Free Republic

The Obama administration says it is confident it will prevail in its bid to force Hobby Lobby and other religious businesses and groups to obey the HHS mandate that compels them to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs.Responding to today’s news that the Supreme Court will take Hobby Lobby’s case to overturn the HHS mandate, the Obama administration released a statement saying, “We believe this requirement is lawful…and are confident the Supreme Court will agree.”The full statement appears below along with tweets from reporters covering it: The health care law puts women and families in control of their health...

Hobby Lobby’s battle against the HHS mandate is headed to the Supreme Court, as the high court today agreed to hear its lawsuit against the controversial provision in Obamacare. The Obama administration is attempting to make it comply with the HHS mandate that compels religious companies to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs for their employees.However, the U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to take up Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a landmark case addressing the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of business owners to operate their family companies without violating their deeply held religious convictions. This is good news to...

With all of the practical ObamaCare disasters in the news the last few weeks, we need to still keep an eye on the threat it represents to religious liberty and free expression. Thankfully, yet another federal court has recognized those dangers inherent in the HHS contraception mandate issued as part of the regulatory scheme implementing the Affordable Care Act: The right of church-related organizations to keep a clear conscience trumps the federal government’s desire to improve access to contraceptives, a federal judge ruled Thursday in a preliminary decision that could set the tone in a legal fight of national scope.U.S....

As Americans have begun shopping for health plans on the insurance exchanges, they are discovering that insurers are restricting their choice of doctors and hospitals in order to keep costs low, and that many of the plans exclude top-rated hospitals. The Obama administration made it a priority to keep down the cost of insurance on the exchanges, the online marketplaces that are central to the Affordable Care Act. But one way that insurers have been able to offer lower rates is by creating networks that are far smaller than what most Americans are accustomed to. The decisions have provoked a...

Multiple individual plans available on the D.C. health-insurance exchange specifically cover elective abortion but not hearing aids, routine foot-care, and routine eye-care. One such plan, Healthy Blue PPO $1500, has a summary on the D.C. exchange’s website titled “Excluded Services & Other Covered Services.” It says enrollees can receive coverage for abortions performed for non-medical reasons, but not for a number of other services that could seem medically necessary. The plan also excludes coverage for some other procedures, including cosmetic surgery, bariatric surgery, and infertility treatment. Per Anna Higgins of the Family Research Council, in D.C. Aetna plans and multi-state...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

Chicago, Ill., Nov 15, 2013 / 04:12 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Obama administration’s defense of the HHS mandate is “unsound and extraordinary” for contending that business owners cannot have religious freedom protections. “The government’s argument is premised on a far-too-narrow view of religious freedom: Religious exercise is protected in the home and the house of worship but not beyond,” the court’s Nov. 12 decision in Grote Industries v. Sebelius said. “Religious people do not practice their faith in that compartmentalized way; free-exercise rights are not so circumscribed.” Compelling businesses owners and...

Bp. David Zubik of Pittsburgh WASHINGTON, D.C., November 14, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Bishop David Zubik, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, told a district judge this week he would not comply with the HHS mandate under any circumstance. The decision was made because the mandate endangers “the integrity of our beliefs,” the bishop said. Zubik’s statement comes as the General Assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a “Special Message” to the Obama administration opposing the mandate, which requires employers to pay for health insurance plans that cover contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization at no...

Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton advised President Obama to "honor the commitment" he made and to allow Americans to keep their health care plans, if they like them. That was a central promise Obama made when he sold Obamacare, but one that turned out not to be true when Obamacare began to be implemented last month. "So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got," Clinton in an interview released Tuesday. Now President Obama...

Obamacare Zombies: Now they are the ones being chased WASHINGTON, November 13, 2013 — President Barack Obama’s legions of Obamacare Zombies are in confusion with the meltdown of Obamacare. It is one crisis that Obama cannot cover-up. For once, the media could not help him by ignoring events, because insurance cancellation letters bypassed media and took bad news directly to the public. Unfortunately, exposing years of deceit required a personal crisis for millions, which for some is a life-and-death crisis. It is inexcusable that it took such disaster to shock these political zombies from their trances. Now it’s too late...

The Department of Health and Human Services reported Wednesday that more than 100,000 people have selected a health care plan through the ObamaCare exchanges -- a number that, likely due to widespread website failures, falls far short of the administration's goal. The administration had originally hoped to sign up a half-million people in the first month of open enrollment. Now more than six weeks into the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov and other state-based exchanges, HHS announced Wednesday that 106,185 people had selected a plan as of Nov. 2. And just 27,000 did so via the federal exchanges. The announcement had...

Cmte. Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) holds another in a series of hearings on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the rollout of the government's healthcare website. The administration says the website will be fixed by the end of November.

A new racy campaign called “Got Insurance” was released today with advertisements that are intended to tout the free birth control component of the Obamacare health care plan. The ads are bathed in sexual overtones, with one ad having a woman declare: “Let’s Hope He’s as Easy as This Free Birth Control.” Another ad has a young woman hoping to score with popular actor Ryan Gosling now that she has her own free birth control. But conservatives on Twitter were quick to bash the campaign and the absurdity of offering free birth control in exchange for increasing health insurance premiums...

(CNSNews.com) - In a 2-1 ruling on Friday, a federal appeals court in Chicago upheld the rights of both individuals and companies to challenge Obamacare's contraception-abortifacient-sterilization mandate. It is the first decision of its kind in the ongoing litigation against the requirement that all employers -- despite their deeply held religious beliefs -- must arrange and pay for employee health insurance that covers no-cost contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization, under penalty of fine. "This is a significant victory for protecting the religious beliefs of individuals and corporations," said Edward White, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice,...

The HHS mandate that is a part of Obamacare was dealt another blow on Friday, as a federal appeals court ruled the Obama administration cannot force a family-run business in Illinois to comply with it and pay for birth control or abortion-causing drugs for its employees. This ruling comes after another victory against the mandate earlier this month. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a pro-life legal organization, informed LifeNews today that a decision by a federal appeals court that clears the way for the ObamaCare HHS Mandate to be put on hold represents a “significant victory for...

Recently released documents reveal that the failed federal insurance e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, could only handle 1,100 users the day before it launched [PDF]. It has long been suspected that the White House prioritized politics over technical realities in the launch of the healthcare website, but this is some of the best proof that officials were burying their heads in the sand. “Currently we are able to reach 1100 users before response time gets too high,” noted a technical report to the website team. Eventually, the document notes, they hoped the website could handle 10,000.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on the federal insurance exchange website and other issues related to the Affordable Care Act. Her testimony comes exactly one week after she appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee where she apologized to the public for what she called the "debacle." Secretary Sebelius and other administration officials have said that problems with the healthcare.gov website will be fixed by the end of this month. During her testimony today, she talks about the progress being made in that effort. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) chairs the committee...

First Amendment: A federal court has ruled that the ObamaCare contraception mandate violates the guarantee of free exercise of religion and forces some to choose between their religious conscience and bankruptcy. The Supreme Court's decision in June 2012 that ObamaCare was constitutional because its fines for not complying with its mandates made the law a tax within Congress' authority to impose did not end the constitutional or court challenges to this attempt at redistribution of health and wealth. On Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Gilardi v. HHS that ObamaCare's contraception mandate violates the constitutional rights of...

If the budget negotiations succeed, Democrats should insist on a full-year appropriation for HHS, not just to smooth the rocky implementation of Obamacare but to restore funding to badly damaged programs and agencies like Head Start and the National Institutes of Health. “It’s a disaster. A disaster if we continue with the yearlong sequester and continuing resolution,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Labor-H bill, on the Senate floor during the shutdown. Failing a full-year HHS budget, Democrats should insist on restoring HHS funding to its pre-sequestration levels. Put another way, they...

Health and Human Services has set up a new website under the url healthyyoungamerica.org. On that site, they host dozens of videos of teens and young adults parroting the lies they have been told by the Obama Administration about the Affordable Care Act. The videos are, for the most part, surreally terrible. That is, if you are able to watch them. A quick visit to that site brought numerous crashes for me. Why? Because when I went to adjust the volume on some of the obnoxiously loud videos, the site crashed. Just to check out the site, I went to...