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Architect of ObamaCare Blames Fox News for Website’s Failure (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News Tonight on The Kelly File, Megyn Kelly took on the architect of ObamaCare for the second time. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel called the ObamaCare numbers released today “disappointing,” but said it’s not surprising given the website’s problems.

“That’s not right, Megyn, you’ve got the numbers wrong,” Emanuel said right off the bat, challenging the fact that almost five million Americans have had their insurance plans canceled.

After a heated back-and-forth, Kelly asked Emanuel if he believes the cancelations are unrelated to the ObamaCare rollout. He maintained that insurance companies cancel plans “all the time.”

Kelly pressed Emanuel repeatedly on whether he predicted insurance companies would cancel individual plans, forcing people into the exchanges. “Whether you could anticipate what business would do is irrelevant,” he answered.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sexually Suggestive ObamaCare ad Called ‘Degrading’ to Women

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Photo Credit: Fox News A sexually suggestive advertising campaign in support of Colorado’s health insurance exchange is taking heat, after the latest ad featured a woman boasting about her birth control while wondering how to get her man “between the covers.”

The ad, by ProgressNow Colorado and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, is being hammered as demeaning to women. It follows a prior ad from the same campaign featuring young men doing keg stands, under the banner “Got Insurance?”

“It’s degrading to women, and it says a lot about what they think of America’s youth today,” Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., said of the latest ad.

The new ad shows a woman holding a packet of birth control pills, while a suave-looking young man stands next to her with his arm around her waist.

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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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Democrat Senators Co-Sponsoring Bill To ‘Keep Your Healthcare Plan’

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Photo Credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/GettyBy CBS Sacramento/AP.

Health insurer Anthem Blue Cross of California has agreed to a two-month extension of about 104,000 individual policies after failing to give the required 90-day cancellation notice, state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones announced Tuesday.

The policies had been set to expire on Dec. 31 but will be extended until Feb. 28 for those who choose to re-enroll. Notices informing customers of the extension will be sent out this week, Anthem said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APDianne Feinstein joins push to keep health plans

By Seung Min Kim.

It’s not just red-state Democrats who want to take aggressive steps to mend controversial provisions in Obamacare.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that she will co-sponsor a bill by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to require insurance companies to continue offering their existing health care plans — a way to make good on President Barack Obama’s promise that consumers can keep their current coverage if they like it.

“This bill provides a simple fix to a complex problem,” Feinstein said in a statement Tuesday, calling Landrieu’s proposal a “commonsense fix” and urged Congress to pass it “quickly.”

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has no plans to bring Obamacare delay bills to the floor, and most Senate Democrats appear to be waiting until the end of the month — the date by which the administration has promised to fix the problematic health care website — to demand major delays to the law’s implementation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Military Members, Veterans Missing Out on Key ObamaCare Provision

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsOne of the most touted benefits of President Obama’s health care overhaul law is the provision allows parents to keep their adult children on their health insurance until age 26.

However, Trace Gallagher reported on “The Kelly File” Monday, this benefit is not being extended to a significant group of Americans: members of the U.S. military.

TRICARE, the Department of Defense program that provides health coverage to active duty and retired military members and their families, only covers young adult dependents up until age 21, or age 23 if they are enrolled full-time in college.

TRICARE recipients can then purchase a plan for their young adult dependents, according to their website.

Read more from this story HERE.

Early Numbers Show 3% Enrollment in Obamacare Among 12 Exchanges

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Photo Credit: Market Watch Blog If you’re expecting a low number of enrollees when the Department of Health and Human Services announces its first round of Obamacare registrant figures this week, here’s a sneak peek into what to expect.

Health-care consultant Avalere Health reported Monday that 3% of the expected 2014 enrollment figure was met as of last week, or 49,100 registrants out of 1.4 million, for 12 of the 15 exchanges available in 14 states and the District of Columbia. No figures were available for California, Massachusetts and Oregon and aren’t included in the totals. Also not included are figures from HealthCare.gov, the troubled online registration system for President Obama’s health-care overhaul in 36 states.

The exchanges for which data are available — Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — showed weaker-than-expected enrollment since their debut Oct. 1, says Dan Mendelson, chief executive of Avalere.

Read more from this story HERE.

Three 20-Year-Old Programmers Build a Working Obamacare Website in Just Days

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Photo Credit: CBSWhile the Obamacare website still remains broken, three 20-year-old programmers have shown the government how it should be done.

Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser developed a site in matter of days – and it does things the expensive and faltering healthcare.gov can’t do.

From a San Francisco office the men have built HealthSherpa.com, which presents the Affordable Health Care Act data in a much simpler way to the government website.

‘They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front,’ Liang told CBS News. The programmer continued: ‘They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision.’

HealthSherpa.com, which is just two weeks old, allows a user to simply input their zip code and view all the health plans available to them.

Read more from this story HERE.

DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz: Democrats Will Win in 2014 Running on Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AP/J. Scott ApplewhiteRep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that Democratic congressional candidates would win by running on Obamacare in the 2014 midterm elections.

“I think, actually, Candy, that Democratic candidates will be able to run on ObamaCare as an advantage leading into the 2014 election,” Wasserman Schultz told host Candy Crowley.

Crowley had been asking Wasserman Schultz about the common perception that the Obamacare issue had made the Virginia governor’s race closer than expected, causing Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe to lose ground in the final days of the raise, ultimately eeking out a narrow victory over Republican Ken Cuccinelli,

“I think Obamacare, because Americans have been feeling the benefits since 2010, where young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26, where on January 1 if you have a preexisting condition, like I do, as you know, as a breast cancer survivor, the peace of mind … that those Americans are going to have knowing that they can never be dropped or denied coverage for that preexisting condition, the preventative care that’s available without a co-pay or a deductible, those are benefits that Americans have already been feeling and will increasingly feel as Obamacare is fully implemented,” said Wasserman Schultz.

Read more from this story HERE.