“Less than a year before Americans will be required to have insurance under President Obama’s healthcare law, many of its backers are growing increasingly anxious that premiums could jump, driven up by the legislation itself.”
“Congressional opponents of Obamacare need to do two things in the months ahead. First, they need to pursue legislation that can contain and minimize Obamacare so that a future president and Congress can still change direction if they choose to do so. Second, Congress needs to continue to cultivate public opposition to Obamacare by highlighting strong bipartisan opposition to its worst features.”
“On Wednesday Florida Republican Rick Scott became the latest GOP Governor to volunteer to shoulder some responsibility for ObamaCare, which has liberal sages gloating about a resistance-is-futile shift in the GOP. The media don’t want to discuss the substance, only the politics, so allow us to report how the flippers are justifying their flips.”
“Spurred by the Affordable Care Act, hundreds of pilot programs called Accountable Care Organizations have been launched over the past year, affecting tens of millions on Medicare and many who have commercial health insurance… We believe that many of them will not succeed. The ACO concept is based on assumptions about personal and economic behavior—by doctors, patients and others—that aren’t realistic.”
“Facing increasing losses in federal courts over Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, the Department of Health & Human Services last week promulgated a rule to expand exemptions for religious nonprofits. That sounds good, but what the government is actually doing is a sort of accounting shell game: employers will no longer have to pay for the products/services to which they objects, but the government requires them to contract with an insurance company that the government then requires to provide these products/services to employees who want them ‘for free.'”
“For instance, the Obama team unilaterally decided to phase-in the guaranteed issue requirements of child-only policies, even though the law required this provision to be fully implemented by the fall of 2010. The administration delayed and then limited the W-2 reporting provisions for employers. These are just two examples.”
“Gov. Scott Walker announced Wednesday that he won’t propose expanding Medicaid services in Wisconsin, joining other Republican governors who have decided to reject federal money for covering more low-income residents under the health care overhaul law. Instead, Walker outlined a hybrid approach that would allow more adults into the state health program, which he said would help cut the state’s uninsured rate of 14 percent in half.”
“‘Already, the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health-care costs,’ President Obama boasted during his State of the Union address. Apart from the fact that the statement is untrue, the line will be a real howler next year, especially for the young people who so enthusiastically supported him.”
“Democrats who supported President Obama’s healthcare law grilled a top Health and Human Services official Thursday over what they see as holes in the implementation effort and the White House’s political bargaining.
Gary Cohen, the director of the HHS office overseeing the bulk of the healthcare law’s implementation, fielded tough questions from several Democrats.”
“Two hospice care centers are struggling to make ends meet, and Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare are to blame.
Hospices—health care facilities for the terminally ill—along with other Medicare providers are facing Medicare pay cuts. Of the $716 billion in payment reductions, hospice care was hit by a $17 billion payment cut from 2013 to 2022. Now, contrary to all of the misleading claims, this effect is already beginning.”