|  last 24 hours | cnbc
Obamacare reduces maximum out-of-pocket costs, but not enough for some - CNBC
"...Obamacare went a long way toward preventing the insurmountable medical bills that led to a large percentage of U.S. bankruptcies. But for many people, the $6,600 per-person, per-year cap on out-of-pocket costs might as well be $600,000, it's so unlikely they could pay it. This is a problem many people will never have to worry about. Without a major disease or accident requiring costly specialty drugs or surgery, very few of us will have enough co-payments and cost sharing to total $6,600 in any year, much less every year. Even fewer families will have so many medical bills that their share will reach $13,200, which is the family maximum for plans purchased on Obamacare exchanges...." see full article
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1171 days ago | realclearpolitics
Obamacare's Deficit of Savings |
"...The Congressional Budget Office appears to have delivered a victory to Obamacare's cheerleaders. The agency's latest estimate puts the cost of scrapping the law at $137 billion over the next decade."Any way you slice it, repealing the Affordable Care Act will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit," boasted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).Not so fast. The CBO reveals in the fine print that its estimates of the impact of repeal are "substantially" uncertain. Further, the report didn't consider a specific measure to repeal and replace Obamacare. So it's evaluating an imaginary proposal.Obamacare's congressional foes should give the agency a real proposal to evaluate -- one that will actually reduce health costs and furnish every American with affordable coverage. They can start by building upon Rep. Tom Price's (R-Ga.) Empowering Patients First Act, which works toward just that end...." see full article
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 1171 days ago | hotair
WSJ: ObamaCare sticker shock will get worse in years to come, too - Hot Air
"...Who could have predicted this? Well, pretty much anyone familiar with risk pools, price signals, and the cost of government mandates in other words, all the people that Democrats ignored while imposing ObamaCare on a hostile electorate.But that's just the beginning. Once the government ends a backstop for insurance companies known as the risk corridor program, the escalating costs of providing care will fall directly on consumers. University of Minnesota's Stephen Parente, a professor of health finance, warns in the Wall Street Journal that the big bill will come due soon enough:..." see full article
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1189 days ago | msnbc
'Obamacare' makes big national gains - MSNBC |
"...Support is up across the board gender, race, age, education, and even party identification. What's more, note that there's been an 18-point swing over the course of about a year from 56%-37% disapproval last summer, to 48%-47% disapproval now. The Gallup data is consistent with the latest CBS News poll and the Kaiser Family Foundation's latest tracking poll. But that's not the funny part. The funny part is comparing Obamacare to Congress. The latest Gallup poll puts Congress' most recent approval rating at 17%. In other words, the Affordable Care Act is more than three times more popular than the Republican-run House and Senate, both of which would still love to repeal the Affordable Care Act...." see full article
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1193 days ago | spectator
The Right Prescription Why Krugman Lies About Obamacare - American Spectator
"...Krugman also fails to mention that the Obama administration has cooked the books on the uninsured rate. The reason he uses public polling figures instead of government statistics is that, as his employer reported last year, The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama's health care law. In other words, despite Krugman's claim that Obamacare has reduced the uninsured rate, he actually has no idea if it has or not.In the same post he repeats another dubious piece of evidence that Obamacare is working: It's also a simple fact that outlays on Medicaid and exchange subsidies are coming in well below projections. To make this sound like a success story, Krugman neglects to mention that the subsidies are below projections because the number of enrollees has been lower than initially estimated by the CBO. Spending is down because Obamacare has failed to hit its goals. Krugman is telling us that his jalopy burns less gas than expected without mentioning that this is due to its failure to start...." see full article
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1193 days ago | dailycaller
Washington's Obamacare Exchange Is Losing A Top Insurer In 2016 - Daily Caller
"...That will leave customers looking for greater choice in their health care options with just one insurance company, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, which is drastically hiking premium rates across the region.CareFirst has already proposed rate increases from 3 percent to 17 percent, according to the Post. In nearby Maryland, CareFirst has requested that state regulators allow it to hike rates by up to 30.4 percent in 2016, The Baltimore Sun reports.DC Health Link's director, Mila Kofman, told The Post that the shrinking number of options isn't a loss for the competitiveness of the exchange and that Aetna's decision to leave the exchange won't harm residents. When you have products when there's not a whole lot of interest to buy, that's the market telling the carrier what they are selling, people can't afford. So in terms of competition, it's not a loss, Kofman said. I don't consider that real competition. ..." see full article
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1194 days ago | krugman.blogs.nytimes
Paul Krugman | Most of the Way With Obamacare - New York Times (blog)
"...How is Obamacare doing relative to that benchmark in its second year of operation? The answer is, pretty well. In Medicare expansion states, it's already around 80 percent of the way there:And notice that this been achieved while the deficit has been shrinking and we've been having the best job growth since the 1990s. Folks, this program works; not perfectly, but every single claim by its opponents it won't reduce the number of uninsured, it will cause soaring rates, it will explode the deficit, it will kill jobs has been proved false...." see full article
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1212 days ago | krugman.blogs.nytimes
The Obamacare Disinformation Loop - New York Times (blog)
"...So will there be big headlines about Obamacare not costing that much, after all, and how the earlier reports were misleading? Hahaha.And think how this affects the vast majority of voters. They aren't carefully keeping score; they're forming impressions based on reports they hear mainly in passing. So each year they hear a flurry of scare stories about surging premiums, then nothing more and the impression they build up over time is that Obamacare expenses are out of control. No wonder, then, that almost nobody knows the truth, which is that Obamacare has ended up costing much less than expected...." see full article
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1224 days ago | reason
Outside Liberal La La Land, Obamacare is Sputtering - Reason (blog)
"...ObamaCare's supporters would like everyone to believe that with Healthcare.gov now functioning, everything is just fine and dandy. Contrary to what the conservative press (which I guess would include me) has been saying about the many problems of ObamaCare, Vox's Ezra Klein declared last September that "in the real world, it's working." In February, his fellow Voxland inhabitant Sarah Kliff rattled off eight ways in which the law had proved its critics wrong.But has it? Not really.For starters, the exchanges have enrolled about 3 million fewer people than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010. And far fewer of the enrollees are from the ranks of the uninsured than hoped. Medicaid enrollment is lower too, for the simple reason that states refused to expand the program...." see full article
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1224 days ago | latimes
Obamacare 'sticker shock'? Still hasn't happened. - Los Angeles Times
"...The depiction of the Affordable Care Act as a driver of huge increases in health insurance rates refuses to die, even though the record thus far shows that premium rate increases have shrunk since open enrollment for individual plans began in 2014.The drumbeat is sounding again, based on early and incomplete filings by insurers. The drum majors typically are conservative news sources anxious to show that sticker shock hasn't been eliminated, just deferred. But numerous general news agencies fomented the panic as well. ..." see full article
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1224 days ago | chicagotribune
Obamacare after the Supreme Court ruling - Chicago Tribune |
"...The issue: Whether the law provides subsidies only to people who signed up for insurance through an exchange established and run by a state. The problem is, 37 states, including Illinois, rely on the federal health care exchange.Many people would find their insurance is too expensive without the subsidy. For that matter, many people will find their insurance is too expensive in the coming months, subsidy or not, because rates are rising swiftly...." see full article
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1224 days ago | thinkprogress
Congressman Makes Bizarre Claim About Obamacare - ThinkProgress
"...Of course, many conservatives are loathe to credit such a success to the health care reform law. That Obamacare wouldn't result in more people having health insurance was, as New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait has rounded up, a claim repeated by many conservatives in 2013 and 2014. That argument has largely gone by the wayside as the uninsured rate continues to drop, but apparently Palmer isn't yet ready to give it up.Palmer didn't just reveal himself as an Obamacare truther. Discussing climate change during the interview, the Alabama GOPer also erroneously declared that temperatures hadn't increased in the last two decades and may even be decreasing...." see full article
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1225 days ago | weeklystandard
President Out of Touch on Obamacare |
"...The arguments over just how successful the bill is, or is not, and whether the president has delivered on the promises he made for it keep your doctor, save $2,500, etc. go on ceaselessly and nobody seems to give. But there is this fact, which might account for the president's pique Obamacare has never been more unpopular than it is on the day he makes his passionate defense...." see full article
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1226 days ago | forbes
Why Are The 2016 Obamacare Rate Increases So Large? - Forbes
"...You might recall that I have said we wouldn't see the real Obamacare rates until the 2017 prices are published in mid-2016. By then health plans will finally have had a couple of years of credible claim data and two of the three 3 Rs reinsurance provisions subsidizing the insurance companies will have gone away.I have also made the argument that after two years the Obamacare enrollment is coming up way short of what it needs for us to be assured that we have a sustainable risk pool enough healthy people signed up to pay the costs for the sick...." see full article
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1226 days ago | salon
GOP senator: Blame Obama if my party's Obamacare sabotage succeeds |
"...Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota took the GOP's Obamacare insanity to new heights on Monday, tweeting a nonsensical attack on the president ahead of a much anticipated Supreme Court decision on health insurance subsidies for low-income Americans in states whose typically Republican-controlled legislatures refused to implement their own state-run exchanges.Thune's concern-trolly attack? If the Supreme Court aids the GOP effort to gut Obamacare by striking down the subsidies, that's the fault of Obamacare and the president...." see full article
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1226 days ago | realclearpolitics
Spare Us From Obamacare - RealClearPolitics |
"...Despite subsidies for the industry of at least $16 billion, many insurers lose money. Far fewer individuals signed up for Obamacare than expected (and the administration claimed). Those who did are older and sicker. Only about 40 percent of those eligible eventually signed up after two full open-enrollments, insurance expert Robert Laszewski told the Washington Examiner. Carriers need more like 75 percent. Subsidies for insurance companies mask the true cost, said Stephen Parente, director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute. Unless reauthorized in 2017, premiums for the cheapest plan could rise nearly 100 percent for individuals, 50 percent for families, he said...." see full article
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1229 days ago | hotair
NYT: In Vermont, ObamaCare flopped so bad it killed single payer - Hot Air
"...This was always the flaw in the supposed Trojan-horse theory of ObamaCare. The government takeover of the markets was too pronounced, too obvious, to leave government with any credibility in the event of its failure. Most opponents thought that the failure would come within a few years as the result of its impossible financial model. Few would have predicted that the federal government and the states could have failed so spectacularly on building the exchanges themselves, or that those failures would still be continuing into 2015...." see full article
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1231 days ago | realclearpolitics
Only Democrats Are to Blame for Obamacare Chaos |
"...Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare. Most, in fact, cautioned that passing the largest health care reform in American history -- written by one party, jammed through using reconciliation, and haphazardly implemented -- could be problematic as not only an ideological matter but a practical one. Now they have to act?It's widely contended that the GOP has some kind of obligation to rescue Obamacare -- whether for moral reasons or for self-preservation. In addition to the administration's position, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut actually stood on the Senate floor with a "shruggie" symbol to criticize the GOP for not formulating a plan in response to King v. Burwell. This would be the equivalent of seeing Sen. Ted Cruz demanding that Democrats come up with a strategy to resuscitate the Defense of Marriage Act. It is preposterous...." see full article
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1231 days ago | chicagotribune
How Obamacare demoralized doctors and degraded care - Chicago Tribune |
"...That's just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven't gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.Then there is the toll on doctors' time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data...." see full article
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1238 days ago | weeklystandard
No, Obamacare's Complexity is Not a Good Thing - The Weekly Standard (blog) |
"...There is a reason that political candidates do not run on slogans of making government more complex. People demand simplicity in how something affects their lives. The underlying complexity of an iWatch is acceptable to the consumer so long as the interface is simple and those who build the watch know what they are doing. Conversely, the complexity of Obamacare remains unacceptable to Americans because it has resulted in unexplained lost coverage, restricted access to long-familiar doctors, and provided unexpected year-end bills, among its other negative outcomes. What is more, its interface with the public has been anything but simple, leaving millions frustrated and worse off than before Obamacare.With Real Clear Politics showing that all 183 Obamacare polls taken during President Obama's second term have found it to be unpopular, supporters of the law are understandably at their wits' end. But praising the 2,400-page legislation for its indecipherable complexity only further highlights the need for full repeal followed by real, sensible, understandable reform of the sort that Dr. Price has advanced...." see full article
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1238 days ago | latimes
Why you can't blame Obamacare for the crisis in 'underinsurance' - Los Angeles Times
"...York asserts that the Affordable Care Act, by outlawing lifetime caps on healthcare benefits and the denial of coverage to those with preexisting conditions, and by mandating that children be covered on their parents' employer plans up to age 26, left insurers with little choice but to jack up deductibles to remain profitable.None of this holds water. For a start, the trend of rising deductibles pre-dated the Affordable Care Act by years. York even acknowledges this; he cites Commonwealth Fund figures showing that the percentage of adults with deductibles equal to 5% of household income rose from 3% in 2003 and 2005 to 6% in 2010. The figure reached 11% last year...." see full article
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1241 days ago | nytimes
Obamacare's Big Gamble on Hospital Productivity - New York Times |
"...This theory asserts that productivity growth in health care is inherently low for the same reason it is in education: Productivity-enhancing technologies cannot easily replace human doctors or teachers. In contrast with, say, manufacturing a sector in which machines have rapidly taken over functions that workers used to do, and have done them better and more cheaply there are, at least for the time being, far fewer machines that can step in and outperform doctors, nurses or other health sector jobs.But a new study casts doubt on that theory and suggests Obamacare's bet may indeed pay off. The study, published in Health Affairs by John Romley, Dana Goldman and Neeraj Sood, found that hospitals' productivity has grown more rapidly in recent years than in prior ones. Hospitals are providing better care at a faster rate than growth in the payments they receive from Medicare, according to the study...." see full article
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1242 days ago | breitbart
Obamacare Insurance Premiums to Jump, up to 51% - Breitbart News
"...President Obama claimed he compromised the design of Obamacare in 2010 to achieve fiscal neutrality over a 10 year projection to avoid increasing the deficit spending. But to achieve that mirage, the implementation was delayed for three years and the premium cost increases were ramped up over the next three years.(My own insurer, Aetna, left the individual market rather than participate in the Covered California exchange. I was forced to purchase a 2014 Blue Shield policy on the state exchange. The premium for my wife and I, who have no major health issues, almost doubled from $740 per month with Aetna to $1,340 under Covered California.)..." see full article
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1242 days ago | newsok
Kentucky example shows perils of Obamacare - NewsOK.com
"...Obamacare backers claimed the law would reduce these visits, which are the most expensive way to get health care, and therefore drive down overall health care costs. Instead, the ACEP survey found those enrolled in Medicaid because of Obamacare cannot get doctors' appointments due to the low rates. As a result, those individuals still go to the ER for routine care.So is Obamacare working? Only if you think giving people coverage without providing access to care and making it harder for hospitals to survive is a success...." see full article
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1243 days ago | washingtonpost
Sorry, Republicans: Obamacare is getting more and more entrenched - Washington Post (blog) |
"...The political implications of these results are clear: We can now add people who got their insurance through the exchanges as another constituency, in addition to those on Medicare and those who have employer-based coverage, whose coverage you cannot mess with unless you want to reap a huge backlash.This is the problem of King v. Burwell, which is why every smart Republican is now probably praying the Supreme Court comes to their rescue and shoots the lawsuit down. Let's assume for the moment that happens. Where does it leave Republicans? They can't do anything that would seriously change or threaten coverage for people who get insurance through an employer (43 percent of American adults, according to Gallup). They can't touch Medicare, much as they'd like to. And now they'll realize they have to be very careful about those who get their coverage through the exchanges, because those people like what they have. So who's left? Why poor people, of course...." see full article
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1247 days ago | spectator
Amid the Ruins of Obamacare - American Spectator
"...Obamacare is collapsing. This we know. When it was passed, the Democrats hoped to ride out the initial resistance to their turning the health care industry on its head and survive on the inertia of so comprehensive a bill working its way through the public's experience. But that has not happened. Obamacare has never polled well, the gradualist nature of its rollout has produced a series of fresh, unpleasant revelations, and it has run afoul of the courts again and again...." see full article
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1247 days ago | motherjones
Obamacare Is Making It Easier to Be a Young Working Parent - Mother Jones |
"...The ACA also means that people who may previously have felt trapped at a job because of their need for insurance now can leave their job without the risk that they or their family would go uninsured. This could give many pre-Medicare age workers the option to retire early. It could give workers with young children or other care-giving responsibilities the opportunity to work part-time. It could give workers the opportunity to start a business. Or, it could just give workers the opportunity to leave a job they hate.While it is still too early to reach conclusive assessments of the labor market impact of the ACA, the evidence to date looks promising. Republican opponents of Obamacare have often complained that the program would turn the country into a "part-time nation." It turns out that there is something to their story, but probably not what they intended. The number of people who are working part-time for economic reasons, meaning they would work full-time if a full-time position was available, has fallen by almost 16 percent from the start of 2013 to the start of 2015. This is part of the general improvement in the labor market over this period...." see full article
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1248 days ago | dailykos
Obamacare is great for family values - Daily Kos |
"...[V]oluntary part-time employment [ ] is up by 5.7 percent in the first four months of 2015 compared to 2013. This corresponds to more than 1 million people who have chosen to work part-time. We did some analysis of who these people were and found that it was overwhelmingly a story of young parents working part-time.There was little change or an actual decline in the percentage of workers over the age of 35 who were working part-time voluntarily. There was a modest increase in the percentage of workers under age 35, without children, working part-time voluntarily. There was a 10.2 percent increase in the share of workers under the age of 35, with 1-2 kids, working part-time. For young workers with three of more kids the increase was 15.4 percent.Based on these findings it appears that Obamacare has allowed many young parents the opportunity to work at part-time jobs so that they could spend more time with their kids. Back in the old days we might have thought this was an outcome that family-values conservatives would have welcomed...." see full article
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1248 days ago | nationalreview
Obamacare Is a Horror Story for Young Americans - National Review Online |
"...Obamacare has enmeshed many Americans in a bureaucratic nightmare. True, the law has helped some uninsured people obtain coverage. But millions of people have seen their health-insurance plans canceled, because the plans did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Others, particularly young Americans, have seen premiums rise to pay for the roster of newly added benefits. Tommy Groves (not his real name), a young professional working at a small firm in Washington, D.C., was among the nearly 5 million Americans who received termination-of-coverage letters from their health-insurance providers because their plans did not comply with the ACA's requirements. While about half the states offered to extend canceled plans for another year, later increased to two years, the District of Columbia required its residents to get new insurance...." see full article
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1259 days ago | thehill
Karl Rove surrenders to ObamaCare - The Hill (blog) |
"...When the first American dies because of the loss of ObamaCare, the world will witness the mother of all Republican and conservative cons: the death panels were not caused by ObamaCare; they were prevented by ObamaCare, and without ObamaCare, people will die and voters will blame Republicans for the real equivalent of death panels, created by the Republicans in their war against ObamaCare...." see full article
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1259 days ago | courier-journal
Ky hospitals: Obamacare forcing cuts, layoffs - The Courier-Journal
"...More than four in 10 hospitals reported service reductions, such as closing a sleep lab, a wound care clinic and a surgery department. And two Kentucky hospitals have recently reported they've had to close their doors for good. Rural hospitals have suffered most. A recent state audit showed that 68 percent of Kentucky's rural hospitals scored below the national average on a measure of financial strength looking at such figures as profit margin and cash on hand...." see full article
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