Free Republic

The firestorm over President Obama's blanket false assurances on Obamacare is only going to intensify, as more groups discover they have lost either their coverage or their doctor thanks to the health insurance changes imposed on the country without a single Republican vote. One of the biggest, yet so far almost completely ignored, changes is the looting of Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Now, it is starting to hit home. Evan Gahr of the New York Daily News recounts a story that will soon become very common among America's senior citizens: Obamacare has a new message to seniors: Take two...

NORTH NAPLES — United Healthcare is dropping hundreds of doctors from its Medicare Advantage plans in Southwest Florida, local physician medical societies say. The effective date is Jan. 1 for doctors affected to no longer be part of the network. ... Worse, she said, is that doctors aren’t being told why they are being dropped. Donahue said she’s trying to put together a list of the doctors and she knows that hospital-employed physicians aren’t affected, while it seems like smaller group practices are being targeted. “We are guessing it is cost-cutting,” she said. “We cannot discern anything else because some...

Wall Street investors hungry for advance information on upcoming federal health-care decisions repeatedly held private discussions with Obama administration officials, including a top White House adviser helping to implement the Affordable Care Act. The private conversations show that the increasingly urgent race to acquire“political intelligence” goes beyond the communications with congressional staffers that have become the focus of heightened scrutiny in recent weeks. White House records show that Elizabeth Fowler, then a top ­health-policy adviser to President Obama, met with executives from half a dozen investment firms in 2011 and 2012. Among them was Kris Jenner, a stock picker with...

(CNN) -- Millions of Americans who get their health insurance through the Medicare Advantage plan could soon be paying more for coverage, according to an announcement expected Monday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will announce on Monday the final Medicare Advantage rates for 2014, which are expected to be cut, saving the government money -- but potentially costing the public more.CMS had initially proposed a 2.3% reduction in what the government pays the insurance companies that provide the plans. Upset by that scenario, the insurance companies have spent the public comment period time lobbying legislators and running...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

Are you as shocked as Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY)? Somehow, I rather doubt it, and I don’t think Jason Mattera is as surprised as the front-page pic suggests, either. Confronted with the new CBO analysis that shows more than seven million Americans will lose their present health-insurance coverage from ObamaCare despite his repeated assertions that no one would lose their coverage, Rep. Engel tells Jason in this Andrea Tantaros Show video debuting exclusively at Hot Air that Congress can always go back and fix what's not working.Funny --- Jason doesn't recall that being mentioned as an option, and neither do...

Though Democrats denied it during the 2012 campaign, Obamacare cut Medicare by $716 billion in order to partially fund $1.9 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next ten years. A big chunk of those Medicare cuts came from the market-oriented Medicare Advantage program. Cleverly, the Obama administration postponed the Medicare Advantage cuts until after the election, so as to persuade seniors that everything would be just fine. But the election is over. On Friday, the administration announced that it would be significantly reducing funding for the popular program. Obama’s proposal, according to one analyst, “would turn almost every plan...

A proposed federal rule to cap profit margins for certain health insurance plans and prescription drug benefit programs is now available for review. The latest in a raft of rules required by President Obama’s landmark healthcare law, the proposed rule was drafted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and sent to Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday. The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is moving quickly to issue the proposal, which will hit the Federal Register on Tuesday. That begins a 60-day comment period. CMS will consider all comments before finalizing the rule. The 116-page...

~snip~ 2. It is pretty apparent that the Obama Administration will do pretty much anything to get Obama re-elected. But this takes the cake: $8 billion of federal money from the Department of Health and Human Services that is available for experiments, will instead be used to extend the Medicare Advantage program that ObamaCare would have curtailed. Medicare Advantage is a program very popular with seniors, and the money shuffling will extend the program through the date of the elections. An experiment to judge a program that is already in effect? huh? The cuts in Medicare Advantage were part of...

Medicare: Backers like to say the more people know about ObamaCare, the more they'll like it. So why is the administration spending $8.3 billion to hide a key provision from millions of seniors until after the election? That's precisely what administration officials are doing right now as a way to mask the effect of ObamaCare's deep cuts to the popular Medicare Advantage program. Championed by Republicans in 1997, Medicare Advantage offers seniors an escape valve from the creaky, government-run Medicare insurance program. The idea was that private insurance companies could better manage costs than the government's own top-down insurance plan,...

Call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department. Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B. Here is how it works. The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters. More “flexibility,” he recently explained to the Russians. But certain...

Outside of the unions, there was perhaps no group more ardent in its support of Obamacare than the AARP. The advocacy group spent $121 million on advertising in favor of Obamacare, and millions more lobbying for it on Washington DC. But now AARP’s insurance business, Medigap which competes with Medicare Advantage (a program AARP lobbied to have hamstrung by OBamacare), just got a waiver from complying with the law. ... Keep in mind, again, that AARP is set to rake in billions in profits now that Obamacare has effective knocked Medicare Advantage out of the market.

Nancy Pelosi warned us we’d have to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it. And what we’re finding we don’t like at all. Higher insurance premiums are hitting families hard. Medicare Advantage has been decimated. Millions will be forced into government-run Medicaid where long lines and rationing await. If we like our insurance -- too bad. Beginning January 1, 2011, more than 15,000 over-the-counter (OTC) health care items will require a prescription (and that means a doctor’s visit) for tax-free reimbursement. Under Obamacare, OTC drugs cannot be reimbursed tax-free from Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)...

AS I SEE IT Congress must repeal Obama's health-care rationing plan By SEN. PAT ROBERTS Special to The Star SNIPPET: "U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Dodge City, Kan., is a member of the Senate Health and Finance committees. He voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." SNIPPET: "It has scarcely been three months since the new health reforms, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), were signed into law. Unfortunately, as I and many of my colleagues predicted, the promises made to the American people by the president and the majority are already unraveling. The...

In the full-circle department, recall the moment last September when Senator Max Baucus and Medicare went after the insurer Humana for having the nerve to criticize one part of ObamaCare. It turns out those same regulators have different standards for their own political advocacy. This week Medicare sent a flyer to seniors, ostensibly to inform them of what ObamaCare "means for you." Many elderly Americans are worried—and rightly so—about where they'll rank in national health care, given that the new entitlement is funded by nearly a half-trillion dollars in Medicare cuts. They must have been relieved to hear that "The...

With Medicare, individuals must choose one of two paths: original fee-for-service Medicare, or a federally subsidized private Medicare Advantage plan, which typically operates like a health-maintenance or preferred-provider organization. Over the next 10 years, the new health-care law will divert some $132 billion from Medicare Advantage... This has sparked concern that these plans may reduce benefits, raise premiums, or both. Also starting in 2011, Medicare Advantage participants who want to switch to another Advantage plan will have to do so in Medicare's six-week annual election period from Nov. 15 to Dec. 31. Previously, participants also were permitted to make a...

The ink was barely dry on President Barack Obama's signature before the RAND Corp. released a report concluding that, not only would the hard-won health care package fail to curb health insurance premium increases, but the bill itself would drive premiums for young people up as much as 17 percent. This should not have been a surprise: the Congressional Budget Office had already warned that the plan would do almost nothing to reduce premium hikes. And when New York implemented the same type of insurance reforms in the 1980s, it led to an increase of nearly $500 per year for...

It’s a favorite talking point among opponents of reform that the new health reform law will threaten Medicare or weaken guaranteed benefits for seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans – when the truth is that law strengthens Medicare and overall health care for our seniors. When it comes to Medicare Advantage, the new law simply puts these privately-administered plans on equal footing with traditional Medicare by cutting wasteful subsidies that pad insurance company profits. More broadly, the health reform law signed by the President strengthens Medicare by taking aggressive new steps to fight waste, fraud, and abuse within the system...

Politics: Sen. Mary Landrieu was the new "Louisiana Purchase." Sen. Ben Nelson got the federal government to pick up his state's future Medicaid tab. Maybe we should just put Senate votes up on eBay. Nelson, the 60th vote in the middle-of-the-night Senate party line vote on health care reform, will go down in American political history as the inventor of the permanent earmark. His seemingly principled stand against including federal funding for abortion evaporated like the morning dew as he decided to take what was behind door No. 1. The deal for Nelson includes special Medicaid funding for Nebraska, along...

Free Speech: The Senate votes against transparency as the administration silences a private insurer for exposing the president's health care proposal. Meanwhile, AARP is allowed to tout reform as it awaits payday. We weren't surprised when the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday voted 12 to 11 against allowing two weeks for the Congressional Budget Office to complete its cost analysis of the health care bill pushed by Montana Democrat Max Baucus and to put the bill online in its original wording. Instead, the Senate panel passed another amendment to require the committee to post the full bill online in "conceptual"...