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A video shows Chelsea Clinton blasting the "crushing costs" of President Barack Obama's signature legislation. In the video, Chelsea Clinton tells a crowd that her mother, Hillary Clinton, is open to using executive action to reduce "crushing costs" of Obamacare. "...cap on out of pocket expenses. This was part of my mom's original plan back in '93 and '94, as well as premium costs. We can either do that directly or through tax credits. And, kind of figuring out whether she could do that through executive action, or she would need to do that through tax credits working with Congress....

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...

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...

Internal checks determined the state Healthplanfinder website was miscalculating the amount of tax credits applicants were eligible for. So exchange officials decided to shut the site down for repairs. They hope to have it back up on Sunday. “It’s our plan to be up as soon as possible,” said Michael Marchand, communications director of the Washington Health Benefit Exchange, which operates Healthplanfinder. By early evening Saturday, the exchange issued a release saying it is expected to be back online by 8 a.m. Sunday. The tax-credit calculations are critical to the site’s utility. Based on an applicant’s income level, the credits...

Many consumers faced hurdles signing up for Covered California health plans. Now they're having trouble finding in-network doctors. After overcoming website glitches and long waits to get Obamacare, some patients are now running into frustrating new roadblocks at the doctor's office. A month into the most sweeping changes to healthcare in half a century, people are having trouble finding doctors at all, getting faulty information on which ones are covered and receiving little help from insurers swamped by new business. Experts have warned for months that the logjam was inevitable. But the extent of the problems is taking by surprise...

When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies. But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014. While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing — right before the midterm elections — could be difficult...

The introduction of an Obamacare replacement plan by Republican senators Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) has given Obamacare’s apologists — who admittedly have had very tough duty over the past four years — a rare opportunity to get out of their defensive crouches and go on the attack. Not surprisingly, fast out of the gate has been Ezekiel Emanuel, who has a piece up at the New York Times website claiming that the fatal flaw of the Republican senators’ plan is that it would raise taxes on millions of American households. There are a couple...

What is the GOP’s health care plan? For years, this has been the rejoinder from supporters of Obamacare whenever asked to confront the flaws in their own legislation. It was an attack line, but also a question worth asking: For the last five years, Republicans have spent plenty of time bashing the president’s health law, but far less time describing what they would do instead. A new proposal from Republican Sens. Coburn (Okla.), Burr (N.C.), and Hatch (Utah) represents a tentative attempt to respond substantively to the question. It’s called The Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment (CARE) Act, and...

Moody's rating agency has lowered the outlook for health insurers from stable to negative, blaming ObamaCare. Section 1342 of the Affordable Care Act forces taxpayers to make insurers whole for most of the losses incurred selling ObamaCare exchange plans through 2016. The bailout is designed to conceal the failure of the president's signature health law until he is out of office. No one in the Obama administration talked up the advantages of bailing out insurers. It was kept under wraps until the fall of 2013. As any business owner will tell you, a temporary bailout is no substitute for the...

Barack Obama was in Wisconsin and Tennessee Thursday happy talking about "opportunity." He's for it, by the way. "It's good to be in Wisconsin," he told Wisconsin. Few hours later, "It's good to be in Nashville." In both places he talked about "opportunity"--the opportunity that comes with jobs and the opportunity that comes with education. As a word, "opportunity" polls well. Americans like the idea. Yet, these days whenever Obama has the opportunity to talk about his signature namesake "achievement," he rarely seizes the opportunity. It wasn't until two-thirds of the way through his 7,000-word State of the Union address...

Here is an interesting video regarding the effects of Obamacare on all the employees at at Simonetta's auto repair shop in Pennsylvania. The video was made by a local TV station. A couple premiums dropped, but most went up, some by huge amounts. In every case deductibles soared. Every person involved is worse off than before. Link if video does not play: Employees in Pennsylvania Company Learn of Increased Health Costs Due to Obamacare Partial Transcript Jeff and Dave used to have a $1,250 deductible. Since Obamacare went into effect, it's now jumped 60 percent to $2,000. That's nothing compared...

The president and his Democratic allies are finding it harder to make people buy insurance than they’d expected. Will Obamacare’s individual mandate survive? Last month, the administration announced that anyone with a canceled 2013 individual insurance plan would be exempt from the “individual-responsibility requirement” this year, and would be allowed to buy the catastrophe-only insurance previously offered to those age 30 or under. This exemption is likely only the first of many. How, for one, can the administration exempt people who had insurance last year but not exempt people who were uninsured because they couldn’t afford coverage? Obamacare’s architects were...

People’s Exhibit A: Josie Gracchi has breast cancer. Up until January 1st of this year she had insurance and was scheduled for a January 3rd biopsy and follow-up treatment at one the largest private cancer treatment centers in the world: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But once 2014 arrived, her insurance was rolled into an ObamaCare health exchange. She now has no access to the surgeons she was working with, her biopsy and treatment have been postponed and she can’t find comparable doctors and surgeons through the ObamaCare website. She pleaded on television for help from the president,...

Last week, Moody’s rating agency lowered the outlook for health insurers from stable to negative, blaming Obamacare. Few Americans will shed tears for insurance companies. But the Moody’s announcement is a warning sign to taxpayers. They’ll be getting clobbered. Section 1342 of the Affordable Care Act forces taxpayers to make insurers whole for most of the losses incurred selling Obamacare exchange plans through 2016. The bailout is designed to conceal the failure of the president’s signature health law until he is out of office. No one in the Obama administration talked up the advantages of bailing out insurers. It was...

Three senior Senate Republicans on Monday proposed an alternative to ObamaCare that would replace “job-crushing” federal mandates with a voluntary system led by the states. The legislative blueprint from Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) would eliminate all of the healthcare law’s federal rules, including the unpopular requirement to purchase insurance under the threat of penalty. But the GOP proposal, known as the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment (CARE) Act, would also weaken one of ObamaCare’s most popular provisions, by giving insurers an opening to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. The CARE Act...

...Obama and his supporters in Congress spent a great deal of time and energy justifying the urgency of passing health care reform. The purported basis for passing the Affordable Care Act into law was to increase access and affordability of health care, mainly by increasing the number of insured people.After being heralded by his supporters and being firmly assigned the title as “the signature legislative achievement” of the Obama presidency,the law’s major provisions have finally begun. But in direct contrast to what one would rightfully expect from such a supposedly grand accomplishment,we see a strongly negative reaction from the American...

Minnesota isn't alone in wasting federal dollars on failing exchanges. ObamaCare exchanges built by Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Vermont also are suffering serious-to-fatal problems. These six states — all solidly Democratic — received $1.2 billion in ObamaCare grants, according to official tallies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those dysfunctional six are in addition to 35 states that initially accepted funds to build exchanges that never got built.

First lady Michelle Obama is seeking $10 donations to protect Obamacare, her husband's troubled health insurance system. Just one day before he gives the annual State of the Union address, the first lady sent out a fundraising email to supporters hoping to use the speech to prompt donations to help Democrats in the midterm elections this fall. [Text of email]Friend — Earlier this month, because of what you did, it became illegal for insurance companies to discriminate against the up to 129 million Americans living with pre-existing conditions....

When the Affordable Care Act became law, Sandra Lozano looked forward to the day when the patients who rely on her free health clinic in Fort Lauderdale would be covered. But even though the new healthcare marketplace has finally launched, at the Light of the World clinic, it’s like the ACA never happened. “We’re seeing a tremendous increase in people coming to us,” said Lozano, executive director at the clinic, where applications for charitable care are up 25 percent since October. From Miami to Key West, other free and low-cost clinics say they’ve seen little impact from Obamacare — no...

Chris Jennings, a top adviser to President Barack Obama who played a key part in the rollout of his signature healthcare law, is leaving the White House for health and family reasons, an aide told Reuters. Jennings, who previously served in the Clinton administration, was brought on board last year before the flawed rollout of the program created one of the biggest political problems Obama has faced since entering office. "Chris served the country at a time when he was needed most," White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said in a statement.