Repealing ObamaCare’s individual mandate would save about $300 billion over the next decade while driving the nation’s uninsured rate back up to 2013 levels, according to new federal budget estimates.

Government health departments would save about $311 billion over 10 years if Republicans successfully repealed the mandate, which requires nearly all adults to purchase healthcare or pay a penalty.

Details

Late last month, the Nevada Health Co-op became the third casualty among 23 insurance start-ups created under the federal health care law to inject competition for coverage in certain parts of the country.

Set up as nonprofits with consumer-led boards, the co-ops were designed to provide affordable insurance coverage to individuals and small businesses. They were intended under the law to offer alternatives — and hopefully cheaper prices — to the plans sold by large established insurance companies in some regions.

Details

Our country’s small and mid-sized businesses owners and their employees make our economy run. We are both former small business owners, and we understand both the long hours and financial pressures facing entrepreneurs looking to get their business off the ground, as well as their commitment to providing a positive working environment for their employees. The Americans powering our small businesses are our family, our friends and our neighbors, and they deserve common-sense solutions to the challenges they face.

Details

An ObamaCare program could be penalizing certain hospitals for serving more poor patients, according to a study released Monday.

The study focuses on an ObamaCare program that docks a hospital’s Medicare payments if its readmission rate is above a certain level. The program is meant to provide a financial incentive for hospitals to improve the quality of care and cut down on costly readmissions, in which a patient must return to the hospital after a procedure.

Details

A Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is a calculation used to loosely gauge the efficiency and profitability of a health insurance plan. The measurement determines what portion of the money consumers pay in premiums is spent on providing health care services or improving the quality of care delivery. A higher MLR is thought to indicate a higher quality insurer because a larger portion of the company’s funds are spent on providing care. However, this is not necessarily the case if an insurer succeeds in keeping a healthier-than-expected risk pool.

Details

The public employees responsible for overseeing $600 million in contracts to build healthcare.gov were inadequately trained, kept sloppy records, and failed to identify delays and problems that contributed to millions in cost overruns.
That’s according to a new government audit, published today. It reveals widespread failures by the federal agency charged with managing the private contractors who built healthcare.gov.

Details

Unsurprisingly there are more problems with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that await members of Congress coming back from their August recess.

Topping the list of issues is a provision in Obamacare that changes the definition of “small employer” from “50 or fewer employees” to “100 or fewer employees,” starting January 1, 2016.

Details

The healthcare sector is undergoing a secular consolidation as payers and providers assume a historic level of mergers and acquisitions. These trends were underway prior to implementing the Affordable Care Act. But there’s little question that ACA hastened them.

Details

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.

Details

Between the end of March and the end of June, 29 states plus the District of Columbia lost Obamacare enrollees, based on an Americans for Tax Reform analysis of recently released data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In total, Obamacare exchanges had a net loss of 238,119 enrollees in the three-month period.

Details