According to a recent Gallup survey, Illinois residents have the least trust in their own state government compared to every other state in the nation. That is why Illinois lawmakers should make stewardship of taxpayer dollars a top priority. When revelations of wasteful spending or outright fraud come to light, they only serve ti further...
Experts from both sides of the aisle are now calling on the Obama administration to eliminate the employer mandate from the president’s signature health-insurance law. A briefing paper released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a liberal-leaning foundation that previously supported former president Bill Clinton’s health-care plan and is now a major supporter of ObamaCare,...
Despite the recent back-slapping and self-congratulations from the Obama administration over the ObamaCare health exchange “enrollments,” there is little reason to believe that the health insurance overhaul is going to have a significant impact on expanding private health insurance coverage in Illinois. Based on national survey data, ObamaCare may have expanded private health coverage to...
While the president and his political allies have been celebrating ObamaCare’s “success,” not everyone is sharing this sentiment. In fact, most people are now taking the opposite view. According to a recent Pew Research Center/USA TODAY survey, more Americans disapprove of the Affordable Care Act now than when the law was enacted. Americans, now that...
In a House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations subcommittee hearing this morning, a major health insurance trade association representative testified that the administration is reporting inflated enrollment numbers. According to their testimony: “Duplicate enrollments: Because of the challenges that surfaced with the launch of the Exchanges in October 2013, some consumers were advised to create a new account and enroll...
A little known, but important, provision in the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, is turning into a major point of contention between some policymakers and insurers participating in the ObamaCare exchanges. The ACA includes provisions to pay insurers for their financial losses in the ObamaCare exchanges. In response to lawmaker and public pressure, the federal...
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has filed suit in federal court “to make Congress live by the letter of the health-care law it imposed on the rest of America.” He now has support from dozens of his Congressional colleagues, as well as a growing number of supporters across the country, to make congressmen participate...
Before ObamaCare, there was RomneyCare, the Massachusetts model upon which ObamaCare was built. This week, Massachusetts announced that it is scrapping its failed state-funded exchange website. The state will simultaneously merge with the federal healthcare.gov site and attempt to build another state exchange website before open enrollment season for 2015 coverage which begins in the...
Media outlets across Illinois are trumpeting the “surge” in ObamaCare enrollments during March, as well as the “extended” enrollment period during the first half of April. But to see the reality behind the ObamaCare enrollments, one needs to dig deeper than the Obama administration’s press release. Instead of counting people who have actually paid for...
You’re not signed up unless you pay. And in Illinois, half of ObamaCare “enrollees” haven’t paid for their premium. That puts the Land of Lincoln well below the national average. Nationwide, just 67 percent of those the Obama administration counted as “enrolled” in the Affordable Care Act had paid their premiums as of April 15,...
The president and his political allies haven’t been shy about touting an ObamaCare enrollment number of 8 million. But it now seems curious that, for all their back-slapping and self-congratulations, the administration is weeks late in releasing its monthly ObamaCare enrollment report. But this delay should not be all that surprising, given that it merely...
Under ObamaCare, if an employer offers a generous health insurance plan that does not happen to cover the law’s mandated minimum set of “essential health benefits” to its employees, the employer would pay more in penalties than if they had offered no coverage at all. There are 10 coverage categories that comprise the essential health benefits,...
Some bad ideas just won’t stay dead. Despite reasonable opposition from both sides of the aisle in Springfield, some political activists are continuing to push the idea of a state-based health insurance exchange. Illinois has a state-federal partnership exchange currently. At a time when the state’s health-care bureaucracy was caught paying Medicaid benefits on behalf of dead...
Illinoisans are all-too familiar with jokes about cemeteries full of voters. But, according to a recent audit, the dead are also receiving Medicaid benefits. National news outlets reported recently that the state made Medicaid payments to health-care providers on behalf of nearly 3,000 deceased Illinoisans under the Medicaid program. The federal-state program, which is supposed...