Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can’t determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.
Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they’ve signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren’t taking their word for it.
In place of quick service and painless billing, these Virginians are now facing the threat of sticker-shock that comes with bills they can’t afford.
‘They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.
She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray. Continue reading
Obamacare may have promised health insurance for the masses. But on its first day, it’s left more Americans without coverage than before the law was passed.
More than 4.7 million Americans had their health insurance canceled as a result of any of the thousand-plus-page law’s new rules, The Associated Press reports, but the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed Tuesday that between federal and state exchanges, just two million Americans have signed up for Obamacare coverage.
The Obama administration has yet to announce the final tally of full enrollments, which are only confirmed once customers have made their first payment, but Cato Institute health policy expert Michael Cannon warns that not all those who signed up will complete their purchases, potentially (and very likely) leaving the White House with an even lower bottom line. Continue reading
Higher premiums could really kneecap the economic recovery.
by Jacqueline Leo
ObamaCare has delivered another sucker punch to the middle class. This time it’s sticker shock.
Now that most people can get past the tech problems of HealthCare.gov and actually see the real cost of insurance plans available, they are finding that Affordable Care is a big hit to the family budget. And when the family budget gets hit in the solar plexus, guess what happens to consumer spending and the economy? Continue reading
by Phil Kerpen
With Democrats cratering in the polls over their collapsing health care law, they are trying to pivot to the only part of their policy agenda that still enjoys broad public support: the minimum wage. But their advocacy and its popularity rest on the incorrect belief that a significant number of families live on the minimum wage. Instead, the primary impact would be to exacerbate a crisis of youth unemployment spurred largely by the last minimum wage increase.
A recent analysis by Ben Gitis of the American Action Forum found that just 1.9 percent of all wage and salary earners make the minimum wage or less. Just 0.3 percent of people in families with incomes below the poverty line make the minimum wage or less — and just 1.5 percent make less than $10.10, the level that Democrats have suggested for the next hike. Applying the most recent academic research, Gitis also found that such an increase would reduce employment by more than two million jobs. Continue reading
President Obama’s politically motivated, science-eschewing ethanol mandates ravage the environment in America’s heartland and the Gulf of Mexico while enabling the well-connected to reap windfall profits.
by Dina Cappiello & Matt Apuzzo
The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America’s push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today. Continue reading
Healthcare: Just days before ObamaCare officially launches, the Newspaper of Record discovers that those allegedly low premiums liberals brag about won’t come cheap. At least, not if you want to actually use health care.
Democrats have worked overtime claiming that premiums offered in the ObamaCare exchanges aren’t as bad as everyone thought they’d be.
“Show me the rate shock” is their refrain. The White House even claims that six in 10 uninsured will be able to buy coverage for “under $100 per person per month.”
So just how could ObamaCare pile on costly new benefit mandates, require that insurers take everyone, not charge the sick more than the healthy, and keep rates low? Did Democrats manage to find a loophole in the law of supply and demand? Continue reading
by Thomas Sowell
It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new “solution” to society’s “problems.” Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.
San Francisco and New York are both plagued with large “homeless” populations today, largely as a result of previous housing “reforms” that made housing more expensive, and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built.
The solution? Spend more of the taxpayers’ money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for more people.
Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. Continue reading
“‘This is painful for a liberal to admit,’ admits Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times columnist… ‘but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.’ Do tell.”
by Bill Murchison
Reason No. 1 not to tremble at the prospect of liberal ascendancy, world without end: Liberalism doesn’t work. At any rate, not the way liberals commonly suppose it’s going to work when they devise enormous taxpayer-funded, government-run programs, minimally connected, if at all, to the realities of human existence.
An article in the Dec. 9 New York Times, of all places, gleams in the darkness of the present political moment as the Obama administration works to rub away resistance to its vision of an all-encompassing federal government. “This is painful for a liberal to admit,” admits Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times columnist who, oddly, doesn’t see his job as requiring regular trashing of conservatives, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.” Do tell. Kristof’s careful examination of anti-poverty programs in Appalachia presents a viewpoint far more nuanced than, say, a Barack Obama speech urging the overhaul of capitalism. He finds that giving people too much free money for too long can create disincentives to live non-dependent lives. He talks about parents who pull illiterate kids out of literacy programs to avoid forfeiting a $698 monthly Supplement Security Income check meant to “help” the intellectually disabled. Continue reading