Free Republic

South Dakota may join 30 other states in expanding its Medicaid program if federal officials approve a plan Gov. Dennis Daugaard is set to outline to the nation’s top health and human services administrator in Washington on Tuesday. The Republican governor is meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to explain the plan, and the federal government has so far been more open to discussions than in the past, said Tony Venhuizen, chief of staff to Daugaard. The proposal, which is in its early stages, would make about 48,500 South Dakota residents newly eligible for the program. It’s...

WASHINGTON — Alabama’s U.S. Senators Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions on Wednesday signed a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell urging her agency to cooperate with upcoming investigations into Planned Parenthood and warning DHS not to delete any relevant records. Planned Parenthood annually receives more than $500 million in funding from the federal government, mostly through Medicaid and Department of Health and Human Services grants. The organization is the largest abortion provider in the country, performing over 300,000 abortions every year. It has been thrust into the national spotlight recently as a result of two...

The ObamaCare consultant who once mocked the “stupidity of the American voter” had a bigger impact on the healthcare law than previously known, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. Jonathan Gruber frequently contacted Obama administration officials via email while crafting ObamaCare, according to the newspaper. The Journal said that previously unreleased messages show that Gruber repeatedly messaged the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) between January, 2009 and March, 2010. He offered advice on healthcare policy and informed officials about media and lawmaker interviews concerning ObamaCare, it added. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told the newspaper...

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...

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell met with “faith organizations from across the country” last week to ask them to help people enroll in federal health care insurance plans created through the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. […] While addressing reporters, Burwell was flanked by two people who attended the meeting: Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, National Catholic Social Justice Lobby and Amy Cotton, senior policy manager at the National Council of Jewish Women. Campbell supported liberal causes, including the reelection of President Barack Obama. In September, Campbell and other nun activists did their third tour to...

JULY 29, 2014Jonathan Gruber, Extremely Smart Person In an oped for Politico, I explain why ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber’s 2012 admissions that “if you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits” matter to the ongoing litigation over the Obama administration issuing those subsidies in federal Exchanges, and why Gruber’s attempts to explain his own words away are not credible. Shortly after submitting that piece, I learned Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt found Gruber’s remarks relevant enough to ask a federal court hearing one of those cases to take notice.Gruber’s...

President Barack Obama’s top health adviser on Monday called for an end to partisan bickering over Obamacare, saying the public and businesses are sending a clear message to Washington that it is time to move on with implementing the law. “The Affordable Care Act is clearly working,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell told a university audience in remarks that unveiled a new administration message about the successes of the healthcare reform law just as the midterm election campaign debate about its future intensifies. “What I’ve been hearing over and over … (is) enough already with the back...

Two Senate committees held hearings this month on the nomination of Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services, the federal agency most responsible for overseeing implementation of Obamacare. In these two hearings, according to transcripts published by CQ Transcriptions, the senators and the nominee spoke approximately 49,000 words. Not one of these words directly addressed the contraception-sterilization-abortion-inducing drug regulation that Sebelius issued under Obamacare and that is now the target of more than 90 lawsuits. The closest anyone came was Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who...

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, new Obamacare head, former Vince Foster trash picker April 14, 2014 — bunkerville Strange how the memory bank of the GOP is so short these days. So Ms Burwell will slide into the position of head of Obamacare without a smidgen of discussion of her political ties. Rather than choosing someone with a Healthcare background, let’s pick another political operative. She got herself off to a good start with helping out Hillary and Bill Clinton and picking through dead Vince Foster’s trash the day of his death. No worries over White Water for sure. So just who...

President Obama on Friday formally nominated Sylvia Mathews Burwell to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) following the botched resignation of Kathleen Sebelius. Burwell served in several positions under the Bill Clinton administration, including as a deputy aide to then-budget director Jack Lew. In July 1995, Burwell (then Sylvia Mathews) was one of several key aides questioned by the Senate Whitewater Committee regarding the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. Foster’s death was officially ruled a suicide. The Clinton White House eventually admitted to misleading investigators about how senior officials had seized and disposed of...

You just can't make this stuff up.

The president nominated Sylvia Burwell, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, to succeed Sebelius. Burwell has long career in government, but she’s actually much more interesting than your typical bureaucrat. Here’s nine things you might not know about the woman who is likely to be the next HHS Secretary: She’s really smart. Obama is not the first president she’s worked for. She accidentally ran a half marathon. She was forced to get involved in last year’s government shutdown. She knows how to handle money — and crises. Her fifth date was a bit unusual. She engages...

Sylvia Burwell, whom President Obama is expected to nominate to replace Kathleen Sebelius as the secretary of health and human services, has a long professional career in business and consulting, but lacks substantial professional or political experience with health care. Her résumé​, according to Dan Diamond of the Advisory Board, only includes a stint as a board member at the University of Washington Medical Center. “Burwell’s track record in health care is not well-established,” Diamond writes in a briefing for the Advisory Board, a health-care consulting firm. Her predecessor, Secretary Sebelius, served as Kansas state insurance commissioner for eight years,...

The Obama administration has found a way to give unions relief from an Obamacare tax nearly three weeks after Republicans rejected a Democratic push to include the labor carve-out in the latest budget deal.The Department of Health and Human Services quietly released a final rule last week that includes an intention to exempt some union insurance plans from a substantial new tax known as the reinsurance fee.As part of Obamacare, the tax was supposed to be levied against all insurance plans to share the risk for insurers taking on the sickest patients next year.But unions, which were among the strongest...

A single person shut down the entire U.S. government for the first time in 17 years. Not a congressman, but an unelected woman named Sylvia Burwell who, as the relatively new director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent the email that initiated the process that has closed national parks, visitors’ centers and even the “panda-cam” at the National Zoo. "Agencies should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations," Burwell wrote in a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies Monday night as it became clear lawmakers had failed to agree on...