Free Republic

It’s been 48 hours since Jah’Keem Yisrael — AKA Alton Noel — perpetrated a horrific terrorist attack on 54 year old co-worker Colleen Hufford, stabbing her repeatedly and then sawing her head off with a knife, and we have yet to hear any acknowledgment from President Obama of this worrisome incident. Why not? All the elements of an Islamic act of terror are present: the savagery,the shouting of Islamic verses during the act, the stated determination to carry out jihad, and a fanatical belief in Islam that, in his mind, justified everything. From a political standpoint, it’s a bad idea...

Nancy Pelosi said Americans would find out all about ObamaCare if Congress would only pass the bill. Now we’re finding that some seniors will not be allowed to spend as much as they choose to on their health care – even if they’re willing to pony up for it. ! Turns out that with ObamaCare, even if you qualify for health care you just might not get any.. A new report by the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics at National Right to Life titled “The Affordable Care Act and Health Care Access in the United States,” analyzes four fundamental...

There isn't a majority that opposes the Affordable Care Act because it's too liberal, in fact, a good number of Americans don't think it's liberal enough. Today’s CNN poll (PDF) on the Affordable Care Act seems like a blow to supporters of the law. When asked if they “generally favor or generally oppose” the president’s health care overhaul, only 35 percent say they “favor.” The large majority—65 percent—say they “oppose.” For Republicans who have staked their entire message on opposition to Obamacare, this looks like vindication. Not only was the rollout a disaster, but now, the public has turned decisively...

Just when the government's insurance website is starting to run more smoothly, an Associated Press-GfK poll finds a potentially bigger problem for President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. Americans who already have coverage and aren't looking for any more government help are blaming the law for their rising premiums and deductibles.

House Democrats are blocking their Republican colleagues from using Obamacare in letters mailed on the taxpayer's dime to voters, but who made up the term in the first place? Lots of people are asking this question, getting answers like "Certainly a republican, potentially Glenn Beck" and "I am about 80% sure it was Rush Limbaugh" and "Hillary Clinton's campaign coined Obamacare." Iowa Rep. Steve King claimed President Obama himself made it up. Free Republic posters want to claim credit. Lots of liberals suspect an insidious plot by Fox News. But the answer appears to be: a lobbyist.

As the fallout from the botched launch of Affordable Care Act's exchanges continues, it grows ever clearer that website glitches are only a small part of the problem with the cumbersome--and increasingly unworkable--law. One has to ask:Is President Barack Obama making this up as he goes?It's hard to imagine that the President and the team charged with implementing Obamacare couldn't have foreseen the problems that have continually popped up. Yet, here we are, bringing in "tech surges" to examine the website problems, security experts to mitigate privacy concerns, insurance executives to "brainstorm" ways to actually insure people. And all the...

There is nothing about ObamaCare that’s working. It took a pack of lies to sell ObamaCare – which passed in the Senate by a single vote. But the ultimate problem that dooms ObamaCare is cost — the sticker shock of the monthly premiums people are experiencing right now who have been thrown into the ObamaCare exchanges. According to a 49-state study by the Manhattan Institute , ObamaCare is causing an average increase in premiums for individuals of 41 percent. The primary reason this is happening is that the architects of ObamaCare confuse health insurance with health coverage. The purpose of...

MIAMI (AP) -- Dean Griffin liked the health insurance he purchased for himself and his wife three years ago and thought he'd be able to keep the plan even after the federal Affordable Care Act took effect ... The Griffins, who live near Philadelphia on the Delaware border, pay $770 monthly for their soon-to-be-terminated health care plan with a $2,500 deductible. The cheapest plan they found on their state insurance exchange was a so-called bronze plan charging a $1,275 monthly premium with deductibles totaling $12,700. It covers only providers in Pennsylvania, so the couple wouldn't be able to see the...

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday denied President Obama had misled the public when he said that consumers could keep their health insurance plans after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Carney said that consumers who "had a plan the day before the Affordable Care Act passed and signed into law" and who had not either dropped their coverage or "been thrown off the plan" by their insurance companies were "grandfathered in and can keep that plan." "If you've kept it, you can keep it forever, as long as your insurer offers it," Carney said.

A data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare law went down on Sunday, the U.S. government said, in the latest problem for the "Obamacare'' rollout. Verizon's Terremark operates the data center behind a federal system for determining eligibility for government subsidies to buy insurance nationwide and hosts HealthCare.gov, the website that makes insurance available in 36 of the 50 states. The data center experienced a failure on Sunday that led it to lose network connectivity, Health and Human Services Department spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid...

Of course it doesn’t, even though that was one of the core promises the administration and Democrats made in pushing ObamaCare on the nation. More than four years after debate began on the massive restructuring of the nation’s health-care market, the New York Times finally notices that the law doesn’t actually address why the costs in rural areas remained so high — the lack of choice and competition: As technical failures bedevil the rollout of President Obama’s health care law, evidence is emerging that one of the program’s loftiest goals — to encourage competition among insurers in an effort to...

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is being forced to cancel plans that currently cover 76,000 individuals in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., due to changes made by President Obama's health care law, the company told the Washington Examiner today. That represents more than 40 percent of the 177,000 individuals covered by CareFirst in those states. Though Obama famously promised that those who liked their health care coverage could keep it under his program, in reality, the health care law imposes a raft of new regulations on insurance policies starting Jan. 1 that are forcing insurers across the country to terminate existing plans....

<p>House Speaker John A. Boehner predicted Wednesday that by the end of the month, more Americans will have lost their insurance by being kicked off existing health plans than the number who were able to sign up in the flawed online healthcare.gov website.</p>

President Obama told the nation there is “no excuse” for the disastrous rollout of the health-care exchanges that are central to Obamacare. But that didn’t stop Kathleen Sebelius, his secretary of Health and Human Services in overall charge of the project, from making excuses in a CNN interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta yesterday. She claimed to Gupta that President Obama hadn’t been told of any potential problems prior to the launch of the exchanges on October 1 — a dereliction of duty anyway one defines it. But there was also this startling explanation of what went wrong at HHS: “We...

The best part of this is that he admits he doesn’t know if the site actually needs more money or not. “Give them a little” is something he seems to say almost reflexively, I guess because when a government program is failing badly, that’s just what you do. For Hoyer, throwing another hundred million or two into this quicksand is really just a symbolic vote of confidence in it, I think, nothing more. When you’re $17 trillion in debt, it’s all Monopoly money at this point anyway.I wonder if he knows that the site’s already three times over budget. I...

The Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday it was bringing in outside help to resolve some of the technical woes that have beset the federally run insurance exchanges, which the agency acknowledged “has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.” “We are committed to doing better,” agency officials said in a blog post that also said that “our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.” Spokespeople for the agency didn’t immediately respond to questions seeking more...

The American people really do deserve a presidential address on ObamaCare. No, not as punishment for re-electing him, or at least not mainly for that purpose. Rather, because 2½ weeks after the launch of the "exchanges" that are supposed to be ObamaCare's operational centerpiece, it is clear to almost everyone that they are an administrative disaster. In this crisis, there is an opportunity: to recognize an impending economic and humanitarian disaster, and to act in time to avert or at least minimize it. That requires a willingness to face reality and a capacity for leadership. So far Obama has shown...

A New York Times investigative article based on two dozen interviews with industry insiders and confidential Obama Administration documents reveals that the catastrophic $500 million Obamacare rollout "has deeply embarrassed the White House" and has the technology companies involved "publicly distancing themselves" from the Obamacare fiasco. "These are not glitches. The extent of the problems is pretty enormous," an insurance executive who participated in Obamacare conference calls told the Times. "At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.'"