Healthcare & Policy News
Reporting on health care policy, insurance coverage, and federal health programs. Includes news updates and conservative commentary from The Daily Signal.
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- News
Ohio’s Obamacare Expansion Has Already Cost Over $2 Billion
Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s Obamacare expansion blew past projections in its first year, putting 471,452 Ohioans on Medicaid and costing taxpayers $2.1 billion. Because enrollment has so dramatically exceeded Kasich administration estimates—the governor expected 366,00 to enroll by July 2015—the Obamacare money appropriated to pay for program benefits will be exhausted months early. If recent…Jason Hart -
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If You Received a Higher Obamacare Subsidy Than You Were Eligible For, You Don’t Have to Pay It Back This Year
Ever since the individual health insurance mandate in Obamacare was upheld as a tax in 2012, taxpayers have been waiting to see how Obamacare affects their tax bill. TurboTax, an online tax service, recently estimated that the average tax penalty for lacking health insurance will be $301. When faced with unpopular requirements of law, the…Andrew Kloster -
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Republican Congressman Urges House Leadership to Use Reconciliation to Repeal Obamacare
Rep. John Fleming, R-La., is emboldening House leadership to embrace a budget tactic that would lower the threshold of votes needed to rollback provisions of Obamacare. “We all say that we want to repeal Obamacare, and we would all love a clean, full repeal,” Fleming said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “But the…Melissa Quinn -
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3 Problems With Indiana’s Medicaid Expansion
It’s official: Indiana has given in and adopted Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Before jumping into the weeds of Indiana’s Medicaid expansion agreement with the Obama administration, it is important to realize the agreement still fails some basic principles of reform. First, it adds more people on to the Medicaid rolls, not fewer. The Indiana plan puts…Nina Owcharenko Schaefer -
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Report: 12 Million People Predicted to Use Obamacare Exchanges This Year
The Congressional Budget Office’s new Budget and Economic Outlook includes some interesting projections regarding Obamacare. CBO director Douglas Elmendorf is testifying on the report at a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday and hopefully some of these projections will be questioned: 1. Enrollment. The CBO projects that 12 million people will obtain coverage on the ACA’s…Alyene Senger -
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5 Takeaways from the CBO’s Report on Obamacare
A nonpartisan entity of the federal government has found that the Affordable Care Act will cost the government less than expected. However, the reduction in the law’s price tag comes among findings that millions of Americans could lose their employer-provided health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office came out with a report yesterday revising the costs…Melissa Quinn -
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Star Parker’s Personal Confession on Why She Is ‘Adamant’ About Ending Abortion
While speaking at ProLifeCon at the Family Research Council last week, nationally syndicated columnist Star Parker called abortion a “crime against humanity,” and lamented the four children she aborted before her conversion to Christianity. “I got caught up in the lies of the left,” she said, “including their lies about abortion.” Watch the video for the…Kate Scanlon -
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Carly Fiorina: ‘Hypocrisy of Liberals’ on Abortion Is ‘Breathtaking’
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina criticized House Republican leadership in a speech Saturday for their decision this week to postpone the vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, after some Republican House members objected to the legislation. She also took aim at the left as well, saying in her remarks at the Iowa…Daily Signal Staff -
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Audit: HHS Failure to Screen Obamacare Contract Recipients Cost Taxpayers $400M
An internal investigation into how the federal government awarded contracts for developing and building the Affordable Care Act’s most important public element — the online exchanges that were to be used by millions of Americans to purchase health insurance — has found the process was flawed. The investigation showed that The Department of Health and Human Services…Eric Boehm -
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Obama Threatens to Veto Bill Prohibiting Federal Funds From Being Used to Pay for Abortion
As hundreds of thousands of pro-life demonstrators participated in the March for Life in Washington, D.C., to protest abortion, President Obama threatened to veto a bill prohibiting federal funds from being used to pay for the controversial procedure. “I am deeply committed to protecting this core constitutional right, and I believe that efforts like H.R….Melissa Quinn -
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Aware of Reported Rape Exception, Women Still Overwhelmingly Support 20-Week Abortion Ban
Americans care. Washington, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to realize that Americans believe 5-month-old unborn children deserve have to their right to life protected. Or that as a nation, America says that when a child is moving, can hear and has a heartbeat, that child deserves the right to live—and deserves a nation that…Katrina Trinko -
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At Last Second, House GOP Leaders Ditch Effort to Pass Bill Limiting Abortion
House Republican leadership tonight abruptly dropped a bill that would ban elective abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. According to news reports, female GOP lawmakers raised concerns on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, prompting party leaders to scrap a vote on the bill. Prominent Republican members who rallied against the plan to limit…Josh Siegel -
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New Poll: 8 Out of 10 Americans Support ‘Significant Restrictions’ on Abortion
Forty-two years after the passing of Roe v. Wade, how do Americans really feel about abortion? A new Marist poll sponsored by the Catholic organization Knights of Columbus asked Americans if they were pro-life or pro-choice – but they didn’t stop there. The poll’s stated intention was to “understand Americans’ attitudes toward abortion,” including those…Kate Scanlon -
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Hawaii’s Obamacare Exchange Projected to Be Financially Viable in 2022
HONOLULU—The state’s Obamacare exchange, Hawaii Health Connector, is the most costly in the nation, and a new report from the Hawaii Commerce and Consumer Affairs Department shows it won’t be fiscally sustainable until 2022. That’s based on an enrollment of 70,000 to 80,000, said its director, Jeff Kissel.Hawaii Health Connector had about 1,000 people enrolled at this…Malia Zimmerman -
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Obamacare Limiting Insurance Options in California
When Dennie Wright went to sign up for Affordable Care Act insurance last year, it wasn’t a hard decision. His insurance agent told him he had only one insurer—Anthem Blue Cross—that he could buy from on the exchange, Covered California. Wright lives in a modest house overlooking a pasture in Indian Valley. It’s a tiny alpine…Pauline Bartolone -
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Medicare Chief Who Oversaw Obamacare Rollout to Resign
The top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced her resignation today. But the official who will serve as the interim head of the agency was the subject of congressional inquiries from Republican lawmakers last year. Marilyn Tavenner announced today that she would be stepping down from her post as administrator for…Melissa Quinn -
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A Sweet Retreat: GOP Lawmakers Chart Course on Immigration, Obamacare in Hershey
HERSHEY, Pa. — At what has been dubbed the “Sweet Place on Earth,” Republicans in both the House and Senate gathered for a sweet retreat to craft their strategies on issues that have caused bitter disagreement. The gathering of GOP lawmakers was the first of its kind to occur in 10 years and centered around…Melissa Quinn -
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We’ve Been Calculating Budget Scores for Legislation Like Obamacare All Wrong
There is hubris in every government project. The unspoken idea behind bills as comprehensive as the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank is that legislators can understand how a system works, tinker with it and improve it. Psychologically, it is unreasonable to expect that anyone is unbiased about her own grand idea, so legislating has a…Salim Furth -
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How Obamacare Exchanges Have Decreased Competition Among Insurers
Unsurprisingly, Obamacare has made yet another problem worse—creating a government exchange that is less competitive than the prior individual market. In 2009, when President Obama was trying to sell his health care reform ideas to Congress, he promised a competitive marketplace, where costs would decrease and quality would increase. He said: We’ll…[create] a new insurance…Alyene Senger -
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Illinois Abortion Clinics Inspected an Average of Once Every 9 Years
Abortion is legal but not safe in Illinois, says a pro-life group’s new report. The Illinois Right to Life Committee’s study determined that abortion clinics statewide are inspected on average once every nine years. Forty percent of licensed clinics went between 14 and 17 years without inspections, according to the report. And only one of the federally…Evan Gahr