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Minnesota Obamacare is calling it quits. PreferredOne, the insurer that sold nearly 60 percent of all private health plans on Minnesota's Obamacare exchange, on Tuesday said it would leave that marketplace. PreferredOne's plans were the lowest-cost options on that exchange, known as MNSure. PreferredOne cited the costs of doing business on MNSure as the reason for its surprising decision, saying that selling plans is "not administratively and financially sustainable going forward," according to KSTP.com, the website of that Minnesota TV News network.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday dropped another financial bombshell on Chicago’s 25,000 retired city workers and their dependents: their monthly health insurance premiums will be going up by a whopping 40 percent — in spite of a pending lawsuit and a precedent-setting Illinois Supreme Court ruling. Last year, Emanuel announced plans to save $108.7 million a year by phasing out the city’s 55 percent subsidy for retiree health care and forcing retirees to make the switch to Obamacare. For the city, the Year One savings was $25 million. For retirees, that translated into an increase in monthly health insurance premiums...

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell insisted Monday that Obamacare is “clearly working,” trying to move past the rocky rollout of President Obama's signature health law by insisting that her agency was not concerned with fighting “last year's battles.” Burwell in a speech at George Washington University said that the verdict was in on Obama's signature domestic initiative. “The Affordable Care Act is clearly working,” the HHS chief said. “Healthcare is more affordable for families, businesses and for our economy as [a] whole. Coverage and services are more widely available to more people. Doctors and hospitals are delivering...

Malicious code was inserted into an Obamacare server and lay dormant, waiting for a command to attack other computers Obama administration claims there's no evidence attack was sponsored by an unfriendly country or exposed Americans' personal information Vulnerable server was left with its default password and wasn't supposed to be accessible from the Internet House Republicans have subpoenaed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief for a September 18 grilling A computer server hosting information for Healthcare.gov, the flagship Obamacare website that millions of Americans have trusted with their social security numbers, income totals and other sensitive personal...

A hacker successfully breached Healthcare.gov in July and uploaded “malicious software,” MarketWatch reports, citing federal officials. However, investigators said consumers’ personal information doesn’t appear to have been compromised or stolen. In a written statement, the Department of Health and Human Services noted that its review shows that the hacked server “did not contain consumer personal information; data was not transmitted outside the agency, and the website was not specifically targeted.” The statement also claimed that measures have been taken to “further strengthen security.”

When she was eight weeks old, Ashlyn Whitney suffered a severe respiratory-tract infection that put her in an intensive care unit for 12 days. "Because she was so young, she couldn't handle it," Ashlyn's mother, Nicole Whitney, recalled. "They had to give her oxygen." The baby, now a year old, recovered from her illness, known as respiratory syncytial virus.The bill for her treatment at the West Boca Medical Center in Palm Beach County came to about $100,000 -- a sum that included almost $4,000 in fees for her birth and pre- and post-natal care -- but every dime of the...

The Affordable Care Act cannot be broken down into sound bites. This holds true for both its most ardent supporters and its most fervent opponents. The law is simply too complex to be labeled either a total failure or a smashing success. But that doesn't mean it isn't trending in one of those two directions. Across the country, individuals and families are beginning to learn whether their insurance premiums will change for 2015—early estimates indicate an overall national increase of 7.5 percent, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. That's what is expected despite the early promise that the ACA would lower...

BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) — Federal authorities say an East Texas man has admitted to deliberately driving his $1 million car into Gulf waters so that he could collect insurance on the vehicle. Authorities announced Tuesday that 39-year-old Andy Lee House of Lufkin has pleaded guilty to wire mail fraud. They say he purchased a Bugatti Veyron and had it insured for $2.2 million. The elegant vehicle is considered one of the fastest in the world.

Since October, 155,000 New Mexico residents have joined the state’s Medicaid rolls, pushing total enrollment to more than 630,000, or nearly a third of the state’s population. On top of that, 410,000 New Mexicans are enrolled in Medicare, the federal health care program for the elderly. Together, total enrollment in those two federal programs are more than 1 million, or half of the state’s 2.1 million population. ... “It’s shocking, and when you add that to the outmigration of people and the lack of economic growth, it’s almost an incentive to stay poor,” said retired University of New Mexico economics...

Seven months after major glitches in the Washington health exchange were discovered, authorities acknowledge that thousands of state residents still don't have insurance they can use to go to the doctor or fill a prescription. [Snip] Some people aren't being properly credited by the exchange for their insurance payments. In some cases, money and information has been lost somewhere between the exchange and the insurance companies. And some people have been told by their doctors that the insurance company has no record of their coverage.

<p>Advocates of the Affordable Care Act, focused until now on persuading people to buy health insurance, have moved to a crucial new phase: making sure the eight million Americans who did so understand their often complicated policies and use them properly.</p>

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif) says she is “tired of hearing pathetic stories from people who have been forced to find new insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The ACA has eliminated substandard insurance policies and guaranteed that every American will obtain superior coverage.” “Rather than be grateful that the Government is looking out for their best interests a cadre of complainers are whining that the new plans cost more than their old plans,” Eshoo complained. “Well, duh. These new plans cover more stuff. A lot of the old plans didn’t cover a number of birth control options. Virtually none...

Health Care: Remember when ObamaCare backers said there was no way the law would push employers to drop their health plans? A new report calls the lie on that one, too. A big concern raised by critics of ObamaCare was that employers would shift their health costs onto taxpayers — dropping insurance benefits knowing workers could access guaranteed, often subsidized coverage in an ObamaCare exchange. Typical of the left's response was a Families USA "fact sheet" that called such worries a "myth." "Employers that offer coverage will continue to do so," it declared. The liberal Urban Institute likewise promised the...

Newly released emails show a key White House adviser intervened on behalf of the health insurance industry after an executive repeatedly warned that massive premium hikes were coming unless the administration expanded an ObamaCare program that Republicans call an industry "bailout." The insurance industry ultimately got a more "generous" offer from the administration -- one that Republicans warn could transfer potentially billions of taxpayer dollars into the Affordable Care Act to bail out insurance companies. The documents were included as part of a report by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republicans allege that White House adviser...

An extra charge on property-insurance and auto-insurance policies to cover claims paid for the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons will end Jan. 1.... The orders make official a decision Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet made last month to end the assessment, Amy Bogner, a spokeswoman for the Office of Insurance Regulation, said in an email. The assessment, which first appeared at 1 percent in 2007...

An employee at an insurance agency in central Sweden will lose 15 days of pay as punishment for surfing the web on the job, spending over 40 hours this summer mainly using social media. Multiple employees at a branch of Försäkringskassan (Swedish Social Insurance Agency) in Gävle face serious repercussions for browsing the web instead of helping customers. In one case, the employee spent about 50 hours of work time during one month visiting 350 websites - including plenty of shopping, weight-loss sites, and blogs. Over a period of seven months the woman had worked 51 hours overtime, but over...

Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federal government after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

With the departure of Eric Cantor as majority leader, it's time to replace him with someone with strong conservative values. My choice is Steve King of Iowa. Steve is not looking for votes, but is looking for solutions to problems.

Anti-Capitalism: You'd think that after ObamaCare's chaotic launch, premium rate shocks, subsidy foul-ups and costly ad hoc changes, the insurance industry would attack the law. Instead, it's slamming the drug industry. "Drugmakers have no straight-face explanation to justify the increasingly astronomical prices they have been charging for their medications," complains one of numerous public relations communications sent recently by the industry trade group America's Health Insurance Plans. The group has called drug prices "unsustainable" and accused the industry of "price gouging." The focus of the industry's fury at the moment is Sovaldi, a breakthrough treatment that can cure Hepatitis C,...