Free Republic

On Tuesday the Supreme Court will consider in Maine Community Health Options v. U.S. whether Congress can limit the spending discretion it has previously granted to the executive branch. Four health insurers have sued the government for not making payments they say they are entitled to under the Affordable Care Act’s “risk corridors.” The temporary program was intended to entice insurers to join the ObamaCare exchanges by minimizing their potential losses and giving them time to calibrate premiums and risk pools. Under a formula in the ACA, relatively profitable insurers for the first three years of the exchanges were required...

By 2016, two years into the expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 17.6 million previously uninsured people around the U.S. had gained health insurance coverage. But with the expansion, researchers at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Kentucky found that ambulance dispatches for minor injuries like abrasions, minor burns and muscle sprains rose by a staggering 37% in New York City. The authors analyzed data from all of the 911 ambulance dispatches in New York City between January 1, 2013, and July 31, 2016. In New York City, 911 calls are routed through a central dispatch...

Data from numerous ObamaCare expansion states reveal that, if new enrollees are not required to work, they will not work—at all. Based on recent research, this conclusion bodes ill for Idaho should Medicaid expansion pass in November. A new report authored by the nonpartisan Foundation for Government Accountability asserts that more than half of Medicaid expansion enrollees across the country don’t have jobs. FGA said of the 12.4 million Medicaid expansion enrollees nationwide, 6.8 million are not working. FGA says 70 percent of the Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Illinois aren’t working, the highest percentage of the dozen states surveyed. Of Idaho’s...

The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016. Maine's Community Health Options lost more than $17 million in the first nine months of this year, after making $10.9 million in the same period last year. A spokesman said higher-than-expected medical costs have hurt the cooperative.

The president’s chest thumping boasting to the contrary, Obamacare is still a mess that has caused health insurance premiums and deductibles to skyrocket. Some advocates of Canadian-style single-payer systems, such as socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, maintain that this state of affairs will lead Americans to accept a universal, government run “Medicare for all” system. Such a system would also feature rationing and death panels, as has been the case in countries that have adopted such arrangements. However, a Wednesday article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Obamacare will, inadvertently, lead to a free market, customer-driven health care system...

RUSH: Okay, now to the House committee looking into Jonathan Gruber. Ranking Democrat on the committee is Elijah Cummings, former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucasians. All of these ranking members get to make opening remarks before the interrogation begins. And we have a portion of Elijah Cummings' opening remarks. CUMMINGS: As far as I can tell, we are here today to beat up on Jonathan Gruber for stupid, I mean, absolutely stupid comments. They were responsible, incredibly disrespectful, and did not reflect reality, and they were indeed insulting. Dr. Gruber does not speak for me nor the chairman of...

(Reuters) - Criticism of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law by a top Senate Democrat this week laid bare post-election tensions that could pose challenges for the party in upcoming fights with Republicans over taxes, energy and immigration. In a high-profile speech on Tuesday dissecting Democrats' losses in this month's midterm elections, Charles Schumer, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, listed "a cascade of issues" botched by the White House, starting with Obama's push for healthcare reforms soon after he took office in 2009. Later on Tuesday, the White House took the unusual step of publicly pledging to veto a deal...

“We have eight million people signed up through the exchanges. That doesn’t include the three million young people who are able to stay on their parents’ plan. It doesn’t include the million people who benefited from expansions to Medicaid. So if my math is correct, that’s 14 million right there. You have another five million people who signed up outside of the marketplaces but are part of the same insurance pool. So, we’ve got a sizable part of the U.S. population now that are in the first — for the first time in many cases in a position to enjoy...

If the ObamaCare contractor brought on last week to fix the back-end of the HealthCare.gov portal doesn’t finish the build-out by mid-March the healthcare law will be jeopardized, according to a procurement document posted on a federal website. It said insurers could be bankrupted and the entire healthcare industry threatened if the build out is not completed. The procurement document signed by healthcare officials in late December says that the government determined in mid-December that CGI Federal, the contractor originally tasked with connecting the online healthcare portal to insurers, was not up to the task. The Centers for Medicaid and...

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With such high premiums, accompanied by de facto poor service in the form of high deductibles, the number of "eff-you" types who will forego coverage for the penalty would seem to be high. The long view of this idea that Obamacare will collapse under its own weight due to lack of participation, is that with the market unable to support the healthcare needs of the many sick and old, on the backs of the few healthy and young, the left wing will at some point execute the complete takeover of the healthcare system in the form of single payer. I'm...

<p>WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Americans really don’t like what’s going on in Washington, and it’s beginning to affect how they look at the economy and their own financial dreams.</p> <p>The showdown in Washington over shutting down the government and increasing the debt ceiling has kneecapped consumer sentiment, according to the monthly survey by University of Michigan and Thompson Reuters.</p>

The website problems of the new federally run health insurance exchanges could do more damage than opponents of Obamacare have. It's hard to gauge how consumers have been affected by the problems at HealthCare.gov because no enrollment data have been released yet. Regardless of the political consequences, the administration owes it to the public to be forthcoming about the site's performance, its problems and the progress toward solving them. The exchanges are crucial to the success of healthcare reform, and it would be tragic if they were derailed by the troubled online rollout.

With just 38 days to go before the opening of Obamacare insurance exchanges, public ignorance about those marketplaces remains sky-high, threatening the very goal of offering affordable health care to the uninsured, several studies show. And according to a troubling conclusion in at least one study earlier this year, awareness about the new health-care law had declined among some groups more than three years after Obamacare was signed.

Of the twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare, below are the five worst that will be foisted upon Americans for the first time on January 1, 2013: The Obamacare Medical Device Tax – a $20 billion tax increase: Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. Obamacare imposes a new 2.3 percent excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. In addition to killing small business jobs and impacting research and development budgets, this will increase the cost of your health care – making...

Take a look at the White House fact sheet just released on the president's "accommodation" on the Health and Human Services ruling on contraceptives and religious liberty: "Under the new policy to be announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she [sic] works. The policy also ensures that if a woman works for a religious employer with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide, pay for or refer for contraception coverage, but her insurance company will be required to...

An M.D. at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (leaders in the fight against HillaryCare and now ObamaCare) points out that Newt Gingrich helped to stop HillaryCare, only to turn around and implement many of its features later on. Newt Gingrich and other Republicans promise to repeal ObamaCare, but doctors remember what they did in 1996. Just after they “defeated” ClintonCare, they changed its name and enacted the very worst parts of it. more He'll betray us again if he's president. Gingrich is a big government statist. Only a fool would think this zebra has changed its stripes.

What happened to the promises of the Democrats’ Health care law lowering cost, enabling consumers to keep the doctors they like and oh yes creating jobs? Well it was passed so now we can find out what’s in it. And what’s in it is nothing like what was promised by the president or the Democrats.(see story) CBO Director Dr. Doug Elmendorf naturally couldn’t warn us before Democrats forced this monstrosity of a bureaucratic nightmare through but now that it is firmly ensconced into American law making it almost impossible to completely reverse we find out that none of the Democrat...

CNSNews.com) – On the same day that House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was chiding House Republicans over job creation, the director of the Congressional Budget Office was testifying in the House Budget Committee that the health-care law President Barack Obama signed last year will kill about 800,000 American jobs over the next decade. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf was responding to a question from Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) regarding an August report from the CBO. “We do estimate, as you said, that the household employment will be about 160 million by the end of the decade and half a percent...

The Internal Revenue Service says it will need an battalion of 1,054 new auditors and staffers and new facilities at a cost to taxpayers of more than $359 million in fiscal 2012 just to watch over the initial implementation of President Obama's healthcare reforms. Among the new corps will be 81 workers assigned to make sure tanning salons pay a new 10 percent excise tax. Their cost: $11.5 million. [See a slide show of 10 ways the GOP can take down Obamacare.] "The ACA [Affordable Care Act] will require additional resources to build new IT systems; modify existing tax processing...