Free Republic

County officials are starting to feel the pain of Obamacare. The Board of Commissioners has learned the various fees levied on large employers by the Affordable Care Act will cost the county nearly $1.5 million for 2014. In a memo to the commissioners, county Risk and Insurance Manager John Anderson said the fees are based on the county’s nearly 3,000 full-time employees who receive health care benefits. The largest cost, by far, is a 2.5 percent fee tacked onto health insurance premiums to help pay for the ACA’s online insurance exchanges and overall implementation costs. The first year price tag:...

Insurance companies working under the Obamacare umbrella have secretly added a surcharge to cover the cost of abortions, an apparent violation of federal law that forbids the practice, congressional leaders charge. Consumers signing up for insurance in an Obamacare exchange won't find a single sentence telling them that they will pay at least $1 a month to fund abortions.

Another hard lesson to learn for anyone that would trust in the myth of efficiency from a monolithic collectivism-based government to legislate any aspect of an individual’s life. Stories range from Maryland’s exchange director going on vacation (as the O-Care exchange website imploded) to dishonesty at the highest levels as Sebelius ducks questions on the “Lie of the Year.” Now this report of Washington state families who can’t pay their bills because the WA State Exchange is erroneously debiting funds from their bank accounts. ... For the second week in a row, the Washington Healthplanfinder website is down, and it’s...

Despite over 2,000 pages of legislative text, many key details of President Obama’s national health care law were left up to regulators to work out, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius given the lead role. The Obama administration wanted to avoid issuing potentially controversial health care regulations during an election year, but now that it’s over, regulations are starting to roll out. In a news dump this past Friday afternoon, HHS released 373 pages of new insurance regulations, and buried on page 299 is a proposed 3.5 percent monthly “user fee” to be levied on the premiums...

Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers. Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a "sleeper issue" with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers. "Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, (companies will) be hit with...

<p>The Obama administration is proposing a new way to finance the health law’s insurance exchanges: A fee levied on the insurers who sell in the marketplace.</p> <p>Health and Human Services will operate a health insurance exchange in all states that decline to set up the marketplace themselves. In order to finance the exchange’s operations, new draft regulations released Friday envision health plans paying a “user fee” if they want to sell in that space.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) — Starting in 2012, the government will charge a new fee to your health insurance plan for research to find out which drugs, medical procedures, tests and treatments work best. But what will Americans do with the answers? The goal of the research, part of a little-known provision of President Barack Obama’s health care law, is to answer such basic questions as whether that new prescription drug advertised on TV really works better than an old generic costing much less. But in the politically charged environment surrounding health care, the idea of medical effectiveness research is eyed with...