Search Results for: obamacare
January 4, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Laura Ungar and Jayne O’Donnell write in USA Today about a “reversal of fortunes” in health care. It seems that “poor, long-uninsured patients are getting Medicaid through Obamacare and finally coming to [doctors] for care, but middle-class workers are increasingly staying away.” They are staying away because, according to Ungar and O’Donnell, “coverage [under employer provided health insurance plans] long considered the gold standard of health insurance now often requires
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January 3, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Tevi Troy says that 2015 is shaping up as Obamacare’s worst year. That’s quite a statement, considering how bad a year it had in 2014 — roll-out problems, false claims of 7 million enrollees, and the defeat of congressional supporters of the legislation. The key challenge to Obamacare in 2015 will come in the Supreme Court. A defeat there would certainly make 2015 a potentially near-fatal year for Obama’s only
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November 18, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
The House of Representative has chosen law professor Jonathan Turley to represent it in a lawsuit against the Obama administration. The suit challenges changes the administration made to Obamacare without congressional authorization. The hiring of Turley has been praised by some conservatives because Turley is a liberal. He voted for Obama in 2008, supports national health care, and so forth. Turley’s status as a liberal may, indeed, be one reason
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November 17, 2014 — Scott Johnson
If Steve Hayward were available, he would say something like this: Oh, yeah, you knew this was coming. Our hero Remy Munasifi and our pals at Reason TV are out this morning with a short video that gives jaunty musical life to the deep thoughts surfaced in the Grubergate videos. This one is “Don’t tell ’em (Obamacare version)” (video below). In that Steve is temporarily unavailable, I will say it
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November 17, 2014 — Scott Johnson
I hadn’t heard of Fox Business News anchor Melissa Francis before she devoted a segment to the Obamacare spike she experienced while working for CNBC during the Obamacare debates of 2009-2010. She reports that she was ordered by CNBC management to avoid criticism of the mystical math of Obamacare in deference to respect for the president. The video below excerpts her introductory personal account from the larger segment. Could Francis’s
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November 11, 2014 — John Hinderaker
The Obama administration has tried to put the best face on Obamacare, touting statistics about how many people have signed up for the program. Yesterday the Department of Health and Human Services issued a report that projects ACA enrollments on the individual exchanges in 2015. Many news outlets have reported that HHS scales down the enrollment estimate that the Congressional Budget Office produced in April. This is true, but it
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November 8, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
As Steve has noted, the Supreme Court will review the Fourth Circuit’s decision in King v. Burwell. That decision holds that the provision of Obamacare authorizing tax credits for insurance purchased on an exchange “established by the State under section 1311” also authorizes tax credits for insurance purchased on an exchange established by the federal government. It seems clear that four Justices are prepared to reverse the Fourth Circuit and
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November 7, 2014 — Steven Hayward
As Paul discussed at the time, the DC Circuit Court’s Halbig ruling striking down Obamacare’s state subsidies would be unlikely to survive an en banc rehearing with all of the new judges that Harry Reid enabled Obama to appoint. And the 4th Circuit upheld the state subsidies in a separate case. But this afternoon the Supreme Court announced that it won’t wait for the DC Circuit’s rehearing, and will take up an
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October 20, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich, on behalf of MoveOn, warns Democrats what will happen if Republicans take control of the Senate: they may use a “tricky, little-known maneuver” to “ram through” their “right-wing policies” with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 votes “usually required” in the Senate. Here he is: So the “tricky, little-known maneuver” that the Republicans may use is reconciliation. Reconciliation dates to the 1974 Budget
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October 13, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
The other day, President Obama claimed that Republicans are talking less about Obamacare on the campaign trail, now that “it’s working pretty well in the real world.” Obama’s assertion turns out to be false. Obamacare is front-and-center as a campaign issue throughout the nation. Republicans would talk about Obamacare even more if the Obama administration stopped preventing disclosure of its shortcomings by gagging insurance companies and hiding information. Robert Laszewski,
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October 10, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
State regulators approved significant premium hikes on the Louisiana and Iowa Obamacare exchanges this week. Sarah Hurtubise of the Daily Caller reports that premiums will rise by double-digits in both states. This is bad news, I assume, for Mary Landrieu and Bruce Braley, the struggling Democratic Senate candidates in the two states. In Louisiana, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana, the exchange’s largest insurer, is hiking prices between 18.3 percent
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October 5, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
In a recent speech at Northwestern University, President Obama claimed that fewer Republicans are running against Obamacare because “while good, affordable health care might seem to be a fanged threat to freedom on Fox News, it turns out it’s working pretty well in the real world.” But are Republican candidates actually backing away from criticizing Obamacare? Not in the real world. Check out the websites of GOP candidates in key
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October 2, 2014 — John Hinderaker
A year ago, a panicked Obama administration sent letters to the state insurance commissioners urging them to allow individual health care plans that were illegal under Obamacare to be extended for another year. We wrote about the ploy, which was intended to defuse the outrage that was then building against the “Affordable” Care Act, here and elsewhere. A year has come and gone, and the Washington Post reports that cancellation
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September 30, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
A federal district court in Oklahoma has ruled that the Obamacare statute means what it says: subsidies may not granted to people obtaining their health insurance through the federal exchange. In Pruitt v. Burwell, Judge Ronald White of the Eastern District of Oklahoma followed the reasoning of the panel in Halbig v. Sebelius, a ruling that the full D.C. Circuit, having been packed by the Democrats, recently vacated. The Oklahoma
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September 17, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Obamacare in Minnesota is called MNSure. The state had the usual problems (worse, I believe, than in most states) getting its system and its web site up and running. Once the enrollment period got underway, the dominant insurer turned out to be PreferredOne. Reportedly offering the lowest premiums in the nation, PreferredOne signed up nearly 60% of all MNSure participants. So it was a bombshell when PreferredOne announced earlier this
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September 4, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Call this the first fruits of the Obama-Reid plan to pack the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The DC Circuit has just vacated its July 22 decision in Halbig v. Burwell that struck down the federal subsidies for Obamacare in states that did not set up exchanges as the clear language of the statute said. The DC Circuit will now hear the case en banc, which likely favors a reversal
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July 25, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Jonathan Gruber, a professor at MIT, is widely is regarded as the architect of both Romneycare and Obamacare. Following the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Halbig, he asserted that the provision of Obamacare limiting subsidies to the state exchanges was a “typo.” Indeed, he found it “criminal” to suggest that Obamacare was intended to work this way. But William Jacobson (via one of his readers) has unearthed video from 2012 in
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