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Top Republicans on Capitol Hill’s health committees are asking the Obama administration to lower payment rates for insurers who benefit from a controversial “reinsurance” program in the Affordable Care Act.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and House Education and Workforce Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.) sent the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services a letter Tuesday, obtained by Morning Consult, calling for reduced reimbursement and to allow certain plans to not participate.

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives will consider H.R. 3762, the “Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015.” This bill would gut the major provisions of Obamacare and essentially make it unworkable. It’s a bill that conservative House Members should support. H.R. 3762 is a net spending cut, a net tax cut, and…

While most of the media have tuned out and the chattering class has mostly moved on, a recent article by Megan McArdle in Bloomberg View, “Obamacare delivers. Just not very much,” reminded me that the calamity that is Obamacare can’t be swept under the rug. It is clear nothing will keep President Obama from declaring victory on every front, but the fact is, Obamacare is a bust. As a result, the next president will be confronted with the reality that at the end of the day, all Obamacare amounts to is a convoluted expansion of Medicaid that we can’t afford.

The catastrophic failure of Obamacare’s launch is now far in the past. But the public’s acquiescence to a law that keeps creating new problems should not be taken as a sign of enthusiastic acceptance, much less as a sign that Obamacare is working.

The important thing is how each of Obamacare’s current problems — skyrocketing premiums, lower than expected enrollment, and the collapse of several cooperative plans — is related to the others.

A full 32.3 million non-elderly people do not have health insurance despite the costly health reform act and the individual mandate tax penalty, new analysis shows.

Nearly half of the 32.3 million uninsured, or 15.7 million, are still not getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid, new state-by-state analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals. More than a quarter of the uninsured are either eligible adults or children.

After five years, two midterm disasters, and a rollout that reminded Americans why they fell out of love with big government in the 1970s, reality has finally begun to dawn on some Democrats about Obamacare. With open enrollment about to start and a third straight round of premium spikes about to hit voters’ pockets, the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate has offered a “major break” with the Obama administration on its signature domestic policy achievement.

ObamaCare is heading toward a death spiral.
The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) is throwing up roadblocks to the confirmation of two top Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nominees over what he describes as “systematic failures” of an ObamaCare program for start-up insurers.

“I will act to block consideration and confirmation of every [HHS] nominee until families who lost their co-op insurance plans get straight answers,” Sasse announced in a press release Monday.

As startup insurers born of Obamacare collapse nationwide, the one in Illinois is drastically limiting enrollment to last for the long haul.

Land of Lincoln Health, one of 23 so-called health insurance co-ops backed by federal loans, is capping enrollment for the signup period that begins Nov. 1. The health plan has about 55,000 members, including individuals and businesses. It wants to end 2016 with only about 15,000 more.

A total of 41 percent said the ACA would be “very important” in determining their vote. Another 33 percent said it would be “somewhat important,” according to the survey, which had a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points.