Photo Credit: TownHallIn order to be a big-government liberal, mental gymnastics and verbal tap-dancing must come naturally. In an impressive display of verbal flexibility, a Health and Human Services official explained that Obamacare is really just a benevolent feature of a loving government that is completely incapable of coercion or force.

According to Joanne Grossie from the HHS, no one is being “forced” into the public exchanges. She even insisted that people who have found themselves kicked off their previous healthcare plans are actually quite lucky; because their previous plans were obviously inadequate clunkers that catered only to their gullibility and stupidity… Or something. According to the National Review Online:

“If you got one of the notices that your policy was going to be discontinued because it didn’t adhere to the law, it meant that now you could go into the health-insurance marketplace,” HHS’s Joanne Grossie told Republican state senator Jeff McWaters. “So, I just want to remind you that you weren’t losinginsurance you were just losing that insurance plan and were now beinginvited to go into the health insurance marketplace,” Grossie continued.

Nifty. It’s nice to know that when the IRS threatens to fine anyone who fails to get a new insurance plan through the government-run website (which I’m pretty sure is made from tinker-toys and an Atari), they’re really just inviting us to take part in Obamacare. I’m glad we cleared that up, because it would be easy for normal people to see that as coercion.

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerHealth insurance premiums under Obamacare are rising in a boatload of states, but HealthCare.gov customers will be faced with a laundry list of glitches and changes that could result in hiked premiums on top of that, according to new research from the American Action Forum.

There’s a big problem with the health-care law’s regulations hiking the actual cost of health insurance for many people. Premium rates are rising because policies are required to be more inclusive, whether the customer wants extra servivces or not. But on top of rising prices, there are seven policies on the federal Obamacare exchange itself that can cause even bigger premium hikes next year.

Partly to blame, according to the free-market think tank’s health policy analyst Angela Boothe, is that on HealthCare.gov, many customers just aren’t guaranteed a certain price for their health insurance.

In a private market, an insurance company charges its customers a set price. But in Obamacare exchanges, the federal government can change what they’re charging many customers after the fact — especially if the customer is one of the 85 percent of federal Obamacare sign-ups receiving a subsidy.

One culprit is an ongoing mismatch between Obamacare applications and federal data. When it comes to premium subsidies, errors can result in effective premium increases — owing the IRS money back at tax season.

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Photo Credit: Edgard Garrido / Reuters / LandovWal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation’s largest private employer.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

“We had to make some tough decisions,” Sally Wellborn, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.

Wellborn says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: “We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart.”

The announcement comes after Wal-Mart said far more U.S. employees and their families are enrolling in its health care plans than it had expected following rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Wal-Mart, which employs about 1.4 million full- and part-time U.S. workers, says about 1.2 million Wal-Mart workers and family members combined now participate in its health care plan.

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerWhen a company manager asked President Obama about his company’s rising health care costs on Friday, Obama’s first response was to blame the company.

Speaking at Millennium Steel Services in Princeton, Indiana, the president said that if the company’s health insurance costs were still rising, the management simply isn’t “shopping” correctly.

“We are seeing almost a double-digit increase in health-care costs every year,” Millennium Steel general manager Mihir Paranjape told President Obama. “Do you think that trend is going to go down, and what can we do to control that trend?”

“I think that’s really interesting, you’re gonna have to talk to Henry,” Obama replied, referring to Henry Jackson, Millennium Steel’s CEO. “No, no, no, this is serious,” he continued, when several audience members laughed, “The question is whether you guys are shopping effectively enough.”

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