Free Republic

Is GOP Health Care Bill a Disaster? No Peter Nelson, my colleague at Center of the American Experiment, is one of the country’s leading experts on health care policy. On the Center’s web site, he urges conservatives to take a deep breath and understand the constraints that Congressional Republicans are working under.In particular, a full repeal of Obamacare must get through the Senate, which means it must get 60 votes. There are only 52 Republican senators. Therefore, the first bill that has been unveiled is intended to be passed under the reconciliation process, which requires only a bare majority. Only...

If you live in a state like South Dakota, you’ve become used to “Republicans” selling out the Constitution, the rule of law, and the American people on ObamaCare. We’ve seen our former governor and newly minted U.S. Senator RINO Mike Rounds, our current governor RINO Dennis Daugaard, and a host of other “Republican” leaders in state government sell us out on ObamaCare. And we’ve seen “Republicans” in Washington D.C. sell us out on ObamaCare, with one of the biggest surrenders a couple of years ago when they had a chance to defund this unconstitutional monstrosity before it ever got...

Health care coverage for the undocumented gets its first test this week when a bill to extend Medi-Cal coverage and Covered California health plans to the undocumented will be heard by the Senate Health committee. A number of legislative efforts to help the undocumented comprise the "Immigrants Shape California" legislative package introduced last week by the Legislature's leadership. The bill would provide Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented Californians who are income-eligible for it and require the state to ask for a federal waiver to include the undocumented in Covered California health plans. The undocumented population currently is ineligible for any state...

Few proposals in Governor Raimondo’s budget have sparked a more heated debate than her proposed “Obamacare tax.” The tax – technically, a “health reform assessment” fee – is the mechanism she’s settled on to pay for the state-run health insurance marketplace created to implement President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The federal government paid the startup costs for HealthSource RI – to the tune of nearly $170 million at last count – but it’s up to the states to figure out how to pay to keep it operating going forward. And that means the state has to come up with its...

Illinois inmates who will soon get out of jail won't pass "Go" and get $200, but they may collect their Medicaid card. A new plan working its way through the Illinois statehouse would start the enrollment, or re-enrollment, process for inmates 30 days before their release through the state's ObamaCare office. State Rep. Camille Lilly, D-Chicago, is sponsoring the legislation that would have Illinois' Department of Health Care and Family Services enroll inmates automatically upon their release. Illinois' prison system released 30,083 people last year, more than 27,000 men and nearly 2,500 women.

The Gold ‘N Silver Inn in Reno, Nev., has long offered health coverage to its employees — but many of the cooks, dishwashers and waiters who make close to minimum wage can’t afford the $100 monthly premium. Last January, when Nevada became one of more than two dozen states to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, 10 of the diner’s 55 employees qualified for the government insurance program for low-income Americans. None of them realized it, however, until the family-run restaurant hired BeneStream, a New York-based start-up funded partly by the Ford Foundation. BeneStream charges $40 to screen each...

Jan. 1 was a red-letter day for America's provision of healthcare to its poorest residents--and we do mean red. That was the expiration day of a two-year bump in Medicaid reimbursements for primary care physicians seeing Medicaid patients. The raise temporarily raised Medicaid rates to the level of Medicare reimbursements; the expiration means a drop averaging nearly 43% nationwide, according to calculations by the Urban Institute. The consequences are self-evident. As the Urban Institute observes: "Significant drops in primary care reimbursement may lead physicians to see fewer Medicaid patients, potentially leading these patients to have difficulty finding a physician or...

Companies with more than 100 full-time employees need to comply or face fines. ... Companies with more than 100 full-time workers must offer affordable health insurance to at least 70% of their staff. This "employer mandate" was supposed to take effect in 2014, but the Obama administration delayed it to this year. And those that don't comply face hefty penalties. Companies will be fined if they don't offer coverage and even just one of their workers gets subsidized insurance on an Obamacare individual exchange. For 2015, the fine is $174 a month times the number of full-time employees (minus 80...

There's a bizarre reason why millions of Americans saw their health plans cancelled in 2013 and, as explained in a new video featuring Robert Graboyes of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, millions more will lose their plans in years to come.

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...

Andy Pasternak, a family doctor in Reno, Nev., has seen more than 100 new Medicaid patients this year after the state expanded the insurance program under the Affordable Care Act. But he won’t be taking any new ones after Dec. 31. That’s when the law’s two-year pay raise for primary care doctors like him who see Medicaid patients expires, resulting in fee reductions of 43 percent on average across the country, according to the nonpartisan Urban Institute. The challenge is to convince physicians not just to continue accepting such patients but to take on more without getting paid what they’re...

County officials are starting to feel the pain of Obamacare. The Board of Commissioners has learned the various fees levied on large employers by the Affordable Care Act will cost the county nearly $1.5 million for 2014. In a memo to the commissioners, county Risk and Insurance Manager John Anderson said the fees are based on the county’s nearly 3,000 full-time employees who receive health care benefits. The largest cost, by far, is a 2.5 percent fee tacked onto health insurance premiums to help pay for the ACA’s online insurance exchanges and overall implementation costs. The first year price tag:...

New York City resident Nicolas Karlson was happy to be one of at least 2.5 million people who beat a major Obamacare enrollment deadline last week, but he's going to be paying a lot more for health insurance next year because of it. To cover himself, his wife, Monica, and their three children, 45-year-old Karlson will go from paying $1,805 every three months for their long-standing Aetna plan, to a new one from New York State's Obamacare exchange that will cost them $1,221.60 per month, or more than 100 percent more than his old plan cost. That steep bump in...

California's health insurance exchange said 144,178 people have newly enrolled in Obamacare coverage during the first month of sign ups. Officials also reported that 216,423 people have joined Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program for low-income people, since Nov. 15. That's in addition to the 2.2 million who had already enrolled in 2014 as part of the health-law expansion.

Demands on the NHS tend to increase during the colder months because of illnesses like flu and norovirus. But with winter just getting under way, pressures are already reaching record levels. Extra money is being invested in each nation, but the four-hour A&E waiting time target is still being missed everywhere. The mounting problems come as the BBC launches its NHS Winter project, which tracks how the health service is performing down to individual hospital trust level. In England weekly figures are released. The latest, for the first week of December, show 91.8% of patients were seen in four hours...

WASHINGTON — Large numbers of doctors who are listed as serving Medicaid patients are not available to treat them, federal investigators said in a new report. “Half of providers could not offer appointments to enrollees,” the investigators said in the report, which will be issued on Tuesday. Many of the doctors were not accepting new Medicaid patients or could not be found at their last known addresses, according to the report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The study raises questions about access to care for people gaining Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care...

The federal government formally completed regulations that will force vending machines and restaurants to display calorie information, which can lead to businesses being fined thousands of dollars for not including the number of calories in a mayonnaise packet. The regulations, which originated in Obamacare, total 319 pages and will cost industry $1.7 billion to comply. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published the final rules last week just before the Thanksgiving holiday, arguing the rules are “an important step for public health.” The final rules increased costs by $542 million from the proposed rules, totaling $531.1 million for vending machines,...

Was heathcare reform a fatal political blunder by the Democratic Party? That thesis of Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, received a respectful airing this week from the veteran political journalist and New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall. Schumer's position--that the Democrats should have delayed healthcare reform at the start of Obama's first term and focused instead on policies to help the middle class--goes to the heart of what it means to govern. It's proper to give it a closer look. It's even more important to examine the misconceptions about Obamacare that lie...

In my previous column, I explained that you become ineligible for Covered California’s tax credits when you turn 65 and enroll in Medicare. You will owe money to the government if you keep getting the credits after your Medicare begins. So I tried to offer a simple solution: Cancel your Covered California plan. Unfortunately, in the past two weeks, I have heard from Californians and insurance agents across the state who have tried mightily — and failed — to cancel their plans. Instead, the premium bills just keep coming. A Covered California phone rep told him that the cancellation challenges...

Nearly four in 10 Californians say the state's health exchange isn't working well as the second open enrollment gets underway, a new survey shows. The results from the Public Policy Institute of California survey may reflect persistent service problems experienced by some consumers as well as continued partisan opposition to the federal overhaul. Californians also remain split over President Obama's Affordable Care Act overall. Forty-six percent of Californians surveyed had a generally favorable opinion of the health law while 43% were unfavorable. Nationally, the sentiment has been more negative.