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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was moved to near tears while speaking about Sen. John McCain early Friday morning after the Republican "skinny repeal" of Obamacare failed on the Senate floor. Schumer choked up as he turned his attention to McCain, who recently received a diagnosis of brain cancer. "And let's turn the page in another way," Schumer said. "All of us were so inspired by the speech and the life of the senator from Arizona. And he asked us to go back to regular order, to bring back the Senate that some of us who've been here a while...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s bid to pass a stripped down repeal of Obamacare on a party-line vote failed dramatically in the early hours of Friday when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., joined two other Republican holdouts and all the Democrats to vote against the measure.

Sorry if there is a thread; I didn't see it. McCain, Collins, and Murkowski voted No. Republicans spent 7 years promising this, and they couldn't get it done. The Republicans don't like Trump all that much, but he is willing to fulfill their promise that they made. Meanwhile, McCain, the GOP hero, helped kill their promise.

Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin blasted Republicans in yet another Facebook note on Wednesday, saying they “lied their way into office” and perpetrated the “greatest hoax in modern politics.” “Here comes rationing, long waiting periods, and massive red-tape,” said Mark Levin in all caps on. “The Republicans lied their way into office in what is the greatest hoax in modern politics.” Levin’s comments came after seven Republican senators joined Democrats in voting no on a “clean repeal” of Obamacare promoted by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. on Wednesday. In the note, the famed conservative radio personality laid the...

After 20 of the 24 Obamacare non-profit health insurance cooperatives collapsed, despite the influx of $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that its trade association would also fail. The National Alliance of State Health Cooperatives (NASCHO), the Obamacare co-op health insurance trade association, has quietly closed its doors, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. NASCHO once represented as many as 24 Obamacare non-profit co-ops that were intended to compete with for-profit commercial health care insurers and perhaps even drive them out of business. The Obama administration underwrote the experiment with $2.4 billion in long-term,...

When the sovereign states decided to create a federal government (yes, it was the states that created the federal government and not the other way around), it was not an open-ended arrangement where the states surrendered all of their powers and authority to the new entity. It was quite to the contrary. Only certain, specifically identified powers, called “enumerated powers,” were delegated to the federal government from the states — powers that the Founding Fathers believed were best performed on a national basis, duties like “provide for the common defense,” to coin money, establish uniform immigration laws, “Post Offices,” treaties...

“We're in this room today to deliver on our promise to the American people to repeal Obamacare and to ensure that they have the health care that they need,” President Trump told Republican senators at a White House luncheon on Wednesday. “We have no choice. We have to repeal and replace Obamacare.” Trump said Republicans are “so close” to getting the job done, even without a single vote from Democrats: "The way I looked at it, we have no Democrat help. They're obstructionists. That's all they're good at is obstruction. They have no ideas. They've gone so far left, they're...

As President Trump reminded both Democrats and their friends in the Democrat Media Complex today, Obamacare was built on a stack of lies. President Trump mentioned two of Obama’s lies, the infamous “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” and if “You like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Both were lies as millions lost insurance coverage and/or their doctors because of the 2,700-page behemoth that has grown to over 20,000 pages in tyrannical regulations. But another one of Obama’s outright lies he told perhaps more than any other, was the Shamwow promise to lower every...

President Donald Trump laid into former President Barack Obama on Wednesday in a meeting with Senate Republicans after RINO Leader Mitch McConnell’s failure to repeal the Obamacare debacle. Not pulling any punches, the president reminded Americans of the many lies Obama told to sell Obamacare: “Obamacare was a big lie. ‘You can keep your doctor.’ Lie! ‘You can keep your plan.’ Lie! It was a direct lie from the president. Twenty-eight times he said it — 28 times. It was a lie and he knew it was. And now it is hurting this country irreparably.” {..snip..}

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif. ) said Sunday on CNN that Republicans would satisfy uneasy voters by strengthening Obamacare, but his fellow panelist Ken Cuccinelli fired back at the notion that the health care program simply needs help. "I think the people are being heard," Swalwell said on "State Of The Union" about the debate over the GOP's health care bill in the Senate. "And I wish we were amplifying these stories two years ago." Swalwell went onto say that those voices would make attempts to repeal Obamacare politically difficult. "It's the people who are coming forward saying, ‘This affects...

Vice President Pence on Monday said congressional Republicans should pass a “repeal only” bill if they can’t come to a consensus on legislation to replace ObamaCare. “If they can’t pass this carefully crafted repeal and replace bill — do those two things simultaneously — we ought to just repeal only,” Pence said in an interview with Rush Limbaugh. Pence’s comments echoed those made by President Trump, who last month suggested that he was open to repealing ObamaCare first and developing a replacement plan later. However, White House legislative director Marc Short on Monday said, "we still believe that the bill...

As only a handful of constitutional conservatives, like Ted Cruz , Mike Lee , Rand Paul , argue for the full repeal of Obamacare, something that was promised by all Republicans for seven years, and as Democrats have no answers for disastrous Obamacare other than more government control — what destroyed the health insurance marketplace in America in the first place and caused prices and deductibles to unnecessarily skyrocket — we should be reminded that ALL involvement of the federal government in the healthcare business in any form or fashion, or redistribution schemes pushed on taxpayers under the guise of...

(CNN)Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will delay the vote on the Republican leadership's health care bill until after the July 4 recess, two sources told CNN. McConnell told GOP senators that he wants to make changes to the bill, get a new Congressional Budget Office score and have a vote after the holiday. A White House official and a GOP aide on the Hill told CNN that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence invited all Republican senators to White House on Tuesday afternoon.

Senate Republicans on Monday released a revised version of their healthcare bill that adds a provision requiring consumers with a break in coverage to wait six months before buying insurance. The Senate bill would make those who had a lapse in coverage for 63 days or more wait six months before obtaining insurance. (Read the bill here.) The continuous coverage provision was noticeably omitted from the Senate’s draft, but aides said they were working behind the scenes to add it. The provision addresses concerns that people would only sign up for health coverage when they’re sick if insurers can't deny...

I can’t imagine what he could have said to put enough shine on the current version of an Obamacare replacement bill that would persuade Senator Cruz to embrace it. The Senate needs 50 votes to get the bill to pass. They can’t rely on Democrats to help in that effort, so they have to pull all the Republican support they can muster. To date, that seems a faraway hope, as well. Senators Cruz, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and as of Friday, Dean Heller have all rejected the bill, as written. Cruz, Paul, Johnson, and Lee released this statement...

Senate Republicans, who have promised a repeal of the Affordable Care Act for seven years, took a major step on Thursday toward that goal, unveiling a bill to cut Medicaid deeply and end the health law’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance. The 142-page bill would create a new system of federal tax credits to help people buy health insurance, while offering states the ability to drop many of the benefits required by the Affordable Care Act, like maternity care, emergency services and mental health treatment. The Senate bill — once promised as a top-to-bottom revamp of the health...

Minnesota-based Medica, one of the few remaining insurance providers on the Iowa Obamacare exchanges, announced Monday afternoon that it will offer plans on the state exchanges in 2018, but proposed an average premium increase of 43.5 percent. The company’s decision is somewhat good news for low-to-moderate income consumers in Iowa that are reliant on the state exchanges for health insurance. Consumers will have at least one provider offering plans in the Obamacare marketplace. The bad news, as Medica announced Monday, is that for all products the average premium increase will be 43.5 percent, The Iowa Gazette reports. “Rate increases of...

When the Republican-led Senate Rules Committee briefly flirted with the idea of restricting television interviews in the hallways of the Capitol last week, it became only the most obvious manifestation of how the party’s leaders were handling the development of a bill to overhaul Obamacare: out of the public eye. While that effort was quickly sidelined after some outcry, the Republican leadership in the Senate was otherwise unfazed in its push to craft a bill that would expose its members to as little negative public attention as possible. No repeat of the town hall meetings that drew angry constituents who yelled...

Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield has requested a premium rate hike of 33.6 percent for 2018 to the Delaware Department of Insurance. The state of Delaware has only two insurers participating on the exchanges this year and after Aetna announced in May that it will pull out of the Obamacare exchanges, Highmark will be the only insurer participating in the state in 2018. This premium rate hike takes into account that both the cost-sharing subsidies and the individual mandate will not be in place next year. {..snip..}

One of the few remaining co-ops created from Obamacare is requesting rate hikes of 80 percent for next year, the Associated Press reported. CEO of New Mexico Health Connections Martin Hickey said that not only will rates be likely raised to 80 percent next year, but that increasingly young, healthy individuals are dropping out from the exchange. "Insurance providers have been left to guess whether the federal government will continue to pay subsidies for out-of-pocket expenses such as copayments and deductibles for lower-income patients," the article said. "Requirements that taxpayers maintain coverage or pay a penalty are also in limbo."...