The impact of ObamaCare on doctors and patients, companies inside and outside the health sector, and American workers and taxpayers
President Obama says he will veto any legislation that amends or repeals the Affordable Care Act (ACA), his signature legislative achievement, either in whole or in part. But GOP congressional leaders in both House and Senate promised their colleagues that they would use a special parliamentary procedure called “reconciliation” to bypass a certain filibuster by Senate Democrats to put a full repeal bill on the president’s desk anyway.
Joel C. White, president of the Council for Affordable Health Coverage, and Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, have written to members of Congress seeking oversight of the co-op program. All but one of the 22 co-op created under the ACA have produced negative net income, despite $2.4 billion in federal taxpayer funding. This is a misuse of taxpayer money and a disservice to patients who have lost health insurance coverage due to co-op failure.
When the House of Representatives filed a lawsuit last year contesting President Obama’s implementation of ObamaCare, critics variously labeled it as “ridiculous,” “frivolous” and certain to be dismissed. Federal District Judge Rosemary Collyer apparently doesn’t agree. On Wednesday she ruled against the Obama administration, concluding that the House has standing to assert an injury to its institutional power, and that its lawsuit doesn’t involve—as the administration had asserted—a “political question” incapable of judicial resolution.
The federal court ruling Wednesday that Congress can sue the President may eventually be seen as the beginning of an historic constitutional watershed. Now that we’ve had the chance to digest the opinion, we’d say it has the chance to restore the separation of powers that President Obama has so often subverted.
The White House isn’t likely to wait long to challenge Wednesday’s ruling allowing House Republicans to sue the Obama administration for spending federal funds on the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing assistance.
The administration is expected to seek what’s called an interlocutory appeal, which would allow a higher court to consider the issue of whether the House has standing to sue before the lower court addresses the merits of the case.
Just when you thought that any further Obamacare lawsuits involved things like contraceptive mandates rather than anything at the law’s core, today a federal judge ruled that Speaker of the House John Boehner’s case against the HHS and Treasury secretaries can proceed. In a highly technical 43-page opinion, Judge Rosemary Collyer found that the House of Representatives has standing to sue these officials and their agencies for spending money on ACA implementation that Congress didn’t authorize.
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the House had the right to sue the Obama administration over billions of dollars in health care spending, a decision that poses a new legal threat to the health care law and gave congressional Republicans a victory in their claims of executive overreach by the White House.
Small businesses are the engines of the American economy, but it’s getting to the point where it is almost impossible for them to get ahead.
Soaring health costs are negatively impacting their ability to compete and still offer affordable health coverage for their employees. Since 2004, the average annual family premium in small firms increased 69 percent. Family insurance premiums for small firms increased from $9,950 in 2003 to $16,834 in 2014, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The problem is the economy rose at just a fraction of premium increases, creating an affordability gap many find too difficult to surmount.
According to a Sept. 3 report by Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal, Pittsburgh-based Highmark Health announced it will cut back its range of plans offered through the ObamaCare marketplaces.
Obama-era boondoggles operate on a far grander scale. Consider the massive 2009 “Stimulus” package and all those “shovel-ready” jobs that never materialized. Or the $536-million loan guarantee for Solyndra, shortly before the solar power company went belly up.