Free Republic

Let me start by saying this is not a political screed against Obamacare; I’m thrilled that some 18 million Americans now have health insurance who didn’t before the law took effect, lowering the percentage of uninsured adults from 18% in 2013 to 11.9% today. But I’m growing concerned that for some people — especially older, middle- and lower-income adults — the Affordable Care Act is becoming The Unaffordable Care Act. A Growing Problem: The Underinsured Several recent studies suggest to me that due to a combination of Obamacare’s incentives to reduce premiums; the rise of so-called “consumer-driven” and high-deductible health...

Anyone who thinks ObamaCare will cut the deficit over the next decade should look at Page 11 of the latest Congressional Budget Office report. The table on that page shows how the trillions in ObamaCare subsidies are supposed to be "paid for" — by tax hikes or spending cuts. What it reveals, however, is that ObamaCare increasingly relies on dubious Medicare spending cuts to cover its growing subsidy costs.

A key goal of the Affordable Care Act is to help people get health insurance who may have not been able to pay for it before. But the most popular plans – those with low monthly premiums – also have high deductibles and copays. And that can leave medical care still out of reach for some. Renee Mitchell of Stone Mountain, Georgia is one of those people. She previously put off a medical procedure because of the expense. But as the threat of losing part of her vision became a real possibility, she sought an eye specialist at Emory University,...

During the past few days the legacy media and the internet have been flooded with news articles, editorials and blog posts with titles like “Overhead costs exploding under ObamaCare.” This all-too-predictable phenomenon has been breathlessly reported by outlets as different in their ideological perspectives as the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Kos. Sadly, when liberal and conservative publications are equally enthusiastic about breaking a story, it usually means the latter have been duped into promoting progressive propaganda. This case is no exception. The basis for these reports is a “study” produced by a couple of notorious lefty data diddlers....

Five years after the passage of ObamaCare, there is one expense that’s still causing sticker shock across the healthcare industry: overhead costs. The administrative costs for healthcare plans are expected to explode by more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade, according to a new study published by the Health Affairs blog. The $270 billion in new costs, for both private insurance companies and government programs, will be “over and above what would have been expected had the law not been enacted,” one of the authors, David Himmelstein, wrote Wednesday. Those costs will be particularly high...

April 15 is right around the corner, and millions of Americans will find themselves paying more in taxes than ever thanks to Obamacare. The law is more than a fundamental change to the country’s health care system. It also is a massive tax hike. As The Heritage Foundation’s Federal Budget in Pictures shows, according to the most recent scores, Obamacare will increase taxes by nearly $800 billion for the period of 2013-2022.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) —The Affordable Care Act's price tag continues to fall.The president's landmark health reform law will cost $506 billion for the coming five fiscal years, according to updated projections from the Congressional Budget Office, released Monday. That's 29% less than the agency's projection back in March 2010. Among the reasons for the decline:-- The Supreme Court's 2012 ruling that allowed states to decide whether to expand Medicaid. -- The continued slow growth of health care spending. -- Enrollment in Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges has ramped up more slowly than anticipated.In its latest projection, CBO also revised its...

If you want a sense of just how far-reaching the impact of a Supreme Court decision gutting Obamacare subsidies could prove, new data on health care signups released this week provide a fresh way to game out such a ruling’s consequences. The Department of Health and Human Services announced the other day that some 11.4 million people have signed up for health plans through federal marketplaces. The new HHS data also provides a breakdown of the number of sign-ups in each of the three dozen states on the federal exchange — precisely the states that would no longer get subsidies...

Obamacare program costs $50,000 in taxpayer money for every American who gets health insurance, says bombshell budget report It will cost the federal government – taxpayers, that is – $50,000 for every person who gets health insurance under the Obamacare law, the Congressional Budget Office revealed on Monday. The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization's new ten-year budget outlook. The best-case scenario described by the CBO would result in 'between 24 million and 27 million' fewer Americans being uninsured in 2025, compared to the year before the Affordable Care Act took effect. Pulling...

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:...

"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass." That was MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the key architects of ObamaCare, explaining how ObamaCare was purposefully designed to obfuscate how it was financed, how the subsidies worked and other unpleasant features of the law. [snip] Gruber's comments, made at a 2013 conference but just now making the rounds on the Internet, are the polar opposite of what Democrats promised the public.

In a new working paper from the Mercatus Center, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan projects that the Affordable Care Act will reduce weekly employment per person by 3 percent, or roughly 4 million full-time-equivalent workers. These new estimates are significantly higher than the 2.5 million reduction in labor supply estimated by the Congressional Budget Office earlier this year. To be clear, a reduction in labor supply differs from a reduction in labor demand—a distinction many failed to recognize when the CBO first released estimates. It is not the case that the ACA will necessarily forces employees out; rather, the...

Next time you eat out at a fancy restaurant, don't be surprised if, at the end of your meal, you spot an unfamiliar item on your tab — a surcharge to pay for Obamacare. Diners at high-end restaurants such as Melisse, AOC, and a dozen others in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas have noticed a 3 percent surcharge for employee healthcare tacked on to their bills, and the Los Angeles Times reports that some of the customers are none too happy about it. One diner complained in an online blog, "It's basically management saying 'Obamacare made me do...

Obamacare enrollees are straining the finances of community health centers around the country, some health center leaders say. The issue is that many lower-income patients with insurance coverage through the federal and state exchanges bought bronze-tier plans with lower premiums but high deductibles, coinsurance and copayments and no federal cost-sharing subsidies. When these patients face high out-of-pocket costs for care that falls below the deductible, they can't afford it. So the centers are subsidizing that care by offering them means-tested sliding-scale fees. When the centers, which are not allowed to turn away patients for inability to pay, try to get...

NBC News - The price to remove a gall bladder or replace a hip has spiked more than 20 percent during the past five years, according to an analysis of data collected for NBC News. Surgery has bloomed into a $500 billion industry in the United States, where 80 to 100 million procedures are performed annually — a per-capita rate that's some 50 percent higher than in the European Union, said Dr. John Birkmeyer, a researcher and adjunct professor at the Dartmouth Institute and in the university's Community & Family Medicine program. The reason? Expensive yet safer technologies and hospital...

Many businesses said Obamacare is jacking up their employee health coverage costs, and they expect it to do so even more next year, two new surveys of businesses by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have found. Not all firms surveyed said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to blame for those cost increases to date. But a majority did. About 20 percent of respondents to both surveys said they were reducing their number of workers and/or raising the share of part-time workers as a result of the ACA. "A similar proportion said they were paying less compensation per...

Sticker shock is around the corner for many Americans with government-brokered medical coverage, as insurance companies are beginning to apply their first-year costs to next year's premiums. In the case of Florida, some consumers will pay as much as 23 per cent more when their plans are renewed in the fall, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2716851/Obamacare-rates-2015-23-cent.html#ixzz39aDNsRvB Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The cost of providing free taxpayer-funded coverage to Bay Staters unable to sign up for Obamacare because of Massachusetts’ disastrous website problems has soared to $173 million, according to a new Patrick administration report. Some 251,280 Bay Staters are now on the free transitional coverage — basically Medicaid — marking an increase of about 50,000 people since April that one watchdog found alarming. “There should be a red siren going off for state budget writers and taxpayers about the cost of this, and yet there seems to be very little alarm,” said Joshua Archambault of the Pioneer Institute. “There will...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a setback to the Affordable Care Act, ruling that premium subsidies provided through the federal health exchange in 36 states are invalid under the writing of the law.Here's the practical effect of the ruling, if it withstands the rest of the legal process: More than 5 million, generally low-income Americans who received tax credits through the federal exchange to purchase health insurance would see their premiums explode.Avalere Health, an independent healthcare firm, released an analysis last week showing that individuals who received premium subsidies for health insurance would see a premium hike of about...

Buy now, pay later. That will be the epitaph on the tombstone of the Obama administration. The Congressional Budget Office, a research outfit that justifies government spending, is warning that while deficit may appear tame now-- comparatively speaking-- the budget path we are on is unsustainable. “The extended baseline projections show a substantial imbalance in the federal budget over the long term,” says the new CBO report, “with revenues falling well short of spending. As a result, budget deficits are projected to rise steadily and, by 2039, to push federal debt held by the public up to a percentage of...