Free Republic

Amid the controversy over Uncle Sam singling out politically conservative groups, Matt Drudge took to Twitter on Monday morning to offer his take. Linking the IRS scandal to President Obama‘s health care law, the Drudge Report creator foreshadowed civil war, an “American Holocaust,” and a “brave new president.” Recently, Sarah Palin, too, drew a connection between health care and the IRS, noting that the “same corrupt” agency “will be in charge of enforcing Obamacare.” Drudge weighed in thusly — including some interesting hypotheticals: (TWEETS AT LINK)

In the last few weeks, numerous Hawaii healthcare industry leaders have stepped forward to create deniability for themselves in the upcoming Hawaii Health Connector/Health Exchange disaster. Those who are implementing Obamacare in Hawaii are now putting themselves on the record explaining that Obamacare will mean higher insurance premiums, fewer doctors and nurses, and shuttered hospitals. Here are their statements, accumulated in one place so that it can be clearly seen that many of those who are in charge are predicting failure: HMSA Chief Predicts Obamacare 'Rate Shock' for Hawaii Maui News May 9, 2013: If Hawaii consumers think health care...

Many small-business owners worry that a new tax on insurance providers in the health-care law will mean higher premiums for them, undermining the law’s capacity to lower their health-care costs. Starting next year, the federal government will charge a new fee on health insurance firms based on the plans they sell to individuals and companies, known as the fully insured market. Meanwhile, the provision exempts health-insurance plans that are set up and operated by businesses themselves (the self-insured market). Revenue from the tax will help pay for the health-care overhaul, which is expected to extend coverage to millions of uninsured...

en. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Wednesday he fears a "train wreck" as the Obama administration implements its signature healthcare law. Baucus, the chairman of the powerful Finance Committee and a key architect of the healthcare law, said he fears people do not understand how the law will work. "I just see a huge train wreck coming down," Baucus told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a Wednesday hearing. "You and I have discussed this many times, and I don't see any results yet." "Small businesses have no idea what to do, what to expect," Baucus said. Citing anecdotal...

As Democrats grow increasingly worried that ObamaCare will explode on the launch pad just as midterm elections get going, the Obama administration seeks to pin blame on Republicans. Good luck with that. Earlier this week, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she didn't realize how complicated getting ObamaCare off the ground would be. Sebelius complained that "no one fully anticipated" the difficulties involved in implementing ObamaCare, or how confusing it would be with the public. She wasn't talking about the massive and impossible task of imposing central planning on one-sixth of the nation's economy. Instead, she was...

Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation. The law calls for a new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses, starting next year. But in most states, employers will not be able to get what Congress intended: the option to provide workers with a choice of health plans. They will instead be limited to a single plan. This choice option, already available to many big businesses,...

An exhaustive study by three congressional committees delivers startling news about the dire effects of Obamacare: President Barack Obama’s signature legislation could increase health insurance premiums by over 200 percent and render insurance coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans. Broadly, the new report declares that Obamacare “breaks its core promise” to make healthcare coverage affordable. The report, “The Price of Obamacare’s Broken Promises,” was prepared by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Majority Staff; Senate Committee on Finance, Minority Staff; and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Minority Staff. “Studies and analyses from the Congressional Budget Office,...

The Democrats knew what they were doing when they deferred the implementation of most provisions of Obamacare until after the 2012 election. What is surprising, really, is that Obamacare has been so unpopular, given that most of its baleful effects have not yet been felt. But it won’t be long now. The Associated Press reports that health insurers are warning of massive price increases beginning next year: Some Americans could see their insurance bills double next year as the health care overhaul law expands coverage to millions of people.

The Affordable Care Act is looking less and less affordable. Start with the IRS’s new estimate for what the cheapest family plan will cost by 2016: $20,000 a year to cover two adults and three kids. And that will only cover 60 percent of medical bills, so add hefty out-of-pocket costs, too. The next surprise is for parents who thought their kids would be covered by an employer. Sloppy wording in the law left that unclear until last week, when the IRS ruled that kids won’t be covered. Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more...

According to projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), entitlements and ObamaCare spending will comprise 53 percent of all federal spending over the coming decade, totaling $24.9 trillion. In its updated Budget and Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday, the CBO projects that Social Security will account for $11.149 trillion in spending from 2014 to 2023 while federal health care entitlements, including Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare, will spend $13.85 trillion. (That total includes TRICARE, CHIP, and “other” spending listed by the CBO under healthcare.) ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies, exchange costs, and other spending are expected to cost the government $949 billion...

President Obama's health care law will push 7 million people out of their job-based insurance coverage — nearly twice the previous estimate, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday. CBO said that this year's tax cuts have changed the incentives for businesses and made it less attractive to pay for insurance, meaning fewer will decide to do so. Instead, they'll choose to pay a penalty to the government, totaling $13 billion in higher fees over the next decade. But the non-partisan agency also expects fewer people to have to pay individual penalties to the IRS...

Smith & Nephew eliminated nearly 100 jobs in Memphis and Andover, Mass., on Thursday, Jan. 31, as the medical device company cuts expenses in an effort to offset tax hikes included in the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act includes a 2.3 percent medical device tax, which took effect Jan. 1. The London-based company, which employs about 1,800 people in Memphis, said the new tax will cost the industry about $30 billion over 10 years. “(The tax) has impacted a number of companies across the U.S.,” said Joe Metzger, senior vice president of corporate communications. “Smith & Nephew is...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some families could get priced out of health insurance due to what's being called a glitch in President Barack Obama's overhaul law. IRS regulations issued Wednesday failed to fix the problem as liberal backers of the president's plan had hoped. As a result, some families that can't afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own. How many people will be affected is unclear. The Obama administration says its hands were tied by the way Congress...

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for family of five will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan. “The annual national...

The excited grins we saw in the sea of faces at Barack Obama’s second Inauguration told us we lost and the socialists won. They made sure we understood that. Liberal talking heads on television and radio as well as in print and in the blogosphere have been taunting us since November and there is no reason to think they will stop any time soon. Their jobs are now safe for as far as the eye can see. “..segment of Obama supporters are learning that elections have consequences and being on the winning side doesn’t guarantee good times ahead. America’s college...

In 2013, the tax increases in Obamacare will increasingly conspire against kitchen-table family healthcare decisions. As just one example, below are some of the taxes that will impact the purchase of dental braces: Obamacare Medical Device Tax: As of Jan.1, Obamacare imposes a new tax of 2.3 percent on medical device manufacturers, including those who make dental braces. The tax is imposed on gross sales -- even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. While the tax will be paid to the IRS by the manufacturer, the tax will be passed along as a higher...

Moe Lane highlighted a number of business in several states that are cutting their employees’ hours (when they’re not actually laying off employees), to prepare for the coming asteroid-strike that are the Obamacare taxes. The IRS, which is in charge of enforcing the bazillion-page monstrosity, recently decided 30 hours is the new “full-time” and so tens of thousands of workers will find their hours cut from a normal 32-40 down to 29, so their bosses can afford to keep them on the payroll. The whole cycle of government action/business reaction/government overreaction was as predictable as an Obama campaign speech but...

President Obama will deliver a second inaugural address later this month. He’ll no doubt reflect on what he’s done during his first four years in office — and on his signature healthcare law in particular. Let’s reflect with him. During his first campaign for the presidency in 2008, the president promised that his health reform plan would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family” by the end of his first term. Well, that first term is just about up. And health insurance isn’t any cheaper. In fact, it’s more expensive. Premiums have increased by an average of $3,065....

Remember that Nancy Pelosi told us that we needed to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it. Barack Obama promised to “bend the cost curve,� too. Looks like both of them were right, at least according to the Paper of Record, which discovers to its surprise that dumping nebulous mandates on insurers causes them to bend the cost curve sharply upward (via Instapundit): Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid...

Senate Democrats who helped pass ObamaCare are finally seeing what is in it and aren't really so sure the massive tax increases mandated in the legislation will be good for their constituents, especially when it comes to the medical device tax which is set to further increase on January 1. With some of their most influential constituent groups facing onerous tax increases that are slated to help fund the law’s mandates and regulations, Senators like Al Franken (D-MN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Patty Murray (D-WA), John Kerry (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and...

<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>

There is an antique saying -- no less true for its antiquity -- that you need to be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. This came to mind when I read a recent report about what is happening at a Pennsylvania college. One of President Obama's most loyal -- not to say fawning -- constituencies clearly is academia. His rate of support among collegiate faculty and administrators surely approaches near-unanimity on the typical campus. This is why the news about the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is so richly ironic. CCAC has just announced...

Exactly two years ago this week, the Obama administration announced it had issued more than 100 waivers en masse to a select group of companies, unions and other health insurance providers seeking relief from the onerous federal health care law. The Obamacare waiver winner's club now totals 2,000. Where are they now? Answer: In the same miserable boat as every other unlucky business struggling with the crushing costs and burdens of the mandate. Among the first and most prominent recipients of the Obamacare waivers for favors were large restaurant chains that provide low-wage, seasonal and part-time workers with low-cost health...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: A bunch of CEOs are in Washington. These people are beside themselves. They're having to hire outside consultants to pore through the Obamacare legislation and advise them, tell them what they have to do to comply. And they are asking for some kind of relief. You've got John Schnatter at Papa John's pizza, the Applebee's people and a number of other restaurant chains are saying, "We have no choice." If they're gonna keep our products priced where they are, which is the price they've all determined is the most sensible for profit stability and affordability for customers,...

Operative Faith reveals that Kroger will soon join the ranks of Durden Restaurants and slash the hours of its non-exempt (hourly) workers to avoid millions in Obamacare penalties. To give you a sense of Kroger’s size and importance, its sales last year were $90 billion and it employs nearly 350,000 people. Most of its jobs are hourly and the vast majority of workers are neither millionaires or billionaires. Faith is a mid-level manager at Kroger and reports the dire news: Last week we found out that, beginning in January, any employee who is not full-time at that point,will be limited...

Obamacare’s coming. Love it or hate it, President Barack Obama’s re-election Tuesday cleared the last major hurdle toward implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Businesses are being forced to take a fast and hard look at how to handle the shift in health-care benefits and potential costs that are part of the law that goes fully into effect in 14 months. “This is here to stay,” said J.D. Piro, a senior vice president at Aon Hewitt who leads the company’s health law consulting group. “I’ve been saying for a couple of years this is by and large an...

As local employees sign up for their 2013 benefits, many are learning that they’ll lose a bigger chunk of their paychecks to health-care costs. For the first time, central Ohio employers will deduct, on average, more than $2,000 from their workers’ paychecks next year to help pay ever-pricier health-care premiums, according to a recent survey by benefits consultant Aon Hewitt. The survey included 113 employers in the Columbus area that represent 79,000 employees. Cost-shifting is just one way that employers have long tried to handle higher health-care costs. Local health-benefit experts say they’re seeing several other strategies emerge, too. For...

Some low-wage employers are moving toward hiring part-time workers instead of full-time ones to mitigate the health-care overhaul's requirement that large companies provide health insurance for full-time workers or pay a fee.Several restaurants, hotels and retailers have started or are preparing to limit schedules of hourly workers to below 30 hours a week. That is the threshold at which large employers in 2014 would have to offer workers a minimum level of insurance or pay a penalty starting at $2,000 for each worker. Pillar Hotels & Resorts this summer began to focus more on hiring part-time workers among its 5,500...

Freedom Works has put together a list of companies that will be laying of employees as a result of President Barack Obama's health care law: Welch Allyn Welch Allyn, a company that manufactures medical diagnostic equipment in central New York, announced in September that they would be laying off 275 employees, or roughly 10% of their workforce over the next three years. One of the major reasons discussed for the layoffs was a proactive response to the Medical Device Tax mandated by the new healthcare law. Dana Holding Corp. As recently as a week ago, a global auto parts manufacturing...

A former Merchant Navy seaman died after doctors refused to resuscitate him because medics made him the subject of a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order without consulting him or his family. John Flockhart, 79, suffered a cardiac arrest and died in hospital despite his daughter begging medics to revive him, an inquest has heard. Doctors had previously ruled any attempt to revive him would be “futile”, despite the family claiming they had never been informed or consulted. Sharon Flockhart "begged" a nurse to try to resuscitate her father. She said: "It felt that I was pleading for my father's life,"...

Under ObamaCare, companies of more than 50 workers who do not provide health-insurance coverage have to pay significant fines, although not nearly as costly as the insurance itself. That alone might have employers bailing out of the health-insurance market, but the Orlando Sentinel reports that at least one company is testing a way to avoid both costs. Employers do not have to provide health-insurance coverage to part-time workers under ObamaCare as long as they work less than 30 hours a week, and one restaurant company has begun experimenting with changing over entire staffs to part-time work to avoid the ObamaCare...

In case you didn't know, the beginning of October marked the point where, under Obama(Doesn't)Care Section 6001, physician-owned hospitals are banned from being started, existing ones prohibited from expanding. This improves our health care system how? It doesn't. But just keep saying everyone's covered, covered, covered. We're all covered, covered, covered. Covered, covered, covered. Like a bunch of freaking sheep. Free colonoscopies! Free condoms! Free free free! Covered covered covered! Republican war on women! Ryan hates Grandma! Romney hates Big Bird! Free free free! Covered covered covered! Meanwhile, things aren't going terribly swimmingly in the U.K., whose utopian health care system was...

The Cleveland Clinic is owned by doctors. But thanks to Obamacare it's illegal for doctors to own hospitals. Section 6001 of the health care law effectively bans new physician-owned hospitals (POHs) from starting up, and it keeps existing ones from expanding. It has already halted the development of 24 new physician-owned hospitals and forced an additional 47 to struggle to meet the deadline to complete construction, according to the Physician Hospitals of America (PHA). You couldn't build the Cleveland Clinic today if you wanted to.

U.S. spending on health insurance grew at an accelerated rate in 2011, breaking a two-year trend of smaller cost increases. The culprit, a new study suggests, is not Americans seeking more treatment but rather rapid growth in the price of medical care. Spending for private health insurance surged by 4.6 percent in 2011, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute. That growth rate is faster than the rest of the economy and higher than the previous year, which had 3.8 percent growth. Average spending on a private insurance patient rose to $4,547 in 2011, compared with $4,349...

A Christian-owned chain of hobby shops is facing a bitter backlash after suing the Obama administration over new requirements to provide insured employees with contraceptive and abortion coverage. .....

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional budget analysts are now estimating that nearly 6 million Americans — most of them in the middle class — will have to pay a tax penalty for not getting health insurance once President Barack Obama's health care law is fully in place.

This puppy's going viral, so we might as well hop aboard the train and toot the horn a few times. Here's medical doctor and Illinois State Senate candidate Barbara Bellar summarizing the president's unpopular healthcare law in a single, tortured sentence: (Video at link) The transcript, via Ed Morrissey: So, let me get this straight. This is a long sentence. We’re going to be gifted with a healthcare plan that we’re forced to purchase and fined if we don’t, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people without adding a single doctor but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,...

A year and a half after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, bureaucrats at the IRS and Health and Human Services issued an 18-page report outlining new regulations that will dramatically increase health care costs for small and large businesses alike. The regulations, written by an IRS attorney, arbitrarily redefine "full time employee" as someone who works 30 hours a week for a business. Traditionally, most private businesses have defined "full time employee" as someone who works 40 hours a week. With this new regulation, the federal government is now removing the right of businesses to...

The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday assured congressional lawmakers that agents would play no role in enforcing the controversial requirement that Americans buy insurance under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. "IRS revenue agents will not be involved. There will not be audits," IRS Deputy Commissioner Steven Miller told a subcommittee of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

U.S. health insurance premiums have climbed faster than wages and inflation this year, and look poised to accelerate in 2013, adding to voter concerns about soaring healthcare costs ahead of November elections for the White House and Congress. A study released on Tuesday showed that premiums for employer-sponsored health plans, which cover about 149 million Americans, grew a modest 4 percent to $15,745 in 2012. It was a substantially slower rate of growth than in past years, including 2011, when premiums jumped 9 percent. But the study's authors at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational...

Skaneatles Falls, NY -- Welch Allyn told employees at companywide meetings this morning that it plans to cut 275 jobs, or about 10 percent of its worldwide workforce. The uncertainty surrounding the future of the Obama health care package is creating turmoil in the domestic market, [Chief Executive Steve Meyer] said. Hospitals and doctor offices aren't investing in new equipment until they see how the health care issues will play out, Meyer said. Welch Allyn and other medical device makers face a new federal tax hike come January when a new 2.3 percent tax on sales of medical devices called...

Note to amateur grammarians: Don’t try to diagram this sentence at home. Via Andrew Malcolm, a physician running for the Illinois State Senate sums up ObamaCare in one sentence — one very long sentence, but still just one. Dr. Barbara Bellar brought down the house at a Romney event in August with this perspective-setting description of the Affordable Care Act, which already has over 340,000 views but which I’ve just seen for the first time: gainst my better judgment, I decided to transcribe this video: So, let me get this straight. This is a long sentence. We’re going to be...

Barack Obama and his campaign hoped to make ObamaCare their pitch to get younger voters more enthused about the election this year --- a perverse but not forlorn hope, as I'll explain in a minute. That may be even more true in North Carolina, where Democrats are holding their convention this week, and where Obama needs to generate the visible and noticeable excitement among college-age voters that was so apparent in 2008 and has been lacking in 2012. Peter Hamby at CNN reports why that may be a bigger problem for North Carolina college students in particular, as the costs...

Obamacare was supposed to be President Barack Obama’s legacy. But it’s looking like a political millstone. The mammoth and unpopular health insurance overhaul weighed down Democrats in 2010 when Republicans helped turn seniors to their side. ....“This could cost us the election,”...the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s political director wrote in a fundraising email last week. “We have to get the facts out to voters immediately.” .....Right now, Romney might be winning the public-relations war in Florida, according to a poll from Rasmussen Reports,.... Asked which plan “scares you more,” the poll found 54 percent of Florida seniors said Obamacare, while...

That the Obamacare law contains no safeguards protecting taxpayers from being forced to fund abortions is very clear and it also contains the HHS mandate forcing religious groups to fund or refer for abortion-causing drugs and birth control.But a new report in the Washington Post by Michelle Andrews indicates Obamacare covers children up to age 26 — but not for pregnancy. The health-care overhaul provides a safety net for young adult children, who can now stay on their parents’ health plans until they reach age 26. But it doesn’t guarantee that their parents’ plan will cover a common medical condition...

States that have refused to implement the Obama health law have already blocked $80 billion of its new deficit spending. If more states follow suit, they can block the other $1.6 trillion and force Congress to repeal the law. The law relies on states to implement two of its most essential pieces: health-insurance "exchanges" and a vast expansion of Medicaid. Exchanges are government agencies through which the law channels $800 billion to private health-insurance companies.The Medicaid expansion adds another $900 billion to the federal debt, with private insurers again taking a slice. States are under no obligation either to implement...

CNSNews.com) – Sixteen states have set a limit on the number of prescription drugs they will cover for Medicaid patients, according to Kaiser Health News. Seven of those states, according to Kaiser Health News, have enacted or tightened those limits in just the last two years. Medicaid is a federal program that is carried out in partnership with state governments. It forms an important element of President Barack Obama's health-care plan because under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--AKA Obamcare--a larger number of people will be covered by Medicaid, as the income cap is raised for the program. With...

Editor's Note: This column was coauthor by Ken Klukowski, a columnist at Breitbart.comHere’s the blueprint for how the states can reject three central pillars of Obamacare and set the stage for replacing it, if Mitt Romney takes the White House and the GOP takes the Senate this November. Two reasons compel dismantling Obamacare. First is restoring individual liberty by empowering states against the national government and citizens against both. Second is recognizing that free markets outperform centrally-planned markets, so private-sector healthcare will better serve Americans than government-controlled Obamacare ever could. However disappointing the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare’s individual...

Now that President Obama's health care overhaul has won the last stamp of approval from the U.S. Supreme court, the question you're probably asking is, Who's going to pay for it? The Affordable Care Act will extend health care coverage to some 30 million uninsured consumers along with an expansion of Medicaid services. It also promises a slew of tax credits for small business and middle-income families to help offset the costs of mandatory coverage.

Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. It was the 33rd such vote taken by the House and, since Democrats control the Senate, no more likely to be successful than the first 32. The day before the vote, however, the House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony that highlighted another, more promising way to override the health care law: Americans can refuse to comply with its command that they obtain government-approved medical coverage, which the Supreme Court has deemed a mere suggestion even though it is essential to...