Free Republic

Cost Curve: A little-noticed problem is fast emerging in states that decided to set up their own ObamaCare exchanges. Many of them face financial crises once the federal grant money runs out. After taking nearly $4 billion in federal grants to set up and run their exchanges this year, 14 states and the District of Columbia are supposed to be self-sufficient by next year. At least that's what the ObamaCare statute says (which these days doesn't mean much). But from the looks of it, many are heading into a fiscal brick wall.

Forget about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. It’s really more like the 0.000001 percent versus everybody else. A tiny group — mostly comprising the Obama White House, a bunch of Washington Democrats, progressive economists, and the media elite — continues to fixate on income inequality as America’s greatest challenge. Most everybody else, the 99.999999 percent, sees things differently. Surveys continue to show Americans most worried about jobs and economic growth, not the income gap between the top and bottom. It’s a rational view given new employment data from the government. The January jobs report showed only 113,000 net...

Many health plans are smiling. We've essentially been forced by Congress to buy their catastrophic policies at first-dollar coverage prices. But because many Americans don't remember catastrophic policies or know what real insurance is or how much insurance should cost -- or how low cash-based medical prices could be -- they don't know badly they're being scammed. To be clear, this is not the first act in this Congressional scam. True insurance got more difficult to buy after Congress favored first-dollar health plans with the HMO Act of 1973. Most employers were forced to offer HMO plans. Like the frog...

Dept. Of Corrections: Leading Democrats said ObamaCare would create 4 million jobs by cutting health costs and unleashing entrepreneurs. Now we learn the promise was off by 6.5 million — in the wrong direction. Here's what Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the top Democratic in the House, had to say about ObamaCare in February 2010: "It will create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately — jobs, again, in the health care industry but in the entrepreneurial world as well." Pelosi was citing a paper released a month earlier by the left-wing Center for American Progress, which claimed the law would lower...

On Fox & Friends weekend edition, conservative pundit Ann Coulter told co-host Tucker Carlson that her friend's sister had passed away over the weekend after putting off medical attention because she had lost her insurance coverage under Obamacare. "This does have real world consequences: I got up the other morning and got an email from a friend saying, 'My sister almost died because of Obamacare,'" Coulter said. Coulter said the friend's sister was kicked off her insurance when Blue Shield pulled out of California, put off going to emergency room despite having a fever because she didn't have insurance, until...

A Texas ophthalmologist and co-founder of AmericanDoctors4Truth tore down the curtain on Obamacare last week, describing President Obama’s “signature” legislative achievement for the con game of forced labor that it really is. When she wrote to the Aetna insurance company canceling her participation in its offerings, Dr. Kristin Held of San Antonio was informed she is contractually bound to care for the company’s patients for another year — as though Obamacare not only re-configured the American health care system, it repealed the 13th Amendment at the same time. In her letter dated Jan. 30, the long-time and vocal opponent of...

When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies. But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014. While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing — right before the midterm elections — could be difficult...

A local news station brings viewers inside one Pennsylvania company as the employees their learn about their new health care plans under Obamacare: "Look at the numbers," says the reporter of two employees. "Jeff and Dave used to have a $1,250 deductible. Since Obamacare went into effect, it's now jumped 60 percent to $2,000. That's nothing compared to Brian, Kristi, and Judy who have kids. They are going to pay twice that, four grand." The reporter adds that co-pays are being increased, too.

Behold, your chart of the day. This comes from Kaiser Health News, which has regularly polled on health-related policies, and in particular the uninsured in relation to ObamaCare. Since 2011, the support and opposition have remained fairly close together, but now that ObamaCare has been implemented, a dramatic change has taken place — and one the White House and Democrats won’t like:KHN says, presumably without irony, that the reason for the sudden shift is unclear: Uninsured Americans — the people that the Affordable Care Act was designed to most aid — are increasingly critical of the law as its key...

The OPTION Act is a bold health care plan. Authored Congressman Paul Broun, M.D. (R-GA), the "Offering Patients True Individualized Options Now Act of 2013" - H.R. 2900 - is an exciting 77-page proposal to repeal Obamacare and change the entire landscape of American health care. It would reintroduce freedom. The OPTION Act eliminates Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program --- and the entire Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Yes. All gone. In its place is private coverage and provisions to encourage and expand private charity. As Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians...

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., Tuesday sharply criticized what she called the Obama administration's "short-sighted, misguided and irresponsible" opposition to legislation delaying flood insurance premium increases for four years. Though the statement of administration policy didn't include a veto threat, Landrieu said the White House's position, "threatens the very foundation of the National Flood Insurance Program and will only saddle taxpayers with higher costs when disasters strike." Just before the White House policy statement was released the Senate voted 86-13 to begin debate on legislation that would delay most increases resulting from the 2012 Biggert-Waters Act so, sponsors say,...

A major flood insurance bill was a rarity when it passed what is widely derided as a do-nothing Congress in 2012, but a year and a half later, there is now an enthusiastic bipartisan effort to gut it. This week the Senate is expected to approve a measure that would block, repeal or delay many of the key provisions of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which was sponsored by Representative Judy Biggert, an Illinois Republican, and Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat. Tucked into broader transportation legislation, the bill had enthusiastic support across the political spectrum, from liberal environmentalists...

While the administration publicly expresses full confidence in its health care law, privately it fears one part of the system is so flawed it could bankrupt insurance companies and cripple ObamaCare itself. "Week after week, month after month," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, "the Obama administration kept telling us everything's working fine, there's no problem and then they turn on a dime and fire their contractor." To justify a no-bid contract with Accenture after firing CGI as the lead contractor, the administration released documents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Center...

One of the latest badges of greenie virtue is the mini-car. Supposedly, if you drive one of these contraptions, you demonstrate your concern for Mother Gaia and help diminish the risk that catastrophic global warming will engulf low lying coastal areas and fry the rest of us in temperatures that will be a couple of degrees higher in the next hundred years. In this worldview, people who drive around in SUVs are carelessly risking the very future of humanity. That's quite a serious risk; never mind that temperatures have failed to rise for the last 16 years as the models...

Calamity: Despite repeated reassurances that ObamaCare website glitches were fixed, officials are frantically trying to repair massive problems that, by their own admission, could crush ObamaCare and the insurance industry. Throughout December, administration officials said that they'd all but fixed the start-up problems with the ObamaCare exchange site, pointing to the sharp increase in enrollment that month as evidence. And as to those "back end" problems that sent erroneous information to insurers, they claimed to have cut the error rate to less than 1% by early December. But hidden from view, administration officials were in a state of panic. A...

The majority of the more than 2 million Americans who signed up for health insurance under ObamaCare through the end of December were already enrolled in employer-sponsored plans or had previously bought their own coverage, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Early data from insurers, brokers and consultants suggest that the marketplaces are popular with consumers who were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about a law intended to expand coverage to millions of healthy, uninsured Americans to help offset costs. A survey by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that only 11 percent of consumers who purchased new coverage...

A District of Columbia federal judge rejected a lawsuit Wednesday that challenged tax credits for Obamacare coverage in the 36 states with federal-run exchanges – one of the most significant remaining legal fights over President Barack Obama’s health care law.The four individuals who brought the lawsuit, Halbig v. Sebelius, had argued that the IRS overstepped its legal authority by allowing federal-run exchanges to provide tax credits for people who purchase health insurance. They contended that the Affordable Care Act only allows for state-run exchanges to access such credits and that Congress purposefully designed the law that way to incentivize states...

WASHINGTON – Insurers have raised concerns that too few young people are signing up for heath insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges after newly released statistics showed that less than a quarter of people who have enrolled are between the ages of 18 and 34. According to the numbers released Monday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, only 24 percent – or 489,460 – of the 2.2 million people who signed up for ACA were in the coveted 18-to-34 age range. That means the government has hit only 18 percent of its stated goal of registering 2.7 million...

While the costs of providing health care insurance are beginning to skyrocket because of Obamacare, insurance company executives are sleeping very soundly. A respected consultant to health insurance companies, Robert Laszewski, reveals that there are two obscure provisions in Obamacare that guarantee that insurance companies will be subsidized and bailed out by Amercian taxpayers. Indeed the Congressional Budget Office estimates that $1.071 trillion will be coercively transferred from taxpayers to big insurance companies over the next decade. This massive redistribution of wealth will take place via two programs stealthily embedded in the Affordable Health Care Act. The first is the...

New York is enrolling a significant number of young subscribers on its health insurance exchange, but many of those already enrolled have raised questions about rules that limit which doctors they can see, or are having problems finding out if their doctors are covered, according to testimony at a State Senate hearing on Monday. New York has been one of the most successful states in signing up people for new insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act and, as of Dec. 24, the deadline for enrollment for coverage beginning New Year’s Day, 230,624 had enrolled. As of Sunday, that number...