Free Republic

Obamacare supporters rejoiced in June when the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. could use its taxing authority to mandate that most people buy health insurance. But their celebrations may have been a bit premature. The Affordable Care Act faces other legal hurdles—including a challenge that only could have been made after the Supreme Court’s ruling. The right-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation amended its challenge to the ACA after the Supreme Court upheld the insurance mandate under Congress’ taxing powers. The group's challenge turns on the Origination Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which requires that bills for raising revenue start in the...

(Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service has released new rules for investment income taxes on capital gains and dividends earned by high-income individuals that passed Congress as part of the 2010 healthcare reform law. The 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, meant to help pay for healthcare, goes into effect in 2013. It is the first surtax to be applied to capital gains and dividend income. The tax affects only individuals with more than $200,000 in modified adjusted gross income (MAGI), and married couples filing jointly with more than $250,000 of MAGI. The tax applies to a broad range of...

Thanks to the 62,615,406 individuals who took off their thinking caps and re-elected President Barack Obama, thousands upon thousands of folks are receiving their pink slips now or soon will over the next several weeks or months. These lost jobs are often high-paying and are disappearing by the hour. The culprit? It's none other than Obama's landmark legislation, The Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Re-electing Barack Obama guaranteed that the 2.3% medical device tax, a key funding source for ObamaCare, will go into effect on January 1, 2013. This transfer of money from these companies to the federal government, which...

Dems: Federal health programs should cover DREAMersBy Sam Baker - 12/03/12 02:53 PM ET Federal healthcare programs should cover the children of illegal immigrants, a group of House Democrats says. Democrats are asking the Obama administration to make healthcare available to children who are able to stay in the U.S. under the deferred-action immigration policy that President Obama announced earlier this year. The policy — similar to the DREAM Act — allows many children of illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. without fear of deportation, as long as they meet certain criteria. A group of House Democrats, led by...

Much like the Greek debt crisis offered a glimpse of that fiscal day-of-reckoning 'Obama bucks' America is soon to face, the UK's  ever-ailing National Health Service -a 60-year-old system of socialized medicine known as the NHS- provides Americans a useful preview of all the expensive, unnecessary disasters our own Obamacare will soon be bringing on this side of the pond. And the prognosis?  Hope you're sitting down... The Guardian (UK): Senior doctors warned that the findings reflected their increasingly frantic efforts to find beds for the growing number of emergency admissions and that repeated breaches of the 85% (capacity) limit meant...

Republicans believed a Mitt Romney win would seal Obamacare's fate. Democrats - or rather, the lonely two-fifths of Americans who support the president's beleaguered healthcare law - believed an Obama win would secure its future. Both sides were kidding themselves.Romney may have pledged to repeal the law, but his positions on Obamacare had the life span of a rainbow. He supported an identical law when he got the credit for signing it as governor of Massachusetts. He then opposed Obamacare when that's what GOP primary voters wanted to hear, and later endorsed parts of it when he thought that's what...

Opposition to Obamacare fueled the Tea Party wave of 2009-2010. The next wave will include continued opposition to Obamacare, along with other fiscal issues, The Tea Party tsunami at the gates. The fight over Obamacare as a law ended when Chief Justice John Roberts enganged in mental gymnastics to uphold the law under Congress’ taxing authority, and then again when Obama’s reelection removed any possibility of complete repeal. The fight over Obamacare now is over implementation. There are inherent problems in the law itself which will raise popular ire, but the battle now is over exchanges and other aspects of...

I’m not easily grossed out or nauseated. Heck, I’m on email lists for a half-dozen softball teams and you can only imagine the strange/filthy/nasty things that guys send to each other. But I read a story about the death panels in the United Kingdom that left me discombobulated. I can’t even begin to describe how I feel.Here’s the intro of a disturbing report in the Daily Mail.Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved...

December 1 , 2012 City of Detroit - Layoffs Coming Feb 2013? Resolution Copper Mining - up to 400 Update: Clinton Community College NY - 10 Celgard - 40 EnerSys Energy Products - 100 AM General - Confirms Layoffs, About 100? Update: AT&T - 106 Landline Techs. in CT City of Steubenville Ohio - 12 Layoff Notices Cumberland Pharmaceuticals - 1/3 of its Salesforce U.S. Steel Corp.McKeesport Tubular Plant - 142 Worldwide Flight Services in 51 in Honolulu Orange Township Ohio - 22 Layoff Notices Scentsy - 19 O'Hare Airport - 300 Janitor Jobs Cuts Possible Glendale Adventist Medical Center...

There is an antique saying -- no less true for its antiquity -- that you need to be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. This came to mind when I read a recent report about what is happening at a Pennsylvania college. One of President Obama's most loyal -- not to say fawning -- constituencies clearly is academia. His rate of support among collegiate faculty and administrators surely approaches near-unanimity on the typical campus. This is why the news about the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is so richly ironic. CCAC has just announced...

Residents of states that refuse to set up health insurance exchanges under Obamacare are set to be hit with higher premiums under new rules announced by the Health and Human Services Department. Insurance companies will be charged 3.5 percent of any premiums they sell through the federal exchanges, the department announced Friday. And insurers are likely to pass that surcharge on to clients, leaading to higher premiums. The only states to be affected are those that refuse to set up their own exchanges because of opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They are almost certain to be...

The "Affordable Care Act" might die a death of a thousand legal cuts. Last June, upon learning that the Supreme Court had ruled Obamacare's individual mandate constitutional, many observers were forced to concur with the Dickens character who opined, "If the law supposes that… the law is an ass." Yet, the increasing number of anti-PPACA lawsuits that have been receiving serious attention from the courts suggests that the legal system may not be as irrational as it seemed when Chief Justice John Roberts began braying from the bench on June 28. If this seems Pollyannaish, consider the fate of McCain-Feingold....

And so the government takeover of our health care system begins: Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, plans to begin denying health insurance to newly hired employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week.. ... By making the fine for not providing health care cheaper than providing health care, this was always the plan: to encourage employers to send us to the government. Remember how Obama's big ObamaCare sell was, "You get to keep the health insurance you have"? It was all a lie, a hustle, a con, a ruse…

The signature power grab of the left may be the “law of the land” as conceded by ever conciliatory House Speaker John Boehner, but getting the massively complex statute up and running will be far more difficult than getting it passed. When Democrats rammed ObamaCare through congress in 2010, their intent was to literally acquire the power of life and death over the American people, not create a workable healthcare plan. And this becomes increasingly apparent as the requirements of the 2700 page behemoth are gradually made known. Those who wrote the law believed that elected officials in the 50...

The ObamaCare fiscal cliffBy: John Hayward 11/30/2012 02:34 PM While we’re busy listening to President Obama demand a $1.6 trillion tax increase on some people as the price for disarming part of a $1.2 trillion tax bomb aimed at other people, let’s not forget that he’s already detonated a $1.058 trillion tax warhead on all of us: ObamaCare. As the House Ways and Means Committee noted last summer, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision upholding ObamaCare, it contains 21 distinct tax increases, “a dozen of which target Americans earning less than $200,000 per year for singles or $250,000...

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) warns that the Obamacare tax hikes set to kick in at the start of 2013 are "a big part of the fiscal cliff" that will hurt those in need of vital medical equipment. Today, Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan issued the following statement highlighting the $1.058 trillion in higher taxes coming from ObamaCare over the next ten years. Many of the tax increases take effect on January 1, 2013: "ObamaCare raises taxes on middle-income families, employers and investors. It hikes taxes on people with no health insurance, people with too little insurance and people with...

Each year, Congress holds a sword of Damocles over the heads of the medical profession. The "doc fix" is a budget adjustment to bring Medicare fees into the world of reality. democrats love to omit it for the sake of appearances. Obamacare cuts $716 billion from Medicare. Obama calls it "waste." Physicians call it reimbursement. What that will do is make finding Medicare providers far more difficult. The AMA supported Obamacare, on the promise that the law would include a permanent “doc fix.” But Democrats reneged on that promise, owing to the cost of a permanent SGR adjustment: something on...

New Obamacare regulations will force pizza chains like Domino's to post up to 34 million nutrition signs in its stores -- one for every pizza combination the company makes. The rules require fast food and grocery stores that have more than 20 stores to require labels for each product they produce. Jenny Fouracre-Petko, the legislative director for Domino’s, said mandated signs will cost Domino’s nearly $5,000 per store. Even worse, the cost will get passed down to the consumer, many of whom will never see the signs since “10 percent of pizza customers never enter a Domino’s store” because they...

Youngstown State University will limit the hours of non-union part-time employees to ensure that the university is not required to provide them with health insurance coverage under Obamacare. YSU, a public institution in eastern Ohio, announced to employees earlier this month that it is restricting part-time employees, including adjunct professors and lecturers, to 29 hours a week or less. Under the Affordable Care Act, the university will have to provide health insurance to full-time employees, classified as anyone working 30 hours or more per week. According to an email sent to English department employees, which was obtained by The Huffington...

"It’s official: the health care law will unduly stick it to young Americans by making them pay far higher premiums starting January 1, 2014.[1] New rules announced this month are even worse than expected when it comes to shoveling an unfair burden onto our nation’s youth. Moreover, they also perversely increase the incentives of young people to remain uninsured." "As shown in the following chart based on estimates by international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the rule will force insurers to hike rates for 18- to 24-year-olds by 45 percent even as rates for those 60 and older drop by...