Free Republic

Republicans’ grip on all levers of power stands as a mandate to the GOP-led Congress, which will move swiftly to try to undo eight years of outgoing President Barack Obama’s agenda. With Republican President-elect Donald Trump weeks away from assuming office, GOP lawmakers plan to open the 115th Congress on Tuesday and immediately take steps to repeal Obama’s health care law. Beyond that, they’ll look at a tax overhaul, reversing Obama-era environmental regulations and other conservative priorities. Republicans will face some obstacles. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Democrats “stand ready to fight vigorously” to protect health care and other...

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...

Open enrollment for Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, begins today. Problems with the law mean consumers could face significant rate hikes in some parts of the country. There will also be fewer health plans to choose from. Starting today, the administration will make a major enrollment push -- but that may be a tough sell in states like Tennessee, which has seen premiums spike more than 50 percent, reports CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan. For songwriter Wendy Jans and her husband, Eric, life was sailing along until health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield pulled out of the Obamacare market in Nashville.

The Obama administration said Monday premiums for Obamacare will increase by an average of 25 percent next year. The Department of Health and Human Services said each of the 39 states currently served by the federally run online insurance exchanges will experience different price hikes. Three large insurers have decreased participation in the Obamacare marketplace, which will leave one in five consumers with only one insurance plan to chose from.

Leaked email suggests Clinton rooting for Affordable Care Act to collapse An email leaked by WikiLeaks Tuesday appears to suggest that Hillary Clinton wants the Affordable Care Act to fail — presumably as a pretense for implementing single-payer, government-controlled health care. In a chain between Clinton and her senior policy adviser Ann O’Leary titled “Memo on Cadillac Tax for HRC,” Clinton said she’s open to changing her position on the Cadillac Tax — but that the Republican plan to repeal it must pass. "Given the politics now w bipartisan support including Schumer, I'll support repeal w 'sense of the Senate'...

The next president could be dealing with an ObamaCare insurer meltdown in his or her very first month. The incoming administration will take office just as the latest ObamaCare enrollment tally comes in, delivering a potentially crucial verdict about the still-shaky healthcare marketplaces. The fourth ObamaCare signup period begins about one week before Election Day, and it will end about one week before inauguration on Jan. 20. After mounting complaints from big insurers about losing money this year, the results could serve as a kind of judgment day for ObamaCare, experts say. “The next open enrollment period is key,” said...

This is the kind of case the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia liked to sink his judicial teeth into -- whether the federal government can compel a religious entity like the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their religious beliefs and acquiesce to the ObamaCare contraceptive coverage mandate. As LifeSite News reported on Wednesday’s hearing: This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a 175-year-old religious order of women who have vowed their lives to care for the elderly poor.

MILWAUKEE - President Barack Obama's Thursday pep rally for Obamacare came with lots of cheering, story-telling, and emotional testimonials - and that was just the mainstream media coverage. But Obama, not surprisingly, failed to mention some of flies in the ointment of his signature Affordable Care Act while congratulating Milwaukee for winning a national health insurance enrollment contest, the "Healthy Communities Challenge." The city beat 19 other cities, adding 38,000 new health insurance participants, out of about 51,000 uninsured people who were eligible to enroll. "I could not be prouder of you. God bless you Milwaukee," the president told an...

<p>Let’s see. ObamaCare’s mandates on insurers have driven individual-market premiums into the stratosphere, and pushed deductibles even higher. For all but wellness checks, the average consumer would have to spend $12,000 out of pocket before benefits kick in and cover some health-care costs. On the other hand, going without insurance will cost $695 or 2.5% of one’s income, which would make the latter choice a better deal for everyone earning under $480,000.</p>

Another year gone. Another year of the Affordable Care Act's opponents moving further from - not closer to - getting their way on health care. How so? This week's omnibus deal, which was approved Friday by the U.S. House and Senate, provided a clear view once again of the uphill climb Republicans face in repealing Obamacare. The omnibus negotiations never included talk of repeal, because that's a non-starter among Democrats and the White House. Instead, Republicans were left to chip away at the health law they hate. They did so by postponing two important Obamacare taxes - the Cadillac tax...

The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016. Maine's Community Health Options lost more than $17 million in the first nine months of this year, after making $10.9 million in the same period last year. A spokesman said higher-than-expected medical costs have hurt the cooperative.

As I explained in last week's column, the U.S. health care system is an unsustainable mess: One dollar of every five worth of economic activity is spent on someone's medical care; Medical costs are growing twice as fast as incomes; Medical prices are rising at three times the rate of consumer inflation. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to fix those problems and make health care "affordable." However, the method used required everyone to purchase overpriced health insurance. That's like throwing gasoline on a fire hoping to smother it. As a health economist, it's hard to imagine a policy agenda...

Coach is Right recently alerted its readers to the importance of the upcoming Supreme Court decision in King v Burwell, a case which would determine whether the Internal Revenue Service had the authority—on the orders of Barack Obama–to re-interpret the Affordable Care Act in a manner favorable to Obama and contrary to the clear language and intent of the Act as written by Congress. Though Obama and members of his Regime have already re-written the Act (contrary to the Constitution) on 31 separate occasions, it was hoped—certainly it was never more than a hope—that the Court would uphold the will...

In a speech on the Senate floor and written statement, Ted Cruz used some interesting language to describe his opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling that upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act. "Robed Houdinis" to describe the justices, who "hide their prevarication in legalese." The cloaked illusionists, as Cruz called them, "transmogrified a ‘federal exchange’ into an exchange ‘established by the State.' " Cruz chose the word transmogrified for two reasons -- its meaning, which is to change, and because it is a sly shout-out to one of his favorite comic strips, "Calvin and Hobbes." In the...

The Supreme Court had an opportunity, with its ruling in King v. Burwell, to determine whether the United States is a nation of laws or of men. Today, in a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that we have devolved into the latter. Although the text of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) clearly states that the government may issue subsidies only through insurance exchanges established by the states, Obama administration bureaucrats unilaterally rewrote that part of the law so that the IRS could dispense such premium assistance through “marketplaces” created by the federal government. The plaintiffs in...

WASHINGTON — (...) The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether the subsidies can continue for 6.4 million people in 34 states who use the federal insurance marketplace at HealthCare.gov. (...) More than 4.1 million people, or nearly two out of three who could lose their subsidies in the case this year, live in just 13 Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/16/3799971/loss-of-health-care-subsidies.html#storylink=cpy

The title as designated and fixed by the Board is as follows: STATE TAXES SHALL BE INCREASED $25 BILLION ANNUALLY IN THE FIRST FULL FISCAL YEAR, AND BY SUCH AMOUNTS THAT ARE RAISED THEREAFTER, BY AN AMENDMENT TO THE COLORADO CONSTITUTION ESTABLISHING A HEALTH CARE PAYMENT SYSTEM TO FUND HEALTH CARE FOR ALL INDIVIDUALS WHOSE PRIMARY RESIDENCE IS IN COLORADO, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, CREATING A GOVERNMENTAL ENTITY CALLED COLORADOCARE TO ADMINISTER THE HEALTH CARE PAYMENT SYSTEM; PROVIDING FOR THE GOVERNANCE OF COLORADOCARE BY AN INTERIM APPOINTED BOARD OF TRUSTEES UNTIL AN ELECTED BOARD OF TRUSTEES TAKES RESPONSIBILITY; EXEMPTING COLORADOCARE...

Citing higher-than-expected costs, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico wants to raise premiums by an average of 51.6 percent on individual Affordable Care Act plans in 2016. The company made the request in a preliminary rate proposal filed with New Mexico Insurance Superintendent John Franchini. Blue Cross and Blue Shield – which insures an estimated 600,000 people statewide – said the proposal affects an estimated 35,000 customers who signed up for qualified individual health plans through the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange, but also those who bought the same plans off the exchange. Franchini has the final authority...

Obamacare, now 5 years old, working mostly as designed: Bloomberg opinion By Jonathan Bernstein Obamacare turns five years old Monday. Let's go straight to what you need to know. -- The law is working more or less as it was supposed to. The two goals of the Affordable Care Act were to expand coverage and to cut costs. The first part has worked as the drafters expected. Even though the effort has fallen short in states that have refused Medicaid expansion (which U.S. Supreme Court allowed them to do), the law has sharply increased the number of Americans with health...

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — The new director of Rhode Island's health insurance exchange is making a case for keeping the state-run marketplace, as some lawmakers are calling for its demise. HealthSource RI has served as a model among the state-run marketplaces. Most other states use the federal exchange. Director Anya Rader Wallack says Rhode Island can use the state exchange as a tool to innovate and control health care costs in ways it couldn't if it switched. Gov. Gina Raimondo supports keeping the program in Rhode Island. But some say it isn't worth it. A group of lawmakers, led by...