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The just-started enrollment period for ObamaCare exchange plans in 2016 is likely to yield one of two dismal outcomes. In the first, enrollment soars as people sign up in droves for the cheapest plan available to avoid the individual mandate tax penalty, whose minimum bite will spike from $325 to $695. Although the law's strongest backers might celebrate this, it's not clear why: Millions of modest-income individuals who opt for bronze would get policies with deductibles as high as $6,850. Yet the Obama administration's own analysis reveals that among those still uninsured, 80% have less than $1,000 in savings. Thus,...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-decline-of-obamacare-1445807092 ObamaCare will almost inevitably be reopened in 2017, whoever wins the election. The good news is the emerging consensus among Republican candidates about a credible, pragmatic and optimistic alternative. Jeb Bush was the latest to release a plan two weeks ago—and this is a debate that has always deserved to be litigated at the presidential level to create a mandate for reform.

President Obama will bring athletes, coaches, academics and parents to the White House later this month for a summit on youth sports safety and the dangers of concussions, an administration official said Thursday. "As both a parent and an avid sports fan, the president loves and appreciates the role that sports play in the lives of young people, and his administration is committed to helping ensure that children continue to be active and play sports safely," the official said in a statement. At the forum, the president will argue for a "team approach" to preventing and treating concussions, the White...

Obama: 'I'm sorry' Americans are losing insurance Associated Press By JULIE PACE 3 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to calm a growing furor, President Barack Obama said Thursday he's sorry Americans are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep under his signature health care law. But the president stopped short of apologizing for making those promises in the first place. "I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he said in an interview with NBC News. Signaling possible tweaks to the law, Obama said his administration...

Confirming our fears from a few days ago, the early numbers are in for Obamacare... and they are not good. Of course, listening to "bloggers" an be bad for your health, but it seems, very few of the million of "uninsured" have decided that it is as crucial as the "leader" has exclaimed. As Millard Brown Digital reports, fewer than 1% of those trying to register for health insurance under Obamacare have completed the enrollment process. The following inverted pyramid highlights the dismal reality of the Affordable Car Act so far...   

It was "night and day" hearing President Obama and President Clinton's health care chat versus Sen. Ted Cruz's, R-Texas, 21-hour "filibuster," the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jr., tells Whispers. "Such clowning really helps President Obama, to see the contrast between the wise man and the clown," Jackson said Wednesday. Jackson has been in attendance at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual confab in New York this week and felt POTUS laid out the Affordable Care Act well when talking to Clinton Tuesday.

The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is reportedly the first union to officially call for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The health care law is prompting some serious buyer’s remorse in Big Labor, which worked hard on behalf of the administration to pass it: The union’s statement can be found here. The full text is below: United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International President Kinsey M. Robinson issued the following statement today calling for a repeal or complete reform of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA):

Two hospice care centers are struggling to make ends meet, and Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare are to blame. Hospices—health care facilities for the terminally ill—along with other Medicare providers are facing Medicare pay cuts. Of the $716 billion in payment reductions, hospice care was hit by a $17 billion payment cut from 2013 to 2022. Now, contrary to all of the misleading claims, this effect is already beginning. San Diego Hospice recently laid off 260 workers, closed a 24-bed hospital, and has recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. San Diego Hospice’s financial condition is attributed mainly to reduced Medicare reimbursement,...

When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely. The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the...

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, Obamacare cuts $716 billion from Medicare in order to pay for its $1.9 trillion expansion of coverage to low-income Americans. It’s one of the reasons why seniors are more opposed to the new health law than any other age group. So why is it that the group that purports to speak for seniors, the American Association of Retired Persons, so strongly supports a law that most seniors oppose? According to an explosive new report from Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), it’s because those very same Medicare cuts will give the AARP...

The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty. *** In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and...

Your Friday IRS regulation dump: Obamacare’s job-killing medical device tax Share By Michelle Malkin • February 3, 2012 04:21 PM If it’s Friday, it’s another White House dump day. Cue the dump truck horn: Doot! Doot! Doot! While Obama sycophants are busy trumpeting deceptive jobs numbers, the administration is quietly moving forward with job-killing Obamacare regs and taxes. The IRS today released rules to impose the $20 billion Obamacare medical device tax scheduled to take effect next year. At a time when the White House is touting its government initiatives to champion “innovation,” the Obamacare innovation tax on medical device/diagnostic...

On Wednesday, NPR's resident ObamaCare booster Jule Rovner spotlighted the left-leaning Kaiser Family Foundation's latest tracking poll on the law. Rovner indicated that 51% unpopularity for the legislation in October was merely a "blip," and played up how "the public is still confused about what the law does and does not do, more than 18 months after its passage." The journalist led her November 30 item for NPR's "Shots" blog, "Health Law's Popularity Rises...Ever So Slightly," with her "blip" label. After briefly noting that "the federal Affordable Care Act still remains slightly more unpopular 44 percent) than popular (37 percent),"...

This week, the House Budget Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings to examine the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a board of unelected bureaucrats tasked under Obamacare to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. During the Budget Committee hearing, Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, described the board: [T]he IPAB is unprecedented in the power given to unelected officials to direct hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending. The IPAB will give unelected, unaccountable government appointees the power to make decisions about payment policy in Medicare that will ultimately determine whether millions of seniors have access...

The White House defense of Obamacare hinges on the claim that Congress essentially has unlimited power to force Americans to spend their personal money on a cause of the government’s choosing. Oral arguments before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday made this all the more clear. Administration lawyers argued that uninsured individuals can be compelled to buy health care coverage under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. If that’s so, what else could Congress compel people to do? As Judge James L. Graham asked acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal,

Ezra Klein, the Washington Post's blogging wunderkind, is a smart guy. He made his name becoming the go-to pundit for health care policy. He understands health care policy as few do in D.C. But if you're looking for an unvarnished opinion about the political realities of Obamacare, he's the last guy I would read. Since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act begin winding its way through Congress last year, Klein has been almost unrelentingly supportive of every proposed version of the legislation. Now that the legislation is in place and we're

Everyone knows that Obamacare was loosely modeled on the refrom undertaken in Massachusetts. So how’s MA doing? About exactly as you’d expect. This summer the Boston Globe wrote that: The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget. Unable to stop the bleeding, Massachusetts has resorted to price controls: In February, the governor filed sweeping legislation that proposes to give the Division of Insurance the...

Democrats think they know how to run the insurance industry better than the insurance industry, and they're getting the chance to prove it under ObamaCare. Consider the early returns on its plan to insure Americans denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. To judge by President Obama's rhetoric, the insurance industry's victims have been wandering the country like Okies in "The Grapes of Wrath." Thus ObamaCare gave the Health and Human Services Department the power to design and sell its own insurance policies. The $5 billion program started in July and runs through 2014, when ObamaCare's broader regulations kick in. Mr. Obama...

Last week the Congressional Budget Office reported that it expects that the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services will spend up to an additional $200 billion over the next decade on administering Obamacare. That's in addition to the estimated $1 trillion that will be spent in 2014-2019 under the new healthcare law. Much of the money will go to hiring hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats to administer Obamacare over the next decade. But in the short term, the additional dollars will bankroll a two-pronged campaign to re-elect congressional Democrats. The Department of Health and Human...

It didn't take long for businesses — especially in Illinois — to start feeling ObamaCare's job-killing punch. While most of the punishing mandates and taxes don't start immediately, public accounting rules operate on a more timely basis. Some businesses have disclosed that their value will be negatively impacted by the new health reform law. In the last week, four major Illinois-based companies — Boeing, Caterpillar, Deere & Co. and Illinois Tool Works — have announced they will take charges of $150 million, $100 million, $150 million and $22 million, respectively, because of one provision in the new law. In order...