Free Republic

Last week, the total number of failed ObamaCare-created insurance co-ops reached eight, as co-ops in Colorado and Oregon announced that they were closing doors at the end of the year.

It’s an Obamacare story with every imaginable outrage — blatant conflicts of interest, millions of tax dollars going to political cronies, thousands of Americans left without health insurance, lavish pay for incompetent executives, federal funds diverted illegally, multiple congressional investigations, insider trading convictions and big decisions made behind closed doors. Tragically, there is even a child abuser. But search the New York Times web site for “Obamacare co-ops” and nothing comes up. Just three entries appear for the same search on the Washington Post web site. Not so, Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. Pollock has...

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

Obamacare, depending on who you ask in the GOP, is either a calculated Trojan Horse designed to collapse and release single payer health care upon the American public, a flawed piece of legislation that needs badly to be revised, or the greatest evil inflicted on the American public since slavery. But what if it was something far simpler: namely, free money for Democrats? A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to congressional requesters provided to this author suggests that this explanation may, in fact, be the correct one. Buried in the document’s appendices is a stunning statistic. Out...

Four exchanges insolvent, 11 receive warning letters . . . and nearly 2 million enrollees aren't paying their subsidized premiums Gosh, who saw this coming? The federal government sets up an artificial market for selling health insurance, sets the prices, subsidizes the premiums, goads people to buy who’ve never before been able to afford it, forbids profits and bans anyone who actually knows what they’re doing from running the darn things. How could that possibly fail? Quite spectacularly as it turns out. While the mainstream media ignores all of the following, lest it stumble in its role as Democrat campaign...

It's deja screwed all over again. In the fall of 2013, our family received notice from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado that we could no longer keep our private health insurance plan because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)."We liked our high-deductible preferred provider organization plan that allowed us to choose from a wide range of doctors. But Obamacare wouldn't let us keep it. Reluctantly, and after great bureaucratic difficulty, my hubby and I enrolled in an individual market plan with Rocky Mountain Health, which offered a much narrower provider...

FRANKFORT — The largest private provider of health insurance policies on Kynect, Kentucky's health insurance exchange, is going out of business. The Louisville-based Kentucky Health Cooperative Inc. announced Friday that it will end current memberships on Dec. 31 and will not add new members because of financial problems. It will not offer health insurance plans on Kynect when open enrollment for 2016 coverage starts on Nov. 1. The cooperative has about 51,000 members in all 120 Kentucky counties. ... Jonathan Gold, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email that the federal government...

When Maryland’s Attorney General announced last summer that his office had negotiated a settlement whereby $45 million would be recouped from the IT contractor that botched the state’s Obamacare exchange, it was widely reported as good news for taxpayers. It appeared that their investment in the mismanaged project would not be a dead loss. But the AG’s statement included this curious passage: “The agreement… will lead to the recovery of funds for both Maryland and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS].” What’s so odd about that? Well, the state didn’t contribute any money to the project. All...

“We should just start calling this law SCOTUScare,” Scalia wrote, referring to the several times the high court has ruled on controversial parts of ObamaCare. Scalia blasted that reading. “The court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government,’ Scalia wrote. “That is of course quite absurd, and the court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.”

Tonight, Reason’s Peter Suderman published an interesting revelation about the history of the decision reached this week by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, that Obamacare subsidies couldn’t be distributed unless it happened through a state exchange. It turns out that one of the key minds behind Obamacare, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, entirely agreed with Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler, the scholars behind the legal theory that backed up the Halbig plaintiffs who triumphed this week.  He’s on the record explaining that Obamacare subsidies are limited to state exchanges.  Suderman writes: Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who helped design the Massachusetts health...

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, Minnesota critics of the health care law are not ending their fight to repeal it. And state Republican leaders are calling for an immediate halt to any more spending on MNsure, the state’s health care exchange. “There’s no reason to continue throwing good money after bad at this point,” Minnesota State Rep. Tara Mack said.

Six are the Chief, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the nationwide tax subsidies under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, in a ruling that preserves health insurance for millions of Americans. The justices said in a 6-3 ruling that the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive to make insurance affordable do not depend on where they live, under the 2010 health care law.< The outcome is the second major victory for Obama in politically charged Supreme Court tests of his most significant domestic achievement. It came the same day the court gave the administration an unexpected victory by preserving...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the nationwide tax subsidies under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, in a ruling that preserves health insurance for millions of Americans. The justices said in a 6-3 ruling that the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive to make insurance affordable do not depend on where they live, under the 2010 health care law.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that health insurance consumers can receive federal subsidies regardless of their state’s role in running their insurance market, fewer states may stay in the game.When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, most people expected that each state would want to run its own health insurance marketplace. That never really happened, as many states opted to let the federal system, HealthCare.gov, do the work for them. Many of those states that did try running their own marketplaces are starting to think twice.Now, with the Supreme Court ensuring that every state’s consumers will have...

They wanted their Obamacare prices to be low—but the state said "no." The state of Oregon reportedly has ordered a number of insurers to raise proposed Obamacare premiums for 2016 after some of those companies asked for rates that were only moderately higher, if not lower than this year. Now, many Obamacare customers there are looking at likely double-digit percentage rate increases after having experienced some of "the lowest premiums in the nation," the Oregonian noted. For example, Oregon's Health CO-OP asked for a 5.3-percent average rate increase for next year, but the state's preliminary decision calls for a 19.9...

Last week Americans For Tax Reform released new information showing that during Hawaii's special Obamacare enrollment period, zero people enrolled. The total state cost for the exchange sits at more than $200 million. While Hawaii enrolled zero individuals and is the worst performing state, it is not alone. Vermont signed up only 97 households, while Rhode Island enrolled just 25 households. Hawaii’s dismal performance should not be surprising. The website cost taxpayers $205 million but could only enroll 8,592 individuals in year one. Cost to taxpayers per enroll: $23,899. The state legislature recently rejected a $28 million bailout for the...

When Barack Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill first rolled out ObamaCare, conservatives warned that the program was so badly designed that it couldn’t possibly be on the level. Instead, people assumed that Democrats intended ObamaCare to fail — so that the only possible choice would be a single-payer system of socialized medicine. Even after Democrats reluctantly eliminated the “public option,” opponents insisted that the intended end game was failure so bad that it would destroy private insurance and leave nothing but the federal government to pick up the pieces.The problem with that strategy, if indeed that was the...

Quietly, in August 2014, one of the largest health insurance companies lost their tax exempt status in the State of California: Blue Shield of California. Established in 1938, it’s been well known for years that this company and its real owner, California Physicians’ Service, Inc. (CPS), quietly scooped up billions in tax exempt revenue. They also managed to confound the government even further by calling themselves a Foundation! The California State Franchise Tax Board is known to be ruthless in hunting down fraud. Finally, after decades of deceit, Blue Shield’s tax evasion scam got the axe. But that isn’t stopping...