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Although the Obama administration has yet to release the federal health care premiums for 2015, some private insurers have. One of them in Minnesota has indicated that they will be showing increases of up to 60% for their ACA-compliant policies. Preferred One, the largest and lowest-cost provider of health insurance in the state, pulled out of the state’s MNsure exchange last month due to its being “unsustainable.” Alycia Riedl, with the Minnesota Association of Health Underwriters, commented on the news:

In the last few months of 2013, Obamacare suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks dealing with everything from a clunky website to plan cancellations tothe White House feeling compelled to arbitrarily ignore the law.Since that time, though, people seem to have adapted to this new burden.But adaptation doesn’t mean approval. There are still serious problems with Obamacare, as evidenced by the fact that the Obama Administration has postponed implementation of various provisions 38 times!However, the White House wants us to believe the law is a success, even if that requires statistical contortions.So let’s look at the record.My Cato colleague Mike Tanner argues...

Everyday Low Benefits Wal-Mart dumps 30,000 part-timers onto the ObamaCare exchanges. Oct. 7, 2014 7:25 p.m. ET Wal-Mart endorsed ObamaCare in 2009 and helped drag the bill through Congress, and so far it hasn’t recanted. By holding back economic growth and incomes, perhaps the law is expanding the retailer’s customer base. Another plus—at least for management—is that Wal-Mart can jettison its employees into the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the largest U.S. private employer is dropping health benefits for some 30,000 workers, or about 5% of its part-time workforce. Earlier health-plan eligibility triage in 2011 had...

The Obama administration unveiled a new version of HealthCare.gov on Wednesday, with some improvements as well as at least one early mistake and a new challenge. Officials also said that HealthCare.gov won’t display premiums for 2015 until the second week of November. Open enrollment season runs Nov. 15 through Feb. 15. Coverage can start as early as Jan. 1. […] The goof is a mistranslation in large type on the home page of the Spanish-language version of the site. It’s the very first word on the page. Trying to translate “get ready,” someone came up with the wrong word in...

Thousands of Iowans are now facing double-digit health insurance premium hikes due to Obamacare. On Wednesday, the Des Moines Register reported that the state's insurance commissioner has approved Des Moines-based Wellmark to hike its rates between 11.9% and 14.5%. The premium spike will affect 19,000 Iowans. "That increase is for individual policyholders who have Affordable Care Act-compliant plans," reports the Register. CoOportunity, one of the main companies offering health insurance on the Obamacare exchange, will increase its rates 19%.

According to Fox News and several print media outlets tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people are about to be notified that their health insurance policies are being cancelled, thanks to Obamacare. That could mean bad news for liberals just weeks before 2014 midterm elections, except the broadcast networks have refused to report it. ABC, CBS and NBC news programs failed to mention the latest wave of policy cancellations as of Oct. 9. Plans that could not meet regulations mandated under the Affordable Care Act will no longer be granted a reprieve in thirteen states and the District...

On November 15, open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges begins again. Before the second act of our national healthcare drama commences, let’s review what we’ve learned in Act I. For starters, everyone now knows that federal officials are challenged when it comes to setting up a website. But they’ve demonstrated the ability to dole out a huge amount of taxpayers’ money for millions of people signing up for Medicaid, a welfare program. And they’ve proved they can send hundreds of millions of federal taxpayers’ dollars to their bureaucratic counterparts in states, like Maryland and Oregon, that can’t manage their own...

As the 800-pound gorilla of retailers, Wal-Mart made national headlines when it announced on Tuesday that it was cutting the health benefits for its 30,000 employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week. A company blog post put the move down to rising healthcare costs, but the 30-hour cut-off gives a clue as to the real cause - President Barack Obama's healthcare reform. Under the Affordable Care Act, large companies are required, starting this January, to provide subsidised healthcare for every employee who works 30-hours a week or more. As the Atlantic's David A Graham notes, many of the...

Walmart announced today that as of the beginning of next year it will be dropping health insurance for 30,000 employees who work less than 30 hours per week. So why is this a good thing? It may involve some hassle for individual employees, as they’ll have to go to the exchange to figure out what plan to get. But most of those Walmart workers will likely come out ahead. Someone who’s earning $9 an hour working 30 hours a week at a Walmart would be making $13,500 a year. Depending on what their spouse makes and what state they’re in,...

Wal-Mart says it's cutting health benefits to part-timers and boosting worker premiums. If a retail empire built on low prices can't find a way around ObamaCare's added costs, we are all doomed.

HealthCare.gov, the online portal where millions of Americans must by health insurance, will not display premiums for 2015 until after the 2014 elections ... Americans will not be able to find out if their health insurance premiums are going up "until the second week of November," which conveniently falls after Americans will go to the polls November 4th.

Obamacare enrollees are straining the finances of community health centers around the country, some health center leaders say. The issue is that many lower-income patients with insurance coverage through the federal and state exchanges bought bronze-tier plans with lower premiums but high deductibles, coinsurance and copayments and no federal cost-sharing subsidies. When these patients face high out-of-pocket costs for care that falls below the deductible, they can't afford it. So the centers are subsidizing that care by offering them means-tested sliding-scale fees. When the centers, which are not allowed to turn away patients for inability to pay, try to get...

ObamaCare defenders keep insisting that the law is a huge success while public approval continues to deteriorate, even among Democrats and especially among the uninsured. It's supposed to be the GOP's worst nightmare — President Obama's health care takeover turns out to be a success, proving once and for all that small-government conservatives are delusional. ObamaCare has, we're told, signed up more than expected while avoiding terminal rate shocks. In fact, a new report suggests premiums for "benchmark" Silver plans will actually be lower in many states next year....

The bill is coming due for ObamaCare and it’s a whopper. According to Medicare Care’s own actuaries U.S. health care spending is about to rocket. Federal meddling in what was once the finest and cost-effective health care system on the planet is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, many Americans paid for doctor and hospital services out of pocket or through modestly priced private insurance. Health care spending was about 6 percent of GDP. Enter President Johnson and Medicare. He bought millions of votes by giving seniors free health care that they never paid for through payroll taxes during their...

Syracuse, N.Y. -- Rate increases requested by health insurers offering "Obamacare" coverage through the New York's health insurance exchange have been cut by more than 50 percent. The state Department of Financial Services said today insurers offering individual coverage on the exchange had asked for an average increase of 12.5 percent for 2015. The department reduced the average increase to 5.7 percent. The state's action was praised by a consumer group and criticized by the insurance industry. "This is great news for consumers and small employers alike," said Elisabeth Benjamin, a co-founder of Health Care for All New York, a...

The Affordable Care Act cannot be broken down into sound bites. This holds true for both its most ardent supporters and its most fervent opponents. The law is simply too complex to be labeled either a total failure or a smashing success. But that doesn't mean it isn't trending in one of those two directions. Across the country, individuals and families are beginning to learn whether their insurance premiums will change for 2015—early estimates indicate an overall national increase of 7.5 percent, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. That's what is expected despite the early promise that the ACA would lower...

Supporters of President Obama’s health care law have been touting proposed insurance rates for 2015 — arguing that they aren’t as high as some of the dire warnings of the law’s critics.But it’s worth considering some additional context.Data complied by the Health Research Institute of PricewaterhouseCoopers from about 29 states plus the District of Columbia show that the average premium increase for insurance starting next year is currently 8.2 percent. But within that average, there’s a wide range.In Arizona, for instance, the average premium increase submitted was 11.2 percent, but rates ranged from a decrease of 23 percent to a...

Many businesses said Obamacare is jacking up their employee health coverage costs, and they expect it to do so even more next year, two new surveys of businesses by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have found. Not all firms surveyed said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to blame for those cost increases to date. But a majority did. About 20 percent of respondents to both surveys said they were reducing their number of workers and/or raising the share of part-time workers as a result of the ACA. "A similar proportion said they were paying less compensation per...

And they should know because they're the ones not collecting the premiums.Much of the left has been trying its best to push the notion that "ObamaCare is working," largely based on the announced enrollment total of anywhere from 8 million to 10 million that has come out of the White House. Since this was more than the 7 million they originally said they needed to make the system viable, viola . . . success!One problem: They counted everyone who enrolled, without regard to whether enrollees ever paid a premium. If you don't pay the premium, you're not insured and you're...

The number of Obamacare enrollments for top health insurer Aetna is plummeting, according to a report from Investor’s Business Daily. Aetna’s enrollment reached 720,000 by May 20, after the final end to the the extended open enrollment period. But by the end of June Aetna had less than 600,000 paying customers, IBD reports, and the company expects paying customers to fall to “just over 500,000″ by the end of 2015. That would be a drop of just under 30 percent from the May sign-up numbers — the last time the Obama administration released its official Obamacare enrollment tally. Aetna’s reported...