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The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday individuals who fail to get health insurance this year will be fined a maximum of $2,448 and families with five or more members can be fined up to $12,240. Under the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, people are either required to obtain health insurance or risk a tax penalty from the IRS Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/213308-uninsured-could-be-fined-almost-2500#ixzz38REt1dEt Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

President Obama’s plan to transform the U.S. health-care market is once again in trouble. This time, two Republican-appointed judges on a federal appeals court have invalidated a key portion of the program. In other words, the U.S. constitutional system is functioning normally. That’s not to say that the majority of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit correctly struck down the issuance of tax credits through the federal health insurance exchanges in 36 states — though it is true, as the judges said, that the law only speaks of “Exchanges established by the State.”...

... There is indeed Supreme Court precedent stating that courts can sometimes refuse to enforce the plain meaning of a statute where doing so creates an absurd result. But, as Judge Griffith’s D.C. Circuit opinion emphasizes (quoting an earlier DC Circuit ruling), it is limited to cases where enforcement of the text would “render[ the] statute nonsensical or superfluous or . . . create an outcome so contrary to perceived social values that Congress could not have intended it.” In this case, however, the result is far from nonsensical. Indeed, the DC Circuit’s interpretation of the ACA reflects the sort...

Federal officials have announced the structure and methodology for the amount of tax fines to be levied to individuals in non-compliance of federal Obamacare mandates. Under the plan announced today, the maximum tax/penalty an individual can be charged for failing to comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) often referred to as "Obamacare" will be $2,448 per person, while a family of five could entail a levy of $12,240. The decision that was announced today would initially impose on the citizenry a first year additional tax fine of $95 per person and be raised as much as 1 percent of...

G.K. Chesterton’s Prophetic Look at National Health Care Dale Ahlquist | 2-20-2012 | American Chesterton Society Blogweb.archive.org/web/20130811135205/http://www.chesterton.org/2012/02/a-prophetic-look-at-national-health-care-2/G.K. Chesterton considered himself a member of the Liberal Party until 1912. As he would later say, he did not leave the Liberal Party. It left him. He believed in something called liberty, the idea that people should be able to make most decisions for themselves, especially the most basic and most important decisions, and not have such decisions made for them by anyone else, especially by the government. He believed, as a liberal, that the State’s role was to preserve liberty, not take...

The Obama administration has filed a brief with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver indicating it plans to develop an alternative for Catholic and other religious nonprofit employers to opt out of providing federally mandated contraceptives they object to including in their employee health care coverage. Several media outlets, including AP, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, reported July 23 that the administration said it would come up with a "work-around" that would be different than the accommodation it currently has available to such employers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as part...

The Obama administration is coming under fire for once again making a unilateral change to ObamaCare -- this time, quietly exempting the five U.S. territories and their more than 4 million residents from virtually all major provisions of the health care law. The decision was made a week ago, and was a long time coming. For months, the territories have been complaining that the law was implemented so poorly in their regions that it destabilized their insurance markets. Until now, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed its hands were tied. But last Wednesday, the department reversed course. The...

The Supreme Court may soon need to decide whether the federal government can be considered a "state" in our federal republic in the same sense that Iowa, Wyoming and Wisconsin are states. On the face of it, this question may seem absurd. In fact, given any level of reflection, it is absurd. The federal government is not one of the states. But this absurd question was at the heart of Halbig v. Burwell, decided this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and it could soon become a defining issue in American life. Section 1311...

Today EJ Dionne wrote an article long on whining and short on logic about the conflicting decisions regarding Obamacare: By effectively gutting the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, two members of a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals showed how far right-leaning jurists have strayed from such impartiality. We are confronted with a conservative judiciary that will use any argument it can muster to win ideological victories that elude their side in the elected branches of our government. Strayed from impartiality? Say what? Then Dionne jumps off the cliff: The extreme judicial activism here is obvious when...

Health Reform: An undercover operation disclosed on Wednesday shows just how easy it is to defraud ObamaCare. This is your health care on government. To test administration claims that it had strict controls in place to verify eligibility and subsidy amounts for ObamaCare applicants, the Government Accountability Office sent a dozen people out to try enrolling with made-up identities. All but one of the 12 succeeded in enrolling in a subsidized ObamaCare plan. [snip] The scale of the problem is potentially massive. According to the GAO, 4.3 million ObamaCare applications have known "inconsistencies" — most of which involve questions about...

It’s not very often when one man, liable for the most destructive decision in a nation’s ideological history, is presented with an opportunity to eradicate his greatest transgression: empowering a socialist leviathan that became the greatest Trojan horse of excessive government in our history. The real question is, after an appeals court ruling struck down key components of the law and dealt John Roberts a temporary stay of stupidity, will he once again abandon 225 years of proven checks and balances, or will the Chief Justice inexplicably pardon Obamacare for a second time and reward those who lied about its...

Should the Obamacare law be enforced as written? No, the IRS is allowed to change it. I don't know. Yes, and let the chips fall where they may.

Two conflicting court decisions on tax credits for Obamacare have millions of consumers worried, along with some Republican governors who opted to let the federal government run their state programs. A decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit determined that only those enrolled in state-operated Obamacare exchanges are eligible for the tax subsidies that put the "affordable" in the Affordable Care Act, The Wall Street Journal reported. Should the ruling stand, Bloomberg News reports, customers in those 36 states could see their subsidies vanish, boosting their healthcare premiums by 76 percent, dealing a serious blow both to Obamacare...

It’s been almost one year since Minnesota rolled out its state version of Obamacare, called MNsure. How is this experiment with government-run health care working? Let’s start with the basic fact that Minnesota’s health care is second to none. Before MNsure, close to 97 percent of Minnesotans had health insurance coverage or were eligible to procure it at very low or no cost. This was among the highest percentage of insured people in the nation. Some $160 million in taxpayer money has been spent to launch MNsure, and we are no better off today. The state had two unique programs:...

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case was met with incandescent outrage from progressives. The overturning of a mandate never passed by Congress which had not existed prior to 2010 signaled, those who consider themselves members of a class of deliberative and reasoned thinkers said, evidence of a theocratic judiciary in the United States. Recognizing the indignation on their side of the aisle, the White House responded by reassuring their base supporters that this offense would not go unanswered. “Today’s decision jeopardizes the health of women who are employed by these companies,” White House Press Sec. Josh...

The nation’s No. 2 court on Tuesday slapped down the Obama administration in a 2-1 decision that could kill the president’s signature health-care law. A less-prestigious federal appeals court issued a contradictory opinion the same day, but if the Supreme Court upholds the DC Circuit’s ruling, it will force Congress back to the drawing board to design a health law that is genuinely affordable, not just falsely titled “Affordable Care Act.” The ruling in Halbig v. Burwell bars the federal government from handing out taxpayer-funded subsidies to people who buy ObamaCare plans in nearly two-thirds of the states — New...

It’s an odd world in which judges are accused of usurping the role of Congress for ruling that the executive branch must follow the text of a law Congress wrote. But that’s what has happened today. In Halbig v. Burwell, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Congress never gave the federal government power to provide subsidies and assess penalties under the Affordable Care Act in states that haven’t established their own health-insurance exchanges. President Obama and the Congress that passed the law assumed this wouldn’t be a problem: States were expected to go along and establish their own...

A pair of federal Appeals Court rulings have sown further confusion regarding ObamaCare, even as they illuminate stark differences in ideologically-inspired interpretations of the law. First, a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Americans are not entitled to subsidies for their healthcare premiums if they live in a state where the federal government set up a healthcare exchange.

The big news from yesterday is that the DC Court of Appeals ruled that Obamacare subsidies obtained on the Federal exchange are in violation of the law. The law states that subsidies are only available to people who buy Obamacare policies on a state exchange. Around 36 states don’t have exchanges, thus citizens in those states aren’t entitled to a subsidy according to the DC Circuit decision. This is significant because in order for employers to fall into the employer mandate an employee has to be eligible for a subsidy. In states without a state exchange, that’s no longer possible...

The Obamacare woes continue as an Oklahoma man spent three agonizing months trying to cancel his health insurance plan. David Emanuel’s 65th birthday last April, when he became eligible for Medicare, spurred him to cancel his private health insurance plan. He called BlueCross BlueShield to terminate the plan and was met with resistance. “They said, ‘You can’t do anything until healthcare.gov tells us that you can drop it,’” he said. He phoned healthcare.gov, but no one answered. Emanuel showed KJRH-OK the call logs displaying how long he waited to speak to a representative from the health care exchange. The call logs show that Emanuel waited 131...