Free Republic

It's early -- we have 362 days to go -- and so there will undoubtedly be competition. But as of Jan. 3, your leader in the clubhouse for most revealing quote of the year is this one reported by the Washington Post: "[Saving money] was sometimes a misleading motivator for the Affordable Care Act. The law isn't designed to save money. It's designed to improve health, and that's going to cost money." The speaker being quoted was Jonathan Gruber, an MIT health economist and one of the authors of -- you guessed it -- the Affordable Care Act. Does anyone...

The last time John Nunnemacher had health insurance was 15 years ago, when his employer paid for his coverage. Since then, the freelance graphic artist hasn't been able to afford a policy. Luckily, he didn't get seriously ill or have a bad accident -- which could have left the San Jose man bankrupt. But as of New Year's Day, the 43-year-old Nunnemacher was once again insured. Nearly four years after Congress passed a controversial health care law, tens of thousands of Californians like Nunnemacher can now see a doctor without begging for charity care.

The financial position of the U.S. is not just troubled; it is artificially created to fool the people. The nation's budget deficit and debt are exponentially higher than what our politicians say they are. None of the headline figures used as the basis of public discourse have any relevance to the true state of U.S. finances. The government's financial reporting is misleading because our political leaders have subverted the democratic process to advance their personal interests. Adding all of the costs associated with the nation's social-insurance programs to the amounts reflected in the Financial Report shows that over the past...

The Affordable Care Act was designed to dramatically increase the number of Americans who qualify for Medicaid. In fact, the ACA will literally FORCE many low income seniors onto Medicaid rolls as subsidies for regular ObamaCare plans are NOT available to those over 55 years of age who earn less than 138% of the federal poverty level ($15,856 for individuals; $21,403 for married couples). And without such subsidies, ObamaCare plans are generally far too expensive for older, low-income individuals or couples. Why should any of this matter to those getting “free” healthcare via Medicaid? Because: “If you’re 55 or over,...

The problem with solutions is that few of them tend to be perfect, even if they act in a mostly benign manner. Actions produce reactions, a principle as true in politics as it is in physics, and those tend to multiply when solutions increase in complexity. The nature of these unintended consequences changes dramatically when complex “solutions” turn out to be poorly designed and incompetently administered. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act has provided many real-world examples of this, but perhaps none so “unintended” as the consequences discovered by the Seattle Times this weekend. Carol Ostrom, The Times’ health...

My, this is an unpleasant consequence of Obamacare.

The article below is the most comprehensive analysis available of “Obamacare” – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The author, a knowledgeable person who wishes to remain anonymous, explains how Obamacare works for the insurance companies but not for you.

Assets become targets of the states ___ Most people think they’re exempt from the estate tax (often called the “death tax”) because they don’t have $2 million. A lot of people with low incomes do have some assets, however, and if they have used any Medicaid benefits, their heirs may be in for a shock. Depending on state law, the state may have the right to everything, up to the cost of Medicaid benefits received — house, car, bank accounts, tools, annuities, piano, furniture, everything — and not just 50 percent of it. This situation is not exactly new. The...

As thousands of state residents enroll in Washington’s expanded Medicaid program, many will be surprised at fine print: After you’re dead, your estate can be billed for ordinary health-care expenses. State officials are scrambling to change the rule. It wasn’t the moonlight, holiday-season euphoria or family pressure that made Sofia Prins and Gary Balhorn, both 62, suddenly decide to get married. It was the fine print. As fine print is wont to do, it had buried itself in a long form — Balhorn’s application for free health insurance through the expanded state Medicaid program. As the paperwork lay on the...

President Barack Obama continues to inform the public about the many benefits of the Affordable Care Act. The latest message of his administration explains that 6 out of 10 uninsured African Americans who may be eligible for coverage may also qualify for financial assistance with Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax breaks by way of the Health Insurance Marketplace. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services, which was released Monday morning, outlines that 4.2 million African Americans can qualify for health insurance assistance to help meet their monthly premium rates. Secretary of Health and...

Some 1.6 million Americans have registered for Obamacare, but more than nine-out-of-10 of them actually signed up for Medicaid, a trend that could end up slamming federal and state government budgets. Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security already account for 48 percent of federal spending, writes economist Michael Tanner, a senior fellow for the Cato Institute, in an article for The New York Post. But with Obamacare adding to the Medicaid costs, "we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency," Tanner writes. The Medicaid program is already the third-largest government program in the United States, coming in only behind...

A small but growing number of physicians are not accepting government insurance, such as Medicare and Medicaid, and are even refusing to accept patients’ private insurance, according to Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). Orient says the transition to a business model in which patients agree to pay doctors directly for the health care services they provide started before Obamacare was passed, but that the new law has accelerated the trend, especially among AAPS’ 4,000 or so members. AAPS is the conservative alternative to the much larger American Medical Association (AMA), which...

Time to test Minnesota Nice to destruction, I guess: …Minnesota’s top insurers have laid out a list of technological problems that they say may keep people who’ve enrolled in a health plan from being covered on Jan. 1. Insurance carriers selling plans on the state’s insurance marketplace say enrollment information they’re getting from MNsure, is inaccurate and incomplete – and that time is running out to fix these problems. [snip] “At this late date, the health plan companies do not have most of the names or information on individuals who have enrolled through MNsure,” Julie Brunner, executive director of the...

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far. The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments. Medicaid is already America’s third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That’s more than $265 billion per year. Indeed, already Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 48%...

The Obamacare website is open for business. But the Charlton Memorial Hospital in Folkston, Georgia, is closed. Because Republicans in half the states have blocked the expansion of Medicaid, funds to public hospitals with large uninsured populations have been slashed. Desperate to try to blame everything and the weather on the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have tried to pin the cuts in subsidies to hospitals on the dynamics of the law alone. Purely for ideological reasons, Republicans are creating a health care crisis — in their own states.

LAURINBURG — The president of the county’s NAACP hopes that the petition delivered to Gov. Pat McCrory this week by the association’s top leader in the state will convince North Carolina legislators to reconsider their decision to opt out of the Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act, a move that left nearly 30 percent of the county uninsured. The Rev. William Barber II, president of the state NAACP, delivered the petition Tuesday, saying as he did so that he wanted to remind the governor over the Thanksgiving holiday of the 500,000 North Carolinians who would be stuck...

The latest wound is largely self-inflicted. Medicaid and the new Obamacare exchanges are competing for the same young and healthy customers that Obamacare needs to survive -- and Medicaid's winning. President Obama and the entire Democratic Party have nobody else but themselves to blame. In its hubris, the Democratic Party members assured the country again and again in 2009 and 2010 that it knew enough to be able to forcibly reorganize one-sixth of the American economy without causing millions to lose their current health insurance coverage, without triggering skyrocketing costs and without causing a host of terrible unintended consequences. The...

As the White House touted improvements to the troubled HealthCare.gov website Sunday morning, conservative pundit George Will said the real test might be in six months when employers begin to weigh their options for 2015. "Watch the employers, because if they start dumping people into … Medicaid – and the doctors then say, the burdens are too high and the reimbursement is too low; we're not seeing Medicaid patients – then all hell is going to break loose," Will said on "Fox News Sunday." Former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., voted for Obamacare, and admitted Sunday it hasn't worked out like...

One wonders what the New York Times has been doing the past few years while conservatives were very vociferously warning about the entirely predictable, pending phenomenon: But now, as California’s Medicaid program is preparing for a major expansion under President Obama’s health care law, Dr. Mazer says he cannot accept additional patients under the government insurance program for a simple reason: It does not pay enough.“It’s a bad situation that is likely to be made worse,” he said.His view is shared by many doctors around the country. Medicaid for years has struggled with a shortage of doctors willing to accept...

States expanding their Medicaid programs under the healthcare reform law to adults earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level may be surprised by their actual costs for the new enrollees, particularly when it comes to mental health services, according to a new study published in the Medicare & Medicaid Research Review. Researchers from Harvard University and the Urban Institute interviewed high-ranking Medicaid officials in six states that have expanded Medicaid since 2010, including California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, Washington and the District of Columbia. These were voluntary, early state expansions allowed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care...