newsletter

New York Times: More Insured, but the Choices Are Narrowing These so-called narrow networks, featuring limited groups of providers, have made a big entrance on the newly created state insurance exchanges, where they are a common feature in many of the plans. While the sizes of the networks vary considerably, many plans now exclude at least some large hospitals or doctors’ groups. Smaller networks are also becoming more common in health care coverage offered by employers and in private...

Forbes: New McKinsey Survey: 74% Of Obamacare Sign-Ups Were Previously Insured The new McKinsey report…indicates that the proportion of uninsured individuals paying for coverage has shot up, from 53 percent in February to 83 percent in April. For previously insured individuals, the percentage of payers increased from 86 to 89 percent. The proportion of individuals purchasing ACA plans who had been previously uninsured remained low. In February, McKinsey reported that only 27 percent of...

CNBC: One by one, states shutter health insurance exchanges Massachusetts' crippled Obamacare exchange is just the latest to throw in the towel and scrap its existing software, but health-care experts said it likely won't be the last. Those same observers Tuesday told CNBC that almost half of the existing state-run Obamacare marketplaces could, in the coming years, end up turning enrollment operations in private insurance plans over fully to the federally run HealthCare.gov for a variety of...

The New York Times: Insurers Say Most Who Signed Up Under Health Law Have Paid Up [but importantly, many of these are duplicate enrollments] Most of the people choosing health plans under the Affordable Care Act — about 80 percent — are paying their initial premiums as required for coverage to take effect, several large insurers said Tuesday on the eve of a House hearing about the law. But the health insurance industry said the total of eight million people who signed up included...

You do some strange things in politics…but petting a pig in a bandana is a first! All to emphasize the Citizens Against Government Waste 2014 Pig Book, released today, chronicling government waste. Too bad our government's pork problem isn't as cute as this fella. pic.twitter.com/L3Q3QtfXDw — Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) May 7, 2014  

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. Sen. Cruz has been documenting the Obama Administration’s lawlessness and other abuses of powers in a series of reports, beginning in April 2013. The Legal Limit Report No. 1: U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Department of Justice’s Expansive View of Federal...

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Own a small business? Brace for Obamacare pain ["The changes put as many as 90,000 policies across Nevada at risk of cancellation or nonrenewal this fall…"] Local insurance brokers are reporting spikes ranging from 35 percent to 120 percent on policies that renew from July to December. The increases are especially acute among employers with workforces made up of younger, healthier men. That’s because Obamacare prohibits offering lower rates to healthier...

Washington Examiner: Obamacare youth sign-ups at or below 25% in 15 states ...This is far below the 40 percent threshold White House officials initially said was required to ensure healthy insurance exchanges…nationally, about 28 percent of those signing up through the exchanges were aged 18 to 34. But national numbers are only a rough indicator of the state of play on the exchanges, because in reality, the insurance market is made up of 51 different risk pools - one for each state, plus...

The Federalist: No, Obamacare Did Not "Save The Economy" Last Quarter GDP growth figures for the fourth quarter of 2013 were released by the federal government, and the numbers were not good. The economy just barely avoided painful contraction, posting annualized growth of only 0.1 percent. But for the Obamacare Truther Brigade, there was a tiny glimmer of hope. It turns out that higher than expected health care spending growth was just enough to keep that quarterly growth number out of the...

Washington Post: The White House's Obamacare victory lap looking more like a false start Democrats have been claiming a turning point in the battle over Obamacare for the better part of the last month. First came the news that 8 million people had signed up [yet again we do not have reliable data as to how many of these people are enrolled and paying premiums or how many of these sign-ups were previously uninsured] -- exceeding the law's goals -- and then came the Congressional Budget Office...

Wall Street Journal: A Doctor's Declaration of Independence It's time to defy health-care mandates issued by bureaucrats not in the healing profession [CMS] dictates that we must use an electronic health record (EHR) or be penalized with lower reimbursements in the future. There are "meaningful use" criteria whereby [CMS - the government agency] tells us as physicians what we need to include in the electronic health record or we will not be subsidized the cost of converting to the electronic...