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BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) — Federal authorities say an East Texas man has admitted to deliberately driving his $1 million car into Gulf waters so that he could collect insurance on the vehicle. Authorities announced Tuesday that 39-year-old Andy Lee House of Lufkin has pleaded guilty to wire mail fraud. They say he purchased a Bugatti Veyron and had it insured for $2.2 million. The elegant vehicle is considered one of the fastest in the world.

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...

Seven months after major glitches in the Washington health exchange were discovered, authorities acknowledge that thousands of state residents still don't have insurance they can use to go to the doctor or fill a prescription. [Snip] Some people aren't being properly credited by the exchange for their insurance payments. In some cases, money and information has been lost somewhere between the exchange and the insurance companies. And some people have been told by their doctors that the insurance company has no record of their coverage.

<p>Advocates of the Affordable Care Act, focused until now on persuading people to buy health insurance, have moved to a crucial new phase: making sure the eight million Americans who did so understand their often complicated policies and use them properly.</p>

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif) says she is “tired of hearing pathetic stories from people who have been forced to find new insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The ACA has eliminated substandard insurance policies and guaranteed that every American will obtain superior coverage.” “Rather than be grateful that the Government is looking out for their best interests a cadre of complainers are whining that the new plans cost more than their old plans,” Eshoo complained. “Well, duh. These new plans cover more stuff. A lot of the old plans didn’t cover a number of birth control options. Virtually none...

Health Care: Remember when ObamaCare backers said there was no way the law would push employers to drop their health plans? A new report calls the lie on that one, too. A big concern raised by critics of ObamaCare was that employers would shift their health costs onto taxpayers — dropping insurance benefits knowing workers could access guaranteed, often subsidized coverage in an ObamaCare exchange. Typical of the left's response was a Families USA "fact sheet" that called such worries a "myth." "Employers that offer coverage will continue to do so," it declared. The liberal Urban Institute likewise promised the...

Newly released emails show a key White House adviser intervened on behalf of the health insurance industry after an executive repeatedly warned that massive premium hikes were coming unless the administration expanded an ObamaCare program that Republicans call an industry "bailout." The insurance industry ultimately got a more "generous" offer from the administration -- one that Republicans warn could transfer potentially billions of taxpayer dollars into the Affordable Care Act to bail out insurance companies. The documents were included as part of a report by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republicans allege that White House adviser...

An extra charge on property-insurance and auto-insurance policies to cover claims paid for the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons will end Jan. 1.... The orders make official a decision Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet made last month to end the assessment, Amy Bogner, a spokeswoman for the Office of Insurance Regulation, said in an email. The assessment, which first appeared at 1 percent in 2007...

An employee at an insurance agency in central Sweden will lose 15 days of pay as punishment for surfing the web on the job, spending over 40 hours this summer mainly using social media. Multiple employees at a branch of Försäkringskassan (Swedish Social Insurance Agency) in Gävle face serious repercussions for browsing the web instead of helping customers. In one case, the employee spent about 50 hours of work time during one month visiting 350 websites - including plenty of shopping, weight-loss sites, and blogs. Over a period of seven months the woman had worked 51 hours overtime, but over...

Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federal government after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

With the departure of Eric Cantor as majority leader, it's time to replace him with someone with strong conservative values. My choice is Steve King of Iowa. Steve is not looking for votes, but is looking for solutions to problems.

Anti-Capitalism: You'd think that after ObamaCare's chaotic launch, premium rate shocks, subsidy foul-ups and costly ad hoc changes, the insurance industry would attack the law. Instead, it's slamming the drug industry. "Drugmakers have no straight-face explanation to justify the increasingly astronomical prices they have been charging for their medications," complains one of numerous public relations communications sent recently by the industry trade group America's Health Insurance Plans. The group has called drug prices "unsustainable" and accused the industry of "price gouging." The focus of the industry's fury at the moment is Sovaldi, a breakthrough treatment that can cure Hepatitis C,...

Colorado will begin charging an Obamacare tax next month on all health insurance policies — even those obtained through private employers — to help prop up the state’s struggling health care exchange. ... Republicans have called the Obamacare tax unconstitutional, given that the state’s constitution requires voters to approve any tax increases, but exchange managers insist it’s a fee, not a tax.

To insurance companies, there’s no doubt that climate change is here: They are beginning to file lawsuits against small towns and cities who they say haven’t prepared for the floods and storms that will cost the companies billions in payments. Earlier this week, the U.S. arm of a major global insurance company backed away from an unprecedented lawsuit against Chicago and its suburbs for failing to prepare for heavy rains and associated flooding it claimed were fueled by global warming. While legal experts said the case was a longshot, its withdrawal didn't alter the message it contained for governments: prepare...

Ineptitude: Millions of people could be in for a rude surprise later this year when they discover they aren't eligible for ObamaCare, or are getting too big a subsidy, thanks to another failed ObamaCare promise. In early September, administration officials declared that the ObamaCare "data hub" was ready to roll. This hub was central to making ObamaCare work, since it was supposed to verify citizenship, income and other information needed to determine eligibility and the level of insurance subsidies available. More important, it was all supposed to happen in real time, right when people were filling out their online application...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Recently, my wife approached me with the unwelcome news that our health insurance plan — which we like — will likely be cancelled next year. Her employer, a healthcare provider, generously provides benefits even for those working part-time. Due to the devastation wrecked upon the industry by Obamacare, they anticipate the need to drop coverage for all employees working less than 60 hours per pay period. My wife works 56. Since my employer’s offering proves virtually worthless, far too expensive for far too little coverage, we will be left effectively uninsured. We may consider Samaritan Ministries as an alternative to...

The teleprompter is still hot from all the Obama spit unleashed in his latest sincerely passionate denial that his administration knew anything, anything at all, about what is merely the latest scandal to rock the president, this time surrounding the Veterans Affairs fiasco, and already a brand new scandal is taking shape, this one Obama however will not be able to sweep as easily under the rug. The LA Times reports that the "Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if...

A major insurance company is accusing dozens of localities in Illinois of failing to prepare for severe rains and flooding in lawsuits that are the first in what could be a wave of litigation over who should be liable for the possible costs of climate change. Farmers Insurance filed nine class actions last month against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area. It is arguing that local governments should have known rising global temperatures would lead to heavier rains and did not do enough to fortify their sewers and stormwater drains. The legal debate may center on whether an uptick...

Or so says a new McKinsey survey of the numbers: One of the principal flaws in the coverage of Obamacare’s exchange enrollment numbers to date has been that the press has not made distinctions between those who have “signed up” for Obamacare-based plans, and those who have actually paid for those plans and thereby achieved enrollment in health insurance. A new survey from McKinsey indicates that a large majority of people signing up are now paying for their coverage. This is progress for the health law. But the survey still indicates that three-fourths of enrollees were previously insured. Of course...