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Minnesota's Democratic governor said Wednesday that the Affordable Care Act is "no longer affordable," a stinging critique from a state leader who strongly embraced the law just a few years ago. Gov. Mark Dayton made the comments while addressing questions about Minnesota's fragile health insurance market, where individual plans are facing double-digit increases after all insurers threatened to exit the market entirely in 2017. They follow cost concerns and criticism nationwide, including President Bill Clinton saying last week that the law was "the craziest thing in the world" before he backtracked.

UnitedHealth Group has been sued by three customers who accused the largest U.S. health insurer of charging co-payments for prescription drugs that were higher than their actual cost and pocketing the difference. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Minnesota by three UnitedHealth customers, seeks to represent a nationwide class that it says could include "tens of thousands" of people insured by UnitedHealth. The lawsuit said Minnesota-based UnitedHealth and affiliated companies charged customers co-payments for drugs that were significantly higher than prices it negotiated with pharmacies for those drugs. For example, the lawsuit claims, one class member paid a...

The projected Electoral College vote count hasn't changed from last week's polls, but Donald Trump is narrowing the margin with Hillary Clinton in several states. WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Donald Trump gained support in nearly every state in the past week, expanding leads in some and gaining on Hillary Clinton in several other key swing states, a state tracking poll released by UPI/CVoter on Monday indicates. Trump gained support in 45 of the 50 states, as well as in Washington, D.C., with the biggest shifts coming in Idaho, Mississippi and Minnesota, in Monday's release, which includes polling data gathered...

While the NO HANDGUNS sign is cut off in this photograph, it clearly shows that the Crossroads Center, where the Islamic mass stabbing terror attack took place, was and is posted as a Gun Free Zone.In Minnesota, the sign has no legal weight.  Minnesota law prevents malls from banning guns from the common areas, but malls are not prevented from asking that visitors not carry guns.  The sign reads “please while shopping”.  That makes it a request, not a command.The difference can easily be lost on a someone who is not well schooled in the niceties of the law. ...

Minnesota’s individual health care market is in “an emergency situation,” the state’s top industry regulator said Friday, noting that it took the approval of massive rate increases to persuade all its remaining insurance companies not to pull out for next year. After a major insurer’s exit from the market earlier this year, the state scrambled to convince the seven remaining companies to continue offering plans to those residents who aren’t covered by an employer or through a public program, Department of Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said. The state agreed to rate increases that range from an average of 50 percent...

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Health insurers are hiking premiums and limiting enrollment in Minnesota’s individual market next year, with regulators saying the emergency measures were needed to avert a market collapse. The moves are a clear sign that the market for some 250,000 people who buy coverage for themselves is dysfunctional and needs reform, said Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman during a Friday news conference. While rate increases of more than 50 percent aren’t fair to consumers, Rothman said, things could have been worse. He described a period this summer when all health insurers in the state seemed prepared to abandon that segment of the...

It took only seconds before Kibet made the connection: Someone had broken in and rifled through the team’s belongings. In the hallway, he saw the stairwell door closing at the end of the corridor. Kibet did what comes naturally: He ran. With his pack on his back and dress shoes on his feet, he flew down five flights until he reached the bottom floor of the Courtyard Marriott, where he found a man with his teammates’ bags. “I got a knife,” the man told Kibet, and then he ran. Kibet briefly pondered what to do, then gave chase, keeping his...

Shortened title. Full title: Minneapolis taxpayers must pay public housing rent for Somalis that spend their income on travel back to Somalia What a deal! Come to the United States, and if you spend your income (even that from welfare and refugee programs) on travel to Somalia instead of paying your rent in public housing, whey the suckers taxpayers of Minneapolis will pick up the tab. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports (via Refugee Resettlement Watch): Public housing residents in Minneapolis will no longer need to pay their normal monthly rent when travel abroad erases their income, a change particularly sought by...

Emphasizing the need for congressional action, farm groups renewed their call for reform of Clean Water Act enforcement, following release of a report documenting how federal agencies overreach their authority to regulate farmland. The report, issued last week by the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, describes numerous incidents in which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency have tried to expand their authority to regulate what crops farmers grow and how they grow them, based on the agencies' interpretation of the act.

FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that the man who stabbed and wounded 10 people in a central Minnesota mall before he was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer appears to have been inspired, at least in part, by extremist ideology.      While testifying for hours before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, Comey was asked whether authorities had confirmed that the attack earlier this month in a mall in St. Cloud was an act of terrorism. Comey responded that the FBI is "still working on it," but that it looks like Dahir Ahmed Adan, 20, appears...

Full title: Exclusive–Caddell: Breitbart/Gravis Polls Show Trump, Clinton Tied in Minnesota with Pennsylvania, North Carolina Tightening In Minnesota, Clinton and Trump are tied with each having 43 percent of the vote, said Doug Kaplan, the managing director of Gravis Marketing, the Florida-based polling firm that executed the poll.

Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell told Breitbart News: “Trump is closing everywhere and states that have not been in play are coming into play, like Minnesota.” Caddell said those states that had been considered battleground states are not moving as fast, but all are inside the margin of error. In the battleground states, the Clinton campaign has built the infrastructure and made the investments, so they have the ability to fight there what is becoming a national tide, he said. “Part of that is because the Clinton campaign, well both campaigns, but particularly the Clinton campaign has spent so much of...

Stabbing 8 people. Quite the achievement. The media, which never misses a chance to whitewash a Muslim terrorist, rushed out with the Muslim Minnesotta mall family's supposed condolences. Adan's family, in a statement through their attorney early this week, asked the community not to "rush to judgment or conclusions." They expressed sympathy to the victims and said they're cooperating with the investigation. "Our family loves St. Cloud and this State and we are [an] integral part of the fabric of this society," the statement said. "Therefore, we urge citizens of St. Cloud and of this State to stay united and...

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson warned Sunday that Americans should be “particularly careful” shopping at malls this weekend following a specific terrorist threat. Terrorist group al-Shabaab released a video calling for attacks on shopping malls in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom, which included mention and images of the Mall of America in Minnesota. “I would say that if anyone is planning to go to the Mall of America today, they’ve got to be particularly careful,” Johnson said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The al Qaeda-linked group was responsible for the deadly Nairobi, Kenya, mall attack...

A German expert who evaluated six Minnesota men who pleaded guilty to trying to join the Islamic State group has developed counseling plans for each of them aimed at keeping them off the path of violence. He has also trained 20 to 25 local probation officers in his techniques. Daniel Koehler, who directs the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies in Stuttgart, sat down with a small group of reporters Wednesday to discuss his work. He was joined by the chief U.S. probation officer for Minnesota, Kevin Lowry. […] Minnesota is the first place in the U.S. to try...

Gun rights advocates have a new hero. Jason Falconer, a part-time police officer who killed an attacker wielding a knife Saturday at the Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud, Minn., earned high praise from local officials as well as his own trending hashtag on Twitter. “He was put in unfortunate circumstances. I believe there was divine intervention,” Corey Nellis, the police chief in the neighboring city of Avon, said at a news conference Monday. “I think he was the person that needed to be there to prevent it from being worse than it was.”

At a press conference addressing a jihadist attack in Minnesota, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) warned Muslims are now potential victims at risk of being harmed in retaliation. CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding operation. The St. Cloud, Minnesota, mass stabbing occurred at the city’s Crossroads Center mall on Saturday night. A Somali man allegedly shouted, “Allah,” as he stabbed nine people before he was shot dead by an off-duty officer. All nine victims stabbed at the Crossroads Center mall...

ST. CLOUD, Minn. (WCCO) — WCCO’s Esme Murphy spoke with a top community leader who has been working with the family of Dahir Adan since Saturday night. Haji Yussuf, the founder of the anti-Islamophobia group Unite Cloud, said that Adan left his family apartment to go pick up his new preordered iPhone at the T-Mobile store inside the mall. “He went out to get an iPhone. He was very happy, he was joyful leaving home,” Yussuf said. He says Adan left the apartment he shared with his father at about 7 p.m. He drove to the mall which is less...

(CNSNews.com) – Almost 100,000 Somali refugees have been resettled in the United States since 9/11, including 8,619 so far during the current fiscal year. The largest number – some 16 percent of the total over the past 15 years – have been resettled in Minnesota, home to the nation’s biggest Somali-American community. Of the 97,046 Somali refugees admitted to the U.S. since the fall of 2001, 99.6 percent were Muslim, and 28,836 (29.7 percent) were males between the ages of 14 and 50.