Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women

For months now, we’ve been waiting to hear how much Obamacare will drive up the cost of health insurance for people who purchase coverage on their own. Last night, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finally began to provide some data on how Americans will fare on Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchanges.
Read the complete article at Forbes.com.

GOP Congress Gets Serious About Fighting Obamacare

The GOP House leadership will adopt a politically risky strategy to try to stop Obamacare by passing a bill funding every government function except Obamcare. Also Wednesday, Republicans in the House unveiled legislation they plan to push to replace Obamacare and provide real health care affordability and access to the American people.
Read the complete article at World Net Daily.

The Obamacare Bomb

A mere three weeks remain before the Obamacare exchanges open for business. The likely result will be the closing doors on Main Street, as shopkeepers and entrepreneurs shut down, unable to make ends meet. It’s clear that the wounded economy can’t cope with the exploding costs ahead. Ohio announced that premiums would rise in the individual market by an average of 88 percent next year. Premiums will rise 72 percent in Indiana, 125 percent in Wisconsin. Even California, with its relatively robust individual market, is bracing for increases of 66 percent.
Read the complete article at The Washington Times.

The Obamacare Exchanges are only the First Step

Supporters of Obamacare acknowledge that "the exchanges are an instrument of enormous potential power". Anyone who says ObamaCare isn’t a government take-over of health care needs to pay better attention. We should all be very, very concerned.
Read the complete article at The Galen Institute.

As Obamacare's 'Compassionate' Reality Sets In, Companies 'Cruelly' Cut Health Benefits

American businesses are discovering each and every day that the president’s signature law will raise health costs for them and their employees in short order.
Read the complete article by Sally Pipes at Forbes.com.

Migration of Personal Incomes Between States

Some states, due to their tax and regulatory regimes, are gaining in personal incomes at the expense of other, more poorly-run states. Biggest winners: Florida, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina. Biggest losers: New Jersey, Illinios, California and New York.

See the graphic at The Tax Foundation

ObamaCare Was Sold to American Voters on Deceptive Terms

In most states, the only people who face real premiums are in the “individual market,” where individuals and families pay for insurance out of their own pockets. Yet the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) will outlaw the pricing of individual risk (medical underwriting) by year’s end. Health insurance, therefore, is very different from just about every other form of insurance.

Read the complete article by John C. Goodman, PhD at The Independent Institute.

The Wisdom of Ronald Coase

Economist Ronald Coase passed away September 2 at age 102. His influence on the discipline is immeasurable. He had co-authored his last book, How China became Capitalist, just last year.
Coase's most famous paper, "The Problem of Social Cost" in 1960, dealt with "externalities," or economic costs (say, downstream pollution) that are used to justify some tax or regulation. Coase showed there may be better ways to address those costs, especially if property rights are well defined. The right to perform certain actions, when properly protected by the law, can be priced and traded like any other good. If transaction costs are low, firms and individuals can bargain their way to a mutually beneficial outcome without litigation, taxation or coercive regulation.

Read the complete article at The Wall Street Journal.

Obamacare Threatens Privacy in America

Over the past several months, a stream of reports from government auditors and news stories has raised serious questions about the Administration’s implementation of Obamacare and its effects on the privacy of millions of Americans. The reports paint a portrait of an Administration casting aside security concerns—potentially putting Americans’ financial and health data at risk—in its push to open insurance exchanges in all 50 states by October 1. These recent developments should provide further impetus for Congress to defund the entire law before the exchanges are able to undermine personal privacy.

Read the complete article at The Heritage Foundation.

Obamacare's Destructive Impact on Business

Obamacare is likely to exacerbate many of the concerns and costs that are already burdening businesses—particularly small-business owners—in at least four ways.
1. Higher Health Care Costs
2. Employer Mandate
3. Higher Regulation Compliance Costs
4. Medicare Taxes on Flow-Through and Investment Income

Read the complete article by Alyene Senger at The Heritage Foundation.

Has Anyone Asked the Patient?

Non-physician practitioners are gaining the licensing to expand the scope of their work to include more of what has until recently been considered the domain of fully trained and certified physicians. This trend may provide some flexibility in the delivery of care and relieve the doctor shortage. But should patients be obliged, with no choice in the matter, to accept a nurse practitioner as just as good as a physician?

Read the complete article by Howard Hyde at AmericanThinker.com.

ObamaCare Means Whatever Obama Wants It To Mean

On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that "the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week." That's quite an accomplishment for a "health" "care" "reform" law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported ObamaCare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It's a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.

Read the complete article by Mark Steyn at Investor's Business Daily.

Health Care Solution: Patients in Command

If patients commanded the resources spent on their behalf, most of the economic problems of health care would be resolved. But the government won't permit that.

Read the complete article by Howard Hyde at FrontPageMag.com.

‘Stupid’ ObamaCare Provision Offends America’s Highest Caste: Congress

In effect, ObamaCare throws members of Congress out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (where most members and staff obtain health insurance) and offers them no other choice but to enroll in coverage through one of ObamaCare’s Exchanges. But here’s the kicker: though the federal government currently pays thousands of dollars of the cost of the congresscritters’ FEHBP coverage, neither ObamaCare nor any other federal law authorizes the feds to apply that money toward a congresscritter’s Exchange premiums.

Read the complete article at The Cato Institute.

Hello World! (Especially Ukraine, China, Germany, Russia...)

Over a third of the traffic to this site comes from outside of the United States. Here is the breakdown for the past 30 days:
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If you are one of HHCapitalism's international readers, we would like to hear from you. Post a comment on an article that interests you or write the editor at HHCapitalism@gmail.com. What do you think about the content of this site? What are your thoughts about America and/or your home country, historically and/or today, its economic development and direction? Do you think America and/or your home country is ascendant or in decline? What lessons about economics and capitalism are you finding valuable, which ones less so? What improvements would you make?
Best regards.

Americans for Prosperity Sponsors Message from Union Bosses on Obamacare

Americans for Prosperity, the nation's largest grassroots advocate for economic freedom, printed a full page ad in the Washington Post highlighting quotes from over a half dozen major unions leaders urging reforms and expressing serious concerns and questions about the negative impact of ObamaCare.
Read the complete article at AmericansForProsperity.org.

Hospital Networks Reject ObamaCare Initiative

Nine major hospital networks just decided they'd had enough of being "Pioneers" for ObamaCare. They withdrew from the health reform law's Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) initiative, which launched in January 2012 with 32 health systems participating. These ACOs are supposed to integrate doctors, hospitals and other providers into one seamless network that could "coordinate" care for Medicare patients — and in so doing, eliminate waste and control costs. But as these nine casualties illustrate, ACOs are going to fail in that mission. Worse, they'll diminish the quality of care that Medicare patients receive.
Read the complete article by Sally Pipes at Investor's Business Daily.

Defunding Obamacare: Worth a Try

Sometimes lawmakers really should stand for something more important than their own reelection. Obamacare is such a fundamental transformation of the American health-care system, and its consequences for patients, providers, taxpayers, and the economy are so grave, that if this is not an issue that Republicans are willing to lose their jobs over, what is?
Read the complete article at The Cato Institute.

Obamacare delay will cost $12 billion, affect 1 million workers

The report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is the first authoritative estimate of the human and fiscal cost from the administration's unexpected one-year delay announced July 2 of the employer mandate - a requirement for larger businesses to provide health coverage for their workers or pay a penalty.
Read the complete article at Reuters.com.

Obamacare Accelerating U.S. Towards A Part-Time Nation

Obamacare is accelerating a disturbing trend towards “a nation of part-timers.” This is not good news for America.
Read the complete article at Forbes.com.