Free Republic

After a barrage of guidance, the IRS finally published its proposed regs on the Affordable Care Act’s “Employer Shared Responsibility” provision, along with a practical Q&A with real-life examples for employers. Here’s help making sense of it all. At this point, virtually every organization knows that all “large” employers — those with 50 or more full-time employees — must provide all full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) with health insurance or pay a “shared-responsibility” penalty. Obamacare considers individuals who work at least 30 hours each week to be an FTE, However, many employers will be surprised by at least one clarification the...

We have learned that the 30.9 million of Federal money being offered to Michigan to fund the Health Care Exchange (referenced in our Jan. 29th “2013 Obama Care in MI and More! article) could see a Committee vote anytime! Grassroots in Michigan joined with other activists from across the state has issued a Press Release on the Health Care Exchange and the expansion of Medicaid in Michigan This money is key to jump-starting the Health Care Exchange this year! We stopped it last year we can do it again! We MUST Do It! Stopping the funding of the Health Care...

Our politics have become so polarized and corrupted that a president of the United States cannot even attend an event devoted to drawing people closer to God and bridge partisan and cultural divides without being lectured about his policies. Last Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., Dr. Ben Carson, director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a 2008 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, broke with a 61-year-old tradition and publicly disagreed with some of the president's policies, such as "Obamacare," taxation and the national debt. Disclosure: I have attended this event...

My column, “Catholics Defy ObamaCare! What About Fundamentalist Churches and Universities?” caused a stir in some circles. Will Christian leaders decide to fraternize with the enemy by killing innocent babies, or fall on their swords by closing their ministries, or fight to the very end by operating illegally in storefronts or darkened basements? They will do one of the three. The fraternizers will be promoted (but should be pitied); those who fall on their swords (seeking some credibility by not joining the enemy or identifying with the “fighters”) will be praised and those who fight and disobey the law and...

Full Title:The newly released “ObamaCare Survival Guide” has rocketed to the No. 2 spot on The New York Times’ bestseller list for advice-giving paperbacks. This remarkable ascendance comes just one week after the book first made The New York Times bestseller list. The first comprehensive and easy-to-read road map on the 2,700-page, the “ObamaCare Survival Guide: The Affordable Care Act and What It Means for You and Your Healthcare," has already made Amazon #1 bestseller status in multiple categories with more than 150,000 copies sold.

DR. BENJAMIN CARSON: There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that's not going to be very helpful for us in the long run, in terms of solving our problems. And somebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to, you know, the bullies.

Harvard Law School was embarrassed recently when one of its graduates, the putative President of the United States, demonstrated that he was unaware that the supreme Court has constitutional authority to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. And after reading a recent paper by Harvard law professor Einer Elhauge, one wonders whether the academic standards (or is it the moral standards?) of that once great school have collapsed. Professor Elhauge says in “If Health Insurance Mandates Are Unconstitutional, Why Did the Founding Fathers Back Them?” (The New Republic, April 13, 2012), that Congress may force us to buy health insurance...

The Affordable Care Act is looking less and less affordable. Start with the IRS’s new estimate for what the cheapest family plan will cost by 2016: $20,000 a year to cover two adults and three kids. And that will only cover 60 percent of medical bills, so add hefty out-of-pocket costs, too. The next surprise is for parents who thought their kids would be covered by an employer. Sloppy wording in the law left that unclear until last week, when the IRS ruled that kids won’t be covered. Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more...

Jan. 1, 2014, will find the fat lady singing for my husband and me. That is when smokers will have to "cough up" extra money for their health insurance because of a provision of the Affordable Health Act. I am 60, which means that I will pay $5,000 extra. My husband at 54 will pay more than $4,000 extra each year. Mind you that this is on top of the insurance payments we already make.

The White House on Sunday stepped up pressure on Republicans to adopt a short-term budget patch that would cancel the $85 billion in spending “sequesters” due on March 1, saying that government spending is still needed to prop up a stubbornly sluggish economy. Late last week, White House officials laid out a list of potential cuts they would have to make if the sequesters aren’t averted, saying they’d be forced to kick children out of the Head Start education program and cut federal loans to small businesses. The officials even warned that more American workers could die as a result...

While Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been arguing that now is not the time for us to be worrying about the federal government’s debt, he does admit that a long term solution is necessary. “In the short run we can always inflate the currency as a means of defaulting on federal obligations,” Krugman said. “But in the long term there are significant demographic problems that require a real solution.” One of the significant demographic problems cited by Krugman was the aging population. “As people get older they tend to need more medical services,” Krugman recounted. “With our advanced...

Many of us have questioned what caused Roberts to switch his vote on ObamaCare at the last minute, as reported by CBS, and doing so, so late that the Conservative Justices were forced to rewrite their majority opinion to be minority dissent. These facts may answer that question. In 2000 Justice Roberts and his wife Jane adopted two children. Initially it was apparent that the adoptions were "from a Latin American country", but over time it has become apparent that the adopted children were not Latin American, but were Irish. Why this matters will become evident. In 2005 the NY...

Many of us have questioned what causedRoberts to switch his vote on ObamaCare at the last minute, as repo..., and doing so, so late that the Conservative Justices were forced to rewrite their majority opinion to be minority dissent. These facts may answer that question.

February 9, 2013 Ambush at Hilton Hollow Russ Vaughn Wow! The commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen walked right into an ambush with no cover, no concealment, and no security at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton. Forced to sit at the dais and suck it up while a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins Medical School, Dr. Benjamin Carson, debunked the concept of Obamacare as well as pointing out the president's seeming indifference to the national debt, Obama did his best to smile but he simply could not suppress that droned-out...

Actually, we already saw it last quarter and there’ll be no escaping it this year. To the shock of many, U.S. GDP shrank in the fourth quarter of 2012 by 0.1%. Immediately, however, economists and commentators flooded the media with reassuring explanations. Super Storm Sandy reduced economic activity in the areas it ravaged; worries about the fiscal cliff and sequestration dampened business spending and government defense spending; businesses let inventory levels dwindle. Even the Federal Reserve commented that the GDP drop was the result of “weather-related disruptions and other transitory factors.” All this is true, to some extent. But none...

The costs of Obamacare are not just hitting businesses this year--they are also hitting the government, and public employees as well. Virginia, for example, is about to limit part-time employees to 29 hours per week in order to avoid triggering Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more. The state cannot afford the $110 million annual cost of insurance. Elsewhere, public institutions are taking similar steps to limit part-time work. In Ohio, Youngstown State University recently announced a 29-hour-per-week part-time limit, and placed employees on notice that they would be fired if...

ObamaCare: Faced with a string of court losses to those defending the First Amendment and religious liberty, HHS reworded its contraceptive mandate. But those who were fooled once won’t be fooled again. While liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, on these pages, and others have declared the new Health and Human Services regulations forcing religious institutions to violate their consciences as some sort of victory for the Catholic Church, any more such victories will surely mean the end of religious liberty in this country. Certainly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not accept what HHS calls an "accommodation" as...

<p>There were a lot of taxes in The Affordable Care Act that Nancy Pelosi famously said "we have to pass the bill so that we can find out what's in it." The American Enterprise Institute has tracked some of the taxes enacted on the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and they are expected to raise billions — in the short term. However, those costs still have to be paid, and consumers are expected to shoulder many of them in 2016.</p>

"Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until "Downton Abbey," make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week. Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn't look happy. You know something's coming when Dr. Carson says, "It's not my intention to offend anyone. But it's hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere."

What to do if the nation fails to fall in line behind new gun grabbing legislation and doesn’t want to put limits on ammo capacity? How about if they rebel against the idea of taxing the heck out of ammo? What if it just seems like there simply isn’t a majority on board with new gun control legislation? Well, if you follow the Obamacare model, you could always consider making extra insurance on weapons technology mandatory. If you can’t force people to do what you want, force them to buy insurance: That seems to be the strategy of the liberal...