Obamacare Schadenfreude Lingers

Like herpes. . .

Financial Troubles Plague The State-Run ACA Exchanges

"The viability of state health insurance exchanges has been a challenge across the country, particularly in small states, due to insufficient numbers of uninsured residents."

Oh. Oooooooh.

Let me make sure I understood. Not enough uninsured people? That's what he said, right? Because it seems to me that Democrats spent years claiming that there ware millions of uninsured people who were going to DIE all over our sidewalks if the taxpayers didn't cough up the cash to build these Obamacare exchanges. Was that not true?

Read the whole piece because it covers all the tropes of failed liberal policy. . .

Read the whole thing. Both of them.

U.S. Health-Spending Growth Jumped to 5.5% in 2014

Growth in national health spending, which had dropped to historic lows in recent years, has snapped back and is set to continue at a faster pace over the next decade, federal actuaries said Tuesday.

The return to bigger growth is a result of expanded insurance coverage under the 2010 health law, a revived economy and crunchtime as Medicare’s baby-boom beneficiaries enter their 70s.

American spending on all health care grew 5.5% in 2014 from the previous year and will grow 5.3% this year, according to a report from actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published in the journal Health Affairs. In the years through 2024, spending growth is expected to average 5.8%, peaking at 6.3% in 2020.

The jump comes after five consecutive years of average spending growth of less than 4% annually—a rate touted by theObama administration as the lowest since the government began tracking health spending in the 1960s and a sign that the health law’s Medicare provisions were helping rein in health costs.

Fixed it! Just waiting for them to propose "single payer" as the fix for Obamacare.

Senate Votes to Revive Export-Import Bank, Keep Obamacare

In a pair of losses for conservatives, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Sunday to revive the Export-Import Bank while failing to overcome a filibuster of an attempt to repeal Obamacare — with more fireworks to come.

The rare Sunday votes set the stage for the Senate to send a long-term highway bill tied to the Ex-Im Bank to the House later this week, but not before facing other gambits by conservatives, including a procedural vote forced by Sen. Ted Cruz regarding the Iran deal and an effort to deploy a maneuver akin to the “nuclear option.”

Lee also wants to go a step further. He has a proposal for a vote on an Obamacare repeal that would doom the highway bill — and take a big step toward subjecting the Senate to majority rule through the use of a nuclear option.

The Utah Republican said Friday the Senate will have an opportunity to add the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to the Export-Import Bank amendment with a simple majority.

“The first Obamacare vote on Sunday will have a 60 vote threshold, and Democrats will likely block it,” Lee said in a statement. “But thanks to the sequencing of the votes we just locked in, Republicans will have the opportunity [to] resurrect that Obamacare amendment later on in the process, and put it back before the Senate in a manner that only requires a simple-majority vote.”

But making that move would require a declaration by senators that the full repeal is “germane,” a simple-majority vote that would end the longstanding practice of construing the germaneness of amendments in the narrowest terms when the Senate has already invoked cloture cutting off filibusters.

With all due respect to the Senators, before Obamacare can be repealed we either need a new president, or a veto proof majority in the both Houses.