Search Results for: obamacare

Tom Cotton sees through GOP wishful thinking on Obamacare replacement

Featured image Sen. Tom Cotton continues to speak more sensibly about Obamacare repeal than any legislator I knew of. Last week, he argued that the GOP is moving too fast on the matter. He stated, “I would much sooner get health care reform right than get it fast.” Considering the stakes for the country and for the Republican Party’s future, it seems difficult to disagree this common sense proposition. Today, Sen. Cotton »

Will the House GOP Obamacare replacement accelerate the death spiral?

Featured image Sen. Tom Cotton says “I think we’re moving a little bit too quickly on health care reform.” He explains: This is a big issue. This is not like the latest spending bill that gets released on a Monday night, [passed] on Wednesday and everybody goes home for Christmas, and we live with it for nine months. We’re going to live with health care reform that we pass forever, or until »

Who will own the Obamacare “replacement”?

Featured image If you answered “the Republicans,” you are right. If you answered the Senate parliamentarian, you are crazy. It makes no sense, therefore, for the Senate parliamentarian to have a say in the replacement of Obamacare. Yet, congressional Republicans are effectively granting the parliamentarian a veto. In so doing, they are ensuring that the Obamacare replacement will be sub-optimal at best and, more likely, disastrous. Here’s the background. Republicans won’t have »

The Obamacare Mess: It’s All the GOP’s

Featured image Donald Trump said in a recent press conference that he had inherited a mess when he became president. This prompted the usual howls of outrage from the liberal press, but I think it is fair to say that every president inherits a mess. It goes with the job. In at least one respect, however, Trump inherited not just a mess, but a steaming pile of dung. In other words, Obamacare. »

CNN Rails Against Trump’s Obamacare Order

Featured image President Trump’s first executive order, other than appointments, related to Obamacare. It directed agencies to interpret Obamacare regulations so as to impose as little financial burden as possible. CNN explained: Within hours of taking the oath of office, President Donald Trump on Friday night signed an executive order aimed at trying to fulfill one of his most impassioned campaign promises: Rolling back Obamacare. *** Republicans have been railing against the »

Schumer talks tough on Obamacare; does he have a good hand?

Featured image Yesterday, I observed that Chuck Schumer’s tough talk on the Supreme Court is backed up by a hand consisting of. . .nothing. Schumer is no Paul Newman, so for him nothing isn’t a cool hand. Schumer is also talking tough about Obamacare. He insists that Democrats will not help Republicans replace the Affordable Care Act. He anticipates, therefore, that repeal will produce a disaster. He intends to call that disaster »

A framework for replacing Obamacare

Featured image James Capretta and Scott Gottlieb of AEI lay out the four reforms around which they say the effort to replace Obamacare should center. They are: 1. Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans. Obamacare provides all sorts of health care coverage, including lots of coverage the purchaser doesn’t need (e.g. child birthing care for people not capable of having children). Making people pay for coverage they don’t »

After Obamacare

Featured image Our friend Tevi Troy, the author of outstanding books about the presidency, is also CEO of the American Health Policy Institute. During the George W. Bush administration, he served as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services. Tevi, along with Lanhee Chen of the Hoover Institution, has written an op-ed on Obamacare for the Wall Street Journal (it’s behind the Journal’s pay wall). Their piece has two parts — a »

Obamacare: The Last Straw?

Featured image The Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period for 2017 began yesterday. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Hillary Clinton. Across the country, exchanges opened with higher premiums, fewer carriers, less choice and smaller networks. Did I mention higher premiums? Forbes reports: What they’ll discover is a witch’s brew of double-digit premium hikes, restrictive provider networks, and fewer coverage choices. Many exchange customers will have only a single insurance provider »

Lies of Obamacare

Featured image It should be a stunning fact that every proposition on which President Obama promoted the sale of Obamacare was a complete and utter lie. I tried to document the foundational lies and their close relations in the endless Power Line series “Lies of Obamacare,” featuring the thumbnail image of the man having Obamacare shoved down his throat. If politicians were subject to truth in advertising laws, Obama would be behind »

Obamacare in 2017: Much higher premiums, much less choice

Featured image The Obama administration admitted today that Obamacare premiums will rise an average of 22 percent for the Silver Plan in 2017. The Silver Plan is the Obamacare benchmark upon which federal subsidies are based. The subsidies will shield many Obamacare purchasers from the impact of the increase, but a large of number of purchasers will be hammered. And, of course, taxpayers will be hit as well by virtue of the »

Obamacare! What Can’t It Do?

Featured image Minnesota’s version of the Affordable Care Act is called MNSure. Like all such implementations of the federal law, it has been a disaster. Last week, Minnesota’s left-wing governor, Mark Dayton, created a firestorm when he accidentally blurted out the truth: “The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable to increasing numbers of people.” Dayton has been furiously backpedaling away from that comment ever since, but local Democrats »

The Obamacare meltdown

Featured image President Obama has two signature accomplishments: Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal. It will be a good while before we see the main consequences of the deal with Iran, though John Podesta’s assessment that it may well lead to nuclear war and represents the biggest appeasement since Munich seems sound. As for Obamacare, Podesta’s pal Bill Clinton’s assesses it as “the craziest thing in the world.” But we need not »

A word against Obamacare

Featured image In the Wall Street Journal Andrew Ogles and Luke Hilgemann argue that “Obamacare’s meltdown has arrived” (their column is accessible via Google here. They take Tennessee as their proving ground, citing state insurance commissioner Julie Mix McPeak approving premium increases of up to 62 percent in a bid to save the exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act. “I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near »

Bill Clinton on Obamacare: “It’s the craziest thing in the world”

Featured image Bill Clinton ripped Obamacare during a campaign rally for his wife in Michigan today. Calling Obamacare, “a crazy system” and “the craziest thing in the world,” the former president said “it doesn’t many any sense; the insurance model doesn’t work here.” Clinton went on to say that Obamacare “works fine” for people with “modest” incomes or who are eligible for government subsidies, but “the people that are getting killed in »

Lies of Obamacare, part MMMMCCXXXII

Featured image Stuart Varney demanded an apology from Obamacare architect and propagandist Ezekiel Emanuel last week on FOX News. The lies of Obamacare resume whenever Emanuel moves his lips, but there is therapetic value in Varney’s beatdown on Emanuel. Emanuel retorts: “Your memory is just so poor about how bad the system was before.” This isn’t good for my anger management therapy, but it is a healthy reminder, so to speak, of »

Obamacare Is Collapsing, But Democrats Don’t Mind

Featured image Obamacare is falling apart before our eyes. In state after state, insurers are withdrawing from the ACA exchanges and premiums are rising rapidly. Barack Obama’s promise that the ACA would bring down the cost of health insurance has become a bad joke. The latest news is that Aetna is leaving 11 of the 15 state exchanges in which it now participates: Aetna’s decision to pull back from ObamaCare is fueling »