Free Republic

We voted you in, gave you the majority in the House, the majority in Senate, delivered the presidency and soon the judiciary. You have been given a mandate to repeal ObamaCare in every election cycle since 2010. Do your job! Do not betray us! No more excuses! Screw the democrats and their unconstitutional socialist entitlement schemes! We did not vote you in to deliver ObamaCare-lite! Repeal every word of this unconstitutional boondoggle!! No more government entitlements!! The constitution clearly reserves health care to the states and the people. Feds stay OUT!! Do the job you were elected to do! Repeal...

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Representative Tom Price, a six-term Republican congressman from Georgia who has led opposition to the Affordable Care Act, to be secretary of health and human services, according to a transition team official. Mr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon, has been a severe critic of the health law, saying it interferes with the ability of patients and doctors to make medical decisions. And he says that events have borne out his warnings. “Premiums have gone up, not down,” Mr. Price said recently. “Many Americans lost the health coverage they were told time and time...

President-elect Donald Trump is tapping Congressman Tom Price (R-GA) to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and Seema Verma as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to a release from the transition team. “Together, Chairman Price and Seema Verma are the dream team that will transform our healthcare system for the benefit of all Americans,” Trump said in a statement. Price, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is a physician and a fierce opponent of Obamacare. “It is an honor to be nominated to serve our nation as Secretary of Health and Human Services....

On Tuesday, the largest private health insurance provider in the U.S., United Healthcare, announced that it would be pulling its plans out of the ObamaCare exchanges in all but a few states. Among a continuing string of bad news for President’ Obama’s Affordable Care Act, this one should stand out as an indicator that the ACA’s collapse is accelerating. Conservatives need to be ready to explain why and to present solutions, because advocates for fully socialized medicine will be ready to turn the collapsing exchanges to their advantage. All of the deficiencies in Obamacare’s structure have been well documented. High...

HUBBARD, Iowa — Senator Ted Cruz is often asked about doing away with President Obama’s health care law. He is rarely pressed by voters on what will replace it.

A bill that would repeal nearly all Obamacare taxes and mandates will save the taxpayer more than $500 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is more than originally thought because Republicans successfully delayed the medical devices tax and the "Cadillac Tax" for several years. The Hill: Legislation to gut most of ObamaCare's mandates and taxes, known as Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act, would reduce the deficit by $516 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The bill is expected to get a vote in the House this week,...

Plenty of Americans choose to reject ObamaCare to save themselves a boatload of money. Republicans in Congress believe the US budget should have that choice, and the CBO agrees with them that it would work, too. Their latest analysis of a bill that would repeal the major components of ObamaCare through the reconciliation process concludes that it would reduce federal deficit spending by $516 billion over the first ten years: Legislation to gut most of ObamaCare’s mandates and taxes, known as Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act, would reduce the deficit by $516 billion over 10 years, according to the...

**SNIP** But even if enrollment tops 12 million, that's barely more than had signed up last year - when the administration said 11.7 million had enrolled. Whatever the number is, it's inflated, because the administration counts anyone who went through the process of selecting a plan, not those who have actually paid for it. It would be like Amazon counting anything anyone put in their shopping cart as a sale. Last year, the initial 11.7 million "enrollees" had dropped by 25% once the non-payers got subtracted out. That's why the White House figures that, by the end of next year,...

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday that House members will vote on a rollback of ObamaCare as one of their first acts of 2016. "When we return in January, the House will put an ObamaCare repeal bill on the floor and pass it and put it on the president's desk," Ryan told reporters Thursday. "We are going to keep working to give families relief from this law while we work to dismantle and replace it altogether." The vote on the legislation, which has already passed the Senate, will set up a veto battle with the White House just ahead of...

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is "disgraceful" and a "disappointment" to conservatives, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Saturday, while praising Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is his favorite member of the high court. "Justice Roberts really let us down. What he did with Obamacare was disgraceful, and I think he did that because he wanted to be popular inside the Beltway," Trump told about 4,000 supporters. The celebrity billionaire was referring to the chief justice twice voting to uphold key provisions of President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law and to the expressway around the District of Columbia, an...

The stick's getting a lot bigger — but it's not clear that many more people will choose the carrot as a result. Households that opt to go without health insurance in 2016 are set to get hit with an average Obamacare fine of $969. That is 47 percent higher than the average $661 penalty per uninsured household for this year, a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed Wednesday. And households without insurance that earn too much to qualify for financial aid to buy Obamacare plans will pay an even larger fine for 2016 — an average of $1,450,...

Government health officials worked diligently this year to improve consumer experience on Healthcare.gov and make sure people know what they are getting for their money when they pick health insurance. But one thing is out of the government's control: whether doctors and hospitals will agree to accept patients who buy these plans. Surveys and data are limited, so it's difficult to gauge the extent of the issue, but anecdotal evidence from patients and providers show it is a struggle. Some newly insured patients wonder whether it's worth paying for coverage they can't actually use. Even when they do find a...

the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has failed. The grand vision of an efficient pseudo-market in health insurance under enlightened federal management — the heart of Obamacare — is not coming to pass. Obamacare, meaning the operating model that undergirded the law that Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed with great fanfare — is dead, and it will not be revived. What remains is fitful chaos.

With the mainstream media, at least the majority that is left of center, flooded with story after story touting Obamacare's success, the news coming this morning from Denver that Colorado's largest nonprofit health insurer and participant in that state's insurance exchange Colorado HealthOP is abruptly shutting down, forcing 80,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016, was a slap in the face for the Obama administration's crowning achievement. According to AP, the health insurer announced Friday that the state Division of Insurance has de-certified it as an eligible insurance company. That's because the cooperative relied on federal support, and...

Nearly a third of the innovative health insurance plans created under the Affordable Care Act will be out of business at the end of 2015, following announcements Friday that plans in Oregon and Colorado are folding. In just the past week, four co-ops, as the nonprofit plans are known, have decided or been ordered to shut down. Their demise means that eight of the 23 co-ops in existence a year ago will be unavailable to consumers shopping for 2016 coverage through insurance marketplaces created under the ACA

Let’s be honest. Obamacare was nothing more than a bait and switch. But Americans never took the bait. In 2010, as President Obama and his fellow Democrats were trying desperately to ram Obamacare down our throats, they made one false claim after another. They told us health-care premiums would go down. They insisted if you liked your health-care plan you could keep it. They guaranteed Obamacare wouldn’t include any tax increases for the middle class. Americans didn’t buy these lofty promises then, and they certainly don’t now, given that each and every one of them has been broken. Five years...

Can Obamacare be repealed, in its entirety, through the budget reconciliation process? Some Republican leaders were hopeful that they would not be forced to answer that question. With a decision in King v. Burwell looming, it became increasingly clear that they planned not to keep the promise they had made in their budget to use reconciliation to repeal Obamacare. Instead, they would use it for some kind of response to the expected decision. In that environment, questions about the feasibility of repealing Obamacare using reconciliation were put on the back burner. But with the Supreme Court’s unexpected and indefensible ruling...

Remember that neurosurgeon guy who said he wanted to run for President? If you work for one of the major cable news networks or the nation’s largest newspapers you probably don’t. I base this anecdotally on the fact that I was struggling this morning to recall the last time I saw an interview with him or coverage of a campaign event he held. It’s almost as if he’d already folded up his tent and gone home. That’s particularly strange in light of the fact that nationally he’s still tied with Huckabee for 5th, he’s a solid 4th in Iowa...

Senate conservatives couldn’t stop a vote on the Export-Import bank. So they’re going to try to force a vote on Obamacare instead. Conservative firebrand Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) announced on Friday that he plans to use a complicated procedural maneuver known as the nuclear option to repeal the Affordable Care Act with just 51 votes. Democrats famously used the strategy in 2013 to break a Republican blockade of President Obama’s nominees to fill judicial openings. Now Lee wants to use the partisan procedure get rid of Obamacare. It’s unclear whether Lee’s gambit will work — but if it does, there...

Senate Republican leaders will use a must-pass highway bill to start another fight over the president’s health care law. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to introduce an amendment to the transportation bill to fully repeal “Obamacare.” […] The Senate is rushing to complete the highway legislation before states face a cutoff of highway and transit aid one week from now. …