Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some families could get priced out of health insurance due to what's being called a glitch in President Barack Obama's overhaul law. IRS regulations issued Wednesday failed to fix the problem as liberal backers of the president's plan had hoped. As a result, some families that can't afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own. How many people will be affected is unclear. The Obama administration says its hands were tied by the way Congress...

Surveys among medical doctors during the health care debate showed that one out of three physicians intended to leave the profession of Obamacare became law. With the law on the books, many in the medical profession are not going to wait for states to sue or courts to over turn, but are going to simply find something else to do.

President Obama has an unsettling defense of his health-care reform -- it's merely a version of the plan implemented by Massachusetts. Obama wants to associate his reform with the one championed by Mitt Romney in 2006 when he was governor of the Bay State. If the liberal Democrat Obama and the conservative Republican Romney passed similar plans, what can be so radical about Obama's reform? This is superficially clever. It not only gives Obama's plan a centrist patina, it shines a light on a significant obstacle to Romney's likely repeat bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Except for the fact...

How can we learn to say no? The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs. There will be a group to compare the effectiveness of different treatments, a so-called Medicare innovation center and a Medicare oversight board that can set payment rates. From an economic perspective, health reform will fail if we can't sometimes push back against the try-anything instinct. The new agencies will be hounded by accusations of rationing, and Medicare’s long-term budget deficit will grow. So figuring out how we can say no may...

The discussion over what parliamentary procedures will be used in reconciling the House and Senate versions of healthcare legislation is a pivotal -- but not the final -- factor in the process. Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles The House Rules Committee meets Saturday morning as Democrats kick off a weekend of parliamentary maneuvering, lobbying and arm-twisting in the healthcare debate ahead of showdown votes set for Sunday. President Obama will meet in the afternoon with House Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, about 24 hours before the House is set to begin voting on a healthcare insurance overhaul,...