How Your Company is Watching Your Waistline By Citing Obamacare Rules

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/LUCAS JACKSONEmployers tried the carrot, then a small stick. Now they are turning to bigger cudgels.

For years they encouraged workers to improve their health and productivity with free screenings, discounted gym memberships and gift cards to lose weight. More recently, a small number charged smokers slightly higher premiums to get them to quit.

Results for these plans were lackluster, and healthcare costs continued to soar. So companies are taking advantage of new rules under President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul in 2014 to punish smokers and overweight workers.

Some will even force employees to meet weight goals, quit smoking and provide very personal information or pay up to thousands more annually for healthcare. That could disproportionately affect the poor, who are more likely to smoke and can’t afford the higher fees.

Nearly 40 percent of large U.S. companies will use surcharges in 2014, such as higher insurance premiums or deductibles for individuals who do not complete company-set health goals, according to a survey of 892 employers released in September by human resources consultancy Towers Watson and National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers.

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Bill Clinton Bluntly Criticizes Obama: Live Up to Your Healthcare Plan Promise

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Photo Credit: APA blunt critique from Bill Clinton on President Obama’s handling of the rocky ObamaCare rollout is prompting the White House to pledge another set of health law fixes — though in doing so, it could inadvertently build the case for those calling for a delay in the law’s implementation.

Aside from scrambling to fix the broken HealthCare.gov website, the administration is now trying to deal with the millions of Americans who have received cancellation notices. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the president’s team is trying to figure out a way to offer relief to some of those policyholders.

The statement comes after former President Clinton, in an interview with the site Ozy.com, said Obama should live up to his promise to Americans that if they like their health plans, they can keep them.

“So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Clinton said.

Asked Tuesday if Obama agreed, Carney said: “The answer’s yes.”

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Three More Apologies the President Will Be Making

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Photo Credit: NewscomFaced with the grim reality of Obamacare, President Obama apologized that millions of Americans are losing coverage because of his law, which was supposed to make health insurance available and affordable.

Sadly, this is not the last apology the President will need to make about his health care law. Although not comprehensive, here are three more apologies on the horizon.

1. “I’m sorry that the cost of coverage — premiums, deductibles, and copayments — is going up for millions of Americans.”

It’s bad enough that people are getting their policies canceled, but it is downright scary when they find out that what’s offered on the exchange is far more expensive.

Before Obamacare, Natalie Willes, a young woman in Los Angles, paid $199 a month; with Obamacare, it increases to $278 a month. Add a deductible of $6,500 and suddenly, a currently insured Natalie wonders if she will be able to afford to stay insured.

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Appeals Court Delivers ‘Significant Victory’ for Religious Liberty in ObamaCare HHS Mandate Case

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Matt YorkIn a 2-1 ruling on Friday, a federal appeals court in Chicago upheld the rights of both individuals and companies to challenge Obamacare’s contraception-abortifacient-sterilization mandate.

It is the first decision of its kind in the ongoing litigation against the requirement that all employers — despite their deeply held religious beliefs — must arrange and pay for employee health insurance that covers no-cost contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization, under penalty of fine.

“This is a significant victory for protecting the religious beliefs of individuals and corporations,” said Edward White, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, who represents one of the plaintiffs, an Illinois company.

“It is also important to note that the appeals court determined that the HHS mandate should not move forward against our clients while this issue is being litigated. It has been our position from the beginning that the HHS mandate violates America’s longstanding history of protecting conscience rights. The mandate is unlawfully compelling employers such as our clients to do the following: abandon their faith to comply with the law, or follow their faith and pay significant annual penalties to the federal government. The decision by the appeals court is encouraging as this issue heads to the Supreme Court.”

The ACLJ represents Korte & Luitjohan Contractors, Inc., a family owned, full-service construction contractor located in Highland, Illinois. The company provides a group health insurance plan for its non-union employees, which number about 20. Cyril B. Korte and Jane E. Korte own a controlling interest in the company and contend the HHS mandate violates their Catholic faith. The ACLJ filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of both the individuals and the company in October 2012.

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For Hollywood, the Joke’s On Obamacare

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Photo Credit: APObamacare has gone from Hollywood leading lady to comic relief.

When the Obamacare exchanges launched last month, celebrities were out front, with everything from nearly topless #GetCovered tweets from young actresses touting affordable care to Funny or Die videos going viral. But since then, amid mounting bad press on everything from the faulty website to the “you can keep it” controversy, Obamacare has become the punch line instead of the star.

Organizers of the celebrity push say they haven’t gone away; rather, they’re still eager to help promote enrollment over the long haul.

The push to promote the Affordable Care Act with celebrities was designed to motivate the hardest-to-reach populations to to sign up. The “young invincibles,” healthy Americans who might not believe they have any need for health insurance, are seen as one of the key groups that Obamacare needs to reach in order to succeed, and celebs were one of the ways to accomplish that.

Last week, country singers Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley mocked HealthCare.gov’s long wait times and early low enrollment figures in a skit during their hosting of the Country Music Awards, singing a duet including the lines “Obamacare by morning/Over six people served.”

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What In the World Is Happening to Our Senior Military Officers?

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Photo Credit: Linas Garsys for The Washington TimesWhat in the world is happening to senior military officers under the Obama administration?

It seems that every week since President Obama took office in 2009, we’ve been hearing that another top leader has been summarily fired, despite his decades of loyal service and valuable experience in protecting the nation. Statistically speaking, it’s actually closer to one every 8.8 days, a staggering 200 military brass shown the door in less than five years.

The Pentagon has offered up a grab bag of reasons for these dismissals — from a simple “loss of confidence,” to more descriptive “insensitive remarks,” “sexual misconduct,” and even “counterfeit poker chips.”

The latest two to fall from grace, Navy Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch, director of naval intelligence, and Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, director of intelligence operations, were stripped of their security clearances last week, effectively ending their careers. They allegedly engaged in “inappropriate conduct” over a Navy contracting scandal related to scheduling port visits in Southeast Asia during the past decade. According to Navy officials, the probe into Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia is expected to widen — meaning, we’ll likely see other senior officers terminated in the weeks ahead.

Though firing senior military leaders was routine in different eras, including World War II and the Civil War, it was mostly related to lack of success on the battlefield. The battlefield has changed considerably since then, though, and those same metrics are harder to measure today.

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Begich and Other Red State Senate Democrats In ObamaCare Damage Control Mode

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesThree of the most vulnerable red-state Democrats are scrambling to neutralize the growing political threat that President Obama’s health care law is posing to their reelection campaigns.

This week, Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas have undertaken a series of unusually aggressive maneuvers designed to distance themselves from the health care law, whose botched rollout has raised concerns it will become a major liability for the 2014 midterm elections. The defensive steps are a smart political play from lawmakers already preparing in earnest for their reelection campaigns, but also amount to a tacit admission that Obamacare has already become a major headache.

Hagan is preparing to ask the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department and the General Accounting Office for a full investigation into the health care law’s rollout, Politico first reported Monday. Begich, meanwhile, announced he personally enrolled in Alaska’s health care exchange the same morning, declining to take the federal government’s contribution to his plan. In a statement, he also called for a “full and transparent accounting of how the vendors contracted to build the site failed to launch it successfully,”

Pryor, considered the most vulnerable Senate Democrat next year, took the most aggressive action of the three. His campaign criticized a senior adviser working for Republican Rep. Tom Cotton for supporting a deal to implement Obamacare in Arkansas, according to The Hill. John Burris, who is a state lawmaker, voted earlier this year to effectively expand Medicaid in the state by helping poor citizens buy private insurance.

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Comprehensive Immigration Reform Would Hurt Economy, Lower Wages

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Photo Credit: APAdding millions of workers through comprehensive immigration reform would have a devastating impact to an already poor economy, according to a growing number of Republicans in Congress.

Analyses of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” bill show that the legislation would add 30 million additional immigrants to the United States over the next decade, at a time when the number of Americans not in the labor force has reached record highs.

“Granting amnesty to untold millions of illegal immigrants will flood our job markets and reduce wages and employment for those hard-working immigrants and lower-income workers who have followed our laws,” Rep. Lou Barletta (R., Pa.) told the Washington Free Beacon.

One of the major reasons Rep. Walter Jones (R., N.C.) opposes the Senate bill is the impact it would have on the economy.

“Congressman Jones has consistently expressed his staunch opposition to the Senate bill—and any other legislation that provides a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants—for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that amnesty would allow individuals who have cheated the system and entered the country illegally to take jobs that could otherwise be filled by lawful citizens,” his spokesperson Sarah Howard said.

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Typhoon Haiyan: 600,000 Believed Homeless; Desperate Survivors Wait in the Open for Aid as Rains Return

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Photo Credit: EPA/FRANCIS R. MALASIGHundreds of thousands of people were spending their fifth night sleeping in the open in the Philippines last night as soldiers and aid workers struggled to deliver help to the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

Almost half of the estimated 660,000 people left homeless by its devastating wind and waves were still without shelter as tropical weather brought more heavy and forecasters warned of the risk of a second typhoon later this week.

Anger across the Philippines was continuing to rise at what seemed to be the slow response to the crisis, with many areas yet to receive aid on the scale needed.

The number killed remains unclear, with the United Nations estimating at least 10,000.

Benigno Aquino, the Philippines’ president, said yesterday that he believed that the true figure was lower – saying only between 2,000 and 2,500 had perished – but many of the worst-affected towns and islands have yet to provide reliable death tolls.

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Barack Obama is No John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan

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Two presidents during the last 50 years captured the hearts and imagination of the American people like no others: John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Their rhetoric and their vision stirred people to believe and to act; they helped define the eras in which they lived.

In 2008, then candidate Barack Obama identified both as presidents worthy of his emulation in terms of changing the “trajectory” and the atmosphere of the country. After five years, he has failed to capture the magic of our 35th and 40th Presidents and the reason is becoming perfectly clear. Though he is a gifted orator, the vision he has offered does not comport with reality, nor resonate with the true American spirit.

Some of the most memorable phrases of Kennedy’s and Reagan’s presidencies capture the essence of the vision each cast.

Of course Kennedy’s most famous words were his summoning call from his Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” The vision Kennedy offered was primarily focused on a belief in the American people as the source of change and hope and strength, and not the government.

The Kennedy Administration became known as the “New Frontier,” a phrase taken from his speech accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960. “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises, it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook…My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age – to all who respond to the Scriptural call: “Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.”

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