Search Results for: obamacare

The Daily Chart: Obamacare Fail

Featured image Remember how Obamacare was supposed to reduce the cost of health care, and lower costs to households by more than $1,000 or something? Pepperidge Farms remembers. I wonder if voters do when they see what’s happening to health care premiums. From the Wall Street Journal: »

Supreme Court set to uphold Obamacare

Featured image During the hearings on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pretended that confirming Barrett would jeopardize Obamacare. To support this claim, they noted that the Supreme Court soon would be hearing a challenge to that law and they pointed to a law review article by Barrett that criticized Chief Justice Roberts’ reasoning when he upheld Obamacare in 2012. The Dems’ argument was always phony. »

Experts weigh in on decision striking down Obamacare

Featured image John wrote last night about the ruling by a federal judge in Texas that Obamacare is unconstitutional in its entirety. Judge Reed O’Connor reasoned: (1) because Congress has repealed the penalty assessed against those who decline to buy health insurance, the Individual Mandate can no longer be fairly read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power; (2) because the Individual Mandate could only be justified constitutionally as an exercise of »

Federal Judge Rules Obamacare Unconstitutional [with comment by Paul]

Featured image Via Drudge, federal judge Reed O’Connor, in Ft. Worth, Texas, has declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, apparently in its entirety. You may remember that Obamacare survived constitutional scrutiny by the skin of its teeth when the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, held that the penalty the act imposes for failure to buy health insurance is a tax, and therefore is constitutional. That holding discreetly bypassed the fact »

Trump Administration Undermines Obamacare

Featured image With the Democrats in control of the House, nothing useful will come out of Congress in the next two years. That means that progress in domestic policy will have to come via regulation and executive action. Happily, the Trump administration is very strong on this front. An underreported story is the administration’s regulatory reform of Obamacare. Here, the administration is implementing ideas that were developed in think tanks like my »

Trump offers limited relief from Obamacare coercion

Featured image In a post called “One Families’ Obamacare Tale — Mine,” I described how Obamacare deprived my wife of the medical insurance that fits our needs. Our tale is interesting, I think, but a bit complicated. I discussed it fully in the original post. Essentially, my wife needed “catastrophic insurance” to fill a gap in her insurance plan. In the pre-Obamacare market, we were able to purchase a fairly reasonably priced »

Trump administration won’t defend Obamacare in key case

Featured image The constitutionality of Obamacare is under challenge once again. Six years ago, the Supreme Court held that the federal government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance, but does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. The ruling saved Obamacare. However, the tax bill Congress passed last year eliminates the tax penalty contained in Obamacare. Thus, Texas now argues that »

Did Obamacare Cost Hillary the Election?

Featured image Back in 2011 I noted over at National Review the work of three Stanford political scientists who dove deep into the data of the 2010 election to discern the causes of the wave that saw Republicans win 63 House seats from Democrats, when none of the pre-election prediction models forecast that Republicans would come anywhere close to that large a gain. Their article, “The 2010 Elections: Why Did Political Science »

Lies of Obamacare revisited

Featured image The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein has no brief for President Trump as a truth teller, but he has been provoked by the New York Times to come to Trump’s defense in one particular: The New York Times has published a story with an accompanying chart suggesting that while President Trump has told 103 falsehoods during his first 10 months in office, President Barack Obama told just 18 throughout his entire »

On Obamacare, Trump Restores the Rule of Law

Featured image The Obama administration carried out the most sustained attack on the rule of law in our nation’s history. One important aspect of that assault was Obamacare, an unworkable statute that the Democrats passed without reading, relying on administrative agencies and the courts to rewrite the law, unconstitutionally. The Supreme Court lent a hand to this project in King v. Burwell by holding that “established by the state” can be interpreted »

Trump accused of “sabotaging” Obamacare [UPDATED]

Featured image The mainstream media has been promoting the idea that the Trump administration is intentionally sabotaging Obamacare. This article in the Washington Post, which uses the word “sabotage” in the headline of the paper edition, is an example of the talking point. One way the administration is said to be sabotaging Obamacare is by cutting funds to groups that try to enroll people in the program and by reducing its advertising »

Can Senate Republicans get Obamacare replacement over the finish line?

Featured image As John noted earlier this week, Obamacare replacement legislation isn’t dead in the U.S. Senate after all. Senators Cassidy, Graham, and Johnson have come up with a bill that partially repeals Obamacare and turns power over to the states. Their legislation would: * Repeal Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates. * Repeal the medical device tax. * Enhance the states’ ability to waive Obamacare’s regulations. * Give to the states in »

The Obamacare Drama Is Not Over

Featured image The Republican Congress’s failure to repeal and replace Obamacare is of course embarrassing, and may well be a political blow to the GOP, as most expect. Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Congressional Republicans actually set out to save Obamacare, and not a single Democrat was willing to join in the effort. The future of Obamacare could be grim. Having run a victory lap or two, the »

Obamacare lives

Featured image Today is a day to be embarrassed to be a Republican, for Obamacare has survived every effort to repeal and replace it with the defection of Senator McCain in the last-ditch effort to keep the effort alive in the final vote on “skinny repeal” after midnight this morning. Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan report the story for the New York Times here. The defeat of Obamacare repeal efforts in the »

Obamacare Lite?

Featured image This cartoon by Michael Ramirez hurts, but I am afraid it is not far off the mark. As I wrote earlier today, the GOP’s inability to follow through on its countless pledges to repeal Obamacare is worse than an embarrassment. Perhaps the situation can still be redeemed, but time is growing short. »

What’s next for Obamacare reform in the Senate?

Featured image Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader McConnell announced that there would be no Senate vote on Obamcare reform legislation this week. Instead, the Senate will take up the matter of reforming Obamacare in July. Also yesterday, GOP Senators met with President Trump at the White House. The purpose was to see how the pending bill might be altered so as to get at least 50 of the 52 Republicans to vote “yes.” »

Obamacare: What would Reagan do?

Featured image Henry Olsen, master election analyst and a scholar of Ronald Reagan, asks what position Reagan would take in the Obamacare debate. Olsen concludes that The Gipper would (and did) back government-subsidized medical care for people who couldn’t otherwise afford it and would approve of federal subsidies such as those contained in Obamacare. Olsen bases these conclusions mainly on Reagan’s support for the Kerr Mills Act. Enacted in the pre-Medicare era, »