Free Republic

Democratic leaders claim the bungled launch of Obamacare is just the latest news sensation — a media-stirred tempest that looks in the heat of the moment like it could upend the midterm election, but ends up fizzling well before voters head to the polls. Some party strategists say they’re in denial. And that perceived gap between party spin and facts on the ground is fueling worries that the White House and Democratic higher-ups aren’t taking the possible electoral blowback seriously enough or doing enough to shield their candidates. Democratic contenders in the toughest races are distinctly less convinced that Obamacare...

The White House had to defend its rollout of the President's signature health care legislation Saturday after two scathing reports that allege missteps, miscommunication and lack of leadership sank the launch of Obamacare's online exchanges. The New York Times and the Washington Post each reported on a meeting between contractor CGI Federal and government employees at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in late August. CGI won the main contract to build the Obamacare website, and CMS, the branch of the Department of Health and Human Services that was overseeing the launch, was growing worried the site was riddled...

The cancellation of health insurance policies for five million Americans who buy coverage in the individual market has sparked a political firestorm. Vulnerable Democrats are scrambling to find a "fix" that would allow them to fulfill their promise that people could keep their policies. This is nothing compared to what will happen next year, when up to 100 million individuals could lose the insurance they receive from their small business employers. Small businesses who offer their employees insurance were able to renew these policies late this year. This will allow them to offer the policies through 2014. The following year,...

After President Obama’s backpeddle on the cancellation of individual insurance policies, the administration has regrouped with guns blazing. According to Thursday’s Politico, Obama held an “off-the-record” meeting with liberal reporters and bloggers including MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, and Fox News contributor Juan Williams. Williams appeared on the Fox News program “The Five” and said he couldn’t reveal the president’s remarks, but would give the context of the meeting. The goal of the meeting was to discuss how to get control of the messaging on the Affordable Care Act. Williams described the administration to be in “full fight...

President Obama promised that taxpayer dollars would not fund abortions through the Affordable Care Act. But now, a new study by a pro-life group suggests that may not be true, in part because federal dollars will be given to those states that are expanding Medicaid -- which, in many states, includes abortion coverage. Also, federal dollars will be given to individuals who qualify, to help them purchase health insurance plans which may, too, include abortion coverage. "ObamaCare's annual net increase in insured abortions that are either fully publicly funded through Medicaid or heavily subsidized through the exchanges could be as...

One woman’s demoralizing experience with the ObamaCare website, which her daughter documented in an article this week in The Wall Street Journal, is shining a light on how the health care law is forcing people into Medicaid even if they don’t want it. "How has it come to this?" Nicole Hopkins wrote of her mother’s experience. After having had her insurance canceled this fall like so many millions of Americans, her mother Charlene sought a new insurance policy on HeathCare.gov. But it gave her only one choice – Medicaid - which is the government's traditional safety net to cover the...

President Barack Obama’s evasive ways are backfiring on him. They only confirm how he lied to America and committed fraud to promote Obamacare. A favorite Obama ploy is trying to evade responsibility for scandals by playing dumb. He’s not denying he said things that turned out to be false; he’s claiming he didn’t realize they were false. So much for being the smartest guy in the room! But it’s fraud not only to make claims you know are false, but also to make claims in disregard of whether they’re true. When people rely on your word, you have a duty...

Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure. “In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.” In the email, Ta noted that older congressional staffs may leave their jobs because...

Many Americans browsing the Obamacare exchanges are finding the Affordable Care Act isn't living up to its name. It's not just premiums that are bringing up the costs. Consumers are finding high deductibles, co-payments and other expenses that make the Obamacare policies seem more like catastrophic plans than comprehensive insurance. Those picking a bronze plan, which carry the lowest monthly rates, may have to spend $5,000 or more before the insurance kicks in. The next highest level of coverage, the silver tier, can carry $2,000 deductibles. And once they hit their deductibles, policy holders still have to pay for doctor...

It's a real shaggy dog story. While Americans across the country are struggling to sign up for ObamaCare due to problems with the federal health care website, at least one enrollee has successfully gotten covered through a state-run exchange: a Colorado man’s 14-year-old Yorkie. Fort Collins resident Shane Smith told KDVR he received a letter last week informing his dog,Baxter, that a health insurance account had been opened for the pup through Connect for Health Colorado. Smith told the station he had to sign up for coverage through the state exchange because his health insurance plan was cancelled under ObamaCare....

Warning that the latest ObamaCare "fix" could compel the federal government to bail out insurance companies, Republican senators have introduced a bill to prevent taxpayer funds from being used to prop up the industry. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., along with a half-dozen other Republican senators, introduced the "ObamaCare Taxpayer Bailout Prevention Act" on Tuesday. It would strip a provision in the Affordable Care Act pertaining to so-called "risk corridors," which could allow the government to pay insurance companies to offset financial losses. Rubio calls it a "blank check" for the industry. "The idea that the federal government should be bailing...

Seven weeks after the launch of the new federal health insurance marketplace, “30 to 40 percent” of the online system still has not been built or tested, including the critical component that processes tax credit payments to insurers, a top Obama administration official said today. “Healthcare.gov, the online application, verification, determination, plan compare, getting enrolled, generating an enrollment transaction, that’s 100 percent there,” said Henry Chao, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project manager in charge of HealthCare.gov, told a House panel. “There is the back office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems. They still need to” be...

The White House is "as sorry as we can be" that a Washington state woman held up as an example of the success of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces appears to be falling through the cracks, press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday. In mid-October, President Obama cited single mother Jessica Sanford as an exchange success story after she wrote to him after being able to sign up for insurance in early October. She's since learned that her state's system miscalculated her tax credit and that her out-of-pocket costs will be substantially higher than expected.

There is new evidence that the Obama administration had plenty of warning over HealthCare.gov, as a consultant's report released by congressional investigators pinpointed flaws in the health insurance website six months before it went online. CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett told the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts that new documents released by congressional investigators show that the White House and the Department of Health and Human services were warned as early as April of this year that the main Federal health care website, HealthCare.gov, was in serious trouble and possibly headed for a disastrous Oct. 1 launch. An...

President Barack Obama had some bad news for the insurance company CEOs who met him at the White House: His “fix” might cost them. Obama asked the CEOs to reinstate millions of Americans’ health insurance plans that were cancelled because they fell short of coverage requirements under the law, according to two executives who attended the session Friday. The president offered the execs some sweeteners, but admitted they won’t necessarily add up to enough to cover the full brunt of added costs that the changes to the insurance market could create. The president’s proposed “fix” to the wave of plan...

A newly disclosed report indicates that officials in the Obama administration and the Department of Health and Human Services received warnings from a private consultant group that the federal online healthcare enrollment site could potentially fail to function properly for the October 1 launch date. The analysis by McKinsey & Company was requested by the White House. It identified various problems with the exchange, including limited testing time and resources before the launch, and found that call-in centers wouldn't function properly if the website malfunctioned. The Obama administration has come under fire for the botched October 1 launch of healthcare.gov....

New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said this morning on “This Week” that President Obama should have been more specific when he made his famous promise — which he subsequently backtracked on — that Americans who liked their health care plans could keep them under his signature health care law. “He should have just been more specific because the point is, if you’re being offered a terrible health care plan, that the minute you get sick, you’re going to have to go into bankruptcy, those plans should never be offered,” Gillibrand told ABC’s Martha Raddatz when asked if she felt...

Over the past two weeks, there’s been a lot of coverage of the President’s misleading promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. No matter what. Period.” But we mustn’t forget that there was a second part to that promise: “If you like your doctor, you will be keep your doctor. Period.” It turns out that isn’t necessarily true, either. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that, due to Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage, among other factors, UnitedHealth expects its network of physicians “to be 85 percent to 90 percent of its current size by...

All of this scrambling by President Barack Obama and Congress to reinstate cancelled insurance policies is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It may look better, but the ship is still going down. It is just a matter of when. We are watching as rats — the Congressional Democrats — quickly swim away from the damage they have caused. The people in steerage — the individuals who lost their insurance policies — are drowning in the wreckage. The first class passengers — the well-off who can afford to pay higher premiums — are heading for the...

Obamacare is intensifying the doctor shortage – though not in ways that were anticipated. Everybody seems to have expected that Obamacare would sign up some 30 million people who don’t have health insurance, and they would overwhelm doctors’ offices. But these people – especially the young and healthy whose sky-high Obamacare premiums were supposed to finance everybody else’s subsidies – have stayed away. They know a bad deal when they see one. Although the young and healthy aren’t going for Obamacare, the doctor shortage is intensifying, because government intervention generally is making it more expensive and difficult for doctors to...