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When the Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010, HHS had three and a half years and $400 million to produce a web portal for individual-market consumers that would … pretty much do what the existing portal did for the Medicare Advantage program that ObamaCare raided to pay for its own operation. HHS rolled it out on time last October, whereupon it crashed repeatedly and had to be overhauled. A few months later, the Obama administration bragged about the system when it hit eight million signups, even though the back end couldn’t actually determine how many actually paid for...

Pro-choice propaganda artist Ron English is very controversial. His artwork, described as very disturbing, often focuses on abortion.Recently Ron English uploaded a video depicting a baby Jesus doll hanging from a coat hanger with a sign saying: Hobby Lobby Aborted Baby Jesus.It is unclear who orchestrated this vandalism or who produced the video. But Ron English just happened to go to the exact Hobby Lobby where these dolls were placed: English writes on his blog, “While at Hobby Lobby in Poughkeepsie NY, Ron came across a rack which held four crucified aborted Baby Jesus’. Wonder if they are still there?”...

Type “Obamacare rollout disaster” into the Google search engine, and you get approximately 290,000 results, most of them dating back to the days immediately following the catastrophic October 2013 launch of Healthcare.gov. Significantly, however, the most recent results focus on the Judicial Watch release on May 19, 2014. That’s the date Judicial Watch released a 106-page document we obtained on May 1 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that reveals the shocking details of the rollout disaster. Though the Obama administration tried to cover up the full extent of the website failure in the days following...

ADMINISTRATION STOPS MONTHLY ACA ENROLLMENT REPORTS: Kyle Cheney with today’s top read [http://politico.pro/1qVCBjd] — “The Obama administration has quietly decided to halt its monthly updates on Obamacare enrollment, which were a major pipeline of information about the impact of the health law heading into the 2014 campaign season. ‘HHS issued monthly enrollment reports during the first marketplace open enrollment period in order to provide the best understanding of enrollment activities as it was taking place,’ an HHS spokeswoman emailed. ‘Now that this time period has ended, we will look at future opportunities to share information about the marketplace that is...

It isn’t getting a lot of attention, but the country is currently amid an important transition for the very important position of America’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, a job that now has extraordinary impact upon this nation.The outgoing secretary is, of course, Kathleen Sebelius. And she isn’t going lightly. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is ensuring that she hears some gunfire in her ears. Issa is chair of the House Oversight Committee. Last week he warned Sebelius that she could face a vote of contempt of Congress if she and her department continue to refuse to comply with a...

Two Senate committees held hearings this month on the nomination of Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services, the federal agency most responsible for overseeing implementation of Obamacare. In these two hearings, according to transcripts published by CQ Transcriptions, the senators and the nominee spoke approximately 49,000 words. Not one of these words directly addressed the contraception-sterilization-abortion-inducing drug regulation that Sebelius issued under Obamacare and that is now the target of more than 90 lawsuits. The closest anyone came was Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who...

The horrendous rollout of Obamacare last Oct. 1 was even worse than the administration has revealed, with just one person able to enroll on healthcare.gov, according to new documents uncovered by a public watchdog group. A 106-page document obtained May 1 by Judicial Watch from the Department of Health and Human Services also showed that a top official was so happy that she thought a second person had succeeded in signing up on day one that she sent out a celebratory email. “On October 1, 2013, at the end of the first day (4:30), the Senior Advisor at Center for...

When the Obama administration pushed for over the counter sales of the Plan B drug, which may cause an abortion in some circumstances, pro-life advocates feared this kind of thing would happen. A local news station in Colorado has discovered that a children’s hospital with giving the Plan B drug to 12-year-old girls and all without parental consent. As Fox 21 reports: motherdaughter6bOne Colorado Springs clinic is offering kids as young as 12 access to the Plan B pill without any parental consent. That clinic is a division of Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora and offers services to 12 to...

Another day, another Obamacare delay. HHS issued new, er, guidance late yesterday afternoon about how the health care law’s individual mandate will be enforced on those who did not purchase insurance on time. In short, for those who managed to buy insurance by May 1, it won’t be enforced at all. This is the third postponement of the individual mandate.The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein explains: Starting in 2014, individuals who did not purchase government approved insurance were supposed to be subject to a penalty of $95 or 1 percent of taxable income. Under the original sequence of events, individuals would...

When the embattled Kathleen Sebelius announced her intention to resign as secretary of Health and Human Services, she pledged to stay in President Barack Obama’s cabinet until her replacement was confirmed by the Senate. Turns out, there may be a financial incentive for the former Kansas governor to take her time getting out of Washington. Next week, Sebelius becomes eligible to receive a government pension and continue certain taxpayer-funded health-care benefits when she hits her five-year employment mark with the federal government, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) policy indicates. Under OPM rules, Sebelius, who was sworn into office on April...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spends roughly $123.2 million per year to provide “email services” for its 70,000 employees, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Buried in a footnote of a recently released GAO report on the agency’s coordination with the nonprofit group Enroll America, the congressional watchdog detailed the high operating costs associated with running the department’s email. “HHS told us that HHS pays $146.64 per month per user for email; that this charge covers connectivity, storage, and other e-mail services; and that this charge is independent of the number of emails that are sent...

The Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a rule that would, if implemented, guarantee that even more Americans who like their health insurance plans cannot keep them. Fixed indemnity plans, which pay insured customers a set amount towards medical expenses and are often cost-effective relative to more comprehensive health insurance, are popular forms of coverage, and potentially becoming more popular in the wake of Obamacare. Health insurance industry representatives say that fixed indemnity plans have been attracting more interest as many Americans look for a way to mitigate against the high deductibles applicable to many insurance policies available...

At the end of the day, we all want Americans to have access to affordable, quality healthcare, but Obamacare is the wrong path to get to that goal. As we begin to review the qualifications and record of President Obama’s new nominee to become HHS Secretary, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, current director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will have to answer a number of very important questions during her upcoming confirmation hearings before both the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. And while Ms. Burwell was unanimously confirmed to become OMB director,...

As horrible as Kathleen Sebelius has been as this nation's health and human services secretary, she has been exactly who President Barack Obama has wanted her to be. This was no rogue incompetent tinkering with America's health care. This was one of Obama's chief lieutenants, one who was doing his bidding every step of that treacherous road they traveled together. Don't get me wrong; Sebelius was inexcusably bad -- arrogant, defiant, uncompassionate, dogmatic and unrepentant. Obama cashiered her only because it was time to deflect blame from himself and change the channel. There is nothing incompatible between assigning major blame...

Senate Democrats have been desperately trying to move the national conversation away from Obamacare to just about anything else before the midterm elections — “paycheck fairness,” the minimum wage, even the Koch brothers. But President Obama’s choice of Sylvia Burwell to replace Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services thrusts Obamacare right back into the national spotlight — and with it Obama’s false promise that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.” Burwell should not be confirmed until she explains how OMB allowed the president of the United States to lie — repeatedly...

Count Ted Cruz among the unimpressed about the HHS claim that over seven million Americans enrolled in ObamaCare by the end of the open-enrollment deadline. Javier Manjarres conducted a short telephone interview with Sen. Cruz, pointing out an earlier story broken by talk radio host Drew Steele about notification letters from HHS of ObamaCare auto-enrollment and questioned whether those were part of the HHS calculations. Cruz called this part of the mystery around the “funny numbers” coming out of the Obama administration, and wondered how many of the 7.1 million were only partial sign-ups:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO The...

Health Overhaul: The midwife of ObamaCare exits stage left, leaving behind wreckage that once was the finest health care system in the world, less affordable health insurance and patients unable to find doctors and hospitals. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services — referred to in the increasingly un-Affordable Care Act's iconic use of the phrase "the Secretary shall determine," which appears in ObamaCare's guiding document no fewer than 1,005 times — has determined that it's time to go. Or rather it's been determined for her by a White House in whose parallel universe ObamaCare's current alleged enrollment...

President Obama on Friday formally nominated Sylvia Mathews Burwell to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) following the botched resignation of Kathleen Sebelius. Burwell served in several positions under the Bill Clinton administration, including as a deputy aide to then-budget director Jack Lew. In July 1995, Burwell (then Sylvia Mathews) was one of several key aides questioned by the Senate Whitewater Committee regarding the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. Foster’s death was officially ruled a suicide. The Clinton White House eventually admitted to misleading investigators about how senior officials had seized and disposed of...

The replacement of Kathleen Sebelius by Sylvia Mathews Burwell as the Secretary of Health and Human Services has been portrayed by the legacy “news” media as a new lease on life for Obamacare. The party line is that Sebelius was mortally wounded by GOP exploitation of a single uncharacteristic mistake—the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov—while Burwell is a brilliant Beltway veteran unsullied by controversy and possessing the very administrative skills needed to save Obama’s “signature domestic achievement.” … This tale fails to conform to the facts, however … The vessel is taking on water at an alarming rate, and Sylvia Burwell’s...

April 13, 2014, 10:09 am Sebelius: Pressure after rollout was 'awful' By Elise Viebeck Outgoing Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she was "flat-out wrong" to believe that HealthCare.gov was ready to go on Oct. 1, 2013. Sebelius made the comment to NBC's Andrea Mitchell on "Meet the Press" in her first post-resignation interview. The secretary has only a handful of weeks left at HHS until her replacement is confirmed. In candid remarks about the healthcare rollout, Sebelius said she regretted not asking different questions when HealthCare.gov was under construction. "If I had a magic wand and...