Category: Need for Reform

Obamacare’s individual mandate has been paid 19.6 million times, forcing Americans to send $8.4 billion to Washington. Over 80% of penalty payers made less than $50k/year.

Small Business Owners say that the most important issue affecting them is the cost of health care, according to the National Small Business Association’s annual Politics of Small Business Survey.

When asked what issues they raised most with elected officials, 40 percent of the surveyed owners said health care costs. Local issues were second on the list at 28 percent and tax reform came third with 37 percent.

Former President Barack Obama promised the Affordable Care Act would bend “the cost curve and [start] to reduce costs for families, businesses, and government.” But his pledge has gone unfulfilled – patients and taxpayers are spending record amounts on healthcare.

This year, total healthcare spending will increase 5.3 percent, according to a recent estimate from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That’s after spending rose by 4.6 percent last year to total $3.5 trillion.

What does health insurance cost without a subsidy? Unfortunately, not everyone qualifies for subsidies, so it’s important to see what health insurance costs without them.

• Premiums for individual coverage averaged $440 per month while premiums for family plans averaged $1,168 per month. The graphs below demonstrate the rise in both individual and family premiums since the Affordable Care Act’s inception.
• The average annual deductible for individual plans was $4,578 and the average deductible for family plans was $8,803. The graphs below demonstrate the rise in both family and individual deductibles since the Affordable Care Act’s inception.

The architects of Obamacare promised a U.S. health care revolution that would control costs, improve quality, and provide coverage for all. They guaranteed access to health care regardless of income or health status. They promised that coverage for all would reduce costs by preventing disease. After more than eight years, Obamacare has failed to make good on its promises. Thanks to its poor design, it continues to increase health care costs, degrade health care quality, and weaken the market for private coverage. This Brief Analysis identifies the Obamacare promises and describes how they have been broken.

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday suggested that adopting universal Medicare would actually boost the economy and put more money in Americans’ pockets, despite studies putting the cost of such a venture at tens of trillions of dollars.

Her comments came days after far-left progressives suffered a series of losses in major races in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo soundly defeated upstart “resistance” candidate Cynthia Nixon. Despite having Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement, Nixon lost in Ocasio-Cortez’s district by thirty percentage points.

A federal judge overseeing the latest lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act questioned claims from Democratic attorneys general defending the constitutionality of the health law during oral arguments Wednesday.

The line of questioning from U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor often echoed assertions made by the Republican officials from 20 states who brought the suit. They argue the ACA is illegitimate now that Congress has repealed the law’s tax-based penalty on people who don’t have health insurance.

Unexpected medical bills top the list of health care costs Americans are afraid they will not be able to afford, with 4 in 10 people saying they had received a surprisingly large invoice within the past year, according to a new poll.

The Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 67 percent of people worry about unexpected medical bills, more than they dread insurance deductibles, prescription drug costs or the basic staples of life: rent, food and gas.

President Trump has a message for millions of able-bodied Medicaid recipients: Get a job.

Since January, the administration has allowed states to require Medicaid beneficiaries who are not disabled to engage in 80 hours per month of work, volunteering, job training, or school in return for taxpayer-funded health coverage. The purpose of this reform is twofold — to conserve taxpayer dollars, and to break the culture of dependency that saps our communities of dynamism and prosperity.