Free Republic

The healthcare industry is beginning to shift blame for Obamacare’s 2018 rate hikes and an unstable individual insurance market to Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress. An alliance of health insurers, doctors and employers are urging the Trump administration and Congress to fund cost-sharing subsidies for millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act. Politico reported Friday that Trump is telling “advisers he wants to end key Obamacare subsidies.” If cost-sharing reductions (CSRs) aren’t funded through 2018, Trump and Republicans will be responsible for more insurers leaving public exchanges and a rate hike of nearly 20% on average, reports indicate....

In the effort to dismantle Obamacare, women's health takes a hit. In 2012, a women's preventative health care provision within the Affordable Care Act went into effect making birth control free for women with insurance. When it was first rolled out, an estimated 26.9 million women benefited. If the mandate is struck down, it will leave 55 million women without no-copay birth control.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a bit apoplectic that the left, which has always wanted single-payer health care, is still pushing for single-payer health care. "Why," he frets, "do we hear not just conservatives but also many progressives trashing President Obama's biggest policy achievement?" He goes on to say, "A lot of what I hear from the left is not so much a complaint about how the reform falls short as outrage that private insurers get to play any role. The idea seems to be that any role for the profit motive taints the whole effort." Krugman says...

When Democratic presidential candidates get together to debate, it really is like watching the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) once joked.

A Washington watchdog group says it has identified a second official in the Obama administration whose family history includes an investigation by the federal government into communist activities. Judicial Watch posted a report Friday that said Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, confirmed in a recent news conference that his grandfather appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. Judicial Watch said the FBI previously disclosed that "the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama's trusted senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government." Johnson's family history is relevant, Judicial Watch...

The City of Bixby changed insurance deductibles for their employees. One of the changes means that a family now has a $7,000 deductible instead of a $500 one. There is a gap plan available on limited basis. Employees said that no one asked them about the change or if they would prefer to pay higher premiums instead.

Judy Naillon called her insurer several months ago to find out why she was being charged $35 every month for birth control pills. Her friends said they were getting their pills free under the federal health law. Why wasn't she getting the same deal? The insurance representative explained that was because the plan Naillon and her husband had through his job was "grandfathered" under the health law. In other words, unlike other health plans, Naillon's insurance policy, which existed before the health law was enacted, doesn't have to cover many preventive services, including contraception. Naillon would have to continue to...

President Obama will tout his healthcare law Tuesday to a Catholic group that has consistently supported the law despite deep divides over its birth control requirement. In a speech to the Catholic Health Association — which represents hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes across the U.S. — the president will talk about the law's major tenets and make his case that it has improved health plans for virtually everyone, in addition to expanding coverage to millions. The address comes just days before the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling that could halt the healthcare law's insurance subsidies to...

In baseball, when you get three strikes, you’re out. There have been at least five strikes called against single payer (SP). Shouldn’t we hear from an umpire? Whether you call it single payer, socialized medicine, universal health care, Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital System, ObamaCare, Public Option, or National Health Service, these are all different names for the same thing: government-controlled healthcare. Details vary but all single payer-type systems have one thing in common: a central authority that controls both supply of dollars and providers, as well as demand for goods and services. Strike #1: Italy's price controls In the...

They cited the example of the asthma drug albuterol sulfate. The average cost for a bottle of 100 pills was $11 last October, the pair said. The average charge by this April was up to $434. The antibiotic doxycycline hyclate cost $20 last October for a bottle of 500 tablets, the congressmen observed. By April, the price was $1,849. Experts say generics are growing more expensive because of reduced competition among manufacturers and shortages of raw materials. However, that might not explain triple-digit price hikes for some drugs. "Most generics are increasing in price by an average 10% a year,"...

Instead of using this space to pretend the newly released CIA "torture" report confirms that the United States is the most evil nation in the history of the universe, I'm going to address Jonathan Gruber's confirmation that he believes we're all stupid. Assuming you are not under any rocks or haven't been in an underground bunker without access to media, you will have heard that Gruber, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the principal architect of Obamacare, made some unflattering comments about his fellow Americans. At a panel event last year, discussing how the administration was able...

Before ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber got famous for calling Americans stupid, he wrote an "ObamaCare for Dummies"-style comic book. The only dummies are those who believe its many fictions.

Former White House senior adviser David Axelrod wrote what appears to be a taunt about Gruber in a Sunday tweet: “As one who worked hard to make A[ffordable] C[are] A[ct] and its benefits clear, let me say: if you looked up “stupid” in dictionary, you’d find Gruber’s picture.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO (Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. … So it’s written to do that,” Gruber said, suggesting “it would not have passed” if the law “made it explicit” that healthy people would “pay in” and the sick would get money. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber continued. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass. I wish...

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. It also appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. They call this claim a Mixture of true and false. Here's their lame...

There is a famous thought experiment called the trolley problem, and it goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed toward five people bound on the tracks. You are standing before the switch that could divert it onto another track, where it would kill only one person. Do you pull the switch? The trolley problem is the most flattering possible way to think about the conservative movement’s fanatical commitment to repealing Obamacare. If they pull the switch and repeal Obamacare, or if they persuade five Republican Supreme Court justices to cripple it, they will spare America from the evils of...

On November 4, 2014, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced that it intends to close a perceived “loophole” in health care reform. This so-called loophole allows employers to offer low cost health plans that don’t cover inpatient hospitalization services or physician services (or both). If that coverage were treated as “minimum value” coverage, then employers could avoid all pay-or-play penalties with low cost coverage and covered individuals would not be able to benefit from premium assistance or subsidies in the health insurance Marketplace. What does this IRS Notice Mean? Once this new rule is final, it means that Non-Hospital/Non-Physician Services...

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the masterminds behind Obamacare, has now explained that he wishes to die at age 75. In an article in The Atlantic, Emanuel writes, “Seventy-five. That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.” He explains that his daughters disagree; so do his brothers and his friends. But, he says, “I am sure of my position…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but

President Barack Obama’s top health adviser on Monday called for an end to partisan bickering over Obamacare, saying the public and businesses are sending a clear message to Washington that it is time to move on with implementing the law. “The Affordable Care Act is clearly working,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell told a university audience in remarks that unveiled a new administration message about the successes of the healthcare reform law just as the midterm election campaign debate about its future intensifies. “What I’ve been hearing over and over … (is) enough already with the back...

Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee in Florida’s governor race in November, says the Obama administration shouldn’t require proof of immigration status for Obamacare sign-ups. “We need to make this law work for the people depending on it, and the President should suspend this requirement so that no American citizen loses their health insurance due to a bureaucratic requirement,” Crist spokesman Brendan Gilfillan told Politico Thursday. Over 310,000 Obamacare customers have failed to provide proper documentation on their citizenship or immigration status to the Obama administration, after the federal government contacted them between five and seven times about discrepancies in the...