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Showing below up to 50 results in range #101 to #150.
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Henry Chao, a senior federal official working on the information technology that will run the exchanges, said in March that he was “pretty nervous” about meeting the October 1 deadline and was reduced to hoping that the exchanges don’t end up being “a Third World experience.” And it’s not as if the feds and the states have been short on money. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have spent $4.4 billion on state exchange grants by the end of this year. That’s more than double what the Department said would be necessary just last year, despite the fact that fewer states than the feds anticipated agreed to establish their own exchanges. | 
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From The Obamacare Insurance Exchange Train Is Already Coming Off The Rails, by Sally Pipes (Forbes, May 27, 2013) (view)
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"One of these new taxes is a so-called health insurance fee. It's a massive $8 billion tax (that escalates to $14.3 billion by 2018) on insurance companies based on their market share. This tax will be paid almost exclusively by small businesses and individuals because the law specifically excludes self-insured plans, the plans that most big businesses and labor unions offer, from having to pay the tax." |
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Close to one out of every 13 jobs is now in "food services and drinking places" — restaurants and bars. These are the exact businesses saying they'll have to cut back shifts to less than 30 hours because of the health care law. Otherwise, paying for expensive Washington-mandated insurance for all of their workers could bankrupt them. Employers forced into this position by the law have picked up a nickname. They're called "the 29ers." |
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From ObamaCare Is Blocking Job Creation, Economic Growth, by John Barrasso (Investor's Business Daily, May 2, 2013) (view)
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Roughly 12 million seniors have chosen to carry Medicare Advantage. Most like it and want to keep it. They surely don’t want the funding for their plan cut by an average of $17,000 per senior over the rest of this decade, as would happen under Obamacare. They similarly don’t want to see the Medicare chief actuary’s prediction come true: that by 2017, enrollment in Medicare Advantage will decrease by half from what it would have been without Obamacare. |
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ObamaCare refugees first began beating down the exit doors last October. Waiver-mania started with McDonald's and Jack in the Box; spread to Dish Networks, hair-salon chain Regis Corp and resort giant Universal Orlando; took hold among major Big Labor outfits from the AFL-CIO to the CWA to the SEIU; roped in the nationalized health-care promoters at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and is now gripping entire states. |
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There is suspicion that HHS has shown favoritism — labor unions have received some 26 percent of waivers while comprising only 12 percent of workers. As Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., said, “What does it say about the feasibility of the health-care law when the administration needs to exempt over 1,000 health plans from its own law?” |
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That approaching train wreck keeps speeding at us. The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to exact $95 penalties to everyone who fails to sign up for health insurance, beginning in 2014. With premiums rising because of government interference in the marketplace, many consumers, especially the young and healthy, will pay the $95 “tax” to avoid paying thousands in unnecessary higher premiums. The sick and elderly will flood the system, while the young stand aside to watch. |
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From Panic over Obamacare, by The Washington Times editorial board (The Washington Times, May 15, 2013) (view)
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In his newly released plan to "reform" Medicare as part of overall deficit reduction, Obama has punted actual cost-cutting and instead proposed a panel - the Independent Payment Advisory Board - to recommend savings for the financially doomed program. Translation: Welcome to the world of rationing. The board, which was an original part of Obamacare (remember the death panel debate?), consists of 15 unelected bureaucrats who will have unchecked, binding power in the interest of supposedly greater efficiency and lower costs. |
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The Affordable Care Act was pitched as a way to save money and lower premiums. Yet Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), recently admitted that premiums have increased "in part because of ObamaCare," but in part because premiums were steadily increasing anyway. The first part is a stunning admission, but the second part is actually the doozy: Did Congress raid Medicare and jeopardize America's financial solvency just to keep the status quo? |
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"Under the Constitution the states are not wards of the federal government. Clever federal tax and spending statutes must not be allowed to reduce states to a servile status that allows the federal government to force massive wealth shifts among them. The federal government should be told either to refund to the states their citizens' Medicaid tax dollars when they pull out of the program or to drop the new mandates to expand Medicaid coverage as the price the states must pay to escape ObamaCare-created duties." |
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From ObamaCare's Phony Medicaid 'Deal', by Richard Epstein (The Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2010) (view)
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Health-care reform forbids insurers to turn anyone down because of a pre-existing condition, and — if it survives Supreme Court review — will add millions to the rolls. It also imposes a series of expensive mandates that will drive up costs. At the same time, it seeks to keep insurers from adjusting to the new realities by raising prices too much. Where will all that lead? The historical evidence is not encouraging. In addition to Venezuela, one could cite New York City, where rent control has created a permanent housing shortage; or Zimbabwe ("Zimbabwe is facing serious food shortages due to price controls imposed earlier this month by the government," BBC) or Russia ("Price Controls on Gasoline in Russia Causing Shortages," Economic Policy Journal), or dozens of other examples. |
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Here in New York, the law has put in jeopardy the entire way I practice as a primary-care physician. The law is so heavy with restrictions and penalties, and so light with actual improvements to care, that it isn’t working well even with the subsidies. I spend more than half of my time on any given day on computer documentation, pre-approvals, contesting billing errors by labs or hospitals and choosing unknown specialists from ObamaCare lists to refer patients to. |
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Meanwhile, not just Taco Bell and Wendy's are demoting many full-time workers to part-time work. Some of Obama's core constituencies — universities and state governments — are cutting hours. For instance, Stark State College in Ohio sent a letter to faculty saying that "to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act ... employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week." |
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Each year, millions of uninsured Americans find coverage through a new employer, Medicaid, or other means. In fact, the number of uninsured has fallen every year since peaking after the 2008 recession. Many of the 1.2 million newly insured through the exchanges likely would have found coverage regardless. Moreover, we know that at least 5 million families have received cancellation notices. Some polices have been temporarily extended, and some have not, but all will lose their insurance once the law goes into full effect. |
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Goldman Sachs is projecting that only 1 million Obamacare sign-ups will come from previously uninsured Americans. Indeed, it estimates that the number of total signups will be just 4 million — not 6 million, as the administration claims — because “HHS figures ... count all persons who selected an ACA exchange plan regardless of whether or not they have actually completed the enrollment process by paying their premium.” Goldman Sachs also anticipates that fully 75 percent of all the Obamacare sign-ups will be from people who already had insurance. |
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From Making up good news about Obamacare, by Marc Thiessen (The Washington Post, March 31, 2014) (view)
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The latest changes to Obamacare, stacked on so many earlier changes, create more headaches and uncertainty for insurers and for enrollees who pay premiums to them. Insurers need tightly restricted enrollment periods to discourage healthy people from waiting until they have an accident or illness to buy coverage. But with the administration's changes creating so much slosh in their pools of customers, insurers already are warning that health insurance premiums are likely to rocket higher, possibly by double digits, next year. |
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From Monday is the Obamacare deadline. Sort of., by Chicago Tribune editorial board (Chicago Tribune, March 31, 2014) (view)
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A 2,700-page law is not a "law" by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there's no equality: Instead, there's a hierarchy of privilege microregulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown and unnumbered bureaucracy. It's not just that the legislators who legislate it don't know what's in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can ever hope to understand it, but that even the nation's most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. |
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From Just reading Obamacare cruel and unusual punishment, by Mark Steyn (The Orange County Register, March 30, 2012) (view)
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"I am working on legislation that would allow states to opt out of this federal health care bill because states need flexibility, not a federal government takeover of health care. Instead, individual states should have the flexibility to solve the health care problems in a way that is best for their specific state, similar to the approach we took in Massachusetts that has resulted in a state-specific plan that covers 98 percent of our citizens without raising taxes." |
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"The Employee Benefit Research Institute calculates that companies could now save $1,000 per beneficiary by handing them off to the government. As many as 2 million more retirees could end up on the government program, according to James Klein of the American Benefits Council. These retirees might wonder about the truthfulness of Obama's constant promise that everyone can keep his current insurance." |
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We instead hope that lawmakers — Democrats chastened by the court's skepticism, Republicans who now have to deliver an alternative to Obamacare — will work together toward a bipartisan health care reform law. A law that carefully and affordably expands care. |
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From If the law falls ..., by Chicago Tribune editorial board (Chicago Tribune, March 29, 2012) (view)
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"For the first time, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it receives in tax revenue, to the tune of $29 billion. [...] So is this really the time for the US to be setting out on a trillion-dollar entitlement adventure filled with so many unknowns and untested elements? And, more important, whose ultimate financial impact on the sky-high -- and still soaring -- national debt is open to so much question? You'd think not." |
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From A grim sign for ObamaCare, by New York Post editorial board (New York Post, March 29, 2010) (view)
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Obamacare’s costs are exploding in the land where budgets already have burst. The $900 billion bargain-basement 10-year cost estimate that Mr. Obama promised for his overhaul recently ballooned to $1.8 trillion. Of course, these are still just estimates, and considering that the government underestimated Medicare’s cost by a factor of 10, who really knows how massive the final price tag will be? |
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From Obamacare’s inescapable death march, by Milton Wolf (The Washington Times, March 28, 2012) (view)
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Health insurance is more costly and child-only policies have largely vanished because of ObamaCare's insurance mandates. And President Obama's promise that Americans would be able to keep their existing coverage? ObamaCare regulations make that impossible to fulfill. |
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From ObamaCare's 1-year toll, by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 27, 2011) (view)
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"In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn't bother reading (because, as Rep. John Conyers explained, he wouldn't understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular good ol' American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden's corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland's is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the highest corporate tax in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is no reason why we can't keep going until it's double Sweden's and quadruple Ireland's." |
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"Indeed, many conservatives, for all their justified opposition to a government takeover of health care, have not yet quite seen the full extent to which this bill will exacerbate the cost problem. It is designed to push people into a system that will not exist—a health care bridge to nowhere—and so will cause premiums to rise and encourage significant dislocation and then will initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so increase them further." |
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"On top of AT&T's $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks. As Joe Biden might put it, this is a big, er, deal for shareholders and the economy. The consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion, unless corporations cut retiree drug benefits when their labor contracts let them." |
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From The ObamaCare Writedowns, by The Wall Street Journal editorial board (The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2010) (view)
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"Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation. But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs -- which are locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates. That's where the value-added tax comes in." |
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From Obamacare's next trick: the VAT, by Charles Krauthammer (The Washington Post, March 26, 2010) (view)
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"...the old Clinton health-care bill was a plan to control costs through health-care purchasing cooperatives, standards of medical practice, and penalties for providers who violated those standards. When Americans came to understand the loss of freedom resulting from the Clinton plan, they rejected it. The Democrats learned from that experience. This time around they simply left their cost control component to be added later." |
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"...since this program was adopted in 2006, our health-care costs have in total exceeded $4 billion. The cost of Massachusetts' plan has blown a hole in the Commonwealth's budget. Just last Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick's office announced a $294 million shortfall related to health-care costs. If not for federal Medicaid reimbursements and commitments from Washington to prop up this plan, Massachusetts would be broke." |
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From Massachusetts Is Our Future, by Timothy Cahill (The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2010) (view)
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"Paying the new tax penalty might actually be cheaper for [Indiana&393;, as it will be for many private firms. I'm not certain the same rule applies to government as to business, but since no member of Congress read this entire bill before the vote, I don't feel embarrassed about not knowing." |
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"If we repeal ObamaCare, we can start over with common-sense market solutions to lower the cost of health insurance. We can end the era of defensive medicine with real malpractice reforms, and use the savings to fund state programs that provide insurance for Americans with pre-existing conditions. We can renew our commitment to seniors in Medicare and pursue the kind of reform required to achieve its long-term solvency." |
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Despite this declaration, backers of the Massachusetts system now maintain that Romneycare was never about controlling costs but simply expanding access to insurance. Five years in, Bay State residents are being told that global budgets, price controls and rationed care are not only necessary but good for their health. [...] Don’t believe it. But do believe this — single payer is the logical and, indeed, likely extension of Romney-Obamacare. |
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From A glimpse of a future with Obamacare, by Sally Pipes (The Washington Post, March 25, 2011) (view)
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Weiner argues that the waiver process dispels "this notion that the government is shoving the bill down people's throats." But only the politically connected, deep-pocketed, lawyered-up and Beltway-savvy can apply. And the White House refuses to shed more light on its decision-making process. Obama's selective favor waivers simply underscore the notion that unaccountable regulatory bureaucrats are presiding over government by the cronies, for the cronies and of the cronies. |
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From 'Weiner's waiver': worse than ObamaCare, by Michelle Malkin (New York Post, March 25, 2011) (view)
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"Republican candidates must focus on ObamaCare's weaknesses. It will cost $2.6 trillion in its first decade of operation and is built on Madoff-style financing. For example, it double counts Social Security payroll taxes, long-term care premiums, and Medicare savings in order to make it appear more fiscally responsible. In reality, ObamaCare isn't $143 billion in the black, as Democrats have claimed, but $618 billion in the red." |
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"In Europe, government spending is equal to 40-50 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 28 percent in the United States, and top tax rates reach 60 percent. That's why Europeans don't knock themselves out earning money. Productivity gains in Western Europe are half the U.S. average, while unemployment averages twice our rate." |
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From Nanny state will turn U.S. into Europe, by Nolan Finley (The Detroit News, March 25, 2010) (view)
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"Even before President Obama signed the bill on Tuesday, Caterpillar said it would cost the company at least $100 million more in the first year alone. Medical device maker Medtronic warned that new taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. Now Verizon joins the roll of businesses staring at adverse consequences." |
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From ObamaCare Day One, by The Wall Street Journal editorial board (The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010) (view)
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"Washington already has no idea on how to pay for its current entitlement programs, as we find ourselves $76 trillion in the hole. Our country cannot afford to avoid a serious conversation on entitlement reform. By taking action now, we can make certain that our entitlement programs are kept whole for those in and near retirement, while devising sustainable health and retirement security for future generations." |
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"The party-in-a-hot house is what the Dems have become under Obama. Their disconnect from the people who pay for their imperial courts is now complete. They acted like children at a birthday party, oblivious to the pain in a nation where perhaps 15 million are out of work." |
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"The hard sell will be urgent. Obamacare's final shape came from panicky congressional vote-buying, and its 2,700 pages hold lots of undisclosed parts. So no one's quite sure what side effects will kick in or when. One big employer, Caterpillar, reported last week that one odd tax increase in the bill would cost it $100 million in the first year. You can bet its future laid-off employees didn't see that coming." |
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From Obamacare: The time for selling has just begun, by Patrick McIlheran (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 24, 2010) (view)
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Dramatic rate increases will come in 2015. They will be on top of increases already underway due to Obamacare. According to eHealthInsurance, individual premiums have increased 39 percent since February 2013. The average individual premium is now $274 a month. Family policies have increased by 56 percent. Average premiums are now $663 per family each month. |
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From Federal health care law proving to be affordable in name only, by The Oklahoman editorial board (The Oklahoman, March 23, 2014) (view)
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Millions of workers saw their insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs increase this year as employers moved to comply with the law's new mandates, including coverage of children regardless of pre-existing conditions, of adult children through age 26, of some counseling and mental health treatments and the elimination of lifetime coverage maximums. Those same expensive mandates have made it difficult for scores of self-employed Americans and small businesses to afford coverage in a sour economy. |
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From One year later, ObamaCare still in ICU, by Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board (Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 23, 2011) (view)
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"The bill taxes insurance plans the government deems too generous, discouraging them. And a study reported on the New England Journal of Medicine Web site showed that 46 percent of physicians surveyed said they would be more likely to quit medicine or retire early if the bill passed. The American people are about to discover that they were sold a fiscally responsible reform but got instead yet another underfunded entitlement program that speeds the nation's slide into insolvency." |
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From Obamacare: Another Washington scam, by New Hampshire Union Leader editorial board (New Hampshire Union Leader, March 23, 2010) (view)
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"On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress moved closer to piling a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America's Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: "More."" |
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"The yearlong partisan crusade - right through its ugly conclusion - revealed that this debate was never about policy but rather a paternalistic ideology at odds with our historic commitment to individual liberty, limited government and entrepreneurial dynamism. The proponents of this legislation reject an opportunity society and instead assume you are stuck in your station in life and the role of government is to help you cope with it. Rather than promote equal opportunities for individuals to make the most of their lives, the cradle-to-grave welfare state seeks to equalize the results of people's lives." |
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From Costs of this debacle will be high, by Paul Ryan (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 23, 2010) (view)
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"The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well. A weasel-worded definition of "staff" includes only the members' personal staff in the new system; the committee staff that drafted the legislation opted themselves out. Because they were more familiar with the contents of the law than anyone in the country, it says a lot that they carved out their own special loophole." |
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From No Obamacare for Obama, by The Washington Times editorial board (The Washington Times, March 23, 2010) (view)
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"Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington! They will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when healthcare costs rise -- and they will -- Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame and out from this Obamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer." |
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Today, it’s the Catholic Church whose free-exercise powers are under assault from this cascade of diktats sanctioned by — indeed required by — Obamacare. Tomorrow it will be the turn of other institutions of civil society that dare stand between unfettered state and atomized citizen. Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. |
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When I was governor of Massachusetts, we instituted a plan that got our citizens insured without raising taxes and without a government takeover. Other states will choose to go in different directions. It is the genius of federalism that it encourages experimentation, with each state pursuing what works best for them. ObamaCare's disregard for this core aspect of U.S. tradition is one of its most egregious failings. |
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The national debt threatens a Greek-style financial crisis. It makes no sense to fuel the spending fire with a new entitlement program, expand a sub-par Medicaid system, and rob $500 billion from Medicare without any fundamental reforms that will make it sustainable for future seniors. (Don't get your hopes up about the Independent Payment Advisory Board's ability to restrain Medicare costs. In practice, it can't do anything but cut reimbursements to doctors and hospitals and reduce access for seniors.) |
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"In 2008, the president campaigned both against forcing people to buy insurance and against taxing their benefits. The legislation runs counter to the campaign on both points. The president promised to change Washington. He has made its stench more noisome, winning this vote by using every kind of deceit and (legal) corruption, and over the objection of a bipartisan coalition representing most Americans." |
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From Obamacare Isn’t Inevitable, by National Review editorial board (National Review, March 22, 2010) (view)
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