According to a federal audit released Aug. 18, Illinois’ Medicaid program routinely over-estimated the amount of funds it needed from federal coffers to the tune of nearly $1 billion from 2010 through 2012. Over that three-year period, the state would spend the Medicaid money elsewhere and was slow in repaying the federal government, costing federal...
When the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was signed into law, three out of 10 physicians were not accepting new Medicaid patients. So to entice more physicians to participate in the Medicaid program, the federal government began temporarily paying higher reimbursements for some of primary care physicians’ routine services. But temporarily boosting a narrow subset...
Illinois is now gearing up for the second round of ObamaCare open enrollment period that begins on Nov. 15. ObamaCare was passed with the promise that it would drastically reduce the number of uninsured Americans. Illinois’ state officials originally aimed to reduce the eligible uninsured adult population by half by the end of the first...
The Affordable Care Act, or ACA, commonly referred to as ObamaCare, was supposed to cut Illinois’ eligible, uninsured adult population by half by the end of March 2014. The state achieved only half of its goal. About one-quarter of Illinois’ eligible uninsured adults have obtained health insurance coverage under the ACA. The state’s original goal was to move half of...
If you live in Illinois and have private insurance – either through your employer or purchased on your own – your premiums likely increased this year as a result of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare. Instead of reducing premiums by an average of $2,500 per family as promised, ObamaCare has increased what...
The problem When the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ACA or ObamaCare, was first implemented, more than three out of 10 physicians across the country were not accepting new patients in Medicaid, a joint state-federal program that is meant to cover the costs of providing health care to the poor. But rather than offering...
According to cancer-patient advocate Robert Goldberg, “The latest innovation in cancer care isn’t a medical breakthrough but an app to ration new drugs. It’ll measure care in terms of what it costs health plans, instead of what it means for patients’ lives.” This “innovation” may be used to conceal the best-available cancer treatment options from...
Two federal appeals courts issued conflicting decisions about the future of ObamaCare on Tuesday. In one, the Halbig v. Burwell decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Affordable Care Act means what it says: ObamaCare insurance subsidies are only available in states that have established their own health-insurance exchanges,...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court has ruled today that the Internal Revenue Service does not have the ability to circumvent the original intent of the Affordable Care Act and provide insurance subsidies or impose individual and employer penalties in a state that has not created its own ObamaCare health-insurance exchange....
The Obama administration’s celebrations touting the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, as a rousing success were premature. There will be little to celebrate as Americans face dramatically higher health-insurance premiums, more health policy cancellations and limited access to providers in the coming years. Now, according to a recent Gallup poll, four in 10 Americans are...
Evidence that the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, is harming the nation’s labor market continues to mount. U.S. News & World Report Chairman and Editor Mortimer Zuckerman explained in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that less than one-half of working-age adults are working full time. Zuckerman lays blame to slow-growth and the...
It is a sad commentary on our political system when a lawmaker has to file suit in federal court to enforce the law. But earlier this year, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., did just that. He filed suit in federal court “to make Congress live by the letter of the health care law it imposed on...
A recent Politico article, “Why liberals are abandoning the employer mandate,” highlights the growing list of liberal policy advocates and analysts who now favor scrapping the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, employer mandate. Originally scheduled to take effect in January of this year, this provision has already been delayed twice. The facts about the destructive...
According to a recent report, the Vermont health insurance exchange was breached late last year by a Romanian hacker. The criminal gained access to the exchange’s development server at least 15 times over the course of one month. This is not the first time the Vermont exchange system has been hacked, raising serious concerns about...