Free Republic

ObamaCare enrollees are less satisfied with their plans than people with other types of health insurance, according to a new poll. The poll from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, the research arm of the consulting firm, finds that 30 percent of people with insurance through ObamaCare’s marketplaces are satisfied with their plans. That compares with 42 percent satisfaction from people with employer-sponsored plans, 48 percent with Medicaid and 58 percent with Medicare. Cost is the most common reason cited for the dissatisfaction with ObamaCare.

New Yorkers are proving to be cost conscious when choosing a private health insurance plan from New York State of Health, the marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act, which has now enrolled more than 10 percent of state residents. Of the 2.1 million enrollees, 415,352 chose a private plan, 1,568,345 signed up for Medicaid and 159,716 enrolled in Child Health Plus, according to an enrollment report released Wednesday by the state's health department. Other highlights from the report: - The state's call center handled calls in 92 different languages and dialects. - Two-thirds of those who purchased a private...

Senate conservatives couldn’t stop a vote on the Export-Import bank. So they’re going to try to force a vote on Obamacare instead. Conservative firebrand Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) announced on Friday that he plans to use a complicated procedural maneuver known as the nuclear option to repeal the Affordable Care Act with just 51 votes. Democrats famously used the strategy in 2013 to break a Republican blockade of President Obama’s nominees to fill judicial openings. Now Lee wants to use the partisan procedure get rid of Obamacare. It’s unclear whether Lee’s gambit will work — but if it does, there...

There's a battle brewing behind the scenes to keep health plans affordable for consumers. The Obama administration weighed in this week, sending letters to insurance regulators in every state and Washington, D.C., that ask them to take a closer look at rate requests before granting them. In Maryland, for example, the dominant insurer on the exchange, CareFirst, is asking for a rate increase of 30 percent for some of its plans. In Kansas, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas is seeking increases averaging 37 percent. Insurance industry consultant Robert Laszewski says that forcing people to change plans in order...

<p>More than 700,000 Obamacare customers claimed tax credits for buying health care but didn’t bother to file their taxes, potentially jilting the government out of $2 billion in bogus payments, the Senate’s senior lawmaker said Monday.</p> <p>Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, chairman of the Finance Committee and president pro tempore of the Senate, demanded the inspector general investigate the recalcitrant taxpayers and look at the IRS‘ own systems for trying to track down tax cheats when it comes to Obamacare.</p>

Eleven fictitious people created as part of an undercover watchdog effort were able to automatically re-enroll in ObamaCare coverage, a new report finds. The report, from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, follows up on a GAO report last year. That report found that 11 of 12 fictitious people, with fake documents, were able to successfully enroll in ObamaCare coverage through the federal HealthCare.gov marketplace. The follow-up report, released by congressional Republicans on Wednesday, finds that those 11 fictitious people were able to maintain their coverage through the end of 2014 and then were automatically re-enrolled for 2015. Some were re-enrolled...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday said he does not have a timeline for using reconciliation to repeal ObamaCare, but indicated that Republicans would look to roll back as much of the law as they can. “I don't have a time to give you, but we're certainly going to consider using budget reconciliation for repealing as much of ObamaCare as is reconcilable,” McConnell told reporters. “There're certain rules that have to be applied to what is reconcilable and that's an active consideration, as you can imagine.” Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, later on Tuesday...

As leading health insurers scramble for market share through a series of multibillion-dollar mergers, consumers are no doubt wondering if their premiums are bound to skyrocket. Short answer: Probably. Ironically, Obamacare had anticipated the negative effects of runaway capitalism with a safeguard that critics branded as socialism — the so-called public option, a government-run insurance plan offered alongside private plans. Thanks to business and ideological interests triumphing over economic considerations, a public option fell by the wayside. Some experts say that, with fewer private insurers and rising rates, we're going to regret not having a public option as part of...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is delaying an Obamacare regulation requiring restaurants to display calorie information until December 2016 after businesses complained they did not have sufficient time to comply with the complex rules. “We are taking this action in response to requests for an extension and for further clarification of the rule’s requirements,” the FDA said. The 319-page regulation, mandated by Obamacare, is estimated to cost industry $1.7 billion to comply. The rule requires restaurant chains with 20 or more stores to list calorie information for nearly every food item, and a “succinct statement” that “2,000 calories a...

American women are spending much less money on birth control since the Affordable Care Act started requiring insurance plans to cover contraception, according to a new analysis. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined health insurance claims from one of the country’s largest private insurers in 2012 (pre-Obamacare) and 2013 (post-Obamacare). They found that spending on the pill, America’s most popular birth control method, quickly fell 38 percent -- from $33 to $20, on average. Spending on IUDs, meanwhile, plummeted 68 percent, from $262 to $84. The total savings, the health economists estimate: $1.4 billion.

On June 25th, 2015, the majority of Supreme Court Justices, lead by Chief Justice Roberts, ruled that what the law says does not matter.   What matters is what the Justices want the law to say. This is an important break down in the rule of law.  We have seen it before from the Supreme Court, particularly from the Warren Court, and during the Roosevelt revolution of the 1930's and on.   There seemed to be a brief period in the early 2000s when the Court might actually follow the law of the land.  This was labelled by the left as...

Higher costs, less care, fewer choices. And lots more federal control The recent Supreme Court ruling on health insurance subsidies means they upheld the “stupidity of the American people” (as Jonathan Gruber would say, and has), and for the third time the Court stretched the law instead of interpreting the law. How the Court arrived at this 6-3 decision has baffled many observers, and the ruling opinion written by Justice Roberts stuns those of us who believe that certain words matter, as Rob said last week. But the words of Justice Antonio Scalia in his the dissenting opinion had plenty...

Acknowledging that the original Affordable Care Act "was so poorly written as to be utterly infeasible in its implementation," Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts took "the liberty of rewriting it to correct its deficiencies." "If we were to confine ourselves to the plain language of the statute, subsidies would be available to only those states that established their own health care exchanges," Roberts wrote. "In hindsight, relying upon the statutory text would doom the plan because only a minority of states established the required exchanges. Rather than allow Congress' inability to accurately forecast state behavior to undermine this signature...

Ted Cruz gave a blistering response to the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare today, calling the decision nothing more than judicial activism and the justices who voted in the majority opinion, lawless. Cruz says these justices have joined with Obama in harming the American people as they’ve appointed themselves unelected legislators – and bad ones at that. Watch the full response below: http://www.youtube.com/embed/EGeXkUeroKw

When words no longer matter…we cease to be a nation of laws and become a nation of Scotuscare. When words no longer matter the Judicial Branch can appropriate the powers of the Legislative Branch…which they have more or less conceded to the Executive Branch anyway.When words no longer matter …well, that reminds me of a song: "Revolution"You say you want a revolution Well you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it's evolution Well you know We all want to change the world But when you talk about destruction Don't you know you can count me...

If the physician networks for plans sold on the health law’s online insurance exchanges were T-shirts, more than 40 percent would be size X-small or small. That’s the takeaway from a new study that analyzed nearly 400 physician networks in silver-level plans sold around the country in 2014. The study labeled 11 percent of plans “extra small” because they covered fewer than 10 percent of physicians in a plan’s region. Another 30 percent were “small,” meaning they covered between 10 and 25 percent of physicians. Just 11 percent of plans were classified as “extra large” because they covered at least...

So the Supreme Court has upheld the subsidies and taxes under Obamacare in states that did not establish exchanges, despite the text of the law requiring that those subsidies and taxes apply to states that established exchanges. This is not very surprising. We have not been publishing or writing much about the King v. Burwell because I was confident – I thought it was a 1 in 5 shot, and I believe Michael Cannon thought the same – that SCOTUS would uphold the law no matter the facts of the case. In the short run conservatives may feel depressed about...

In a speech on the Senate floor and written statement, Ted Cruz used some interesting language to describe his opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling that upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act. "Robed Houdinis" to describe the justices, who "hide their prevarication in legalese." The cloaked illusionists, as Cruz called them, "transmogrified a ‘federal exchange’ into an exchange ‘established by the State.' " Cruz chose the word transmogrified for two reasons -- its meaning, which is to change, and because it is a sly shout-out to one of his favorite comic strips, "Calvin and Hobbes." In the...

Dr. Gary Dee figured the state’s fiscal troubles would lead radiologists like him to face a cut in their Medicaid payment rates. But he wasn’t anticipating the 42.5 percent cut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration imposed this spring. Now, Dee’s private practice has stopped taking new Medicaid patients. “The reimbursement is to the point where we can’t take care of these patients. They’re going to lose access,” said Dee, president of MidState Radiology Associates in Meriden. The result is that it could become harder for the more than 725,000 state residents with Medicaid to find specialists to treat them, undermining...

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Obama Administration in King V. Burwell that the Internal Revenue Service may extend subsidies to health insurance coverage purchased through exchanges established by the federal government despite the language of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that such subsidies were limited to states. Associate Justice Scalia, whose dissents are always a fun read, was openly disdainful of the reasoning used by the majority to arrive at its conclusion. Here are 21 passages that capture his disappointment.1) “The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange...