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Spending on health care grew an astounding 9.9% in the Bureau of Economic Analysis' advance estimate of first-quarter GDP. It's the biggest percent change in health-care spending since 1980, when health-care spending jumped 10% in the third quarter. Analysts said it's primarily due to a consumption boost from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Adjusted for inflation, America is spending more on health care than ever before.Personal consumption grew by 3.0%, about half of which was due to the growth in health-care spending, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. "If health-care spending had been unchanged, the headline GDP growth number would have...

President Obama is doing his victory dance, telling us how his health care plan has become a success because his more than his targeted number (8 million) clicked their desire to have health insurance on a website. We will soon see how many are real policyholders, and later we will see their real costs as everything shakes out with co-pays and renewals next year. What we do know is that Medicaid is a pending disaster waiting to happen. When the Obamacare registration period started we were regularly hearing about all those new Medicaid sign-ups. Then we did not hear about...

Have you ever wondered why ObamaCare is burdened with so much complexity? Here's the answer: Barack Obama. Obama? Yes, the president himself. He campaigned on the promise that he would put partisanship aside and unite the country behind sensible answers to pressing problems. Then he didn't. How could that possibly have worked in health care? Easy. Obama could have adopted the approach taken by his 2008 opponent, John McCain. In fact we now know that Zeke Emanuel and others on the White House staff were urging him to do just that. Also, before he became the president's chief economic adviser,...

Getting teens to sign up for the Affordable Care Act and learn how to obtain contraceptives through Obamacare, was the focus of an event hosted by the D.C. Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy at the Church of Scientology’s National Affairs Office in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, a gathering that featured officials from the Health and Human Services Department and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) . Wilma Robinson, deputy director of the HHS Office of Adolescent Health, said she was attending to explain “the impact of the Affordable Care Act on adolescents,” which she defined as girls and boys...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) admitted Friday it’s “difficult to turn the clock back” on ObamaCare, but proposed making the law voluntary as a possible fix for consumers. “I think it’s going to be difficult to turn the clock back. People get assumed and accustomed to receiving things, particularly things that they get for free,” he told a crowd of students at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Friday. Paul’s comments echo those of other Republicans who have admitted it will be difficult to fully repeal the law after some of its more popular provisions took effect. The potential 2016 presidential candidate...

Earlier today, Oregon became the first state-run health exchange to adopt the federal HealthCare.gov exchange portal. After receiving more than $300 million dollars in federal grants, the state struggled to sign up private insurance enrollees through their own online portal, Cover Oregon. Due to these difficulties and the projected costs of fixing the exchange, a technological advisory committee recommended to Oregon’s exchange board on Thursday that the state transition to using the federal exchange, rather than attempt to fix its existing exchange. Today, state officials approved the advisory board’s recommendation. Examining the cost projections between the two options, state officials...

Millions of Americans fall into the 'coverage gap' where they do not get Medicaid, but are too poor to qualify for federal subsidies on the new insurance exchanges.

The Illinois Medicaid program paid an estimated $12 million for medical services for people listed as deceased in other state records, according to an internal state government memo. The memo dated Friday, which The Associated Press obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the state auditor compared clients enrolled in the Medicaid database with state death records dating back to 1970. Auditors identified overpayments for services to roughly 2,900 people after the date of their deaths... Republicans have pressed for the state to use a private company to verify Medicaid eligibility. Maximus Health Services was hired to scrub...

Republicans “still can’t bring themselves to admit that the Affordable Care Act is working,” President Obama told a news conference on Thursday. He also took aim at states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs:“This does frustrate me—states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid for no other reason than political spite. You got 5 million people who could be having health insurance right now at no cost to these states—zero cost to these states—other than ideological reasons they have chosen not to provide health insurance for their citizens.”But some governors, pointing to President Obama’s own broken promises, simply don't...

Washington state has blown past its targets for signing up new Medicaid participants under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The program’s ranks have grown roughly 25 percent in the past six months, helping fulfill one of the act’s key goals to provide health care to nearly all Americans. But with enrollment success comes the challenge of serving more people in a $10 billion program that’s already stretched thin in places. Some of the new enrollees haven’t seen a doctor in years and need help navigating the health-care morass. Medicaid patients already struggle to get care in parts of the state...

Four years after Obamacare became law, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is notifying Medicare providers and suppliers of new fingerprint-based background checks. Eventually, all individuals who hold a five percent or greater stake in a Medicare supplier or provider that is categorized as "high risk" will be subject to the requirement. The provision is part of the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP Program Integrity Provisions (Title E) of the Affordable Care Act, and gives the HHS secretary broad discretion in applying the background check requirements depending on the potential for abuse, fraud, and/or waste. The new requirements are...

Lost in the overall shuffle concerning the many problems with Obamacare’s exchanges is the central problem of enforcement of those aspects of the law the president hasn’t waived or delayed yet – including the particular challenge when it comes to verifying the immigration status of those applying for taxpayer subsidized insurance. On April 1st, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a new guidance document to health insurers. The CMS guidance says that people whose immigration status is uncertain will be presumed eligible for subsidized coverage in Obamacare’s marketplaces while a further review is pending. Emphasis mine: If there...

It may be water over the dam, but one report on the potential impact to employers if Michigan did not adopt the Obamacare Medicaid expansion has been exposed as being essentially bunk due to flagrant misuse or misrepresentation of the data it cited. This is worth noting because the claims from Jackson Hewitt were widely cited by Republican lawmakers here who supported the expansion, and probably tilted others into that camp. Its conclusion was that "employers may pay substantially higher federal tax penalties under the ACA (Affordable Care Act) in states that do not expand Medicaid." Jackson Hewitt estimated Michigan...

Millions of Americans who didn't have health insurance last year now do, as a result of the Affordable Care Act. In Lane County, Oregon, Trillium Community Health Plan is struggling to deal with a huge influx of new patients. CEO Terry Coplin says they expected 26,000 people to sign up in the first few years. Instead, about that many signed up in the first few months. "We weren't expecting to get such a large assignment of patients in the first two months," says Coplin. "These patients who are coming onto the program, many have not seen a physician for years....

Sally Kohn, a “progressive” homosexual activist and writer at the Daily Beast, makes some mighty tall claims in her column from Tuesday, “New Poll Shows Voters in Red States Want to Expand Medicaid.” Citing several polls, including one from NPR and one commissioned by MoveOn from Public Policy Polling, she claims that the popularity of Medicaid expansion in conservative states is now soaring. The leftist polling also indicates that 75 percent of Americans nationwide support the expansion of Medicaid, and the claim is that the “overall” popularity of Obamacare is rising. But, Kohn insists that Republicans are desperate to create...

Vance McAllister, the Louisiana Republican who got elected to Congress on Saturday after being endorsed by Duck Dynasty's Willie Robertson, supports amnesty for all of the country's illegal immigrants. “We have to secure the borders, but (citizenship) has to be attainable for those people already here,” he told Thetowntalk.com before the election. “It has to be a tough path, but it has to be attainable.”

The number of Americans who were enrolled in Medicaid at any time during fiscal 2013 exceeded the entire population of the United Kingdom, according to new data published by the federal government’s Medicaid and CHIP Payment Access Commission (MACPAC). Were Medicaid a nation instead of a U.S. entitlement program it would be the 20th most populous country on earth. …

And here I bet some of you thought the 2013 elections were over, didn’t you? Well, they were for the most part, but given the variations in election laws and special circumstances from state to state, there’s always some action brewing someplace. In this case, the congressional seat in Louisiana’s 5th district was open due to Republican Rodney Alexander’s resignation earlier this year to take a job with the Jindal administration. That required a special election, which began earlier this fall. Because of Louisiana’s somewhat unique election structure and the fact that nobody got more than 50% of the vote,...

Mr. McAuliffe stated,point blank,he would not engage in partisan skullduggery to affect the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare at the expense of the Virginia State budget, yet that is exactly what he is doing. Less than six months after taking office, Mr. McAuliffe is not only doing “a 180” on his campaign promise not to hold the budget hostage to his whim, but doing so at the expense of the State budget and the well-being of State government. So what does it mean when we say Gov. McAuliffe and his Progressive and Democrat stooges will hold the budget hostage in...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration often touts that people with pre-existing conditions and countless others can now get covered under ObamaCare. But there's another group that's starting to benefit from the law -- prison inmates. Cash-strapped state and local prisons increasingly are using the Affordable Care Act to pay for their inmates' medical costs, taking advantage of a little-known provision that lets them shift some of those expenses to the federal government. Ohio, Illinois and Iowa are among the states trying to offload the rising costs of health care – which include mental health programs – by enrolling inmates into...