Free Republic

A bill introduced Friday by California Assembly Member Mike Gipson (D) would force insurance companies to provide lawmakers with an annual report highlighting homeowners with guns in their residence. The bill, AB 3067, says: “This bill would require an insurer, by January 1, 2026, to include questions on an application for homeowners’ or renters’ insurance seeking specified information regarding the presence and storage of any firearms kept in the household, accessory structures, or vehicles kept on the property subject to any applicable insurance policy.” It continues: “The bill would require an insurer to annually report this information to the Department...

he veteran mechanic Scotty Kilmer has warned motorists thinking of buying an electric car to be careful not to damage the battery or face expensive repair bills. The popular YouTuber has worked on cars for over 55 years, and regularly posts videos helping viewers buy the right car for them and avoid issues. In one of his latest videos, Scotty warns that a lot of car insurance companies are scrapping electric vehicles with damaged batteries. He advised: "Here's yet another reason not to buy an electric car, because many insurance companies are now totalling electric cars with even minor damage...

The insurance industry is increasingly wary of the risks presented by climate and natural disasters, prompting major firms to scale back their presence in more vulnerable states. In June, Farmers Insurance announced in a company memo it will no longer write new property insurance policies in Florida, citing “catastrophe costs … at historically high levels.” Earlier in the month, AIG stopped issuing policies along the Sunshine State’s hurricane-vulnerable coastline. Those followed State Farm, California’s largest single homeowners’ insurer, which in May announced a moratorium on new policies in the state, blaming “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” The decision came after years...

Yogi Berra called and he says he’s got Deja Vu like it’s the 2008 financial crisis all over again.In 2008, formerly staid and respectable mortgage lenders found themselves at huge risk from stupid government policies forcing them to lend to people who could not pay back. Never fear, they had spread the risk in the secondary market, which should have had a stabilizing effect, but ended up more like a circular firing squad with banks toppling like dominoes.History does not repeat, but it rhymes:In 2021, staid, respectable, and conservative insurance companies suddenly found themselves at huge risk from bad government...

It's coming Tonight’s address to Congress will be the first of the Trump presidency, and it will be heavy on policy matters - especially as it relates to what’s coming next following the imminent repeal of ObamaCare. To help lay the groundwork for that, Trump met yesterday with many of the insurers who’ve been losing their shirts on ObamaCare exchanges and asked them to get on board and help ensure a smooth transition: Trump told the insurers that his changes would include expanded healthcare savings accounts, which are tax-free savings accounts typically used with high-deductible insurance plans, and the sale...

Gigantic losses put exchanges on the brink, send program careening into chaos Remember when everyone watching ObamaCare was focused on how many people had signed up? First they needed 7 million, then 11 million, and on it went as new targets replaced the old. These weren’t meaningless - at least it didn’t appear that way. The targets represented the critical mass the Obama Administration itself said the program needed to be economically sustainable. Insurance, they told us, is about risk pools. If you’ve got enough people in the risk pool, you’d have enough premiums being paid in to cover those...

Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned.Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to nine barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.All 24 received 15-year loans in varying amounts to offer health insurance to poor and low income customers...

Former president Bill Clinton will be the keynote speaker at a conference of health-insurance executives this week. America's Health Insurance Plans, the largest health-insurance provider trade group in the country, is holding its Institute 2015 conference in Nashville this week. Clinton, whose wife Hillary is running for president, will close out the conference Friday afternoon with his address to attendees. "The session is open to Institute attendees (who have registered and paid for the entire Institute) and Friday only registrants," says the conference's website. "No press allowed."

Let’s start with the doctor/patient relationship—the disappearance of which has been lamented by many. The pertinent definition of “relationship” in the Oxford Dictionaries deems it: “The way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.” In one sense, every patient wants to be treated well by his physician, and in many cases, so-called “continuity of care” is most desirable. Likewise, the physician may wish to spend more time with a particular patient, but is forced by economic realities to rush the process. Perhaps, some of this search for the ideal doctor/patient relationship is driven...

A key former adviser behind President Obama's healthcare law said the traditional role of health insurers would be "dead" by 2025, predicting massive changes in the industry. "By 2025, insurance companies as we know them — taking in premiums and paying out — dead," Ezekiel Emanuel ... Emanuel, the older brother of former White House chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has long argued that health insurers will shift away an employer-based system. By 2025.. ... Most Americans currently receive health insurance through their employers. ObamaCare includes an employer mandate, which requires companies with 50 or more...

Complete Title...Guess How Many Insurance Officials Raise Their Hands When Asked if Premiums Will Decrease By $2500 Like Obama Promised? We were given a lot of promises about Obamacare, from seeing premiums decrease to being able to keep our plans if we liked them — none of which, of course, ended up being true. And apparently, major insurance officials knew that premiums wouldn’t decrease, too. During a House hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) asked a group of seven insurance officials to raise their hands if they anticipated a premium reduction of $2,500 or more for the average American...

(Reuters) - U.S. consumers eligible for Obamacare health plans could see double-digit price hikes next year in states that fail to draw large numbers of enrollees for 2014, including some states that have been hostile to the healthcare law, according to insurance industry officials and analysts. The early estimates come as insurance companies set out to design plans they intend to sell in 2015 through the state-based health insurance marketplaces that are a centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy achievement that is widely referred to as Obamacare. WellPoint Inc, which sells plans on 14...

After a blistering four-month rally that took stocks to record highs last year, January could not have been more different, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell more than 5%. In the first month of the year, traders worried the financial health of both the U.S. and smaller nations meant stocks were too dangerous to continue owning for the time being, especially after a nearly uninterrupted rise that began in early 2009. Those jitters continued on the first trading day in February, driven by weakness in a manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management. By the close of...

While the Government continues to struggle with what seem to be insurmountable problems with the Affordable Care Act's implementation, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urged insurers to “cover whoever claims to have insurance.” “We fully understand that under normal conditions insurance isn't effective until the insured has paid a premium for coverage,” Sebelius said. “However, we aren't dealing with normal conditions. Many who have tried to sign up for insurance haven't been successful. For many of those who have been told they're signed up our system hasn't been able to properly bill them. Some have assumed that the...

One of the many huge issues with the infamous healthcare.gov website, that is only now getting the notoriety it deserves is this: There is currently no mechanism to get payments from the enrollees to the prospective insurance companies. But, hey…No prob, bro. The insurance companies can simply submit their estimates to the Feds, who will get them the money—all to be settled up later. Quoting from the article… Health plans will estimate how much they are owed, and submit that estimate to the government. Once the system is built, the government and insurers can reconcile the payments made with the...

Don’t cry for these people, needless to say. They helped make ObamaCare happen. They were only too happy to see healthy young adults forced into buying their product by a constitutionally dubious mandate and to gouge healthy middle-class people with the new, more expensive plans required by the exchanges. They wouldn’t have partnered with the White House if this wasn’t a payday for them. But now they’re screwed twice over: Not only are Democrats trying to make them the fall guy for the cancellations, they’re looking at their payday melting down into red ink if they take Obama’s “advice” and...

About 73,000 policy holders around the state will lose their insurance in coming months because nine insurance companies are dropping some health plans that were not grandfathered under the Affordable Care Act, the Maryland Insurance Administration confirmed Monday.

Insurers say faulty data from ObamaCare marketplaces is straining their ability to handle even the first wave of consumers who were able to sign up for health insurance using federally run exchanges during the glitch-ridden rollout of the new law. Executives at more than a dozen health insurance companies say they have received data from online marketplaces that is riddled with errors, including duplicate enrollments, missing data fields and spouses reported as children, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. "The longer this takes to resolve…the harder it will be to get people to [come back and] sign up," Aetna CEO...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put out a press release today promoting the savings to consumers from Obamacare in 2012. The department claims that the average consumer receiving a refund will get about $100 as a result of rules on how insurers must spend premium dollars. The press release contains the following curious characterization of ineligible expenses health insurers might incur: Created through the Affordable Care Act, the rule requires insurers to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar on patient care and quality improvement. If they spend a higher amount on other expenses like...

Internal cost estimates from 17 of the nation´s largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent, crushing the administration´s goal of affordability. New regulations, policies, taxes, fees and mandates are the reason for the unexpected "rate shock," according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a report Monday based on internal documents provided by the insurance companies. The 17 companies include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and