For months, Republicans and their amen corner have been warning "Obamacare will destroy the private-insurance market" in order to "make a single-payer, i.e. socialized medicine, system inevitable." Apparently, the conservative prophets of doom forgot to tell the nation's major health insurance companies. As it turns out, even as Republicans decry the Affordable Care Act's mythical […]

The first numbers on the body count from the Republican sabotage of the Affordable Care Act are just now coming in. Last week, an analysis from Harvard's Theda Skocpol revealed that states that both set up their own health care exchanges and embraced the ACA's expansion of Medicaid are racing towards their enrollment goals, while […]

Their losing 2012 presidential ticket warned that America is becoming a nation of "makers and takers" as self-identified "victims" seek "free stuff" from their government. In 2013, Republicans in Congress voted to gut food stamps, blocked the extension of jobless benefits to 1.3 million long-term unemployed Americans and supported drug testing for recipients. Now on […]

On January 1, 2014, the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect. But for all of the furious fighting over the law these past five years, Obamacare was always an evolutionary reform grafted onto the existing American health care system. The Medicaid public insurance program has been extended to roughly four million lower income Americans […]

With the Affordable Care Act now in full effect, the conservative propaganda factory is working overtime to produce and publicize Obamacare horror stories, real or imagined. So with the federal government, the states, private insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacies scrambling to assist the six million newly insured so far, the GOP's media water carriers are […]

A new study in the journal Science revealed that emergency room use rose by 40 percent over 18 months among new Medicaid beneficiaries in Oregon starting in 2008. While opponents of Obamacare and its expansion of Medicaid cheered those findings suggesting that U.S. health care costs will go up as a result, their exhilaration may […]

With an estimated 2 million Americans having signed up for private health insurance plans on the federal and state exchanges, the Affordable Care Act is now making real progress towards the goal of 7 million new enrollees by the end of 2014. But as the Washington Post cautions, Obamacare's first real test comes on January […]

For years, the defining truth of health care in America has been this: health care is worst in those states where Republicans poll best. In general, the states with the greatest percentage of uninsured, the unhealthiest residents and the most dismal health care systems give the GOP its strongest support. (With the "coverage gap" in […]

Charity, it is said, begins at home. But as Tuesday's Wall Street Journal suggests, charity clearly ends with America's health insurance companies. As the Journal reports, insurers are battling charities and hospitals who have launched pilot programs to help pay for the health care premiums of lower-income Americans. But the carriers' campaign to prevent potentially […]

On Monday, the GOP-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) released a damning report about the so-called Obamacare "navigators." That Issa's inquisition railed against the Affordable Care Act's use of dozens of dozens of community groups, hospitals and other non-profit organizations who have received $67 million in federal grants […]