Free Republic

Millions of Americans who had their health plans cancelled will be exempt from the Obamacare individual mandate, the administration said Thursday – a surprise move that comes just before Monday’s deadline to sign up for coverage starting Jan. 1. The administration also said people who had their plans cancelled could get a scaled back catastrophic plan, which has more limited benefits than those included in other Obamacare health plans. The move prompted sharp criticism from Republicans and concern from the insurance industry that another last-minute change would disrupt coverage and lead to tumult in the new marketplaces. “This latest rule...

The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place. Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured....

There’s an old saw about cooking frogs: Place them in cool water, and then turn up the heat. The frogs fail to respond to gradual temperature change, and by the time the water gets near the boiling point, the frogs are unable to jump out and save themselves. That is what President Obama and the Democrats have had in mind with Obamacare, which they planned would lead to single-payer, socialized medicine. However, their incompetent “chefs” have placed ordinary citizens directly in a boiling health care caldron. Americans are reacting with extreme reproach, and it is progressivism and the Democratic Party...

It’s early for a palate cleanser but I’m not sure this doesn’t qualify as legit news. I … did not expect to find myself eager to revisit the Romney 2012 campaign on film, but here we are, my friends. Here we are. It’s true that the trailer is more humanizing than anything Romney’s campaign did for him, but the deck is stacked. The bio video that the GOP produced for the convention was solid but nothing as stage-managed as campaign propaganda will ever have the disarming charm of behind-the-scenes footage of the candidates in unguarded moments. Plus, the trailer’s cheating...

Nearly 15,000 enrollment records from Americans trying to sign up for Obamacare never made it to insurers — but the federal government does not know which records never made it to which insurer. The federal analysis merely compares the number of times Obamacare enrollees clicked “enroll” to the number of plans HealthCare.gov sent to insurers, according to The Washington Post. Consumers who send the vanishing enrollments, or “orphan files,” are not notified that their information has not been processed and an insurer did not receive sensitive financial and health-related data, meaning that they could be in for an unpleasant surprise...

Obamacare’s face has no bedside manner. Dr. Zeke Emanuel, brother of Obama’s previous Chief-of-Stiffs, Rahm who is currently the Mayor of the disaster called Chicago, showed what a petty, evil law the ACA truly is. As he abetted and added to 4 years of Obamacare lies by your president (not mine), he has become the face of the mad, self-proclaimed-genius-evil-doctor we all worry about who has the power of life and death over us. All that lacks are a deeply German accent, a wheelchair and an arm that flies uncontrollably into full Nazi salute while Zeke screams SEIG HEIL! SEIG...

In the face of mounting criticism, President Barack Obama announced last month that he would allow insurance companies to renew so-called "subpar" plans for existing customers. But nearly a month later, not everyone is seeing the benefit of this policy change. CNN spoke with four people in the days and weeks that followed the president's announcement to see how they have been affected. Their results are varied, and for some of them, the future remains uncertain. Catherine Franklin 46, Winston-Salem, North Carolina It was September when Catherine Franklin received her letter. The much-maligned HealthCare.gov website had yet to be launched...

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act tend to suggest expanded coverage resulting from the law’s Medicaid expansion somehow doesn’t really count as success. But the law’s goal is to expand coverage, and the Medicaid expansion is one of the tools it utilizes to accomplish that. And here’s another way the Medicaid expansion could succeed — continuing to grow the built-in constituencies that will benefit from the Affordable Care Act. I’m told that the Department of Health and Human Services has just notified Iowa that it is prepared to grant the state a waiver to pursue much of what it has...

Getting people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act remains an uphill battle in much of Florida. Politicians in the state erected roadblocks to the law from the beginning — from joining in the 2010 lawsuit to thwart the law to placing restrictions on what insurance helpers called navigators can tell people seeking advice. Even so, advocates have been trying to get the word out to an estimated 1.6 million Floridians who qualify for new subsidies to make coverage more affordable. Florida has the second-highest rate of uninsured residents in the U.S., yet it seems many...

Just as cars can’t go anywhere without drivers and employees can’t work without bosses, health care doesn’t happen when there are no doctors around. And when an estimated 70 percent of the doctors in the nation’s deepest-blue state are rebelling against Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act is forcing a critical decision: America will have to junk Obamacare and go back to square one on health insurance reform, or trash the last vestige of private health care in this country by forcing doctors to do the government’s bidding. The rebellion among California physicians was detailed earlier this week by Washington Examiner...

In the latest in the Paper of Record’s recent series on their gradually creeping realization that There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch: ObamaCare Edition, the NYT has a story out this morning that hones in on the Obama administration’s desire to tout premiums that sound as gloriously low as is humanly possible — even if that means deliberately obfuscating the ways in which insurance companies are now looking to make up the increased costs of the overhaul in other, less immediately obvious areas. The Obama administration will herald what appear to be “affordable” premiums available to so...

The real problem, as dozens of thoughtful commentators have concluded, is the law itself. Obamacare is a massive policy experiment that seeks to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy – a body that’s so fantastically complex, with so many players and so many moving parts, that nobody can possibly understand how they all interact. ... Even Max Baucus, the Democratic Senate finance chairman, has warned that implementing a law so complicated could be a “train wreck.” Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. It’s not just that he looks incompetent – it’s that he looks deceitful. He told people they...

The rise of nonphysician providers will enable more team care. Skilled health aides will monitor patients at home and alert a doctor if certain medical parameters decline. Nurses will provide wound care to diabetic patients, adjust medications like blood thinners and provide the initial management of chemotherapy side effects for cancer patients. Pharmacists will provide more counseling and urgent care. Physicians will remain essential to the proper diagnosis and treatment of disease, but will be backed up by teams who will help manage the more routine features of chronic illness.

Former President Bill Clinton, who prodded President Obama last month to keep his promises on Obamacare, said Tuesday that the political damage for Democrats from the flawed law will be “minimal.” “I believe that if the computer problems are all fixed, and it’s up and running by — and healthy in the next several weeks, I think that the damage will be minimal,” Mr. Clinton told interviewer Jorge Ramos of Fusion. “It’s getting better. I think it’ll be fixed by — in the next few weeks. If it’s worked through, I think within four or five months people will be...

President Obama declared Tuesday that ObamaCare "is working" and that "we're not going back," as the White House looked to reboot its efforts to sell Americans on the president's signature healthcare law. Obama said that "poor execution" of the rollout of HealthCare.gov had "clouded" the benefits of the bill, but said he would not allow technical glitches to undermine a program that was providing financial security for many Americans. "If I've got to fight another three years to make sure this law works, that's what we'll do," Obama said. "We're not repealing it as long as I'm president," he added....

Obama administration officials, racing to beat a month-end deadline to fix the troubled federal insurance website, said Sunday there has been "dramatic progress" in patching HealthCare.gov but acknowledged "there is more work to be done" in improving the site and its underlying technology. An eight-page report released Sunday morning by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials offered a few details of progress in fixing the site, which crashed shortly after its launch Oct. 1.

As best as I can judge from monitoring Twitter for about 20 hours out of every 24, which is my habit these days, few of this country’s big-time journalists are keeping a close eye on the Obamacare crisis in the United States. We are all caught, like flies in a spiderweb, in the evolving stories of Rob Ford and the Senate multi-scandal. Both are news files quite unusual in Canada, delivering little bomblets of fresh weirdness for months on end and on a basis that could be characterized as “daily, gusting to hourly.” Or maybe these stories aren’t unusual; maybe...

The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare's insurance costs more in return for worse coverage. ObamaCare imposes to create a supposedly superior insurance product are resulting in an objectively inferior medical product. But government usually helps the less fortunate honestly by raising taxes to fund programs. In summer 2009, Senate Democrats put out such a bill, and the $1.6 trillion sticker shock led them to hide the transfers by forcing people to buy overpriced products.

Another stumble now, after recent revelations of policy cancellations and premium increases for some under the reforms known as Obamacare, would further weaken public trust in the administration's ability to implement the 2010 Affordable Care Act intended to help millions of uninsured Americans get coverage. Continued problems also would provide more ammunition for fierce attacks led by conservative Republicans seeking to dismantle a law they consider unworkable and the ultimate example of big government run amok. "This law has been an absolute disaster, leaving us to ask, 'What's next?' " the Ohio Republican said in a statement. "If the President...

Click link