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The frigid winter has gotten even colder for Barack Obama. President “selfie-stick” just got a snapshot of his troubled Affordable Care Act and it’s starting to resemble an unaffordable debacle. The latest snafu: Some 800,000 Americans who got their plans on the technologically toxic Healthcare.gov were given incorrect tax forms and will need to “amend” their filings. Don’t worry though, the correct forms are coming ... in March! Bad news if you’ve already spent your refund. By the way, you’re going to need that refund because anemic enrollment means fewer dollars in the pool and that means premiums will go...

Phony Numbers: The Obama administration says more than 11 million signed up for ObamaCare this year. Should anyone believe this number? Even if it's true, is it a sign of success? The answer to both is a resounding no.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell promoted Obamacare “in the spirit of Dr. King” on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, during a breakfast hosted by Al Sharpton. “African-Americans have the lowest life expectancy of any other race in this country,” Ms. Burwell said in a speech to the National Action Network, The Hill reported. But “thanks to the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “7.8 million African-Americans with private insurance now have access to expanded preventative services with no cost sharing.” Ms. Burwell’s speech comes as HHS ramps up its efforts to insure people ahead of next month’s

Marilyn Tavenner, the Obama administration official who presided over Obamacare’s worst debacles and most devious deceptions, has finally made an intelligent decision—she resigned. Tavenner ran the government bureaucracy responsible for the inept rollout of HealthCare.gov, the promulgation of phony PPACA enrollment figures, and the handout of legally dubious waivers to Democrat-friendly donors. And, when Congress subpoenaed her emails—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—she discovered that they had somehow been deleted. Having thus committed as many blunders as can be reasonably expected of any incompetent apparatchik, she announced last Friday that she will depart next month. The “news” media...

<p>After two constitutionally dubious delays, ObamaCare’s employer mandate took effect on Jan. 1 for employers with 100 or more full-time employees. The last open-enrollment date for our company, CKE Restaurant Holdings, Inc., was Dec. 4, 2014. As of that date, our company had approximately 20,000 employees, 6,900 of whom worked 30 or more hours a week and were eligible for ObamaCare-compliant health insurance. We elected to offer them coverage rather than pay the employer penalty, which would have sent workers to ObamaCare’s health-insurance exchanges, where those who qualified could receive federal subsidies to help pay for insurance.</p>

Marilyn Tavenner, head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, plans to step down at the end of February, she told her staff in an e-mail.As Bloomberg reports, Tavenner didn’t say why she was leaving.In November, she acknowledged that her agency had made a mistake in its calculation of the number of people enrolled under Obamacare. As a reminder... from November The Obama administration said it erroneously calculated the number of people with health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, incorrectly adding 380,000 dental subscribers to raise the total above 7 million. The accurate number with full health-care plans...

The leader of the agency charged with the ObamaCare rollout is stepping down after five years on the job. Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), announced her departure Friday, which will take effect next month. "It is with sadness and mixed emotions that I write to tell you that February will be my last month serving as the administrator for CMS," Tavenner wrote in an email to staff. Tavenner is leaving after five turbulent years overseeing the agency. Her tenure included the disastrous rollout of the government’s HealthCare.gov website as well as, most recently,...

MNsure says it will use the money to upgrade its website and address other ongoing issues. MNsure will receive an additional $34 million in federal funds to continue work on the state’s health insurance enrollment system.With the new money, total federal grant funding in support of Minnesota’s health insurance exchange is now about $189.3 million, according to an announcement Wednesday by MNsure.The money will fund improvements to the MNsure website, said Scott Leitz, the MNsure chief executive, during a board meeting Wednesday in St. Paul. It also will let MNsure address ongoing issues, Leitz said, such as invoices for people...

Some 87 percent of people who just signed up for Obamacare are getting financial assistance to lower their premiums, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. That is a jump from 80 percent during the last open enrollment period. ... includes more than 3.4 million people who selected a plan in the 37 states that are using the HealthCare.gov platform for 2015 Full Title: Tax dollars at work: 87% of new Obamacare users given federal aid

New York City resident Nicolas Karlson was happy to be one of at least 2.5 million people who beat a major Obamacare enrollment deadline last week, but he's going to be paying a lot more for health insurance next year because of it. To cover himself, his wife, Monica, and their three children, 45-year-old Karlson will go from paying $1,805 every three months for their long-standing Aetna plan, to a new one from New York State's Obamacare exchange that will cost them $1,221.60 per month, or more than 100 percent more than his old plan cost. That steep bump in...

Obamacare is easily on track to beat the administration's enrollment targets, with more than 6 million people already signed up for coverage. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said Tuesday that 6.4 million people have either selected new plans or automatically renewed their coverage. The 6.4 million people who selected plans through the federally run exchanges include about 1.9 million new customers. The rest are current customers who either automatically renewed their coverage or shopped for a new plan. People who automatically renew their policies are at risk for some of the biggest out-of-pocket premium increases anywhere in...

The Obama administration acknowledged Thursday it has been over-reporting the number of people signed up under the health care law, a discrepancy that congressional Republicans seeking to repeal the program say they uncovered. Administration spokesman Aaron Albright said that the overcount involved about 400,000 people. Those consumers have separate dental coverage in addition to a medical plan, and were double-counted by mistake, said Albright. They had purchased both the medical and dental plans through HealthCare.gov and state insurance markets created under the law. That means the correct number of people enrolled for medical coverage as of Oct. 15 is about...

The Obama administration’s much-touted enrollment figure of 7.3 million includes nearly a half-million people who have only purchased dental plans, the House Oversight Committee has found. Without the 400,000 people enrolled in dental-only plans, the total enrollment for ObamaCare drops to 6.97 million, according an investigation by the committee, which was first reported by Bloomberg News. “Instead of offering the public an accurate accounting, the administration engaged in an effort to obscure and downplay the number of dropouts,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the committee, wrote in a statement to Bloomberg. Enrollment figures have strayed from the initial 8...

Obamacare has apparently been cured. After the registration process was addled with technical glitches in 2013, the second enrollment period under President Obama’s health-care law launched on Saturday with few hiccups. Officials phased in the operation by allowing people to scout out potential 2015 plans the week before the launch, and have targeted uninsured people in nail salons, pizzerias and laundermats.

Next year, 35 percent of uninsured people would rather pay the upped fine for not having health insurance than buy Obamacare coverage — up 6 points from this time last year, when the penalty was hundreds of dollars lower. According to a Gallup poll released Thursday, 55 percent of the uninsured said they’re planning on getting coverage in 2015, but 35 percent are fine with just paying the individual mandate’s tax on going uninsured. In November 2013, just 29 percent of the uninsured said they were willing to pay the $95 fine in 2014 for remaining uninsured. But in 2015,...

Enrollment for small businesses under ObamaCare is falling short of the government’s expectations, according to a federal audit to be announced Thursday. About 76,000 people have enrolled in the state-run exchanges, a dismal total that nearly guarantees that the Obama administration will miss its target for small businesses, according to a report by the nonpartisan General Accountability Office (GAO) provided early to The Hill. The report confirms fears of many Democrats, who have acknowledged that last year’s botched launch would keep people from signing up. The bad news also provides new fuel for Republicans intent on dismantling ObamaCare in the...

There was strong opposition to Medicare before it went in to effect in 1965, but after that, the health program for seniors quickly became an accepted and even popular part of the U.S. medical system. Supporters of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s bold health reform law, often highlight the similarity to Medicare in terms of initial opposition. But Obamacare, as the ACA is known, is hardly catching on like Medicare did (at least not yet). In fact, the law suddenly seems more threatened than at any time since it was passed in 2010, and it’s now possible the whole...

The administration on Monday said fewer than 10 million Americans will enroll in Obamacare’s health exchanges this go-around, well short of the 13 million target congressional scorekeepers deemed critical to its economics, suggesting another rocky rollout in the law’s second year of full operation. Policy advisers at the Health & Human Services Department estimated that 9 million to 9.9 million people would enroll through the exchanges — or only a slight increase over the 8 million that the administration says were active at the end of the first enrollment period this April. The Congressional Budget Office, which is the government’s...

So the number "13" apparently is bad luck for Obamacare, too. Federal officials on Monday sought to lower expectations for upcoming enrollment in Obamacare, announcing that they now believe that only between 9 million and 9.9 million people will be enrolled in Affordable Care Act health insurance plans by the end of 2015. That is well below the 13 million people that the Congressional Budget Office has projected for Obamacare enrollment by the end of 2015. Open enrollment for 2015 plans resumes Saturday. The new projection, more than 30 percent reduced from the CBO estimate, comes from the Health and...

After repeatedly shifting the deadline for the end of ObamacareÂ’s open enrollment period in past spring, the White House crowed when it determined it had finally reached its goal of enrolling 8 million Americans in Affordable Care Act-associated insurance plans. Few in the press made mention of the administrationÂ’s downward revision of that figure in October from 8.1 to 7.1 million Obamacare enrollees. DonÂ’t expect many in the administration or the media to make much of another revision of the estimated number of projected Obamacare insurance customers for this yearÂ’s open enrollment period. Anticipating slightly less than 6 million...