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CAMP MEEKER (CBS SF) — A Sonoma County man battling more than a dozen tumors in his body is fighting a new battle with his insurance carrier, who has denied coverage for his treatments. Jeffrey Rusch of Camp Meeker knew the news was bad when an MRI found 20 tumors in his brain. Two days later, a C-T scan at Sutter medical center in Santa Rosa brought another devastating blow, discovering a large tumor in his lungs, and more in his liver and bones. Doctors told Jeffrey he would need to be hospitalized immediately. “My husband was having a lot...

Four years after its passage, Obamacare has now been largely implemented, and millions have had their coverage disrupted. For years, the administration has propagated a number of myths about Obamacare. Some have already crumbled, and others will fall as Obamacare continues to change the American health system.Myth No. 1: If you like your health plan, you can keep it. Despite President Obama’s promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” about 6 million people have already been notified by insurance companies that their policies are being canceled. That number will grow. Currently, about 19 million people have...

CAMP MEEKER (CBS SF) — A Sonoma County man battling more than a dozen tumors in his body is fighting a new battle with his insurance carrier, who has denied coverage for his treatments.

MIAMI (AP) -- The first thing Michelle Pool did before picking a plan under President Barack Obama's health insurance law was check whether her longtime primary care doctor was covered. Pool, a 60-year-old diabetic who has had back surgery and a hip replacement, purchased the plan only to find that the insurer was mistaken.Pool's $352 a month gold plan through Covered California's exchange was cheaper than what she'd paid under her husband's insurance and seemed like a good deal because of her numerous pre-existing conditions. But after her insurance card came in the mail, the Vista, California resident learned her...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's Lenny in Bayville, New Jersey. Lenny, I'm glad you called. Thanks for waiting, sir. Hello. CALLER: Thank you. Blessings this afternoon, Rush. That's first and most important. RUSH: Well, thank you very much. CALLER: Now, with this medical insurance stuff from the companies. AT&T is taking all their retired, non-management employees and putting them into the private health exchange on January 1st of 2015. RUSH: All their retired, non-management employees? CALLER: Yep. RUSH: So the retirees that are still on the company health care plan because of the deal they had or whatever? CALLER: Yes. RUSH:...

On the heels of Oregon’s decision to drop its dysfunctional health insurance site, Massachusetts officials announced plans to follow suit on Monday. Unlike Oregon, however, Massachusetts will be taking a different replacement route—instead of using HealthCare.gov to sign up enrollees, Massachusetts will attempt to build a new health marketplace site based on software used by Colorado and Kentucky. While the state hopes to have this software from hCentive Inc. up and running by November 15th of this year, they will also connect to the federal exchange as a backup in case the new exchange software is not ready in time...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's the headline: "A Lot More People Are About to Learn They Can't Keep Their Plans If They Like Them." I was intrigued. I was really intrigued by that headline: "A Lot More People Are About to Learn They Can't Keep Their Plans If They Like Them." Let's get started here. "It's almost time for Stage Two of the great Obamacare dump, as the truly breathtaking depths of Barack Obama's Big Lie are exposed ... and America is shoved closer to the howling abyss of single-payer health care, the transformation nobody voted for." Fine so far. "Kaiser...

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...

As you can imagine, there’s a lot to choose from in the contest for the most spectacular waste of tax dollars. But the politicians in Oregon must really want the prize, because they managed to flush several hundred million dollars down a rat hole by putting together a state-run Obamacare website that has to be abandoned because it is so dysfunctional. And if the Oregon website is so bad that it’s switching to the much-derided Washington Obamacare website, it must be a disaster of unparalleled dimensions! Here are some excerpts from an AP report. After months of trying to get...

We hear it every day, “the rich don’t pay their fair share”, “there is a deeper divide than ever between the rich and the poor”, “the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer”.Blah, blah, blah, it reminds me of an old record that keeps skipping and repeating itself over and over.It is just another political point that this administration uses to divide the people of this nation. Lots of talk, no solutions. They talk about the privileged 1% and how evil they are. They bloviate on how unfair it is that the rich take advantage of the poor and...

Last week, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked? You aren’t, but you should be. Mainstream politicians didn’t always try to advance their agenda through lies, damned lies and — in this case — bogus statistics. And the fact that this has become standard operating procedure for a major party bodes ill for America’s future. About that report: The really big policy news of 2014, at least so far, is the spectacular recovery of the...

Government IT projects have a tendency to fall on their rear ends more often than not. After the miserable debacle that was Healthcare.gov last October, I made the case for why the larger than life public face of Obamacare had zero chance of succeeding in original form. Fast forward six months, and after some contractor firings and a public about face consisting of a "tech surge", the website is finally working at nominal levels. That's not to say no one didn't take the fall for the mess of this bungled IT project gone haywire. The former head honcho of the...

Leaders of both parties in Tennessee are condemning a blog post by a state senator likening the federal health care law to the deportation of Jews to concentration camps in the 1940s. Republican Sen. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville said on his blog that Democrats boasting of about the number of people who have signed for coverage as required by the federal health care law is like “Germans bragging about the number of mandatory sign-ups for ‘train rides’ for Jews in the 40s.” …

The latest USA Today/Pew survey shows Obamacare polling as poorly as it ever has: Views of ACA Little Changed. As other recent national polls have shown, including the April health care tracking survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the recent surge in signups for the new health care exchanges has had little impact on public opinion about the Affordable Care Act. In fact, the share disapproving of the law (55%) is as high as it ever has been in the four-year history of the law. Just 41% approve of the 2010 health care law.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!!! The White House Director of Progressive Media needs to send out an emergency response team to Sarah Kliff of General Electric Vox  to get her "mind right" again for going off-message on ObamaCare since the debate is "over." Got that? The debate  is OVER! Except that the debate is not quite over when one of the biggest ObamaCare cheerleaders is beginning to cast aspersions upon her formerly beloved program. This is starting to become something of a "disturbing" pattern for our Miss Kliff who recently underwent a rapid response mind change when an administration official quickly turned...

<p>SANDY, Utah (AP) — Tea party favorites and Republican U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee condemned the federal health care law and the Obama administration to a crowd about 1,000 Utah Republican faithful Friday night.</p> <p>Cruz, speaking in front of a giant American flag, called President Barack Obama “the most lawless President” in the nation’s history, criticizing decisions from his administration to delay parts of the health law and deciding not to go after states legalizing marijuana.</p>

The state of Oregon received $303 million in federal grants—more than all but two other states—to build and operate a health insurance exchange, dubbed Cover Oregon, under Obamacare. One of those grants was a $48 million "early innovator" grant for states whose exchanges were intended to serve as models for the nation. The state was among the most enthusiastic about implementing the law, with Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber touting both the law and his state's work building the exchange. The state's work on its exchange recieved praise throughout the media, and it was reportedly loved by the Obama administration: In...

A new report on ObamaCare would tend to distract from the White House victory lap earlier in the month, and might even – gasp! — “re-open” the debate that Barack Obama insisted was closed. Don’t look for this information on the right-wing blogs, though. Vox’s Sarah Kliff, formerly at the Washington Post, warns that another class of policies will get canceled due to coverage mandates, and that will put some lower-income Americans in a fiscal bind: The Obama administration is quietly trying to stamp out some of the skimpiest health plans, a decision that industry officials say could trigger yet...

Most of the consumers who bought a private health plan from Florida Blue through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges between October and April were previously uninsured — one of many factors potentially leading to higher premium rates in 2015, according to a senior executive. Jason Altmire, senior vice president of public policy for Florida Blue, cited familiar reasons for a likely rise in rates next year. Altmire said “most” Florida Blue consumers who signed up for exchange plans have paid their first month’s premium, which is required to activate a plan. But he said many consumers remain uneducated about...

Health insurers and hospitals, usually on opposite sides, lined up together Tuesday to give Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler an earful about his proposed new rule for insurance-provider networks. Kreidler proposed the rule after complaints that consumers have been taken by surprise about narrower networks in insurance plans offered in the Affordable Care Act. Those networks exclude some of the region’s prominent hospitals and medical centers, meaning some consumers don’t have access to providers they expected to use. For example, only one insurer offering plans through the Washington Healthplanfinder online exchange includes Seattle Cancer Care Alliance in Seattle; only three include...