Free Republic

Health insurer Aetna Inc said on Wednesday it will exit the 2018 Obamacare individual insurance market in Delaware and Nebraska - the two remaining states where it had offered the plans. Aetna had previously announced plans to exit the individual commercial market in Virginia and Iowa. It has now "completely exited the exchanges," the company said in an emailed statement. The insurer attributed the losses to "marketplace structural issues, that have led to co-op failures and carrier exits, and subsequent risk pool deterioration." Aetna said it had 964,000 individual commercial plan members as of the end of 2016, but that...

More American voters approve of the Affordable Care Act now than they ever did under the previous administration, which enacted the law — even as support is slipping for the GOP alternative that Republicans are now shepherding through Congress.A new Morning Consult/POLITICO poll shows that 50 percent of voters strongly or somewhat approve of Obamacare, while 42 percent disapprove of the 2010 health law. On the other hand, 38 percent of voters say they approve of the American Health Care Act, versus 44 percent who disapprove of the GOP measure meant to replace the ACA.House Republicans narrowly passed an...

Thanks to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the healthcare policy pronouncements of late night comic Jimmy Kimmel are back in the headlines. This is terrible news, because Kimmel's statements represent everything that is wrong about this nation's healthcare debate. For those just catching up, Kimmel's entrance into the world of healthcare punditry started earlier this month, when he discussed in emotional terms the birth of a newborn son with a heart condition, and the medical intervention necessary to save him. Now, it should be said at the outset that I'm sure that what Kimmel and his family went through was incredibly...

ObamaCare: Republicans who voted for the American Health Care Act are doomed. The bill will push 24 million off health insurance. It will be terrible for those with pre-existing conditions. These are the claims being made about the GOP's plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare. And they are everywhere: Every time a Democrat speaks, on the nightly news, on late-night television, at town halls. But wait a minute. Who exactly is making these claims? Oh, right, the very same people who predicted that ObamaCare would be a great success. Remember? They said ObamaCare would be a huge political win for...

Critics of Republican U.S. Rep. Dave Brat and the House health care bill he voted for packed a raucous town hall meeting in his Virginia district Tuesday night, booing and shouting down the congressman from start to finish. Brat is the latest in a series of lawmakers across the country who have gotten an earful from constituents at town hall meetings since last week’s passage of the House health care bill that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. […] A former economics professor who defeated then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a historic 2014 upset, Brat briefly discussed...

Jimmy Kimmel returned to his late-night show after a week-long absence Monday, where he used his monologue to update his audience on the health of his newborn son and confront those who criticized his widely-watched monologue on the subject during a broadcast last week. The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host unloaded on Republican lawmakers in his first monologue back Monday, and called on Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La) to explain why “the vast majority of Republican politicians” are against Americans having health care coverage. But before that, Kimmel addressed the reaction he received after he made an emotional plea last week for...

Are you ready for the mock funerals in defense of Obamacare? One Manhattan real estate investor has started a super PAC aimed at defending the law using shock tactics. From Politico: “We must be far more visceral,” said Jason Haber, a Manhattan real estate investor who started a super PAC that he said will host mock funerals — including “tombstones, coffins, even eulogies” — later this month for “the constituents that will be killed as a result of losing access to health care.” Haber, who has worked in New York Democratic politics, said “in the age of Trump, nothing short...

Republican senators said it’s unclear whether their chamber will repeal all of the taxes imposed under Obamacare as they set aside the health-care bill passed by the House and prepare to write their own from scratch. “That’s hard to say right now. We just have to see,” said Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican whose panel oversees health-care and tax policy. “It’s going to be negotiated.” The uncertainty comes despite what Hatch said on the floor of the Senate in February, when he called repealing the Obamacare taxes essential, labeling them “harmful to the economy.”...

RICHMOND, Va. - Health insurance companies say they need large rate increases to cover their costs for individual health plans sold in Virginia next year. Preliminary rate requests for 2018 recently filed with the State Corporation Commission average a 28 percent increase among the seven companies offering individual plans. Some major insurance companies, like UnitedHealth Group and Aetna, are pulling out of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchange in Virginia next year.

This program is destined for failure. Emmanuel (an Obamacare architect) said people should die at 75 because they are no longer productive. And the Murdoch sons have made him a FoxNews contributor???

If you’ve only followed coverage of the Republican health-care bill loosely in the media, you might believe that House Republicans, after much effort, passed legislation to deny people with pre-existing conditions health insurance. The issue of pre-existing conditions has dominated the debate over the GOP health-care bill out of all proportion to the relatively modest provision in the legislation, which is being distorted — often willfully, sometimes ignorantly — into a threat to all that is good and true in America. The perversity of it all is that the legislation is properly understood as doing more to preserve the...

Insurance companies offering individual health care plans in D.C. want to increase premiums from 13 percent to nearly 40 percent on average. Four major insurance companies have submitted health insurance rates for 2018 to the D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking for review. This will be the fifth year of open enrollment on DC Health Link, the District’s health insurance marketplace under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. In the individual market, CareFirst has proposed an average rate increase of 39.6 percent for HMO plans and 19.7 percent for PPO plans. Kaiser proposed an...

There’s corruption in DC... This concept comes into clear view when we look at ACA and AHCA, better known as Obamacare and Trumpcare. These two “competing” bills are so similar one would think the same people who support one would support the other, but the exact opposite is true. It’s divided along party lines. In fact, nobody is on record supporting both, though some Federalist-minded politicians were wise enough to support neither. Congressman Justin Amash reluctantly supported the latter. He was so disgusted by the necessity to support AHCA as the lesser-of-two-evils that he penned a response to his vote...

Despite his voiced desire to stay out of the political theater, former president Barack Obama returned again to defend his presidency and speak out against his successor Donald Trump. The former president has repeatedly spoken out against Republicans and their policies, facing a sharp reversal of his presidency. “I want to be quiet a little bit and not hear myself talk so darn much,” Obama said to reporters during the last press conference of his presidency. But it’s clear that the president has no intention of staying out of the public spotlight. On Sunday, the president urged members of Congress...

Take yes for an answer The Democrats and the liberal media are still pushing their dishonest rhetoric about what’s not in the Republicans’ American Health Care Act, and the damage it’s supposedly going to do to people. All lies! As I wrote on Sunday, pre-existing conditions are taken care of through a high-risk pool funded to the tune of $130 billion over 10 years. But the liberal media and Democrats keep pushing the lie that they are not covered. Scare tactics 101!

The stupidity of the American voter. If you spend any time following politics, you’ll run across idiotic arguments. When backed into a corner, those who operate in the political sphere often employ a “throw anything at the wall” defense where they desperately hope to wriggle their way out of a tight spot with some outlandish claim. It rarely works. Usually, they just end up sounding like morons. That said, I have NEVER heard someone try something as utterly and completely asinine as what ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber tried yesterday. I mean, the following clip is so astonishing in both its...

Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, where he was awarded the Profiles in Courage Award, Obama said a lot of freshman Democratic lawmakers found themselves tossed into the healthcare debate when they arrived in Washington. Though they knew voting for Obama's healthcare bill might be unpopular back home, Obama said they felt it was the right thing to do. "They had a chance to insure millions … but then this same vote would likely cost them their new seats, perhaps end their political careers," he said. "And, these men and women did the right thing. They...

AHCA: Myth vs. Fact MAY 04 2017 I have a pre-existing condition. How does this bill affect me? Under our plan, insurance companies cannot deny you coverage based on pre-existing conditions. And your health status cannot affect your premiums, unless your state asks for and receives a waiver—a condition of which is the state having other protections in place for those with pre-existing conditions. Even if your state does obtain a waiver, so long as you’ve been continuously covered, you still cannot be charged more. And the bill provides added resources to help people in waiver states who have not...

Quite a weekend. Frost warnings all across the MidWest: Spring Frost, 1919, Elioth Gruner In and effort to win the hearts and what’s left of the minds of the American public Democrats went on the Sunday shows to wail about the black hearts of Republicans and their healthcare plan which will “kill thousands of people.” Even the chief architect of the Obamacare disaster took to the airwaves to explain how Trump is the one responsible for Obamacare’s implosion: …said the man who told us it was “the stupidity of the American voter” that required him to obfuscate (lie about) the...

There isn’t one. With the American Health Care Act dominating the week’s news, one conversation has been unavoidable: Someone — someone who pays attention to public policy — will suggest that we pursue policy x, y, or z, and someone else — someone who pays a little less careful attention, who probably watches a lot of cable-television entertainment masquerading as news — responds: “The first thing we have to do is acknowledge that health care is a human right!” What follows is a moment during which the second speaker visibly luxuriates in his display of empathy and virtue, which is,...