Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I've got so much stuff here today, folks, and I'm trying to figure out which I want to do first. Here's Obama with deportations, and here's Obama with determining who gets overtime, all of this is a distraction. It's all a distraction from what's happening with the economy and with Obamacare. I guess this is the big deal to me. We have this massive electoral victory on Tuesday in Florida, Florida 13. And I'll be damned if the Republican establishment is not doing its best in high gear to tell everybody, "Hey, don't think that Obamacare was...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Sunday that Republicans will repeal the controversial healthcare law after President Obama leaves office in 2017. Cruz became of the face of an unsuccessful effort to eliminate the healthcare law last year that resulted in a government shutdown. Most Republicans backed off the repeal-or-shutdown position after sustaining political damage during the two-week standoff in October, but Cruz promised on Sunday during an appearance on ABC News’s “This Week” to continue trying to get rid of Obamacare during the remainder of the president’s term. “I’ll give you one scenario where it could [be repealed before Obama...

ATLANTA, Mar. 3, 2014 – Today, the Georgia state house of representatives passed a bill which bans the state from participating in significant portions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). House Bill 707 (HB707), introduced by Rep. Jason Spencer, pushes back against the ACA in five ways. It passed the house in a late-night vote of 115-59. Specifically, HB707: 1. Prohibits any state agencies, departments or political subdivisions from using resources or spending funds to advocate for the expansion of Medicaid. This provision works hand-in-hand with HB990 to make it more difficult to expand Medicaid. HB990 would require legislative approval...

So how about this simple 2014 campaign idea: The Republicans, as a party, tell the voters that if they keep the House and recapture the Senate, they will immediately push for a three-year moratorium on Obamacare. On all of it: The mandates. The time extensions. The taxes. The regulations. The job losses. The reductions in hours worked. The part-time hiring. The website. The potential taxpayer bailout of insurance companies. The verification of income. The lack of personal security and threat of ID theft. And the whole wet blanket that Obamacare has thrown over the economy and the health-care system. The...

Washington, DC—Representative James Lankford (R-OK), Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, today introduced the House Joint Resolution legislative proposal for the Health Care Compact, a breakthrough governance reform that allows states to clean up the health care mess created by the federal government. “The Health Care Compact is a way for states to protect their residents from the top-down, one-size-fits-all health care ‘solutions’ that have been imposed from Washington DC, including Obamacare,” said Lankford. “The compact transfers health care decision-making authority and responsibility from the federal level to member states. Those member states are then free to implement their...

KRAUTHAMMER: Remember how Democrats were complaining that when Republicans were trying to overturn Obamacare, it was somehow unpatriotic because it was an attack on the law of the land. This law of the land doesn't even exist; it exists in Obama's head. It's whatever he thinks, he wakes up in the morning and decides what the law is going to be. That is an understatement, that's not the way it's supposed to work. And we had an editorial in The Washington Post of all places, not exactly a right-wing rag, saying that Obama has really overstepped the lines arbitrarily, changing...

The proposal...would solve the three core problems that called out for real reform even before the Democrats passed Obamacare: getting more people insured; dealing with the problem of preexisting conditions; and lowering costs.... It wouldn’t force anyone to buy insurance. It wouldn’t auto-enroll anyone in any plan. It wouldn’t reduce the tax break for employer-based insurance (aside from closing the tax loophole at the high end). It wouldn’t cost anywhere near the $2 trillion over a decade that Obamacare would cost. It wouldn’t undermine religious liberty. It would allow Americans to keep their current plan if they like it... [The...

With the President delaying, again, parts of Obamacare, House Republican Leader Eric Cantor and Speaker John Boehner have declared they will not raise the debt ceiling unless the President does two things: (1) delay Obamacare by a year and (2) approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. In fact, Congressman Paul Ryan is standing shoulder to shoulder with them, telling Robert Costa, “Shutting down the government puts us on the wrong side. The fight is on the debt limit”. Further, the GOP won’t even bother fighting on a continuing resolution because they feel so strongly the debt ceiling is the path forward...

1) 1 In 4 Voters Already Know Someone Who Has Lost Insurance because of Obamacare: One in four Americans have either lost their health insurance because of Obamacare or know someone who has, according to a new poll shared first with The Daily Caller. The YG Network Congressional District Poll of 1,652 likely voters in 11 competitive U.S. House districts indicates Obamacare will be a powerful issue that motivates voters in important races in 2014. Twenty-seven percent of respondents claimed knowing someone or personally receiving a health-insurance cancellation notice. 2) Almost all of the people signing up for Obamacare lost...

AOL Inc. blamed President Barack Obama’s health-care law for its plan to reduce its spending on contributions to employees’ 401(k) retirement plans. AOL, owner of websites such as the Huffington Post, will still match employee contributions to retirement plans up to 3 percent of their paychecks, Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong said. Under the new policy, it will make the matching payments in a lump sum at the end of the year, forcing employees who leave before then to forfeit the benefit, he said in an interview today on CNBC. “Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as...

‘The House should sharply reduce IRS funding until the agency is more responsive.” Well, I’d have omitted everything after “funding” but this was still an astute observation, offered at the conclusion of Thursday’s excellent Wall Street Journal editorial. I’m grateful to have smart guys on the team, even if slumming with us power-of-the-purse radicals may get them booted from the GOP’s “We’re only one-half of one-third” circle of submission. The editors were exercised over the revenue agency’s latest shenanigans, which include covering up its past shenanigans — the willful targeting of conservative groups in order to frustrate their opposition to...

When a locomotive crashes, it stops. Obamacare, on the other hand, just keeps on going like a cancer that’s ignored, perpetuating itself and destroying everything in its path. While we thought the health care act was a train wreck, it’s more like cancer. Discovering you’ve got a problem should be the first step on the road to recovery. You’re supposed to go in and confront it like you would if you found a tumor. You wouldn’t just leave it there, wondering what it was up to, hoping it would go away on its own. No, you’d enlist some help and...

The introduction of an Obamacare replacement plan by Republican senators Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) has given Obamacare’s apologists — who admittedly have had very tough duty over the past four years — a rare opportunity to get out of their defensive crouches and go on the attack. Not surprisingly, fast out of the gate has been Ezekiel Emanuel, who has a piece up at the New York Times website claiming that the fatal flaw of the Republican senators’ plan is that it would raise taxes on millions of American households. There are a couple...

Moody's rating agency has lowered the outlook for health insurers from stable to negative, blaming ObamaCare. Section 1342 of the Affordable Care Act forces taxpayers to make insurers whole for most of the losses incurred selling ObamaCare exchange plans through 2016. The bailout is designed to conceal the failure of the president's signature health law until he is out of office. No one in the Obama administration talked up the advantages of bailing out insurers. It was kept under wraps until the fall of 2013. As any business owner will tell you, a temporary bailout is no substitute for the...

Tennessee nullification legislation of Obamacare and all federal gun laws is being pushed by lawmakers in the Volunteer State. On one hand lawmakers are pushing new legislation, that if passed, would gut the implementation of Obamacare. On the other hand legislation that is an expansion of the 2009 Tennessee Firearms Freedom Act was introduced yesterday, which is designed to protect Tennessee citizens from Congress’ violations of the Second and Tenth Amendment. First, SB1680 is being sponsored by Sen. Mae Beavers (R-Mt. Juliet), along with eight co-sponsors in the Tennessee senate and a companion bill in the House by Rep. Mark...

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) - South Carolina lawmakers say they have found a way to stop implementation of the U.S. Affordable Care Act in their state, an effort that could provide a template for other Republican-led legislatures looking to derail the federal program. The proposed measure would ban state agencies from helping carry out President Barack Obama's signature healthcare reform law and prevent federal money flowing through state coffers from being spent on it, said Republican state Senator Tom Davis. The legislation would give South Carolina oversight of insurance rates offered through its federal exchange and require healthcare navigators, which...

It is an odd juncture in American politics when the president of the United States and the leading intellectual narrators for his political party are keen to ridicule individual liberty and limited government, cornerstones of the American constitutional tradition, as being outmoded and driven by contempt for minorities and the poor. Such conserving of liberty, according to Hannan, is urgently needed today. For us, though, the major threat comes neither from self-aggrandizing kings nor from foreign dictators, but rather from progressive elites who, in defiance of the historical record, depict the Anglosphere as uniquely culpable for the world’s ills and...

They’re nervous. “We are becoming increasingly concerned about momentum that is quickly building among some leading conservatives for elimination of the risk corridor and reinsurance programs,” [Blue Cross Blue Shield Association CEO Scott] Serota wrote…“Their efforts, along with growing support for repealing the risk corridor and reinsurance programs, could combine to create a perfect storm to, at a minimum, dissuade the Administration from modifying risk corridor program rules to provide increased funding in light of the recent ‘transitional policy’ allowing insurers to offer consumers the option to renew their 2013 health plans for 2014,” Serota wrote.In attached talking points, seemingly...

Where have we seen an anti-Obamacare threshold of two-thirds before? Oh, right. In this case, undecided voters basically fall into two categories. They're either pure independents, or they're low information voters who nonetheless say they're likely to go to the polls in November. It looks like the GOP is enjoying a significant advantage among both groups heading into the midterms -- including with those under-informed voters who are so often ripe for Democrats' picking. The perception that Obamacare stinks has calcified in the public's imagination, and it's tough to reverse those sort of sentiments, especially amidst powerful headwinds. Check out...

Echoing strategy that led to the October 2013 government shutdown, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says Republicans have opportunities to scale back Obamacare with deadlines looming on spending bills Jan. 15 and on a debt ceiling vote this spring — and is urging GOP lawmakers to use “every leverage point available” to uproot the law. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Cruz vowed to “fight even harder . . . to repeal every word of Obamacare,” calling the health care law "a disaster" and "the No. 1 job killer in the country." The feisty lawmaker sees a comparison...