Tag Archives: health insurance

It’s Time To Shut Down Healthcare.gov

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Dur­ing the ear­ly 1970s, stu­dents at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy car­ried out what is reput­ed to be the first e‑commerce trans­ac­tion: the sale of an unde­ter­mined quan­ti­ty of marijuana.

This year, glob­al online retail sales are pro­ject­ed to exceed $2.4 tril­lion. By 2020, e‑commerce will account for 14.6 per­cent of all retail pur­chas­es, near­ly dou­bling its mar­ket share in just five years. Con­sumers shop online for every­thing from cars to car insurance.

Which rais­es the ques­tion: Do we real­ly need HealthCare.gov?  Read more on The Hill.

Walls Closing In On Obamacare Lawlessness

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Congress and the courts are losing patience with the government's lawless implementation of Obamacare, which involves unlawful expenditures to subsidize insurance companies. [Credit:forbes.com]

Con­gress and the courts are los­ing patience with the gov­ern­men­t’s law­less imple­men­ta­tion of Oba­macare, which involves the diver­sion of bil­lions in tax­pay­er dol­lars from Trea­sury to insur­ers. [Credit:forbes.com]

The Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion is unlaw­ful­ly divert­ing bil­lions of dol­lars from tax­pay­ers to insur­ance com­pa­nies that sell Oba­macare policies.

That is the con­clu­sion reached in a legal opin­ion let­ter writ­ten to the Galen Insti­tute by for­mer Ambas­sador and White House Coun­sel Boy­den Gray. Read more on Forbes.com.

Obamacare’s Tax-Subsidized Failure

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Here’s some bad news for the insur­ance indus­try: Unex­pect­ed­ly gen­er­ous cor­po­rate sub­si­dies didn’t save com­pa­nies sell­ing Oba­macare poli­cies from bleed­ing red ink.

The worse news: Those sub­si­dies are set to expire in 2017, mean­ing that insur­ers will have to make ends meet with­out bil­lions in hand­outs.  Read more at Nation­al Review Online.

You can also read the Mer­ca­tus Cen­ter study that Bri­an Blase, Ed Haislmaier and I wrote here.

A $5 Billion Obamacare Windfall for Insurers?

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A dozen health insurance co-ops established by Obamacare have so far failed, leaving behind headaches for consumers, providers and taxpayers. Now one of them is suing for more government handouts. [Credit: Manhattan Institute]

A dozen health insur­ance co-ops estab­lished by Oba­macare have so far failed, leav­ing behind headaches for con­sumers, providers and tax­pay­ers. Now one of them is suing for more gov­ern­ment hand­outs. [Cred­it: Man­hat­tan Institute]

Oregon’s health insur­ance co-oper­a­tive is yet anoth­er Oba­macare fail­ure. It squan­dered tax­pay­er-backed hand­outs and loans, dis­ap­point­ed its cus­tomers and now has shut­tered its operations.

But with an audac­i­ty that would make even Don­ald Trump blush, Health Repub­lic of Ore­gon wants more tax­pay­er mon­ey. Its exec­u­tives are suing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to demand more gov­ern­ment hand­outs.  Read more on Inside Sources or RealClearPolicy.

Will HHS Get Away With A $3.5 Billion Heist?

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CMS administrator Andy Slavitt has a $3.5 billion problem. Will Congress and presidential candidates talk about it? [Credit:nextgov]

CMS admin­is­tra­tor Andy Slavitt is plan­ning to short the U.S. Trea­sury $3.5 bil­lion. Will Con­gress and pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates talk about it? [Credit:nextgov]

The Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices (HHS) announced Fri­day night that it was in the process of short­ing the U.S. Trea­sury $3.5 billion.

Well, they didn’t exact­ly announce it.  You had to read between the lines. Con­tin­ue read­ing →

No, Zeke, You’re Not Paying For My Medicine

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Zeke Emanuel is tired of paying for your medicine. [Credit: Maryland Public Radio]

Zeke Emanuel is tired of pay­ing for your med­i­cine. [Cred­it: Mary­land Pub­lic Radio]

Zeke Emanuel is tired of pay­ing for your expen­sive medicine.

Dr. Emanuel, who served in a senior posi­tion at the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get where he con­tributed to the recur­ring night­mare known as Oba­macare, recent­ly com­plained in the New York Times [“I Am Pay­ing For Your Expen­sive Med­i­cine”] that his insur­ance rates are high because the med­i­cines you’re tak­ing cost too much. Con­tin­ue read­ing →