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Janice Riddle got a nasty surprise when she filled out her tax return this year. The Los Angeles resident had applied for Obamacare in late 2013, when she was unemployed. She qualified for a hefty subsidy of $470 a month, leaving her with a monthly premium of $1 for the cheapest plan available. Riddle landed a job in early 2014 at a life insurance agency, but since her new employer didn't offer health benefits, she kept her Obamacare plan. However, she didn't update her income ... Now, she has to pay back the entire subsidy, which is forcing her to...

I put off reading Steven Brill’s new book, America's Bitter Pill, for much the same reason I procrastinate when it’s time to clean the gutters on my house. I was sure it would be a boring chore that would leave me yearning for a shower. A previous encounter with this writer’s work in a 2013 edition of Time suggested that this tome would contain a catalogue of canards about U.S. health care, a tendentious account of the tawdry political process that produced Obamacare, and some hare-brained theory on how to fix our medical delivery system once and for all. My...

Obamacare is going to kill you. Or one of your kids. Or one of your parents. Someone in your family is going to die from Obamacare. You can bet on it. You can bet your life on it. There are many things in medicine that are in a state of flux because of Obamacare. Obamacare is the name given to the most inappropriately termed "Affordable Care Act." There is nothing about Obamacare that makes care affordable. Obamacare has made care much more unaffordable. What it has done is make healthcare appear to be affordable because of subsidized premiums. The problem...

In baseball, when you get three strikes, you’re out. There have been at least five strikes called against single payer (SP). Shouldn’t we hear from an umpire? Whether you call it single payer, socialized medicine, universal health care, Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital System, ObamaCare, Public Option, or National Health Service, these are all different names for the same thing: government-controlled healthcare. Details vary but all single payer-type systems have one thing in common: a central authority that controls both supply of dollars and providers, as well as demand for goods and services. Strike #1: Italy's price controls In the...

One of the most controversial features of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was the desire on the part of many of its backers to subject medical decisions to a “cost effectiveness” standard. In a nut shell, that means asking of various medical procedures if the addition to good health or life expectancy they promise is worth what they cost. But if it’s good to ask that question about a medical procedure, isn’t it equally good to ask the same question about the entire Obamacare program? When we do it turns out that Obamacare fails the test. To a lot of...

They cited the example of the asthma drug albuterol sulfate. The average cost for a bottle of 100 pills was $11 last October, the pair said. The average charge by this April was up to $434. The antibiotic doxycycline hyclate cost $20 last October for a bottle of 500 tablets, the congressmen observed. By April, the price was $1,849. Experts say generics are growing more expensive because of reduced competition among manufacturers and shortages of raw materials. However, that might not explain triple-digit price hikes for some drugs. "Most generics are increasing in price by an average 10% a year,"...

Instead of using this space to pretend the newly released CIA "torture" report confirms that the United States is the most evil nation in the history of the universe, I'm going to address Jonathan Gruber's confirmation that he believes we're all stupid. Assuming you are not under any rocks or haven't been in an underground bunker without access to media, you will have heard that Gruber, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the principal architect of Obamacare, made some unflattering comments about his fellow Americans. At a panel event last year, discussing how the administration was able...

Before ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber got famous for calling Americans stupid, he wrote an "ObamaCare for Dummies"-style comic book. The only dummies are those who believe its many fictions.

Former White House senior adviser David Axelrod wrote what appears to be a taunt about Gruber in a Sunday tweet: “As one who worked hard to make A[ffordable] C[are] A[ct] and its benefits clear, let me say: if you looked up “stupid” in dictionary, you’d find Gruber’s picture.

"Stupid is as stupid does" -- Forrest Gump Unless you regularly follow conservative media, you may not have heard what one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) thinks about you. Jonathan Gruber is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who helped craft Obamacare. In a rare moment of unvarnished candor, Gruber told an audience last year at the University of Pennsylvania the law passed because of the "stupidity of the American voter." In what can only be described as a smoking gun -- meaning there is no way to spin his remarks as "out of...

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO (Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. … So it’s written to do that,” Gruber said, suggesting “it would not have passed” if the law “made it explicit” that healthy people would “pay in” and the sick would get money. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber continued. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass. I wish...

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. It also appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. They call this claim a Mixture of true and false. Here's their lame...

There is a famous thought experiment called the trolley problem, and it goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed toward five people bound on the tracks. You are standing before the switch that could divert it onto another track, where it would kill only one person. Do you pull the switch? The trolley problem is the most flattering possible way to think about the conservative movement’s fanatical commitment to repealing Obamacare. If they pull the switch and repeal Obamacare, or if they persuade five Republican Supreme Court justices to cripple it, they will spare America from the evils of...

Meet Jonathan Gruber, a professor at MIT and an architect of Obamacare. During panel event last year about how the legislation passed, turning over a sixth of the U.S. economy to the government, Gruber admitted that the Obama administration went through "tortuous" measures to keep the facts about the legislation from the American people, including covering up the redistribution of wealth from the healthy to the sick in the legislation that Obamacare is in fact a tax. The video of his comments just recently surfaced ahead of the second open enrollment period for Obamacare at Healthcare.gov. "You can't do it...

On November 4, 2014, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced that it intends to close a perceived “loophole” in health care reform. This so-called loophole allows employers to offer low cost health plans that don’t cover inpatient hospitalization services or physician services (or both). If that coverage were treated as “minimum value” coverage, then employers could avoid all pay-or-play penalties with low cost coverage and covered individuals would not be able to benefit from premium assistance or subsidies in the health insurance Marketplace. What does this IRS Notice Mean? Once this new rule is final, it means that Non-Hospital/Non-Physician Services...

Buried inside of the 20,000 pages of the Obamacare monstrosity are a few paragraphs which could create a multi-billion dollar industry in the American healthcare sector. Known as "biosimilars," the law allowed for the production of complex drugs which are medically equivalent versions of biologics (drugs derived from living organisms), and can treat deadly diseases ranging from Alzheimer's, AIDS, and rheumatoid arthritis. Not only can biosimilars save lives, the competition they create for a heavily regulated and patented marketplace can help patients by lowering the price of their prescriptions by up to 40 percent. The average annual cost of biologic...

“When the Ebola case was diagnosed, we went in to crisis mode," Ed Garcia, the managing director of Firestone Liberia, recently told NPR. In a saga that commentator Scott Ott characterizes as one of “an evil capitalist corporation” springing into action for the commonwealth, Firestone employees in Liberia stopped the spread of Ebola in their area by taking quick actions after an employee showed symptoms of the deadly disease. When no hospital in the area could take the stricken woman, Firestone staff built an onsite treatment center in record time. The Firestone employees set up an Ebola ward so quickly...

THE ELDERLY are such a pain, aren't they? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel thinks so. Half of those older than 80 have "functional limitations," the prominent health policy analyst and key ObamaCare architect writes in the October issue of The Atlantic. One in three Americans 85 and up has Alzheimer's. Old people are more likely to be disabled, or at least "faltering and declining." They lose their creative mojo. They don't "contribute to work, society, the world." Instead of being regarded as "vibrant and engaged," they grow "feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic."Especially disagreeable are old parents, who can be so irritating: "They set expectations,...

Normally, no one would care that in a recent Atlantic essay -- "Why I hope to die at 75"-- 57-year-old Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel argued that living to be 75 years old was long enough for anyone. After 75, Emanuel suggests, "We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic. But Emanuel is no garden-variety crackpot. Nor is he a wannabe science-fiction writer dreaming of a centrally planned planet of robust youthful humanoids. Unfortunately, he was one of the chief architects of the troubled Affordable Care Act and a key medical advisor to the Obama...

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the masterminds behind Obamacare, has now explained that he wishes to die at age 75. In an article in The Atlantic, Emanuel writes, “Seventy-five. That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.” He explains that his daughters disagree; so do his brothers and his friends. But, he says, “I am sure of my position…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but