newsletter

Heritage Foundation: New Obamacare Enrollment Data: Employer-Based Coverage Declines New data show that the number of people who have private health insurance increased by just over 520,000 in the six months between October 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014. That was because almost all the gains in individual coverage through the Obamacare exchanges were offset by reduced enrollment in employer-sponsored group coverage. During the same period, Medicaid enrollment increased by about 5 million,...

From USA Today: To most Americans, the words "Export-Import Bank" don't mean very much. The DC insiders, cozy with international corporate interests putting taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, want to keep it that way, too.The Export-Import Bank is big businesses' big-government bank backed by U.S. taxpayers. It sends huge amounts of assistance to foreign corporations, buyers, and companies that are hostile to our economic and security interests, but can...

Weekly Standard: Emails Show Cozy Government-Insurer Alliance, Expectation of Bailout White House communications director Tara McGuiness and Chris Jennings, Obama’s deputy assistant for health policy, “traded talking points with numerous insurance company CEOs.”  According to the report, “Ms. McGuiness and Mr. Jennings collaborated closely with Florida Blue Cross and Blue Shield CEO Patrick Geraghty.  After a CBS Evening News appearance on October 11, 2013, Ms....

The Transom: THE LAW IS WHAT WE SAY IT IS One of the underrated aspects of the current debate over Obamacare’s subsidies triggered by the Halbig decision is that we are dealing with an argument about a piece of legislation which was never intended to become law in its existing form. Scott Brown's election to the Senate completely disrupted the process, preventing conferencing on the bill and leaving Democrats with the option of an up or down vote to ram through this stillborn piece of...

The Transom: YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT JONATHAN GRUBER SAID [About the Halbig case, specifically the law's distribution of tax credits to only state-based exchanges] …[Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber] was on MSNBC just the other day [and said] “Chris, it is unambiguous this is a typo. Literally every single person involved in the crafting of this law has said that it`s a typo, that they had no intention of excluding the federal states. And why would they? Look, the law says...

Washington Examiner: When Obamacare loses in court, insurance companies lose, too Obama's Internal Revenue Service, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, had been illegally transferring money from taxpayers to insurers by pretending the Affordable Care Act said something it didn't say. …it’s misleading to describe the tax credits as simply subsidies to the insurance customers. They’re really subsidies to the insurance companies. Obamacare tax credits amount to a check from...

The Wall Street Journal: Reining in ObamaCare – and the President Halbig v. Burwell is about determining whether the president, like an autocrat, can levy taxes on his own Because the ruling forces the Obama administration to implement the Affordable Care Act as written, consumers in 36 states would face the full cost of its overpriced health insurance. According to one brief filed in the case, overall premiums in those states would be double what they are under the administration's...

Washington Post: D.C. Circuit strikes down tax credits in federal exchanges This morning the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit released its much awaited opinion in Halbig v. Burwell.  In a 2-1 opinion, the Court held that the Internal Revenue Service regulation authorizing tax credits in federal exchanges was invalid.   Judge Griffith, writing for the court, concluded, “the ACA unambiguously restricts the section 36B subsidy to insurance purchased on Exchanges...

The Tennessean: BlueCross requests rate increase of 19 percent in 2015 Meanwhile, Cigna is requesting an average rate increase of 7.5 percent in 2015, while Kentucky-based Humana would like to boost marketplace rates by an average of 14.4 percent…In 2014, the least-expensive version of the silver plan — the most popular of the exchange plans — was $160.62 a month in Davidson County. At a 19 percent increase, the new rate would be $191 a month. BlueCross has the majority of...

Huffington Post: White House: Employers Must Disclose Objections To Covering Birth Control The White House on Thursday sent a message to companies that want to opt out of covering birth control, saying those employers are required to be transparent about their objections. The Department of Labor updated its website to indicate that closely held for-profit corporations must include in their insurance plans "a description of the extent to which preventive services (which includes contraceptive...

NPR: Patients With Low-Cost Insurance Struggle To Find Specialists Understandably, a lot of [Dr. Sawhney's] patients picked lower-cost plans, she says, "and we're running into problems with coverage in the same way we were when they were uninsured." One of her patients is a Chinese immigrant to Houston who purchased a Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO silver plan. Soon after, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Sawhney found an oncologist to coordinate his treatment, but she and the oncologist ran...

McAllen Monitor: Texas sees rise in Medicaid signups [Also known as the "woodwork effect" this was anticipated but often brushed aside by Obamacare supporters] More than 80,000 additional Texans have enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program since the rollout of the Affordable Care Act last fall despite Republican state leaders’ decision not to expand eligibility to poor adults, according to federal figures. The 80,435 new enrollees as of May — mostly...

The New York Times: Why Improving Access to Health Care Does Not Save Money (Huh!? Where has this dose of reality been hiding for the past 5 years? Conservatives and libertarians have been screaming about it for years – even Politifact somewhat understands it) One of the oft-repeated arguments in favor of the Affordable Care Act is that it will reduce people’s need for more intensive care by increasing their access to preventive care. For example, people will use the emergency room...

The Wall Street Journal: What the HHS Reports on the Health Exchanges Didn't Cover One HHS report examined data from federally run exchanges through Feb. 23 and from state exchanges through last December. Put another way, federal auditors tallied data from the months when the exchanges experienced middling to sluggish enrollment—not the periods when the greatest number of applications were completed. The inspector general’s report indicates that federally run exchanges had 2.9...