as of March 27. There’s no way to reconcile that with RAND’s data.One of them is wrong. Maybe both, in fact.There’s a big spike in Medicaid, just as everyone expected. There’s a less big but still seven-digit...

Our recent interview with Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel about his provocative prediction that most employers will abandon health coverage by 2025 struck a nerve with You’re The Boss readers. It came as no surprise that Dr. Emanuel’s claim, first made in his new book, “Reinventing American Health Care,” would be swept up in the broader political and ideological debate about the Affordable Care Act. But in their many comments, readers raised interesting questions, and we took some of them back to Dr. Emanuel in another conversation that appears, edited and condensed, below. It’s worth noting that among those readers who...

It is a fool’s errand to attempt a cost-benefit analysis on government programs. War, for example, is probably the oldest government program. It is easy enough to determine the cost in lives and treasure, but it is far more difficult to determine the benefits, and then, if these benefits were worth the cost. Back in the day, victory was the goal, and presumably the overriding benefit. In the past, “victory” was always understood as causing your enemy to surrender. Nowadays, of course, that is no longer the case. In the 1960s, it became popular to declare “war” on all sorts...

Health Care: Republicans pushed a bill that would let small businesses continue to offer high-deductible plans to employees, despite ObamaCare. Sounds like a good idea. So why did the leadership try to hide it? The original plan for ObamaCare was to force every business with 50 or more employees to provide "affordable" coverage or pay a stiff fine, plus to sharply restrict the plans they could offer by, among other things, capping deductibles at $2,000 for workers. The cap was little more than a stealth attempt by Democrats to wreck Health Savings Accounts, which trade off high deductibles for tax-free...

Texas has a medical futility–what I call Futile Care Theory–law permitting doctors to remove wanted life-support that works from a patient based on their views about quality of life. Before that is done, patients/families are supposed to receive due process–such as it is–e.g., a hearing before a bioethics Star Chamber committee. Then, if the committee decides the treatment should end, the patient has 10 days to find a new hospital. terrymaceBut here’s the thing: I believe that once a society determines that doctors can refuse wanted efficacious life-sustaining service–that becomes the meme–and eventually the due process part goes away. That...

Roughly 1,800 New Jersey children had their insurance plans cancelled last week due to Obamacare. With the flurry of cancellation notices hitting mailboxes across the Garden State, one parent, Bob Miotla, told the NJ.com news of his son's cancellation made him "extremely angry." "Without having that safety net, if an illness arises, we will probably take him to the ER," said Miotla, who is on Medicare and disabled. Obamacare's new mandated requirements killed New Jersey's low-cost children's insurance coverage plan, FamilyCare Advantage. The plan, offered by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, was designed for children whose parents...

Here's more fallout from the health care law: Until now, customers could walk into an insurance office or go online to buy standard health care coverage any time of year. Not anymore. Many people who didn't sign up during the government's open enrollment period that ended Monday will soon find it difficult or impossible to get insured this year, even if they go directly to a private company and money is no object. For some it's already too late. With limited exceptions, insurers are refusing to sell to individuals after the enrollment period for HealthCare.gov and the state marketplaces. They...

Fort Hood shooter was taking "prescription drugs for depression and anxiety". SSRIs? "Lopez was undergoing a variety of treatments for conditions including depression, anxiety and sleep disturbances, McHugh said. He was prescribed drugs that included Ambien, a sleep aid. Lopez was fully examined last month by a psychiatrist. There was no record of any sign he was likely to commit violence against himself or others, according to McHugh. "So the plan (going) forward was just to continue to monitor and treat him as deemed appropriate," he said." They say that he was "prescribed drugs" but only named one, Ambien, which...

BOYLE HEIGHTS, Calif. -- A family that claims a woman was frozen to death in a hospital morgue after she was prematurely declared dead can proceed with a medical malpractice lawsuit, an appeals court ruled Wednesday. "This is one of the most egregious cases you'll ever see," family attorney Scott Schutzman told CBS Los Angeles. "This case keeps me awake at night." The California 2nd District Court of Appeal overturned a lower court ruling that the lawsuit against White Memorial Hospital was filed too late. Maria de Jesus Arroyo, 80, was declared dead in July 2010 after suffering a heart...

ERICK ERICKSON FRONT PAGE WRITERS FEATURES E-LETTERS COFFEE & MARKETS GATHERING FRIENDS « BACK | PRINT RS FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR Yes, There’s A Republican Health Care Plan: Bobby Jindal’s Plan Rolling Out A GOP Alternative To Obamacare By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary) | April 2nd, 2014 at 07:14 PM | 15 RESIZE: AAA Bobby_Jindal_CPAC_2013There’s a Republican alternative to Obamacare – a health insurance plan rolled out today by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. It’s not only a better plan, but starts with a better way to think about how we pay for healthcare. The Search For A Republican Alternative One of the...

In a report that aired on Topeka, KS ABC affiliate KTKA on Tuesday, Newman Regional Hospital in Emporia, KS is scaling back some services as a means of countering the "negative financial impacts of the Affordable Care Act."

Janis Finer, 57, a popular primary care physician in Tulsa, Okla., gave up her busy practice two years ago to care full time for hospitalized patients. The lure? Regular shifts, every other week off and a 10 percent increase in pay. Just as millions of Americans are obtaining insurance coverage through the federal health law, doctors like Finer are voting with their feet. Tired of working longer and harder because of discounted insurance payments and frustrated by stagnating pay and increasing oversight, many are going to work for large groups or hospitals, curtailing their practices and in some cases, abandoning...

Rarely has a bill passed by Congress endured as many nicknames, both positive and negative, as The Affordable Care Act of 2010. Obamacare, Nationalized Healthcare, Socialized Medicine, even The Abominable Care Act… the list seems endless, as do the tentacles of this far-reaching 2000-some-page law, not to mention the stacks of enabling regulations that already tower over the average homeowner’s foreclosed house. But the critics and skeptics must admit at last, four years after its passage, that the program is working far beyond the wildest dreams of its supporters. Despite almost daily, almost laughable website crashes, holes in its security...

Should Congress repeal Obamacare? If you had asked that before the botched Affordable Care Act rollout, I would have had a hard time answering yes. I didn't see how the scheme could work, but I also believed that Washington owed the millions of Americans who I was told had been waiting desperately for years for guaranteed health care. Now I say, "What's in a name?" There's no need for a repeal when Washington is bound to revamp the law. The reason: Consumers aren't buying it. According to the White House, more than 6 million people have signed onto Obamacare exchanges....

The Los Angeles Times greeted the Obamacare enrollment data on Monday with a striking headline, claiming that "at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage," which is 3 million people more than the Obama administration itself claimed last week (a number that was itself highly questionable, since it did not exclude those who had not paid for their new insurance). The Times' analysis, however, is laughable. The data reported by Noam. N. Levey are not actual counts of enrollees, but a hodgepodge of "state and federal enrollment reports, surveys and interviews with insurance executives and government officials nationwide."...

Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) sits his son and daughter down to tell them how he met their mother. That’s the way “How I Met Your Mother” began, on Sept. 19, 2005. Nine seasons and almost nine years later, Ted is less than 48 hours from getting to the point. It’s a tossup which is more impressive here: that a sitcom could last 200 episodes with what sounds like a one-idea premise, or that a parent could keep his kids listening to him talk about anything for nine years. But if Mosby’s kids wanted the answer, they didn't have much choice....

After six tumultuous months, open enrollment on the new Obamacare marketplaces comes to a close. Once enrollment is over, a look at the marketplaces will give the nation a better picture of how well the Affordable Care Act is functioning. It's already perfectly clear, though -- to voters and lawmakers alike -- that the law is a work in progress. The first few months of open enrollment were disastrous, after HealthCare.gov -- the site that serves as the Obamacare portal for 36 states -- was launched with major technical problems. Still, the administration says it has largely recovered, with more...

Consumers who’ve tried to sign-up for the Affordable Health Care Act in Colorado are frustrated and uncertain if they are covered, despite signing up for coverage last year... complaints about the lack of action taken by Connect for Health Colorado, the state created health exchange. The viewer complaints were primarily about the exchange not sending insurance application over to insurance companies, leaving some consumers in limbo on whether or not they have medical insurance. ... Republican State Senator Kevin Lundburg, who serves on the state’s Health and Human Services committee, is equally frustrated by the lack of answers coming from...

I am not a lawyer or legal beagle nor have I even stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, but would there not be some connection with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United and the current Hobby Lobby case? And if so, why isn't this being discussed in the media and conservative talk radio? In Citizens United, the Supreme Court basically established corporations as individuals allowing them to contribute to political campaigns. If a corporation is regarded as an individual when it comes to political contributions, why would not a corporation be given religious freedom rights as an individual? The...

The world is on the verge of coming to an end. No, not because of Russia’s aggression or Jihadists getting a nuclear weapon, but because the Supreme Court could rule that owners of companies cannot be ordered to violate their deeply held religious beliefs. Yes, society has sunk this low. The Supreme Court is not expected to rule until June in the case of Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby, so you’ve got some time to stock up on canned goods and toilet paper before the reckoning. But, if the Constitution means anything, that reckoning will come to pass. At stake is...

Health Care: Two more signs that all is not well in ObamaCare land: The administration has pushed back the enrollment deadline while refusing to say how many have actually paid their ObamaCare premiums. ObamaCare has become like that old quip of Mark Twain's about the weather in New England. If you don't like it, wait a few days and it will change. Less than two weeks ago, the administration was emphatic that there would be no delay of the March 31 enrollment deadline for ObamaCare. In fact, the spokesman for the agency in charge of ObamaCare said, "We don't actually...

Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don't the media acknowledge that? And it's fair to ask: Why don't they ridicule it? After all, in the Bush years, the press reran President George W. Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner time and again, did they not? Perhaps Joe Biden at the signing ceremony saying into an open mic that this was a "big (blanking) deal" would suffice. How do we know Obamacare is failing? Ironically, because those very same "reporters" are doing the opposite of the Bush years. They're burying the story. They aren't in denial. They know the truth....

Last December just before Christmas I took my car to a Body Shop for repairs. I received an estimate, which gave me an idea of how much I would be charged. My insurance company also gave me a clear quotation on how much they would cover. Once the repairs were completed, I received an itemized receipt showing exactly what I paid for parts and labor. The process was expensive, but it was not difficult to understand. Healthcare, however, is an entirely different matter. Once we learn we need a procedure or a test, we often have very little idea what...

Not too long ago, the Greens of Oklahoma City were law-abiding people running an arts-and-crafts chain called Hobby Lobby. They weren’t disturbing the peace, or denying anyone his or her rights. They were minding their own business — quite successfully and in keeping with their Christian faith. The roughly 600 Hobby Lobby stores stock Christian products, close on Sundays, and play Christian music. Then one day Uncle Sam showed up to make an offer that the Greens couldn’t refuse — literally. As part of Obamacare, federal law demands that the chain cover contraceptives that the Greens consider abortifacients. The family...

With Obamacare's March 31 sign-up deadline and subsequent penalties looming over the heads of young and old Americans, citizens are wondering more than ever -- and with good reason, I might add -- whether Washington has dished out another bill of bad goods. And here are a few more solid reasons our skepticism about socialist medicine continues. Reporter Bob Unruh at WorldNetDaily recently reported about how Obamacare is blocking patients from paying for their own treatments. The feds are already capping what some citizens can spend on their own health care, even if those patients are willing and able to...

Now that the first open enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act is coming to a close, insurers say they are getting a better idea of what to expect next year — and that includes higher premiums.Early into ObamaCare's troubled launch — plagued with website problems, canceled plans, and numerous delays — several insurers were already warning that the rocky rollout would result in significantly higher premiums in 2015.Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini first raised concerns over a potential rate shock in December, when he told investors that "in some markets," individual-market premium increases "could go as high as 100 percent."Now,...