Free Republic

WASHINGTON — For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar....... In addition, some ideas that looked good to academia in theory are now causing consternation. In 2009, while Congress was considering the health care legislation, Dr. Alan M. Garber — then a Stanford professor and now the provost of Harvard — led a group of economists who sent an open letter to Mr....

Companies with more than 100 full-time employees need to comply or face fines. ... Companies with more than 100 full-time workers must offer affordable health insurance to at least 70% of their staff. This "employer mandate" was supposed to take effect in 2014, but the Obama administration delayed it to this year. And those that don't comply face hefty penalties. Companies will be fined if they don't offer coverage and even just one of their workers gets subsidized insurance on an Obamacare individual exchange. For 2015, the fine is $174 a month times the number of full-time employees (minus 80...

If you decided to skip health insurance this year, consider this: Unless you can prove you have a valid excuse, you will be liable for a penalty during the coming tax season — and the time to start making your case is now. That’s not all. People who bought subsidized insurance through one of the marketplaces may have new tax forms to complete, while paying the penalty itself may demand some serious number-crunching. The Internal Revenue Service is gearing up to answer questions, but it warns that only half of the callers may get through — and those who succeed...

If you like your health care plan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has a Christmas surprise for you! When will this new present arrive? December 25th. In an ongoing effort to keep Obamacare numbers elevated, CMS has embarked on the next step of its government takeover of healthcare. It seems CMS is taking a page from Jonathan Gruber’s book; rather than allowing the “stupid” masses to make a decision on their own health plan, CMS has proposed a new rule that includes an overly reaching provision allowing CMS to re-enroll anyone who has not made the annual...

The Obama administration is actually pleading with people to shop around before choosing a health insurance plan. Ordinarily that would be good advice. Ideally, people should comparison shop – considering the differences in premiums, subsidies, and networks of the different plans. But as I wrote at Forbes this week, there’s one big problem: Intelligent comparison shopping is virtually impossible. The Obama administration calls the health insurance exchanges “markets.” But they are unlike any market you have ever encountered. Think about what you would have to consider to make a reasoned choice. For starters, you have to consider all the health...

Democrats are arguing among themselves about whether to focus on the poor, who are not reliable voters, or the middle class, who have started to turn to the Republican Party.Influential Democrats who have strongly defended Obama-Care for years are now publicly questioning whether the law was worth the political fallout. Passage of the Affordable Care Act marked the start of a political unraveling for the Democratic Party, which lost huge majorities in Congress and control of a majority of state governorships in the last four and a half years. Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic...

Let’s start with the doctor/patient relationship—the disappearance of which has been lamented by many. The pertinent definition of “relationship” in the Oxford Dictionaries deems it: “The way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.” In one sense, every patient wants to be treated well by his physician, and in many cases, so-called “continuity of care” is most desirable. Likewise, the physician may wish to spend more time with a particular patient, but is forced by economic realities to rush the process. Perhaps, some of this search for the ideal doctor/patient relationship is driven...

A fast-growing, short-term alternative to ObamaCare that allows customers to get cheap, one-year policies could put the government-subsidized plan into a death spiral. The plans, the only ones allowed for sale outside of ObamaCare exchanges, generally cost less than half of what similar ObamaCare policies cost, and are increasing in popularity as uninsured Americans learn they are required to get health coverage. The catch -- that the policies only last for a year -- is not much of a deterrent, given that customers can always sign up for ObamaCare if their short-term coverage is not renewed. “Applications rose 30 percent...

The "esteemed" Sen. Mark Warner ( proud supporter of Obamacare) is hearing from me first thing tomorrow morning. I just received a letter informing me that my current health care plan, Anthem Blue Cross of VA, will no longer be offered as of Jan. 1, 2015. For a comparable plan, the monthly premium in increasing 38%, from $460 to $736. This is outrageous! I am going to have to get a plan with a much larger deductible and more OOP costs and even that will be well over $500. I'm no spring chicken, but I'm too young for Medicare and...

MILWAUKEE — Several Wisconsin insurance companies are holding special sign-ups so same-sex couples can add spouses to their health plans. The special enrollment periods are needed because gays and lesbians who got married in Wisconsin last summer were unable to add spouses to their coverage amid the uncertainty surrounding the legal status of their marriages. People generally can make changes to a health plan during the year only after a "life-changing" event, such as a marriage, divorce, or birth or adoption of a child. The typical deadline is 30 days....

HealthCare.gov, the online portal where millions of Americans must by health insurance, will not display premiums for 2015 until after the 2014 elections ... Americans will not be able to find out if their health insurance premiums are going up "until the second week of November," which conveniently falls after Americans will go to the polls November 4th.

The next wave of ObamaCare insurance cancellations is under way, flying largely under the national media radar… until Wal-Mart announced it would be dropping coverage for all its part-time employees.

It’s been a while since we heard from healthcare.gov and the fallout of the law, but we’re approaching the end of the year and the period when most of us will begin looking at our tax situation. For those who were fortunate enough to still have jobs with health benefits (and who got to keep them, as promised) or those who earned so little that they qualified for mostly subsidized Obamacare, they won’t see much of an effect. But by the latest estimates there are still roughly 41 million Americans without insurance who did not enroll in the government plan...

Walmart doesn’t settle for second place: The nation’s #1 retailer just said it wants to be the #1 health care provider in the retail industry, too. The company’s statement came on Monday, alongside an announcement about Walmart’s new health insurance initiative. Under Walmart’s new partnership with DirectHealth.com, about half of 4,300 Walmart’s stores will feature DirectHealth.com licensed agents, who will help consumers shop for health insurance and navigate Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. The program, known as Healthcare Begins Here, begins on Friday Oct. 10 and will run for two months. Not coincidentally, the Medicare open enrollment period begins next week,...

One of Barack Obama’s best-remembered promises was, “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.” But at the very same time the president was making that promise, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were drafting legislation that would make sure that promise could never be kept. We call it Obamacare. Moreover, the problem is not only that millions of people were unable to keep the plan they had in 2010, when the health reform law was passed. They are not likely to be able to keep for long any plan they have selected this year on a health insurance exchange....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday dropped another financial bombshell on Chicago’s 25,000 retired city workers and their dependents: their monthly health insurance premiums will be going up by a whopping 40 percent — in spite of a pending lawsuit and a precedent-setting Illinois Supreme Court ruling. Last year, Emanuel announced plans to save $108.7 million a year by phasing out the city’s 55 percent subsidy for retiree health care and forcing retirees to make the switch to Obamacare. For the city, the Year One savings was $25 million. For retirees, that translated into an increase in monthly health insurance premiums...

When she was eight weeks old, Ashlyn Whitney suffered a severe respiratory-tract infection that put her in an intensive care unit for 12 days. "Because she was so young, she couldn't handle it," Ashlyn's mother, Nicole Whitney, recalled. "They had to give her oxygen." The baby, now a year old, recovered from her illness, known as respiratory syncytial virus.The bill for her treatment at the West Boca Medical Center in Palm Beach County came to about $100,000 -- a sum that included almost $4,000 in fees for her birth and pre- and post-natal care -- but every dime of the...

We've been focusing a lot on President Obama's foreign policy, from Ukraine to Libya to Syria to Iraq to Israel and Iran. However, get ready for ObamaCare to make a return engagement to our front pages, and politics as well. Sally Pipes posted some numbers yesterday that won't make Democrats happy, especially those in tight elections: "Get ready to pay more for health insurance next year, compliments of Obamacare. A new analysis from PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that average premiums for policies sold through Obamacare’s exchanges will increase 7.5 percent in 2015. In nearly one-third of the 29 states that PwC investigated,...

Since October, 155,000 New Mexico residents have joined the state’s Medicaid rolls, pushing total enrollment to more than 630,000, or nearly a third of the state’s population. On top of that, 410,000 New Mexicans are enrolled in Medicare, the federal health care program for the elderly. Together, total enrollment in those two federal programs are more than 1 million, or half of the state’s 2.1 million population. ... “It’s shocking, and when you add that to the outmigration of people and the lack of economic growth, it’s almost an incentive to stay poor,” said retired University of New Mexico economics...

the latest Fox News national poll finds voters oppose the law by a 52-41 percent margin. As in the past, the new poll shows that most Democrats favor Obamacare (74 percent), while most Republicans (84 percent) and independents (61 percent) are against it. Voters in every age group are more likely to oppose the law than favor it, with one exception: those ages 65 and over. And that group only favors it by two percentage points. President Obama receives higher job approval ratings on health care than on almost any other issue: 42 percent of voters approve, while 53 percent...