Free Republic

President Trump on Wednesday claimed the Republican tax plan “essentially” repeals former President Obama’s signature health-care law. “When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means ObamaCare is being repealed,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. “We have essentially repealed ObamaCare and we will come up with something much better.” The GOP tax overhaul gets rid of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which requires almost all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. Trump said he refrained from playing up that measure because he was worried about how the news media would report...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans didn’t get their wish to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health care law, but the tax bill barreling toward a final vote in Congress guts its most unpopular provision, the requirement that virtually all Americans carry health insurance. Politically, the move is a winner for Republicans, who otherwise would have little to show for all their rhetoric about “Obamacare.”

Senate Republicans have approved the repeal of ObamaCare’s individual mandate as part of their tax-cut bill, a major step forward toward ending an unpopular part of the healthcare law. “Families ought to be able to make decisions about what they want to buy and what works for them –not the government,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said, hailing the accomplishment.

The Senate this week is expected to vote on a tax bill that includes a controversial provision to repeal Obamacare’s tax penalty on the uninsured. Democrats and some conservative policy analysts fret that if Congress scuttles the so-called individual mandate, insurance premiums will rise. The reverse may be closer to the truth: Premiums for Obamacare policies next year will be so high that millions will be exempt from the tax penalty whether Congress repeals it or not. Even the skimpiest coverage now costs so much that many uninsured people with six-figure incomes will be exempt. The individual mandate is repealing...

According to a report from the Washington Examiner, President Donald Trump will prepare an executive order that will unravel Obamacare’s individual mandate. A Republican senator told the Examiner that the executive order resides at the Office of Management and Budget waiting for final approval. President Trump reportedly delayed the executive order after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pushed to include a repeal of the individual mandate in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. A White House official pushed back on the Senators’ claims, saying that the Trump administration’s position remains that Congress should resolve the issue of repealing Obamacare. The White...

The tax agency has stopped requiring individual filers to indicate whether they maintained health coverage or paid the mandate penalty as required under the law How much difference does a single line on a tax form make? For Obamacare's individual mandate, the answer might be quite a lot. Following President Donald Trump's executive order instructing agencies to provide relief from the health law, the Internal Revenue Service appears to be taking a more lax approach to the coverage requirement. The health law's individual mandate requires everyone to either maintain qualifying health coverage or pay a tax penalty, known as a...

The Trump administration may no longer enforce a rule requiring individual Americans to carry health insurance or pay a penalty if they do not, a senior White House official said on Sunday Speaking on ABC's "This Week" program, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said President Donald Trump "may stop enforcing the individual mandate." Separately, on CBS' "Face the Nation" show, she reiterated Republican promises that no one would lose their health insurance under Obamacare while a replacement is being developed.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a campaign against Catholic hospitals, charging that the health of patients-- especially women-- may be endangered by the US bishops' health-care directives. Noting that Catholic institutions account for one of every six hospital beds in the US, the ACLU remarks that Catholic institutions are generally forbidden to perform abortions and sterilizations or to euthanize patients: procedures that the ACLU defines as forms of "health care" Thus the ACLU report concludes that "health care" is not always available at US hospitals because of Catholic teachings. "When hospitals prevent doctors from providing care, the...

Donald Trump: “I like the mandate.” Donald Trump has often promised to repeal the “disaster” that is Obamacare and he’s right, it is a disaster.But at Thursday night’s CNN Republican Presidential Town Hall in South Carolina, Donald Trump embraced what is easily the worst part of Obamacare, the anti-free market “individual mandate” which forces Americans to buy only government-approved health care insurance, whether they want to or not.To justify his support for the Obamacare mandate, Donald Trump uses leftist talking points of not wanting people to “die in the streets,” as if they has ever happened in America — before...

One of the worst of Obamacares ill-conceived provisions went quietly into effect on January 1. The employer mandate, previously inflicted only on businesses with 100 or more employees, will now be imposed on those with as few as 50. This mandate will prevent countless small employers from hiring workers they would otherwise have hired and incentivize many others to replace full-time employees with part-timers. It is such an obvious job killer that the Obama administration delayed enforcement until after the 2014 midterms, the liberal Urban Institute has called for its repeal, and it has even been obliquely criticized by Hillary...

Republican leadership has an odd idea for one of its first big policy pushes of this Congress: a change to Obamacare that threatens to make the law worse. The idea, expected to come to a vote in the House on Thursday, is to change Obamacare’s requirement that most employers provide full-time workers with generous health insurance, a rule known as the “employer mandate.” (Or the “employer shared responsibility provisions,” if you prefer Gruber-speak). It sets the definition of full-time work at 30 hours a week. Republicans have been making the case for some time — and no small number of...

..."He also serves on the Massachusetts board that oversees the state’s new health care exchanges. Along with these credentials, Mr. Gruber’s position as an adviser to the influential Congressional Budget Office also left him perfectly positioned to advise the White House on health reform. “The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” said Neera Tanden, who was a senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services. ...

After Massachusetts, California came calling. So did Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming. They all wanted Jonathan Gruber, a numbers wizard at M.I.T., to help them figure out how to fix their health care systems, just as he had helped Mitt Romney overhaul health insurance when he was the Massachusetts governor. Then came the call in 2008 from President-elect Obama’s transition team, the one that officially turned this stay-at-home economics professor into Mr. Mandate. “Creating a good model from scratch would have taken months, maybe years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was the director of President Obama’s National...

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance. And it is his work that explains why President Obama has so much riding on the three days of United States Supreme Court hearings, which ended Wednesday, about the constitutionality of the mandate. Questioning by the court’s conservative justices has suggested deep skepticism about the mandate, setting...

With many political debates, I try to give opponents the benefit of the doubt on intentions. Sure, raising taxes is a bad thing, but some politicians and pundits believe higher taxes will benefit society. Some people think we need to spend more, and others really fear climate change.When it comes to the HHS abortifacient/contraception/sterilization mandate, however, I’ve almost stopped being that generous with the left’s media and thought leaders. This New York Times Magazine editorial is a prime example as to why. Almost from start to finish, the piece misleads and misdirects readers about the mandate, its opponents, and religious...

President Obama has repeatedly suspended parts of the Affordable Care Act without the consent of Congress. The latest unilateral action happened Monday night, when the administration announced another delay of the employer mandate, the law's provision that businesses with more than 50 employees must provide their employees with insurance starting in 2014 or pay large fines. In July, the president decreed the mandate wouldn't be enforced at all in 2014, and last night administration officials declared that businesses with 50 to 99 employees wouldn't be penalized in 2015. Republicans have denounced such actions as "lawless." But if what the president...

Small business owners who thought they were off the hook for ObamaCare regulations until 2015 may be in for an expensive wake-up call next month. Beginning Oct. 1, any business with at least one employee and $500,000 in annual revenue must notify all employees by letter about the Affordable Care Act’s health-care exchanges, or face up to a $100-per-day fine. The requirement applies to any business regulated under the Fair Labor Standards Act, regardless of size. Going forward, letters are to be distributed to any new hires within 14 days of their starting date, according to the Department of Labor.

From the Atlanta Business Chronicle: “The decision comes as many analysts are downplaying the Affordable Care Act's effect on companies such as UPS, noting that the move reflects a long-term trend of shrinking corporate medical benefits, Kaiser Health News reports. But UPS repeatedly cites Obamacare to explain the decision, adding fuel to the debate over whether it erodes traditional employer coverage... Rising medical costs, “combined with the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” UPS said in a...

Many have speculated that the Obama administration isn’t prepared to roll out ObamaCare. Some have speculated that even if the administration were prepared, the rollout would still be chaotic with job losses, rate shock, employer dumping, and the like. But since the Obama administration has been remarkably secretive about the status of its implementation efforts, no one has a better perspective on its preparedness, and the potential for chaos, than the administration itself. That’s why the decision to delay the implementation of ObamaCare’s employer mandate for one year is so illuminating. Implementing the law without the employer mandate will definitely...

In a huge victory for pro-life advocates taking on the controversial HHS mandate, the Obama administration is giving up its effort to force a Bible publisher to obey it. The mandate has generated massive opposition from pro-life groups because it forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties. The Obama administration opposed an order a judge gave temporarily stopping enforcement, arguing that Tyndale House Publishers isn’t religious enough for an exemption from the mandate, a component of ObamaCare that forces employers, regardless of their...