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A little more than 1.9 million people signed up for health insurance in the first three weeks of the Affordable Care Act open enrollment for 2019 coverage. That compares with almost 2.3 million during the first three weeks of open enrollment last year, which included an additional day. Americans are signing up for coverage through the federal marketplace at a slower rate this year, but the CMS numbers don't include enrollment in states that operate their own exchanges. It also does not include those who will be automatically enrolled in plans during the last week of open enrollment, which ends...

The Obamacare Supreme Court ruling seemed strange. Chief Justice John Roberts’ reasoning was incoherent. The conservative’s dissent read like it was originally meant to be a majority opinion. Now, we know why. According to Jan Crawford of CBS News, John Roberts switched sides in May, withstanding a “one-month campaign” from his conservative colleagues to change his mind.

I keep up with the events and politics. I am reading the book Kids These Days - Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris and it gave me a very different perspective on student Debt. Chapter Two called Go to College, discusses student debt, its design not to be discharged via bankruptcy, and the use of future earnings of millennials to fund current healthcare debt IE Obamacare and education capitol construction projects for the foreseeable future. This puts a different spin on what happened to these kids who have been encouraged to voluntarily take on debt that...

At the time of this writing, six “Gruber videos” have been released and “gone viral,” as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever. Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article: Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget...

(this story is 1 year old) Evidence shows that John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was “hacked” by a Deep State surveillance operation overseen by Obama administration CIA director John Brennan and Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper. Roberts, the Bush appointee who made the decisive vote to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare before the 2012 election, was allegedly the victim of the same Deep State surveillance program that spied on President Donald Trump. (continues at source)

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in an op-ed accusing President Trump of lying about "Medicare for all," starts out with a whopper of his own. "It would guarantee everyone could get the healthcare they need without going into debt at far lower cost than the current dysfunctional system," Sanders writes in USA Today. The problem with his pie-in-the-sky statement, and the op-ed that follows, is that it fails to recognize the natural tradeoffs between access and cost in healthcare policy. In doing so, he also ignores the value of individual choice and the distinction between public and private that is central...

When President Trump declared in a USA Today op-ed that the Democrats' "Medicare for all" proposal would "outlaw" private health insurance, CNN's Jim Acosta indignantly tweeted that this was "false." But reading the text of the leading proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders makes clear that Trump's op-ed was correct. "It is right there in their proposed legislation: Democrats outlaw private health plans that offer the same benefits as the government plan." This is, in fact, 100 percent accurate. The plan would require, in four years time, for individuals to be enrolled in the new government plan at birth. At that...

This is an absolute classic out of the Dem/MSM playbook. Take a huge, expensive, inefficient, government program. Find someone with a heartwrenching story who is helped by it. Highlight that story as if it represents the essence of the program in question. Bonus points if you can get someone to choke up on camera. Reporters noticed that after Kavanaugh was confirmed, the Democrats shifted the agenda to health care as the central issue of the midterms. And thus it was that today's Morning Joe featured a segment in which NBC reporter Morgan Radford traveled to Ohio ahead of President Trump's...

A Republican allegation that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis invested in a company benefited by his work as a congressman is now a formal complaint. Former Secretary of State Gessler, a GOP candidate for governor in 2014, filed the complaint Tuesday with the Secretary of State’s Office on behalf of Kristina Cook, a Denver County Republican Party official and conservative radio personality. She and Gessler allege that Polis failed to disclose in his official paperwork that he had invested between $5 million and $25 million in BridgeHealth Medical Inc. “This failure to report his interest in BridgeHealth is not a...

The Senate on Wednesday defeated a Democratic measure to overrule President Trump’s expansion of non-ObamaCare insurance plans as Democrats seek to highlight health care ahead of the midterm elections. The Democratic measure would have overruled Trump’s expansion of short-term health insurance plans, which do not have to cover people with pre-existing conditions or cover a range of health services like mental health or prescription drugs. It was defeated on an extremely narrow, mostly party line 50-50 vote, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voting with Democrats in favor of overturning the short-term plans. Republicans argue the short-term plans simply provide a...

Republican lawmakers have made it clear they have no intention of repealing Obamacare in the current Congress. Republicans in the nation’s top lawmaking body have never really wanted to get rid of Obamacare. They would prefer to present the program, which David Horowitz correctly describes as “the greatest assault on individual freedom and individual choice in our lifetimes,” as a villain and whip up sentiment against it and run against it every election. They view Obamacare as good for the business of politics. They may chip away at it from time to time or tinker with it at the margins,...

Despite numerous promises from congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama when they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the health care law has created far more problems than it has solved. Premiums, deductibles, and health care choices have all worsened since Obamacare went into effect, and there’s no sign America’s health insurance system will improve anytime in the near future. President Trump inherited a health insurance crisis when he took office in January 2017, so he and congressional Republican leaders immediately began to work to implement their plan to replace Obamacare with a more market-centered approach to improving the...

Few states have expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) since 2016, but a new trend may accelerate the pace of adoption. Last year, voters in Maine used their state’s citizen-initiated ballot referendum process to pass Medicaid expansion, and this November, four states will follow Maine’s lead. On Friday, Nebraska’s Secretary of State certified that supporters had collected enough signatures to put the question of Medicaid expansion to voters on Election Day. Nebraska joins Idaho and Utah, both of which will have Medicaid expansion on their November ballots. And late last month, the Secretary of State in Montana...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading a five-state coalition that on Thursday won an $839 million judgment against the federal government in an Obamacare lawsuit, a massive blow to the Obama administration’s namesake legislation. The Affordable Care Act (ACA, better known as Obamacare) requires medical providers to pay a Health Insurance Provider Fee (HIPF). Even though the ACA exempts states from paying that fee when providing health care, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the Obama era created a regulation requiring states to pay the fee anyway, a fee that is styled as a tax...

Red-state Democrats are embracing one of Obamacare’s most popular provisions to help them win re-election in November. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota unveiled ads this week slamming GOP opponents for trying to gut Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing illnesses, such as diabetes or cancer. Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., did the same in a Twitter video. Each of the candidates is seizing on actions by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration to unravel Obamacare. But instead of highlighting the law in general, they are centering on its rules obligating insurers to cover...

Despite numerous promises from congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama when they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the health care law has created far more problems than it has solved. Premiums, deductibles, and health care choices have all worsened since Obamacare went into effect, and there’s no sign America’s health insurance system will improve anytime in the near future.President Trump inherited a health insurance crisis when he took office in January 2017, so he and congressional Republican leaders immediately began to work to implement their plan to replace Obamacare with a more market-centered approach to improving the...

https://khn.org/news/once-its-greatest-foes-doctors-are-embracing-single-payer/ By Shefali Luthra 08/07/2018 When the American Medical Association — one of the nation’s most powerful health care groups — met in Chicago this June, its medical student caucus seized an opportunity for change. Though they had tried for years to advance a resolution calling on the organization to drop its decades-long opposition to single-payer health care, this was the first time it got a full hearing. The debate grew heated — older physicians warned their pay would decrease, calling younger advocates naïve to single-payer’s consequences. But this time, by the meeting’s end, the AMA’s older members had agreed...

The Trump administration has approved a plan in Wisconsin allowing the state to shore up its Obamacare market. The plan is expected to lower premiums in 2019 by an average of 3.5 percent. Without it, premiums would rise by 11 percent in 2019, even after seeing hikes of 44 percent for 2018. “People in the individual market saw their premiums go up by 44 percent on average last year, and some saw much larger increases – that’s unsustainable and unacceptable,” said Republican Gov. Scott Walker, an Obamacare opponent. “Thankfully, the federal government is giving us the flexibility to implement a...

Sunday, December 7 | 1:00 a.m. BY JOHN LAIRD, OPINION EDITOR Vancouver, Washington Let’s assume that Rush Limbaugh is right, that liberals are “invested” in a U.S. defeat in Iraq because it would accelerate their anti-military agenda. Using that same logic, conservatives are invested in the economic recession because it accelerates their reduced-government agenda. And, oh, how our governments are about to be reduced. While America’s economy is in the toilet, some conservatives are flushed with excitement over budget cuts on the horizon. Even Democrats know that now is not the time to raise taxes. That leaves politicians no choice...

The House voted to repeal a 2.3 percent medical device tax, a provision that both parties have criticized for harming innovation. The medical device tax was first imposed in January 2013 to help fund the ACA. After harsh criticism from legislators and the medical device industry, Congress passed a two-year suspension of the levy in 2015. While the suspension was set to expire Jan. 1, a stopgap bill signed into law by President Donald Trump Jan. 22, further delayed the medical levy. It was set to take effect Jan. 1, 2020. The tax applies to products such as pacemakers and...