Free Republic

The latest issue roiling the Republican Party is Medicaid, specifically whether Republican governors should expand Medicaid with federal Affordable Care Act money -- especially if they want to be on the GOP national ticket in 2016. It's a hot issue because Obamacare allows states to expand their pool of eligible Medicaid recipients. For the first three years, Washington promises to pay 100 percent of the freight for new enrollees; later, federal support would shrink to 90 percent. (Washington covers about half the cost of today's pre-ACA enrollees.) It's as free as free money gets in this country -- nearly $1...

Retired chemist Edward Schokowitz was incredulous when he received a letter from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey early last month saying his Medicare Advantage Plan, which had no premium, would be eliminated next year.“They took all the senior citizens and threw us out of the plan. They now want to give us the same plan for $153 [per month],” he told the Daily Caller. “The President said you can’t be kicked out of your plan. He lies.”Schokowitz is one of many Medicare beneficiaries now learning that — like Americans who buy insurance on the individual market —...

Reuters) - President Barack Obama made a pitch on Friday to create jobs by fixing roads, dredging ports and modernizing the air traffic control system, urging Congress to focus on these investments as it tries to work out a budget deal by a January deadline. The visit the Port of New Orleans was an opportunity for Obama to focus on the economy and take attention away from the controversy around the launch of his signature healthcare insurance program, widely known as Obamacare.Obama pledged, however, to fix the malfunctioning Healthcare.gov website, and took a veiled jab at Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby...

Barack Obama flew to Dallas, Texas on Wednesday to promote his troubled Obamacare program. He also wanted to defend the Obamacare navigators who work on Obamacare in Dallas.Barack Obama flew to Texas to thank members of an Alinsky-founded group for their support. (Yahoo)During his visit Barack Obama thanked members of the Dallas Area Interfaith (DAI) a group professing to be an interdenominational Christian group. DAI is actually a front group for the Industrial Areas Foundation, which was founded by Saul Alinsky.  The group plans on distributing 100,000 copies of the DAI health care booklet in the Dallas area.DAI purports to be a...

President Barack Obama walks in with volunteer Edna Pemberton before speaking with other... With Washington focused on the Obamacare website's continued failure and insurers dropping millions from their plans, President Obama traveled to one of the areas of the country where opposition to Obamacare is the strongest to offer a pep talk to the law's supporters.Speaking to a synagogue in Dallas, Obama said the many benefits of the Affordable Care Act are getting lost in all the “politics and all of the chatter.”Because of the law, children up to the age of 26 already can stay on their parents...

President Barack Obama traveled to North Texas Wednesday to thank those working to help Texans sign up for coverage through the nation’s new healthcare plan — and to call on Republican Gov. Rick Perry to do more to help those without insurance. He brought his defense of the controversial healthcare law to Texas, the largest Republican state where officials oppose the program as well as any expansion of Medicaid. “There’s no state that actually needs this more than Texas,” Obama told a crowd of about 150 gathered at Temple Emanu-El, where volunteers work to enroll others in the healthcare program,...

Could Virginia Start Forcing MD's to Accept Medicare & Medicaid Patients? by Kerry Picket 3 Nov 2013 Kathleen Murphy, a Democrat who is running for the House of Delegates against Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock, told a forum in Great Falls on Saturday that doctors should be forced to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients: FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.....

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the federal government’s major health-care programs as well as the Obamacare insurance exchange, spent $1,113,178,000,000 in fiscal 2013, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement for September, which was released last week. That sets a record for the most money ever spent by a federal agency or department in a single year. It also means CMS spent more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the entire federal government spent in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation creating the Medicaid and Medicare programs. …

Kathleen Murphy, a Democrat who is running for the House of Delegates against Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock, told a forum in Great Falls on Saturday that doctors should be forced to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients: FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.  She did not recognize that the payments are inadequate to cover the doctors' costs.  She also did not recognize there is a shortage of over 45,000 physicians...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services--the federal agency that created and is operating the Obamacare exchanges--says in a budget document provided to the congressional appropriations committees that the Medicare, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will cover almost 116,000,000 Americans in 2014. That equals approximately 37 percent of the nation’s total population and approximately 43 percent of the population that will have some kind of health insurance. Of the approximately 57 percent of Americans who will remain in non-government run health insurance plans next year, many will qualify for a federal tax subsidy...

I can’t tell exactly when Maryland’s health benefit exchange posted its new numbers, but it appears to be no earlier than late this afternoon — perfect timing...

The company chosen by the Obama administration to oversee the repair of the new federal health insurance Web site faced questions from lawmakers a year ago about whether it was an appropriate choice for earlier work on the site, given that it is owned by the country’s largest health insurance company. Click here for full article================================================================== The No Gloating Zone If you were expecting any gloating from me over how Democrats are being hoisted on their own petard -- an unread law they rammed through the House and Senate on a party-line vote, using crooked means and against the will...

Apparently the numbers of people enrolling in Medicare are far higher than expected and could take away from the base of healthy people needed to make Obamacare work:

For those of you being entertained by the Obamacare disaster, I've got good news. Pop some more popcorn, sit back in your chair and watch the meltdown that will occur when the Medicaid expansion begins on November 1. Politico: A new phase of the Obamacare launch is coming, this one involving Medicaid. And it could be déjà vu all over again.On Nov. 1, the health law's malfunctioning enrollment system is supposed to send reams of data to states so they can begin placing thousands of people into Medicaid. But state officials say that transfer system has barely been tested and...

Here’s a big surprise for the White House and the insurance industry: Turns out it’s a whole lot easier to get people to sign up for an insurance plan that costs them nothing than it is to make them buy insurance at steep Obamacare rates. CBS News had an excellent piece on this in the morning...

LINK ONLY PER FR POSTING RULES: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/2013/10/23/37000-fully-enrolled-in-ny-health-exchange/3171943/

Oregon State University and the Oregon Health Authority have received $1.25 million from the Centers for Disease Control to study the health impact of opening the Oregon Health Plan to more people.OSU announced the grant in a press release Wednesday.The five-year study will evaluate how the health of low-income women and their infants is affected when more of them are eligible for Medicaid health care coverage, i.e., the Oregon Health Plan.The OSU team will be led by researchers in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, including Marie Harvey, Jeff Luck, Jocelyn Warren and Jangho Yoon.“Oregon is an ideal...

Ohio just pushed the country past a symbolic threshold: it’s become the 25th state to pursue expanding Medicaid under the president’s health-care law, making the nation’s states evenly split on the issue for the first time. As of the start of the month, 24 states had opted to forge ahead with the expansion and 26 had not, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy news and analysis nonprofit. Ohio was among those that were not expanding health care to more low-income adults, though Republican Gov. John Kasich wanted it. But a seven-member board that considered his request got...

A new Kaiser Family Foundation report says Florida’s decision not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act - often called Obamacare - means that more than 700,000 low-income Foridians could remain uninsured in 2014. The Kaiser report says in states deciding to expand Medicaid nearly all low-income residents will be covered, but in states like Florida there will be a coverage gap. The report says some low-income residents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to receive tax credits to help them afford coverage under healthcare exchanges. Florida officials decided against Medicaid expansion saying it would...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. Insurance enrollment helpers are encouraging Native Americans to sign up for coverage under the nation's new health care law. Native Americans are exempt from the Affordable Care Act's requirement that people carry insurance. But ``navigators'' tasked with helping people get insurance say the new law will give Native Americans better access to X-rays, mammograms, prescription drugs and trips to specialists not covered under Indian Health Service.