Free Republic

Deepak Bhargava, a former ACORN lobbyist has been hired by President Obama to run a contest promoting Obamacare through videos. Bhargava was the manager in charge of advancing ACORN's legislative agenda until he resigned in 2002. He faces the daunting task of convincing huge numbers of young Americans to purchase health insurance, they will probably never use, instead of paying the $95 dollar tax. Bhargava is currently the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Community Change, a left leaning partisan group, which is funded by George Soros. They are especially interested in immigration reform and support open borders....

WASHINGTON — A federal judge’s ruling that the Obama health law is unconstitutional has landed like a stink bomb among Republicans, who’ve seen the politics of health care flip as Americans increasingly value the overhaul’s core parts, including protections for pre-existing medical conditions and Medicaid for more low-income people. While the decision by the Republican-appointed judge in Texas was sweeping, it has little immediate practical impact because the Affordable Care Act remains in place while the legal battle continues, possibly to the Supreme Court. HealthCare.gov , the government’s site for signing up, was taking applications Saturday, the deadline in most...

(Bloomberg) -- Obamacare was struck down by a Texas federal judge in a ruling that casts uncertainty on insurance coverage for millions of U.S. residents. The decision Friday finding the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional comes just before the end of a six-week open enrollment period for the program in 2019 and underscores a divide between Republicans who have long sought to invalidate the law and Democrats who fought to keep it in place. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that he had to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act,...

The healthcare industry is beginning to shift blame for Obamacare’s 2018 rate hikes and an unstable individual insurance market to Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress. An alliance of health insurers, doctors and employers are urging the Trump administration and Congress to fund cost-sharing subsidies for millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act. Politico reported Friday that Trump is telling “advisers he wants to end key Obamacare subsidies.” If cost-sharing reductions (CSRs) aren’t funded through 2018, Trump and Republicans will be responsible for more insurers leaving public exchanges and a rate hike of nearly 20% on average, reports indicate....

The leading presidential candidates’ positions on health reform could not be farther apart. Donald Trump wants to repeal Obamacare it in its entirety. Hillary Clinton wants to expand it. If elected, she plans to prop up Obamacare with more taxpayer subsidies. The Obama Administration is already looking for ways to bail out insurers as they flee the federal and state marketplace. Clinton now wants to boost subsidies to low-income households as well. Expanding Obamacare. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the government pays all premiums in excess of 2 percent to 9.5 percent of income, based on a sliding scale....

In August 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama expressed his hope for the growth of socialized medicine in the United States. “[Health care] is a $2 trillion part of our economy, and it is my belief that it’s not just politically, but economically, it is better for us to start getting a system in place—a universal health care system signed into law by the end of my first term as president and build off that system to further to make it more rational … By the way, Canada did not start immediately with a single-payer system. They had a similar transition step.”...

For the past several years, Idaho lawmakers have rejected every attempt to bring Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to the Gem State. Earlier this year, they rejected two expansion plans that were so unpopular, they failed to even earn a committee vote. But with the legislative session winding down, there’s another last-minute, backdoor attempt to expand Medicaid on the horizon. The latest plan, dubbed the “Idaho Accountable Care Waiver Act,” would require the state to “provide for managed Medicaid services” to a new class of able-bodied adults. Although the legislation nominally limits its Medicaid expansion to able-bodied adults below the poverty line,...

The primary component of GOP presidential candidates’ health policy proposals is to repeal Obamacare. Once GOP frontrunner Trump released his plan, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget took notice and did an analysis of the likely fiscal effects from Trump’s plan. Presumably, these fiscal effects would also apply to the other Republican candidates who also support repealing Obamacare. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a budget watchdog group that began 35 years ago. For the past few years it has been housed with the neo-Democratic think tank, New America. The two organizations parted ways over the...

It is common sense that people take care of their own property better than community property, often times referred to as "commons." Because community resources are finite (say, grazing land in a pastoral society), overgrazing - and too little maintenance - is bound to occur absent any collaborative agreements. Moreover, one person's conservation efforts cannot overcome all the other self-interested parties' perverse incentives. Economists call this the tragedy of the commons. Unfortunately, Obamacare proponents (and LBJ for that matter) did not understand how the tragedy of the commons would boost health care spending. Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare plans are all...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a bit apoplectic that the left, which has always wanted single-payer health care, is still pushing for single-payer health care. "Why," he frets, "do we hear not just conservatives but also many progressives trashing President Obama's biggest policy achievement?" He goes on to say, "A lot of what I hear from the left is not so much a complaint about how the reform falls short as outrage that private insurers get to play any role. The idea seems to be that any role for the profit motive taints the whole effort." Krugman says...

When Democratic presidential candidates get together to debate, it really is like watching the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) once joked.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was intended to solve the problem of affordable coverage for people with preexisting conditions by using an age-old strategy that politicians love. That strategy is often referred to as OPM (other peoples' money). For instance, ACA regulations force insurers to accept all applicants -- including unprofitable ones -- at rates unadjusted for their health risk. Premiums can vary somewhat by age, but not by health status. Thus, Obamacare is a bad deal for most people by design; the majority of enrollees are charged much more than their expected costs. In theory, this should allow individuals...

Liberal public health advocates and left-of-center health policy wonks have long thought every American needs health insurance (they don't, but that's another discussion). Lefties assume health insurance is the only way Americans access medical care. After all, the purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to insulate Americans from the financial hardship of medical care they couldn't afford to pay for out of pocket. Moreover, many pundits believe having to reach for one's wallet during a medical encounter is unacceptable. So imagine my shock when I read a headline in The New York Times claiming that Obamacare is no guarantee...

The third open enrollment period for Obamacare is currently underway ahead of the New Year and the CEO of America's largest health insurance is expressing regret for getting involved in the government mandated entitlement program. From Bloomberg (bolding is mine):

The City of Bixby changed insurance deductibles for their employees. One of the changes means that a family now has a $7,000 deductible instead of a $500 one. There is a gap plan available on limited basis. Employees said that no one asked them about the change or if they would prefer to pay higher premiums instead.

Judy Naillon called her insurer several months ago to find out why she was being charged $35 every month for birth control pills. Her friends said they were getting their pills free under the federal health law. Why wasn't she getting the same deal? The insurance representative explained that was because the plan Naillon and her husband had through his job was "grandfathered" under the health law. In other words, unlike other health plans, Naillon's insurance policy, which existed before the health law was enacted, doesn't have to cover many preventive services, including contraception. Naillon would have to continue to...

President Obama will tout his healthcare law Tuesday to a Catholic group that has consistently supported the law despite deep divides over its birth control requirement. In a speech to the Catholic Health Association — which represents hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes across the U.S. — the president will talk about the law's major tenets and make his case that it has improved health plans for virtually everyone, in addition to expanding coverage to millions. The address comes just days before the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling that could halt the healthcare law's insurance subsidies to...

<p>Despite 6-1/2 years of horrid governance and dozens of acknowledged scandals, several of which a few of the credible remaining outposts of liberal thought have actually agreed are scandals, David Brooks, the New York Times's resident fake conservative, asserted on Friday's PBS NewsHour, as if it's an indisputable fact, that "President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him."</p>

One of the frustrating things about reporting on the King v. Burwell litigation is the difficulty explaining some relatively complicated legal concepts to an audience of non-lawyers. Jonathan Cohn of Huffington Post has come up with a pretty good analogy, though I don’t think it works quite the way he thinks it does. First, to recapitulate the legalese. The Affordable Care Act works by mandating that people buy health insurance. To help ensure accessibility of that insurance, the statute creates exchanges where people can shop for policies. This is done in three sections of the law. Section 1311 mandates that...

If you want a sense of just how far-reaching the impact of a Supreme Court decision gutting Obamacare subsidies could prove, new data on health care signups released this week provide a fresh way to game out such a ruling’s consequences. The Department of Health and Human Services announced the other day that some 11.4 million people have signed up for health plans through federal marketplaces. The new HHS data also provides a breakdown of the number of sign-ups in each of the three dozen states on the federal exchange — precisely the states that would no longer get subsidies...