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…

One week in, and Healthcare.gov seems more like a make-work project for low-bid contractors than a portal to twenty-first century government. After spending $93.7 million to build parts of ObamaCare’s federal government insurance exchange website, the results are in.  Millions of people can’t create user accounts…

With the ObamaCare insurance exchanges up and glitching, at least one high-profile supporter sees "better" days ahead. In an op-ed entitled, “A Good First Step Toward Single Payer,” Bernie Sanders, a United States Senator from Vermont and avowed socialist, argues plainly for using ObamaCare as a launching pad to expand Medicare…

Remember in 2009 when President Barack Obama was campaigning for his health reform law that became ObamaCare? He told anyone who would listen that despite widespread fear of a government takeover, “[W]e will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be…

In a win for the rule of law late last Friday, the Obama Treasury department said it will not go against the plain meaning of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) to carve out a costly exception for certain labor unions. The decision was made public in a letter to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Earlier in the week, Hatch, the highest ranking Republican…

After a very public campaign of complaints saying that the Affordable Care Act (i.e. ObamaCare) would, among other things, “shatter… our hard-earned health benefits,” union leaders representing 20 million part-time workers are getting closer to their goal – a multi-billion dollar annual subsidy available only to them. In the…

One of the reasons Republicans have had such a difficult time uniting around a single alternative to ObamaCare is that many of their reform proposals lack the comprehensiveness necessary to fully replace the controversial health law. Consider these highlights from a litany written up by GOP strategist Karl Rove. Tort reform advocates want to cap…

Perhaps the biggest – and costliest – misunderstood ObamaCare regulation is the so-called “Employer Shared Responsibility” requirement, i.e., the mandate that all employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees must provide health insurance or pay stiff penalties. The word equivalent bears emphasizing because it looms…

As ObamaCare’s implementation draws near, the costs to unions could be fatal. For private-sector unions, the biggest danger comes from the health law’s increased coverage requirements. New entitlements like eliminating pre-existing conditions from eligibility considerations and paying for dependents up to age 26 add enormous costs to health…

What if Congress amends a key part of ObamaCare, but doesn’t fix the underlying problem? That could very well be the case if either of two bills passes to change the health law’s definition of a full-time employee. As written, ObamaCare defines “full-time” as “an employee who is employed on average at least 30 hours…

With the Obama administration gearing up to spend $700 million on an advertising blitz to convince the young and healthy to sign-up for insurance under ObamaCare, cash-strapped cities like Detroit are emerging as the biggest obstacle. The reason: Tens of thousands of retired public employees are owed billions in lifetime health care coverage. In…

With a string of controversial policy decisions, ObamaCare’s Federal Data Hub is shaping up to be the new poster child for government waste, fraud and abuse.  The waste is apparent to anyone familiar with the current state of health technology. Already there are at least 100 companies that operate private health insurance exchanges, according…