Free Republic

Promises: Vulnerable Democrats think they've found a winning strategy for the November elections: Tell voters they can fix ObamaCare, but Republicans won't let them. It's a con. ObamaCare is unfixable. 'Joe Garcia is working to fix ObamaCare," says an ad for the Florida House Democrat. "He voted to let you keep your existing health plan and took the White House to task for the disastrous health care website." Of course, Garcia fails to mention ObamaCare is the reason millions lost their health plans to begin with. Or that its problems extend well beyond a glitchy website. But this is the...

**SNIP** As FEMA has moved to update its decades-old flood maps, experts have cheered the effort. Using the latest in mapping technology such as laser beams (LiDar) and computer modeling will account for climate change, they say, and will lessen the blow of devastating storms by compelling homeowners to reduce their risk. But critics caution that the maps, which are used to determine flood insurance premiums, are tough to challenge and in some cases are ensnaring homeowners who shouldn’t be in a flood zone. And though FEMA intends for everyone to pay their share, some businesses have found a way...

Americans must understand that our federal government has chosen to collude with insurance companies, hospitals and drug companies to take total control of our healthcare system and one sixth of the US economy rather than collaborate with patients and physicians to achieve good healthcare reform that benefits each individual patient. This unholy alliance is facilitated by lobbyists bearing gifts of money and power. Individual patients and physicians are by comparison penniless and powerless. We are nothing more than pawns in a game which we can play no more. This is the ultimate game of life, and the only way not...

Last week I testified before the House Oversight committee on the “risk corridors” in the (ObamaCare) exchanges. Republicans claim that this is a device to bail out the insurance companies. Democrats, in the unusual position of defending the insurance companies, actually claimed that the government was going to make a “profit” because of it. I was in the uncomfortable position of not agreeing completely with either side. The Affordable Care Act creates a new health insurance marketplace (the exchange). But because of the great uncertainty about what buyers will enter the market and who will buy what product, the law...

So Bob Laszewski was right. Fully one-fifth of the new enrollment numbers that HHS has been waving around are bogus. Their target for the end of January was 4.4 million sign-ups; a few days ago, they told the country they’d made it three-quarters of the way there with 3.3 million. In reality, once the deadbeats are bounced from the rolls by their new insurers, they’ll be in the ballpark of 2.6 million, or 60 percent of their target. And that’s after HHS pressured insurers to extend the payment deadline from December 31 into January, hoping that a little more time...

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...