Free Republic

Janice Riddle got a nasty surprise when she filled out her tax return this year. The Los Angeles resident had applied for Obamacare in late 2013, when she was unemployed. She qualified for a hefty subsidy of $470 a month, leaving her with a monthly premium of $1 for the cheapest plan available. Riddle landed a job in early 2014 at a life insurance agency, but since her new employer didn't offer health benefits, she kept her Obamacare plan. However, she didn't update her income ... Now, she has to pay back the entire subsidy, which is forcing her to...

Ineptitude: Millions of people could be in for a rude surprise later this year when they discover they aren't eligible for ObamaCare, or are getting too big a subsidy, thanks to another failed ObamaCare promise. In early September, administration officials declared that the ObamaCare "data hub" was ready to roll. This hub was central to making ObamaCare work, since it was supposed to verify citizenship, income and other information needed to determine eligibility and the level of insurance subsidies available. More important, it was all supposed to happen in real time, right when people were filling out their online application...

If there’s one thing liberals/progressives can’t handle it is being held to their own standards. They support higher taxes but shelter their wealth in trusts and tax havens, which already is earned and no longer taxable as income, so they can avoid the death tax. They claim “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share” and decry “loopholes” but then avail themselves of every deduction their accountants can find. They will not live the way they seek to impose on others unless and until it is imposed on others, and then only maybe. In the case of Obamacare, Members of Congress...

Capitol Hill Republicans are trying to stop the Obama administration from offering labor unions a sweetheart deal on ObamaCare, as the White House tries to quell a simmering rebellion from Big Labor over the health care law. President Obama and White House officials reportedly have called union leaders to try and persuade them to tone down their complaints, pledging an accommodation. The AFL-CIO, though, on Wednesday approved a resolution anyway calling the law "highly disruptive" to union plans. But reports have surfaced on a plan that would give union workers -- and only union workers -- subsidies to help pay...

I hope you will forgive me for assuming the Obama administration was merely bumping their normal Friday news dump forward to before the July 4th holiday, with their announcement that they would effectively delay the employer mandate’s implementation for a year. This was not the case – instead, the much bigger news, and far more devastating to any remaining claims that Obamacare is being properly implemented, was buried on Friday: the news that the most significant entitlement increase since the Great Society will be operating on the honor system. Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar report: “The Obama administration announced Friday...

Delaying the "employer mandate" already means the government is giving up potential revenue next year, as businesses whose employees buy subsidized coverage on an Obamacare exchange would be fined $3,000 per person. In addition, without the reporting requirements of the employer mandate in 2014, "the exchanges and the IRS will not be able to verify whether someone's coverage is unaffordable" and thus whether the person is eligible for subsidies, said law professor Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. That leaves it up to individual consumers to be honest about what they do, or do...

One of the biggest administrative hurdles facing Obamacare was the ambitious plan to verify the income and insurance status of applicants for federal health coverage subsidies. In theory, on Oct. 1 of this year, a prospective beneficiary of Obamacare was supposed to be able to visit a website like Orbitz, enter basic information, and wait as multiple state and federal government databases communicated with one another to confirm in real time the applicant’s income level, and then display the level of subsidy to which the applicant was entitled, if any. It was a level of technological sophistication unlike anything ever...