DESTROYER-IN-CHIEF: Obama Finally Admits He "Accidentally" Shredded U.S. Healthcare

By Sen. John Barrasso, M.D.

Hillary Clinton is telling voters she wants "to build on" Obamacare. But President Obama's signature healthcare law remains highly unpopular because many Americans believe it's not a good deal for them personally.

The president essentially laid out a case for his own law's failures in an article he wrote for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

He wrote: "too many Americans still strain to pay for their physician visits and prescriptions, cover their deductibles, or pay their monthly insurance bills; struggle to navigate a complex, sometimes bewildering system; and remain uninsured."

It was a striking concession. It also shows that the president still has no idea how much damage he's done to Americans' healthcare:

AWESOME: Obamacare has Blue Cross Singing the Blues

By Investors Business Daily

Health Care: The insurance industry must be kicking itself for backing ObamaCare. Several have since posted big losses and it looks like Blue Cross Blue Shield got the losing end of the stick, too.

Fitch Ratings looked at nearly three dozen BCBS companies and found that 23 saw a decline in earnings that totaled $1.9 billion in the first nine months of last year, while 16 had net losses.

OBAMACARE: A Naked Plot to Bankrupt America

By Cliff Kincaid

One topic of conversation in the Republican race for the White House has been whether President Obama has been incompetent, or actually knows what he’s doing. On the matter of Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Obamacare, self-declared socialist Professor Gerald Friedman seems to agree with conservatives that it can’t and won’t work. Friedman, a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) “Medicare for All” single-payer plan, says that Obama and his advisers knew that the ACA was a “bad idea” that would not control costs, and that a total federal takeover of the health care system was inevitable.

The problem with a federal takeover of health care is that it would bankrupt the U.S., leading to left-wing demands for even more federal control. This is how socialism is coming to America.

SHOCKA: Obamacare Enrollees Reeling From Exploding Deductibles

Make sure you're sitting down before you read the next sentence:

Obamacare is causing health insurance premiums, deductibles and fees to skyrocket.

I know, that's startling news.

Who could have predicted such a catastrophic failure on the part of DMV-care?

OBAMACARE: The Gift That Keeps on Taking

By Jim Quinn

Isn’t it interesting that the mainstream media offers barely a peep about the ongoing and worsening Obamacare debacle?

Healthcare premiums, co-pays and deductibles are soaring, while doctor and plan choices contract to a minuscule level. Recent surveys reveal the hardship being inflicted upon families across the nation. Those who are willfully baffled by the lack of consumer spending need look no further than Obamacare and its impact on the budgets of hard working Americans.

MOST! TRANSPARENT! EVAH! White House concealing list of a dozen dying Obamacare insurers

By Richard Pollock

Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned.

Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to eight barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.

All 24 received 15-year loans in varying amounts to offer health insurance to poor and low income customers and provide publicly funded competition to private, for-profit insurers. The eight co-ops to announce closings served populations in ten states: Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont, New York and Colorado.

Nearly half a million failing co-op customers will have to find new coverage in 2016. More than $900 million of the original $2 billion in loans has been lost.

The 11 unidentified co-ops appear to be still operating but are now on “enhanced oversight” by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages the Obamacare program. The 11 received letters from CMS demanding that they take urgent actions to avoid closing.

Aaron Albright, chief CMS spokesman, said 11 co-ops “are either on a corrective action plan or enhanced oversight. We have not released the letters or names.” He gave no grounds for withholding the information from either the public or Congress.

I KNOW YOU’LL BE SHOCKED: Obamacare seems designed to launder your tax dollars from Feds to... Blue States

By Mytheos Holt

Could the failed Obamacare exchanges have been merely an excuse to direct payola to safely Democratic states? Based on a new report from the Government Accountability Office, and the actions of acting head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies (CMS) Andrew Slavitt, the answer may well be yes.

Let’s start with the report. Americans for Tax Reform summarized its findings:

If Governor John Kasich is on the Republican ticket, Obamacare repeal is off the table

By Jason Hart

Republicans can forget about campaigning against Obamacare in 2016 if Ohio Gov. John Kasich is on the party’s presidential ticket.

Conventional wisdom says Kasich will need to explain his Obamacare Medicaid expansion to Republican primary voters — but he’s been explaining it for two years.

That’s the problem: most of Kasich’s arguments for Medicaid coverage for working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities sound like they were written by Democratic strategists.

The longer Kasich is in the presidential race, the greater the potential for Democrats to capitalize on Kasich’s promotion of Obamacare.

“What we’ve seen as a result of this? Saved lives, there’s no question about it,” Kasich said when asked about Obamacare expansion at an Ohio Chamber of Commerce event.

“Turning down your money back to Montana on an ideological basis when people can lose their lives because they get no help doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Kasich growled at an Obamacare skeptic in Montana.

If Kasich is the Republican nominee for president or vice president, expect to see Democratic campaign ads using Kasich’s tortured talking points against Obamacare critics.

In short, Kasich has worked to turn his own primary election problem into a general election problem for every Republican candidate.

John Kasich Has a $14 Billion Obamacare Problem

By Jason Hart, Ohio Watchdog

Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s habit of telling voters “Ohio money” pays for his Obamacare Medicaid expansion is about to catch up to him.

To silence conservative critics, Kasich says Obamacare expansion is bringing $14 billion of Ohio money back to Ohio from the federal government.

But that’s not how the expansion works — a fact Kasich’s opponents in a crowded Republican presidential primary are certain to point out.

There is no vault of “Ohio money” set aside to pay for Kasich’s Obamacare expansion, which has already increased federal welfare spending by $4 billion.

Matt Mayer, president of free-market think tank Opportunity Ohio, expects the governor’s message to fall apart when it’s challenged by other presidential candidates.

OBAMACARE TRAVESTY: The Supreme Court Continues To Make Stuff Up Out Of Thin Air

By Michael Snyder

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s willingness to make stuff up, Obamacare has been saved once again. In order to save Obamacare from utter disaster, Chief Justice Roberts essentially rewrote the law.

If you are thinking that the Supreme Court is not supposed to do that, you would be right. But this is what our judicial system has devolved into. When I was in law school, I was horrified to discover that most judges in our country just do whatever they feel like doing. Instead of applying the law to the facts and coming to a fair and unbiased judgment, most judges in America just do whatever they want to do and then search for some law or case precedent that they can use to justify their decision. If there is no law or case precedent, some federal judges even go outside of the country to find justification for their absolutely ridiculous rulings. There have been instances where international law or international standards of morality have been cited as authority for a decision in a federal case. We have become a lawless land where the letter of the law no longer holds any real meaning, and where tyrannical judges just make stuff up out of thin air in order to advance their own personal political agendas.

This decision on Obamacare should have been quite straightforward for the court. The following is how Business Insider described the key issue in this case…

The case revolved around the interpretation of a phrase that stated that healthcare exchanges must be “established by the State” in order to receive tax credits. Scalia said that he was baffled that the majority of the justices could interpret this to mean that the federal government could give tax credits in states where exchanges weren’t established by the state.

“Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words ‘established by the State,’” Scalia said.

That sounds pretty basic, right?

“Established by the state” should mean “established by the state”?

In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia excoriated the court for discarding all usual rules of interpretation in order to preserve Obamacare…

TED CRUZ RIPS SUPREME COURT’S OBAMACARE RULING: They are "rogue justices"

At least one American Senator is willing to speak truth to power.

Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz attacked Chief Justice John Roberts and other members of the Supreme Court in unusually harsh terms Thursday, referring to them as "rogue justices" and "robed Houdinis" after a 6-3 decision to uphold President Barack Obama's health care law.

Cruz, a Texas senator, did not mention any current high court members by name in remarks on the Senate floor. But his speech included a thinly veiled reference to Roberts, part of the court majority that upheld tax credits that defray the cost of coverage for lower-income individuals nationwide.

"These justices are not behaving as umpires calling balls and strikes. They have joined a team," the Texas lawmaker said.

KING V. BURWELL: James Madison and Antonin Scalia blister a lawless Supreme Court

In a letter to Henry Lee dated 25 June 1824, James Madison wrote:

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers.

If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it, it is evident that the shape and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense!

Echoing Madison's sentiments, in his dissent to the ludicrous majority decision of King v. Burwell, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State' ...

... Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved ...

... We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years….And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

And the Constitution, already in tatters, has been torn yet again.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

"UNEXPECTEDLY": Massachusetts ObamaCare exchange joins Oregon under investigation by FBI

By Uncover Obamacare

It’s no secret that ObamaCare’s father is RomneyCare in Massachusetts, and as we look to the problems that plague a government run health care system, The Bay State is a good place to start. Case in point: corruption in the system.

Josh Archambault, senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability has dug into the state’s $1 billion ObamaCare exchange and found many discrepancies and issues that should concern everyone.

Culled from “publicly available third-party audits and hours of interviews with multiple whistleblowers with first-hand knowledge,” Josh found that Massachusetts officials:

• Failed to execute a contract with CGI, the vendor hired to build the site, that would track the progress of the project and ensure on-time delivery of a product that included all required features;
• Failed to commit sufficient resources to the project, resulting in workers sending documents to their home computers to open them, and to demand that CGI commit the additional resources necessary to complete the job on time, at an acceptable level of quality;
• Repeatedly failed to hold CGI accountable for shoddy work, and for missing required deadlines, often pushing technical staff to approve faulty results, and firing at least one for refusing;

UNEXPECTEDLY: Obamacare Caused Health Insurance Rates to Go Up By 50% On Average

By Warner Todd Huston

Remember how Barack Obama claimed that all our insurance rates would go down? Heck, at one point he even claimed he’d save Americans $2,500 a year. Well, it turns out that his Obamacare law caused expenses to soar by over 50% on average and for some more than that. Yes, Obama lied again.

Here are some examples of Obama claiming that insurance rates would go down for most Americans with his Obamacare law…

Well, apparently this is yet another major Obamacare lie. In fact, almost no one has found lower insurance rates. On the contrary, premiums have soared in costs and they continue to rise.

It’s been five years since the Affordable Care Act became law, but only two since most of its provisions went into effect.

As its detractors predicted, Obamacare’s implementation led to a large, immediate rise in health insurance premiums. This is hardly surprising: The law required that a broad swath of treatments be fully insured, thus deepening the moral hazard problems that have long plagued the American health insurance system.

Democrats Freaking Out as Obamacare Tax-Penalty-Fee-Fines Loom for Millions of Americans

Well, I'll be damned.

Who could have predicted that 2,500 pages of law and 50,000 pages of regulations -- that not one person read in toto -- would turn out to be a complete cluster?

The official sign-up season for President Barack Obama's health care law may be over, but leading congressional Democrats say millions of Americans facing new tax penalties deserve a second chance.

Three senior House members strongly urged the administration Monday to grant a special sign-up opportunity for uninsured taxpayers who will be facing fines under the law for the first time this year.

The three are Michigan's Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. All worked to help steer Obama's law through rancorous congressional debates from 2009-2010.

ACORN PART DEUX: Obamacare Navigator With History of "Breathtaking" Fraud Gets Millions From You

By Chris Butler

NASHVILLE — The federal government is giving an Obamacare insurance navigator Seedco, which has a reported history of fraud, $1.4 million to operate in Tennessee this fiscal year

Last year, Seedco received $1.2 million for the same services in Tennessee.

As reported, the federal government sued Seedco on the grounds it faked at least 1,400 of 6,500 job placements under a $22.2 million federally funded contract with New York City.

Seedco, according to National Review, had to settle that lawsuit.

Meanwhile, state Comptroller Justin Wilson reported last year certain Memphis residents participating in the Temporary Assistance For Needy Families program falsified paperwork and wrongly received almost $30,000 in taxpayer money through a Seedco subcontractor.

Alicia Hartinger, spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the navigator program, said Friday the $1.4 million is for a 12-month cycle.

Seedco, Hartinger added, had to compete for the money against other potential navigators, although she didn’t say how many.

Hartinger downplayed concerns about Seedco’s past problems.

HAPPY YET, DRONES? Early Preview of Obamacare Premiums Show a 40% Spike in 2015

It is my sincere hope that one day conservatives will kick teachers' unions to the curb and retake the nation's educational system. One of the first orders of business then would be to teach not only the genius of the American founding but also the utter, repeated and unbroken failures of collectivism.

Which brings me to Obamacare, a socialistic plan sold on a panoply of lies and doomed from the outset to failure. Failure that even the Obama administration acknowledges, with its serial and unlawful rewrites of the statute, along with delays and modifications to shield a complicit Democrat Party from enraged electorates.

As for what collectivism applied to health care will do to insurance premiums? It's just as we predicted.

On Thursday, the Alaska Division of Insurance announced hefty insurance rate increases in 2015 for Alaskans who purchased individual plans under the Affordable Care Act.

...In 2015, Premera Blue Cross insurance rates will increase between 35 and 40 percent, Wing-Heier said. Those plans cover roughly 7,000 Alaskans. Alaskans who chose a silver plan (the most popular) through Premera will see an increase of 37 percent.

Moda Health plans will increase between 22 and 28.8 percent, according to Wing-Heier. These plans cover roughly 8,000 Alaskans, Moda regional operations director Jason Gootee said.

Why the shocking and unprecedented increases?

Wing-Heier said 2015's greater increase is due to the small number of Alaskans on the individual market: “For insurance to work the way it’s intended ... you pool your risk and spread it across the pool.”

Insurers were facing “some very horrific claims” with “just not enough people” to balance it out, she said... ...“There are not enough healthy members in Alaska’s individual market to offset the cost of members with very high medical costs...”

...Premera expects to lose $3.7 million in 2014 on these plans, the company writes... “We need a 71.5 percent average rate increase to break even in 2015,” the release states. In 2015, Premera is forecasting losses of $5 million, even with the rate increase.

Alaska is but a microcosm of the insanity laced throughout the ill-named "Affordable Care Act."

Thousands of years of human history have proven, if nothing else, that central planning can never replace the efficiency of free markets.

And still the hard left, Marxist-controlled Democrat Party insists on its suicidal vision for America. We, the American people, will pay the price for their insane plans. And they, the oligarchs, won't feel a thing.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

THE REAL WAR ON WOMEN: Obamacare's Destruction of Home Health Care Disproportionately Hits Females Hardest

By Nicole Rusenko and Melissa Quinn

The Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, authorized the Department of Health and Human Services to cut or increase categories of Medicare spending. Last year, then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced home health care funding would be slashed by 3.5 percent annually until 2017. Industry analysts say these cuts disproportionately affect women—who make up the majority of home health care beneficiaries, caregivers, and professionals in that sector of health c are.

Robert Moffit, senior fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, said:

Congress does need to control the growth in Medicare spending. But the best way to do that is to inject free market competition into the program to control cost. In the meantime, Congress could secure solid home health care savings by adding a modest co-payment to that program. This is much better than simply cutting payments to home health agencies, which could reduce their participation and thus undercut seniors’ access to care.

Law of the Land Comix

Based upon "Will Insurers Ever Say Enough’s Enough To Obamacare?"

Obamacare isn't the law of the land. It's an ever-evolving set of lawless dictates from bureaucrats and other miscreants in Washington.

It must be destroyed, defunded, repealed or otherwise nuked from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

And any so-called Republican who refuses to commit to such a course of action should be expelled from consideration as a serious candidate.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

IPAB: Obamacare's Unconstitutional 15-Person Death Panel Faces Major Legal Challenge

By Eric Boehm

It might sound like the latest new product from Apple, but IPAB is actually the newest major legal challenge to Obamacare.

Last week, a three-judge panel in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard arguments about the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, a 15-member panel created by the Affordable Care Act and empowered to make all kinds of decisions regarding health coverage for Americans. The board’s powers are significant, and some say completely unconstitutional, because language in the ACA frees the board from any kind of congressional or judicial oversight.

The board, which many in the right-wing have labeled the ACA’s “death panel” after Sarah Palin coined the term in 2009, would be able to set Medicare policy and health care payment rates for virtually all Americans starting in 2017. Language in the ACA even prevents Congress from being able to repeal the IPAB’s existence after that same year.

“It’s really and truly an unprecedented concentration of power,” said Christina Sandefur, an lawyer at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., who argued the case June 10 before the 9th Circuit Court.

Those challenging the legitimacy of the IPAB in the Coons v. Law lawsuit argue that it is unconstitutional for a variety of reasons — in particular, they say it violates the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, while also running afoul of the separation of powers that are enshrined throughout the Constitution.

“It consolidates the powers of every single branch of government into one body, and yet it is unaccountable to any of those branches,” Sandefur told Watchdog.org on Friday.