As ObamaCare’s taxes go into effect, the Internal Revenue Service’s role in enforcing the controversial health care law is getting more attention. The reviews so far aren’t encouraging. In mid-August, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) published a report critical of the IRS’s failure to accurately…

When it comes to ObamaCare, should Republicans repeal or reform it? As a conservative, the answer depends on whether you think there is anything in the law worth saving. Because ObamaCare was passed on a party-line vote and seems like an effort to kick-start the march toward a single-payer, nationalized health care system, most Republicans favor…

Federalism and the free market don't always go together, especially not in a Nanny-state like California. Evidence is mounting that continued centralized control over issues like education and the environment erode state and local power under the Constitution. This week comes news of a fight brewing between Covered California - the local ObamaCare…

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars yet failing to enroll a single person on its ObamaCare health insurance website, Oregon’s top officials are considering whether to sue Oracle, the software giant and primary contractor. This isn’t where Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber and other ObamaCare supporters thought they’d…

Pop some popcorn, grab a cold one, sit back and enjoy this emerging spectacle.  Labor unions were among the strongest and earliest supporters of ObamaCare, and foolishly accepted Nancy Pelosi’s admonition to embrace the law before finding out what was in it.  Now they’re beginning to pay the price.  With increasing frequency…

Indiana Republican Governor Mike Pence says his plan to use ObamaCare’s Medicaid dollars to expand his state’s health savings account program won’t create a new open-ended entitlement. Before considering Pence’s arguments, it’s important to understand how ObamaCare changes Medicaid. If states expand Medicaid eligibility…

What’s so affordable about a health care law that imposes $100 billion in sales taxes on consumers? That’s the question being asked by small business owners as they prepare to start paying ObamaCare’s health insurance tax or HIT. HIT is a sales tax imposed on each policy sold in the fully covered insurance market. The tax is projected…

With ObamaCare’s enrollment season officially over, evidence is emerging that billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent funding waste, fraud and abuse. American Commitment's Phil Kerpen over at The Federalist paints a financially gruesome picture of how much federal taxpayer money has been wasted by state-based ObamaCare exchanges since…

In the nearly two weeks since Kathleen Sebelius resigned as Secretary of Health of Human Services, many pundits have tried to sum up her legacy. Immediate focus has centered on the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, the federal insurance exchange website that failed spectacularly when it launched. The glitches were so bad and the repair job so long…

In a surprise move, the Obama administration has reversed course on an ObamaCare-mandated cut to Medicare Advantage, replacing the long-feared cut with a slight increase in funding. Though motivated by political calculations, the episode confirms that the fundamentals for reforming health care support the policy changes sought by Paul Ryan. Monday…

With Democrats trying to pivot to income inequality before the 2014 midterms, a new labor union report says ObamaCare threatens to do tremendous harm to low-wage workers.  “Ironically, the [Obama] Administration’s own signature healthcare victory poses one of the most immediate challenges to redressing inequality,” warns UNITE…

For all the heated political rhetoric and hard-hitting campaign ads, there is a little-discussed reality that should be remembered – Republicans and Democrats agree that Medicare needs reform. They also agree that the senior-focused entitlement system should reroute money toward elements that work and reduce funding for those that don’…

If the Obama administration is trying to kill half of Medicare, why aren’t liberals angry? No one who saw the infamous Democratic campaign ad showing a Paul Ryan lookalike throwing a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff missed the point – Republican reform efforts like Ryan’s would “change Medicare as we know it,” causing…

Another federal election on the horizon begets more extra-legal ObamaCare extensions. In October of this year, the Obama administration’s last-minute decision to allow millions of people to keep their non-compliant individual health insurance policies will run out. That’s about a month before the 2014 midterm elections. Sensing an anti…

There are a number of ways to look at Monday’s announcement that the Treasury Department is going to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate — requiring firms to provide health insurance for their employees — until 2016 for companies with between 50 and 99 employees. You can consider it raw politics, a shameless exercise in taking…

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously said “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” He can be forgiven the sentiment, because he uttered it in 1985, before the world knew of Barack Obama. What Cuomo meant is that candidates out on the stump are inevitably going to sell sweeping, romantic notions of what their time in office…

Looking back on the first four months of ObamaCare – an error-prone rollout for Healthcare.gov, adverse selection in state-run risk pools and a last-minute rule change by federal regulators to allow consumers to keep non-complying plans – it’s a wonder that the health insurance industry ever signed off on ObamaCare in the first place…

With the federal budget now officially a non-issue until 2015, 2014 – in particular the midterm elections that will animate it – is shaping up to be the year Republicans finally give voters an ObamaCare alternative. That is, unless Democrats succeed in convincing a minority of GOP members to help fix the broken health care law. The electoral…

If you still think no one can top President Barack Obama’s now infamously deceptive promise, “If you like your health insurance, doctor and hospital, you can keep them,” then you didn’t watch Ezekiel Emanuel’s appearance on Fox News Sunday last weekend. Emanuel, a Harvard-trained bioethicist and one of the architects…

When Chief Justice John Roberts changed his vote – and his reasoning – to uphold ObamaCare in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), he drew the ire of many conservatives. His most vocal critics were the four Supreme Court justices whose majority opinion became the dissent after Roberts jumped ship. The quartet of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and…

President Barack Obama’s latest "fix" to his signature health reform law is being greeted with none of the approval of his previous uses of so-called enforcement discretion. This past July, Obama announced that he would not enforce the employer mandate in 2014, the first year of ObamaCare’s implementation. The decision was met…

There’s a deep, lusty irony to Barack Obama being undone by his own inability to keep quiet. After all, the President owes his ascension to the White House almost entirely to an oratorical ability that was regarded as near-magical back in 2008. Today, “near-fatal” might be a better characterization. A funny thing happens to presidents…

After demanding payback for supporting Democratic candidates and the passage of ObamaCare, an influential group of labor unions is getting a special exemption from one of the health law’s most onerous taxes. But will it be enough to save them? Buried in a complicated regulatory announcement last week, the Department of Health and Human Services…

Dishonesty was required to pass ObamaCare. Stupidity might be enough to elect the Congress that repeals it. By now, many Americans are all-too-familiar with Obama’s 29 videotaped assertions to Americans that, “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan.” Obama’s message was unmistakably…

Are you ready to have the same federal agency that can’t run a website bombard you with social media messages designed to change your “health-related” behaviors? Last week, a little-known federal aggregator of health scholarship called the National Library of Medicine (NLM) announced that it plans to track how visitors to its website…

This week, we passed a new presidential milestone.  According to the periodic NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, Barack Obama plummeted to an all-time low of 42% in public approval.  While that alone constitutes a notable event, it’s actually not the most important aspect of the survey, since peaks and troughs are cyclical realities…

Government interventions in the private sector are inevitably pockmarked by unintended consequences. Given both the scale and scope of ObamaCare, it is thus unsurprising that the program’s rollout has been met with a bevy of unforeseen shortcomings. The worst one of all: the President of the United States has been transformed into an infomercial…

Things just went from awful to worse this week for ObamaCare, and the Obama Administration more generally.  Nearly a month into its disastrous debut, it’s clear that the ObamaCare website isn’t just “glitching,” it’s completely melting down.  This is quickly becoming a watershed moment, a failure so obvious…

Since the rise of the Progressive movement over a century ago, liberalism has been enchanted by the idea of enlightened administration — of beneficent, all-knowing bureaucrats who could steer public policy and shape it towards the public good, usually without the messy restraints of democracy or constitutional strictures. Edward Mandell House…

With health insurance premiums and deductibles spiraling out of control, ObamaCare is looking more and more like a vehicle for massive wealth redistribution. It hasn’t been a fun two weeks to be Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Shoddy work by foreign contractors rendered Healthcare.gov, the federal ObamaCare exchange, mostly…