WASHINGTON — [font size="+1"] A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.[/font]

The attack stems from two years of effort by Senator Marco Rubio and others in Congress to undermine a key financing mechanism in the law. So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.

Mr. Rubio’s efforts against the so-called risk corridor provision of the health law have hardly risen to the forefront of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but his plan limiting how much the government can spend to protect insurance companies against financial losses has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage.

The risk corridors were intended to help some insurance companies if they ended up with too many new sick people on their rolls and too little cash from premiums to cover their medical bills in the first three years under the health law. But because of Mr. Rubio’s efforts, the administration says it will pay only 13 percent of what insurance companies were expecting to receive this year. The payments were supposed to help insurers cope with the risks they assumed when they decided to participate in the law’s new insurance marketplaces.
(more)

Throughout President Trump’s first 100 days, the Fact Checker team will be tracking false and misleading claims made by the president since Jan. 20.

Jump to the full list

Trump has been in office for 67 days. As of our latest update on day 63, we’ve counted 317 false or misleading claims.

Highlight claims about: (this categorizes lies by topic)
(more)

WASHINGTON ― Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants the Senate to delay a vote on President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick as long as Trump’s campaign remains under investigation by the FBI.

Democrats have struggled to come up with a cohesive strategy on how to handle the vote to confirm Neil Gorsuch, whom Trump picked in January to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat on the high court.

On Monday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in his testimony to Congress that his agency is investigating ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“There is a cloud now hanging over the head of the president, and while that’s happening, to have a lifetime appointment made by this president seems very unseemly and there ought to be a delay,” Schumer told reporters on Tuesday.

The only reason Gorsuch has a chance to win confirmation now is because Republicans refused to even hold a hearing for President Barack Obama’s nominee after Scalia died in February more than a year ago. Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, went through all the motions of meeting senators, but Republicans refused to consider him because Obama was going to leave office in a little less than a year.
(more)

~~

The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.

And then something happened. As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”

Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”

And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.

So the insurance companies did the only things they could. In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether. This has left some states with only one single insurer left. In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.
(more)

rump’s lies aren’t just a problem for Washington insiders and the media. They’re having a tragic effect on actual lives – even the lives of people who supported him.

One such supporter is Helen Beristain. She believed Trump when he said he was only interested in deporting hard criminals. This week, she learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) is scheduled to deport her husband, Roberto Beristain – owner of a popular restaurant in a conservative community in Northern Indiana – to Mexico tomorrow.

We know what you’re thinking. Helen’s husband must be one of Trump’s ‘bad hombres,’ a drug dealer, perhaps, or maybe a rapist, or a gang leader. Not exactly.

His crime that ran him afoul of Trump’s deportation force? Accidentally entering Canada 17 years ago.

(more)

The Republican plan to repeal Obamacare remains deathly unpopular, and the GOP have foundered in their attempts to lie their way into higher approval numbers for the plan. But that did not stop Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) from trotting out the desperate and false claim that Medicaid expansion killed 80,000 Medicaid recipients.


(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

One of the key obstacles to the success of the Affordable Care Act was the sheer volume of lies that were fed to the American about the bill, often abetted by the press.

This time around, though, those lies have failed to weaken support for the now-popular Obamacare, or to garner any support for the Republican repeal plan.

But that reality did not stop House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) from throwing out a desperate whopper during a CNN interview, claiming that Medicaid expansion has caused “80,000 more deaths attributable to Medicaid care”:
(please go to article to see the schmuck make this statement on video)

"And then if you look at where the majority of the people went, they went on Medicaid, and historically if you compare Medicaid, the outcome of service to other parts of the industrialized world, it has some of the poor, worst performing outcomes. In fact, since the Affordable Care Act came in, there’s been over 80,000 more deaths attributed to Medicaid care, and we want people to have access, but more importantly, we want them to have access to quality care."

(more)

President Obama released a statement marking the seventh anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. The former president also used his statement to sharply rebuke the ongoing Republican activity designed to repeal the law, engineered by Donald Trump and Paul Ryan.

Obama makes clear that “any changes” should “make our health care system better, not worse for hardworking Americans,” a clear allusion to the Congressional Budget Office’s conclusion that the Republican-backed America Health Care Act would kick 24 million people off of the insurance they gained on Obamacare, with millions more remaining uninsured.

There has been a grassroots uprising against the Republican’s anti-health care agenda, with town hall meetings packed with angry and fearful constituents who want to hold on to the coverage they have.

Pointing out that the law has made clear that “health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for everybody,” Obama highlights the benefits of the legislation: “Twenty million Americans have gained the security and peace of mind of health insurance” while “more than ninety percent of Americans are insured – the highest rate in our history.”
(more)

Among the many other problems facing the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, it turns out that one of their hastily-added "improvements" to the bill could leave 7 million military veterans ineligible for health care tax credits. When asked about the snafu, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had no idea what reporters were talking about.

In their desperation to gain votes for their unpopular plan to repeal Obamacare, House Republicans inserted a raft of “improvements” to the bill, including one that could harm up to 7 million veterans by making them ineligible for the bill’s tax credits.

Former Policy Advisor for the House Republican Conference under Chairman Mike Pence Chris Jacobs discovered the disastrous tweak, and described its impact:

The most recent estimates suggest about 9.1 million individuals are enrolled in VA health programs. However, a 2014 Congressional Budget Office score of veterans’ choice legislation concluded that “about 8 million [veterans] qualify to enroll in VA’s health system but have not enrolled.” Subtracting for VA enrollment gains since that CBO score leaves approximately seven million veterans eligible for, but not enrolled in, VA health programs, and thus potentially affected by the House’s “technical” change.

Will Fischer, Iraq War Veteran and Director of Government Outreach for VoteVets, slammed the plan in an email statement:

“What started as a bad bill has now turned into a grotesque Frankenstein monster, a crude and rushed patchwork of mini-bills that hurt people who can least afford it.

Now, we find out that Trumpcare will strip tax credits from potentially millions of veterans, and flood the VA with new patients at a time the VA is understaffed to handle a rush, thanks to the Donald Trump’s hiring freeze.

Since the freeze went into effect, we’ve already seen wait times lengthen; the claims backlog that President Obama had virtually eliminated, starting to grow again. This will only cause things to get worse.

We cannot put it more simply than this: Trumpcare will punish veterans. You cannot be pro-veteran and vote for Trumpcare.”

(MORE)

The top-line numbers of President Donald Trump’s budget proposal should give the nation’s scientists shivers. The administration doesn’t seem to think science should be a priority at all.

The blueprint released today is preliminary. The administration still needs to draft a full budget, which we won’t see until May. And ultimately, it’s up to Congress to decide who gets what.

But what’s important about this budget proposal is that it tells the public and Congress where the president’s concerns lie. And they don’t appear to be issues like climate change, disease treatment and prevention, or basic research funding for universities.

In all, we count up least $7 billion in reductions to science programs, including:

A $5.8 billion reduction in funding to the National Institutes of Health (18 percent of its total budget.) Most of the NIH’s budget goes to funding research in health care in universities across the country.

~~
~~

A $900 million reduction in the Energy Department’s basic science research. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy — a $300 million program that provides grants for energy research — is wholly eliminated because “the private sector is better positioned to finance disruptive energy research.”

(more)

The reports won't stop coming.

Donald Trump is in the middle of a non-stop waking nightmare. Every single day finds the nation's most powerful conspiracy theorist at the center of what might be the biggest conspiracy in our nation's history. And unlike the theories Trump likes to push (Obama having Trump's "wires tapped," Obama not being born in America, etc.), more and more this one seems like the real deal.

Yesterday reports came out that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had worked for a Russian oligarch with the intention of furthering Vladimir Putin's interests in the United States. That alone would usually make for the latest in a long line of bad weeks for the administration. Not unlike the week where Michael Flynn was fired because of his failure to disclose his Russian connections or the week where attorney general Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from any Russia investigation due to his lying under oath about his own contact with Russian officials during the campaign. Yes, if that was the last bad news for the administration on the Russia front, it would already have been a shitty week...

It was not the last bad news for the administration on the Russia front.

Last night CNN reported that it looks like the FBI's investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to swing the election may be looking bad for Donald Trump.

The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, US officials told CNN.

This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, according to one source.

(more)