The signs, as the likes of Vox, Bloomberg News, TPM and the Washington Post have observed, are everywhere. With Democratic candidates finally touting the Affordable Care Act and many Republican campaigns abandoning their all-out war to destroy it, it is increasingly clear that Obamacare is here to stay. What Paul Krugman called the "Obamacare Life […]

Can you put a cost on stupid? In the case of Republican-led states rejecting Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid coverage to their low income residents, The answer is a resounding "yes." Florida, Texas, North Carolina and 20 other No states aren't merely losing billions in federal funds to provide insurance for millions of their residents. As […]

As Dylan Scott recently summed it up at TPM, "The GOP's all-out war on Obamacare is in a death spiral." That development should come as no surprise. All along, Republicans opposed the Affordable Care Act not because they believed it would fail, but because they feared it would succeed. And with enrollments exceeding forecasts, health […]

Earlier this week, two federal appeals courts reached opposite conclusions as to whether Congress intended for the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance subsidies to Americans purchasing coverage through both state and federally-run exchanges. While Romneycare architect and Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber seemed to create some confusion with remarks from 2012, for the drafters […]

When two appeals courts issued conflicting rulings Tuesday on whether Obamacare's health insurance subsidies apply to the 34 states that chose to let the federal government run their exchanges, Republicans were quick to pounce on the one decision they liked. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) called the DC Circuit's decision a "repudiation of Obamacare" which "should […]

To hear the best and the brightest of the conservative movement tell it, Americans' freedom of religion is in dire peril. At Liberty University in April, Texas Senator Ted Cruz cautioned, "Religious liberty has never been more under attack." Ben Sasse, the Nebraska GOP Senate candidate, went even further in declaring that "the free exercise […]

Mitch McConnell has an Obamacare problem. Make that 410,000 problems. Because that's how many of his constituents obtained health insurance through his state's very popular Kynect exchange. And as he well knows, repealing the Affordable Care Act "root and branch" means virtually all of those Kentuckians will lose the coverage the ACA's Medicaid expansion and […]

In December 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lectured American troops worried about vital equipment shortages plaguing U.S. combat forces in Iraq. "You go to war with the army you have," Rumsfeld pontificated, "not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." That was a particularly galling statement for Rumsfeld of […]

For the first time since the shocking revelations of secret VA patient waiting lists came to light, President Obama on Wednesday seemed to equivocate on his support for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. "I know that Rick's attitude is if he doesn't think he can do a good job on this and if he thinks […]

With its shameful backlog and secret waiting lists at some of its facilities, the Veterans Health Administration is facing an urgent crisis. But the only reform certain to make things worse would be to privatize the system of 1,700 VA facilities that serve 8.76 million American vets. Despite its troubles, studies consistently show that VA […]