Free Republic

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), representing 40 denominations with more than 45,000 congregations, have released a statement urging President Obama to drop the proposed Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate on contraceptive and abortifacient coverage, even after the administration offered a limited ‘compromise’ slightly expanding religious exemptions to the rule. “The minor modifications announced today still require many Americans and their religious organizations to either violate faith and conscience or face heavy financial penalties,” wrote the group on Friday. “At the very least he should exempt all religious employers who object on grounds based in religiously informed...

Just a little midweek, midday roundup of a few of the most recent ways in which the Affordable Care Act is just not going according to plan. “Unexpectedly,” of course.The House Ways and Means, Education and Workforce, and Energy and Commerce Committees have teamed up on a new report called the “ObamaCare Burden Tracker,” meant to function as “a real-time online resource to help the public keep track of all of the new government mandates, rules, and red tape as a result of ObamaCare.” Every hour and dollar spent complying with the Democrats’ health care law are time and resources...

College students will soon wake up to the fact that they have been had. While they were overwhelmingly supportive of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or “ObamaCare”) when their charismatic President was championing it, they will not be pleased when they find out that there is a huge price they will have to pay. ObamaCare will be anything but affordable. Apparently, New Jersey is the only state in the nation that currently requires all college students to have healthcare coverage. This has always been a bare-bones plan costing from $100-600 per year. The new healthcare regulations will...

PHILADELPHIA, February 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews) – Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput on Monday condemned the Obama administration’s proposed ‘compromise’ on the HHS birth control mandate in his weekly column for his diocesan newspaper. “The White House has made no concessions to the religious conscience claims of private businesses, and the whole spirit of the ‘compromise’ is minimalist,” the Archbishop wrote in the column, called Making Sense of Another Ambiguous ‘Compromise.’ At issue is the HHS mandate requiring private employers to provide health care plans that include contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs to female employees without copays. Churches are currently exempt...

According to projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), entitlements and ObamaCare spending will comprise 53 percent of all federal spending over the coming decade, totaling $24.9 trillion. In its updated Budget and Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday, the CBO projects that Social Security will account for $11.149 trillion in spending from 2014 to 2023 while federal health care entitlements, including Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare, will spend $13.85 trillion. (That total includes TRICARE, CHIP, and “other” spending listed by the CBO under healthcare.) ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies, exchange costs, and other spending are expected to cost the government $949 billion...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday quietly raised the 10-year cost of ObamaCare's insurance subsidies offered via the health law's exchanges by $233 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office review of its latest spending forecast. The CBO's new baseline estimate shows that ObamaCare subsidies offered through the insurance exchanges — which are supposed to be up and running by next January — will total more than $1 trillion through 2022, up from $814 billion over those same years in its budget forecast made a year ago. That's an increase of nearly 29%. [snip] The CBO also expects 7 million...

President Obama famously promised Americans that if they liked their health care plan they could keep it, but a new report from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 7 million Americans will lose employer-based insurance as a result of his national health care law. In 2022, by CBO and JCT’s estimate, 7 million fewer people will have employment-based health insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act,” the CBO announced in its new budget outlook released on Tuesday. This is up from an estimate of 4 million last August, mostly reflecting the effects of tax changes. In a July...

Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has been a United States senator for only 34 days, but already he is making his mark on national politics. His conspicuous presence and aggressive tone have thrilled his conservative cheerleaders, while inducing fits of rage in liberal detractors and Joe Scarborough. In the past week alone, Cruz has tangled with veteran Democratic spin-master Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Meet the Press, sent a tongue-in-cheek letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, introduced legislation to fully repeal Obamacare, and recorded “no” votes on major items, including Hurricane Sandy relief, raising the debt ceiling, filibuster reform, and...

Boy, it’s great to be liberal in Minnesota. While the usual suspects remain ever vigilant for any hint of political malfeasance involving Rep. Michele Bachmann, Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar get off scot-free for voting in favor of Obamacare’s medical devices tax before they were against it.

Gov. John Kasich today joined the growing ranks of Republican governors who will expand Medicaid... However, the brief also said that Ohio would "reverse this decision" if the federal government failed to cover nearly all of the cost of expansion, as it has said it would. The expansion of Medicaid fulfills an option under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to provide coverage to adults living at up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states have the ability to opt in or out of the program, but they...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday quietly raised the 10-year cost of ObamaCare´s insurance subsidies offered via the health law´s exchanges by $233 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office review of its latest spending forecast. The CBO´s new baseline estimate shows that ObamaCare subsidies offered through the insurance exchanges — which are supposed to be up and running by next January — will total more than $1 trillion through 2022, up from $814 billion over those same years in its budget forecast made a year ago. That´s an increase of nearly 29%.

Obamacare outlawed underwriting by health insurance companies. In other words, if we are diagnosed with cancer, run 10Ks, have diabetes or a family history of heart attacks, we all pay the same price. Fine. But there is one big exception. Smokers, who can be charged a huge insurance surcharge for their unhealthy habit. **SNIP** This financial stick is entirely political. Notice we never hear experts wanting to “punish” the promiscuous for the cost burden they inflict on the health care system. Yet people who sleep around, like smokers and the obese, cost the rest of us plenty–what with promiscuity leading...

To live well is nothing other than to love God with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul and with all one’s efforts; from this it comes about that love is kept whole and uncorrupted (through temperance). No misfortune can disturb it (and this is fortitude). It obeys only [God] (and this is justice), and is careful in discerning things, so as not to be surprised by deceit or trickery (and this is prudence). – Augustine The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that prudence is the auriga virtutum, the “charioteer of virtues.” It’s “right reason in action,” the...

Any immigration package in which current illegal immigrants are made eligible for ObamaCare — in the form of either exchanges or Medicaid — could increase costs to the federal government by between $120 billion to $200 billion in its first decade, according to internal calculations by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee that were obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller. GOP Senate Budget Committee staffers explained to TheDC that the estimates assume that the law’s provision capping total spending on exchange subsidies, which is set to begin in 2019, is enforced. However, should the provision fall by the...

The federal government has once again driven a wedge between patients and physicians by creating its own criteria for the screening of these two prevalent malignancies. Instead of trying to improve on something that was working pretty well, Washington decided to scrap the idea because it did not fit the current agenda. Our own government is avoiding early diagnosis and treatment of these two known killers, turning a blind eye as these malignant terrorists invade our bodies. Only Washington could take something as straight forward as cancer screening and turn it into a complicated quagmire, and a deadly one at...

Why did the Tea Party–backed governor of Ohio just say yes to a key part of President Obama's health care law? Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) is the latest governor to accept the hefty Medicaid expansion authorized by President Obama's health care overhaul. He's not the first Republican to do so — Brian Sandoval (Nev.), Susana Martinez (N.M.), Jack Dalrymple (N.D.), and Jan Brewer (Ariz.) have, too — but Kasich's opt-in is a bigger deal. As House Budget Committee chairman during the Newt Gingrich years, the "fiercely conservative" Kasich "built his political identity arguing for smaller government," says David Nather...

Nobel Prize winning “economist” Paul Krugman spoke at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. last week. During the Q&A session following the lecture, an audience member asked him about the rising national debt. Earlier in the evening, Krugman had already vocalized his satisfaction at President Obama’s apparent lack of concern over the exploding cumulative deficit. However, in a moment of brutal honesty, the esteemed Princeton professor revealed his long term prognosis. According to the professor, "Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re...

President Obama's health care law will push 7 million people out of their job-based insurance coverage — nearly twice the previous estimate, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday. CBO said that this year's tax cuts have changed the incentives for businesses and made it less attractive to pay for insurance, meaning fewer will decide to do so. Instead, they'll choose to pay a penalty to the government, totaling $13 billion in higher fees over the next decade. But the non-partisan agency also expects fewer people to have to pay individual penalties to the IRS...

By accepting the provision included in President Barack Obama's health care law expanding federal Medicaid funding, Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined four fellow Republican governors in welcoming part of a program their party has campaigned vehemently against. He also drew the ire of some Republican activists, who had viewed him as a model of small government conservatism and a potential candidate for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Or, in other words: Just give in already to the power of the all-knowing and all-powerful bureaucracy. Trust us.Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that ObamaCare’s Medicaid mandate (requiring that states expand their programs and provide specified health care to all citizens whose income falls below a certain threshold, or else face losing all prior federal funding) was an unconstitutional “gun to the head” for states’ administrations and budgets, and confirmed their right to opt out without penalty — but that doesn’t mean the Obama administration isn’t applying every type of political pressure and fiscal inducement they can to coerce...