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President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to weaken the Obamacare law and make it easier for Americans to buy bare-bones health insurance plans, but the action faces possible legal challenges. Stymied in Congress by the failure of Senate Republicans to pass legislation to dismantle Democratic former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, Trump’s order marks his administration’s latest effort to undermine the law without action by lawmakers. Trump’s order gives people more access to plans that do not cover essential health benefits such as maternity and newborn care, prescription drugs, and mental health and addiction treatment....

The White House announced Thursday that President Trump is taking executive action on health care as Congress stalls on efforts to overhaul ObamaCare, calling for a plan that could let employers band together and offer coverage across state lines. An executive order Trump plans to sign Thursday morning aims to offer “alternatives” to ObamaCare plans and increase competition to bring down costs. “The time has come to give Americans the freedom to purchase health insurance across state lines, which will create a truly competitive national marketplace that will bring costs way down and provide far better care,” Trump said in...

President Trump promised to replace Obamacare, but so far has only suggested modifying it. He should replace the Obama approach to health care. Medical costs cause the price of health insurance to be too high for some to afford. Obamacare attempted to deal with high insurance rates by forcing healthy people to buy health insurance. A better approach would recognize that it isn't practical for profit-making insurance programs to pay for expensive to treat chronic disorders such as those associated with alcohol or tobacco use. Special programs could be set up to cover such disorders. Taxes on alcohol and tobacco...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Oct 9 2017 Ferguson asks court in Seattle to declare new rules unlawfulSEATTLE — Attorney General Bob Ferguson today filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the Trump Administration’s new rules undermining women’s access to contraception.The new rules would allow any company to deny coverage for contraceptive services to its female employees based on religious grounds. Additionally, certain types of organizations would also be able to deny this coverage on moral grounds. If allowed to go forward, President Trump’s rules could have a significant impact on the more than 1.5 million Washington workers and their dependents who receive...

Synopsis of video: Trump is demolishing Obamacare, piece by piece. brick by brick. 1. He is reducing enrollment in Obamacare by slashing outreach funds and cutting back on hiring people whose job is to sign up new enrollees. 2. More importantly, Trump is creating viable alternatives to Obamacare: a. Obamacare has a provision for "short term programs" which don't have to cover everything. Those in these short term programs are expected to sign up with Obamcare after a few weeks. Trump has changed the definition of "short term" and made it up to 1 year and beyond. b. Trump is...

Groups charged with enrolling as many people as possible in Obamacare's insurance marketplaces say the Trump administration didn’t give them credit for signing up thousands more people for Medicaid when the administration dramatically slashed their federal funding this year. The groups known as "navigators," created under the Affordable Care Act to help people obtain coverage, are under fire as Republicans and the Trump administration fight the 2010 law that has provided health coverage to more than 20 million Americans. After attempts to roll back the ACA failed in Congress, Trump's Health and Human Services Department is now targeting the navigators,...

Having provoked much progressive sputtering and head spinning last Friday by issuing new regulations weakening the notorious HHS contraception mandate, President Trump is poised to sign an executive order that will further dry up Obamacare’s regulatory morass. The Wall Street Journal reports that the order will expand enrollee options restricted by the Obama administration — allowing coverage to be purchased through association health plans, encouraging the sale of short-term medical insurance, and permitting pretax funds from health reimbursement accounts (HRAs) to be used for premiums on health plans. The impending order has already drawn satisfying charges of “sabotage” from Obamacare...

Spend some time on the Twitter feed of the “Sassy Gay Republican,” and at first it all seems pretty simple. He can't stand “liberals.” He thinks universal health care is extremely suspect. And he loves President Trump, in case that wasn’t obvious. Just another anonymous Twitter personality with 30,000 followers riding the #MAGA train, right? But then things got complicated. The 21-year-old Mesa resident, Alex Newman, was in a collision on the 202 on September 12, while he was working as a pizza-delivery driver. In the aftermath, his decision to crowdfund his bills on GoFundMe is raising eyebrows. Newman found...

WASHINGTON — Stymied in his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Trump is poised to issue an order that could ease some federal rules governing health insurance and make it easier for people to band together and buy coverage on their own, administration officials said Saturday. One official said the directive could move the president a step closer to one of his longstanding goals: allowing consumers to buy health insurance across state lines. Conservatives say that interstate sales could expand options for consumers, increase competition in the insurance market and perhaps lower costs. The order, which the administration...

The Trump administration is taking a hatchet to ObamaCare after failing to pass legislation through Congress repealing President Obama’s signature law. The administration has cut funding for advertising and outreach by 90 percent, raising the odds that fewer people will join the health-care exchanges during the fall enrollment period. It has slashed funds by 41 percent for outside groups that help reach and enroll likely ObamaCare consumers.

President Trump reached out to the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, on Friday to propose yet another effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but Mr. Schumer later said he had quickly shot down the offer. Mr. Trump’s phone call, which he announced in a tweet on Saturday morning, was his latest overture to Democrats, after reaching a bipartisan spending deal and forging an unexpected, if tentative, alliance on immigration with Mr. Schumer and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi. The president has vented frustration with the serial failure of Republicans in the Senate to strike down the...

Obama Administration Used Confidential Taxpayer Information to Push Obamacare It’s Government Gone Wild Time In Washington, DC Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Mueller Russian Special Counsel Budget Obama Administration Used Confidential Taxpayer Information to Push Obamacare Your Judicial Watch uncovered yet another Obama IRS scandal – and one that includes the massive Health and Human Services (HHS) running Obamacare AND the Obama White House directly! We received two productions of documents, 77 pages and 108 pages , from the IRS revealing that the Obama IRS coordinated with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Obama White...

The Trump administration announced today that employers will now be exempt from the federal requirement to provide insurance coverage for abortion-causing drugs in their health insurance plans if it conflicts with their sincerely held religious or moral beliefs. This now limits a rule created under the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act that required that employers, including non-church religious organizations, must cover all forms of contraception, from birth control pills to abortion drugs and devices at no cost to the employees. The Trump administration stated legal reasons for issuing two rules: one for religious and the other for moral objections. The...

One of the enduring mysteries of the Trump era so far is how the president maintains the steadfast loyalty of many of the Republican Party’s key constituent groups despite the fact that his presidency has been a long series of blunders, bumbles, pratfalls and screw-ups, all against a backdrop of White House chaos and naked corruption. I have a theory to explain it, one that can be seen in today’s big news that the Trump administration has issued a rule to dramatically cut back the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate and in the administration’s ongoing sabotage of the ACA in...

The Trump administration on Friday announced a major rollback of the ObamaCare contraceptive mandate, granting what officials called “full protection” to a wide range of companies and organizations that claim a “religious or moral objection” to providing the coverage. The decision swiftly ignited a new battle over the Affordable Care Act. Republican lawmakers and faith-based groups hailed the decision as a win for religious liberty, while Democratic officials and groups like Planned Parenthood accused the administration of attacking women’s rights. By early afternoon, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it was filing a lawsuit challenging the change.

Make no mistake: Bobby Jindal is far and away the best choice to replace Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services. Dan McLaughlin at NRO and Steve Berman at The Resurgent both made the case earlier this week for why President Trump would be wise to pick Jindal, whose health-care policy chops and general seriousness about good governance are undisputed. Berman notes that, among all the other candidates floated recently by Axios and Politico, “Jindal is the best qualified person to run HHS, to craft health care policy, to shepherd legislation through Congress, and to speak intelligently on...

Bernie Sanders' 'Medicare for All' is Good for None (and Young Bernie Sanders Agrees) The good news in Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan is that it has no chance of passing. Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled a single-payer healthcare plan called “Medicare for All.” Sanders titled his approach for nationalizing one-sixth of the American economy as “Medicare for All” in order to offer a template for his vision of the U.S. healthcare system. Unfortunately, using Medicare as the template for the nation’s healthcare system is a little like using the production model for the Lada, the “people’s car” of the...

The Internal Revenue Service was involved in a $5 million push to pressure Americans to buy Obamacare coverage, according to documents obtained from the watchdog group Judicial Watch. Under former president Obama, the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House's Behavioral Sciences Team created a $5 million program to target and pressure those who refused Obamacare and either decided to pay a penalty instead or were exempt from being forced to purchase coverage. "Attached are drafts of the letters that IRS will send to selected taxpayers who paid a penalty for failure to have coverage or who...

Prayers were requested in August and answered for Sophia, daughter of FReeper lilyramone, a sick little girl. Good news. I'll post an excerpt from a recent email from her. She thanks everyone for their prayers and Glory be to God for the answers! :::Three days before we were to leave for Boston, Sophia's stroke team in Dallas scheduled a meeting with us. When I arrived I was shocked to hear every department (Neurology, Neurosurgery, Hematology, Pediatric Neuro-radiology, etc) told me they advised against the surgeries at this time. They told me she may need these surgeries in the near future...but...

The latest iteration of Obamacare repeal has likely failed. Senate Republicans were unable to pass a watered-down repeal effort that offered states some meager level of federalism in the form of block grants. Now, we're again going to hear a lot of noise about the need to embrace a "bipartisan" approach to fix health care. "Since nearly every promise we made with Obamacare has failed, you now have a responsibility to save it": To many, this might seem like a shamelessly counterintuitive thing to say, but it's very popular among Democrats. The problem is that any effort that further entrenches...