Your 2014 tax return will ask if you had insurance coverage or qualified for an exemption. If not, you may owe a shared responsibility payment when you file in 2015.

On Monday, Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) repeatedly refused to answer a simple question on when she knew people wouldn’t be able to keep their current plans under Obamacare.

Sen. Hagan promised on at least 24 separate occasions people in North Carolina would be able to keep their current health care plan — once Obamacare went into effect — if they wished to do so.

However, she dodged the question at her press conference after she made it official she’d be running for re-election.

One reporter asks, “Much has been made about if you like you health care plan you can keep it, but what we’re still not sure about is, when exactly did you learn that wasn’t the case? Because you were on a lot of committees that helped write the bill. Was there a specific time frame — a day, a month, a week — that you can narrow it to when you learned that wasn’t going to be the case?”

Hagan avoids the question. Instead, she talks about a bill she is sponsoring that will allow people to keep their plans.

"Despite all that good news, there's plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all over America," said Reid.

"The leukemia patient whose insurance policy was canceled [and] could die without her medication, Mr. President, that's an ad being paid for by two billionaire brothers. It's absolutely false. Or the woman whose insurance policy went up $700 a month--ads paid for around America by the multibillionaire Koch brothers, and the ad is false.

"We heard about the evils of Obamacare, about the lives it's ruining in Republicans' stump speeches and in ads paid for by oil magnates, the Koch brothers. But in those tales, turned out to be just that: tales, stories made up from whole cloth, lies distorted by the Republicans to grab headlines or make political advertisements.

"Mr. President, these two brothers are trying to buy America. They not only funnel money through their Americans for Prosperity, they funnel money into all kinds of organizations to do the same thing that they're doing. They're trying to buy America. I don't believe america is for sale. We'll see, Mr. President."

"Imagine signing up and paying for health insurance and then being told you can't use it," say the local anchors. "that's the situation facing an Ogden man."

Says the reporter, "This is one of those medical insurance nightmares that all starts with a guy who was simply trying to sign up for health insurance through the federal health care exchange. More specifically, he wanted a dental plan. He got it, and he's been paying on for several months. But now that it's time to use that plan, he's being told it's worthless."

But when they went to use that plan, the man's adult children were told it was worthless. "It was was pediatric dental not adult dental," says the man.

"That's right," says the reporter, "a dental plan for children. Well, they don't need that. So, Scott says he asked [the health care plan] to cancel the policy. Thus began the run around. Select Health says he has to cancel through the marketplace where he signed up. But the marketplace told him, we can't help you reslove this issue."

Says the Utah man, "I'm paying a monthly premium for dental coverage that I cannot use."

Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.

The snapshots from the surveys released Thursday provide preliminary answers to what has been one of the biggest mysteries since HealthCare.gov and separate state marketplaces opened last fall: Are they attracting their prime audience?

A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality” President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.

Unite Here warned that due to Obamacare's much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay, the result will be a pay cut of up to $5 an hour. "If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage," said the union in a new report.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

“And the truth is that they can get coverage all for what it costs you to pay your cell phone bill,” Obama said.

Discounting taxes nationwide, that plan costs about $90 on Verizon, $80 on AT&T, $70 on Sprint, and $60 on T-Mobile every month. Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer the same plans with unlimited monthly data for $80. All pricing is relevant as of January 2014.

Verizon Wireless and AT&T, with 96.2 and 72.6 million respective wireless subscribers, make up the vast majority of cellphone users in the U.S.

Of the Affordable Care Act’s “bronze,” “silver” and “gold” coverage plans offered on the Washington, D.C. health insurance exchange marketplace, the cheapest middle-of-the-road equivalent silver plan is $181.01 per month, after subsidies, for the lowest age bracket, which covers 27-year-olds and under that make about $25,000 annually. Silver plans must cover 70 percent of all medical costs, according to the law.

...

The only instance in which the president’s math is slightly more correct is in terms of the lowest tier bronze plan, which covers 60 percent of all annual health care expenses included in the plan. The cheapest bronze plan on the D.C. health insurance exchange has a $124.05 monthly premium — still almost 70 percent more expensive than the average wireless service bill.

The Obama administration has decided that the sequester's mandatory spending cuts no longer apply to part of Obamacare.

The health care law provides subsidies to help low-income people cover some of their out-of-pocket costs. Last year, the administration said those subsidies were taking a 7 percent cut because of the sequester, which imposed across-the-board reductions in federal spending.

But now, the White House has changed its mind. It removed the cost-sharing subsidies from its list of programs that are subject to the sequester, eliminating the 7 percent cut for 2015.

The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich’s mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn’t.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state’s Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He’s been paying monthly premiums since November.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man’s-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he’s covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich’s insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich’s problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

Xerox, meanwhile, said it’s working every day to fix Basich’s problem, and its legal counsel is routine.

In the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and its insurance exchanges, you can find a success story for every failure. But Basich’s case is extreme.

WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?

Basich said he began trying to enroll on Oct. 1, the day the exchange website went live. Like many consumers, he fought technical flaws during multiple sign-up attempts. In mid-November he finally got through and chose his plan: UnitedHealthcare’s MyHPNSilver1.

“It was like reaching the third level of Doom,” Basich said of the torturous sign-up process.

Basich paid his first premium on Nov. 21, and within days the exchange withdrew the $160.77 payment from his money-market savings account. Because Basich paid a month before the Dec. 23 deadline, his coverage was to begin Jan. 1.

Weeks ticked by, but Basich received nothing to confirm he had insurance. Nevada Health Link kept telling him he was enrolled, but UnitedHealthcare said he wasn’t in their system.

Basich’s predicament went critical on Dec. 31, when he had a heart attack. His treatment, which included a triple bypass on Jan. 3, resulted in $407,000 in medical bills in January and February that no insurer is covering...

The brouhaha started when Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not 'getting covered'... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX.”

Jesse Lee, the Director of Progressive Media at Barack Obama's White House, responded that that was a “Flat lie, no fee for previous year,” adding, “Scary how much influence he once had.”

Lee’s response to Drudge set off a firestorm in the liberal media, with many mainstream media and left-wing reporters countering him on Twitter and in their own articles to claim he does not have to pay Obamacare’s Individual Mandate tax until next year. The individual mandate went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, and most people paying their taxes right now are paying taxes for 2013.

“Dude, there's no penalty until next yr,” Sahil Kapur of the leftwing Talking Points Memo tweeted.

Kapur’s colleague at TPM Dylan Scott wrote a full story with a headline alleging Drudge was “probably lying.”

“Americans don't pay a penalty for not having health insurance until they file their 2014 taxes -- in 2015,” Scott wrote. “So either Drudge is lying or he paid a huge penalty a year earlier than he needed to.”

“Penalty isn't collected until 2015,” Sam Baker of National Journal tweeted at Drudge.
The Huffington Post’s Jeffrey Young wrote a full article in which he described Drudge’s tweet as “weird” and a “little head-scratching” because the Obamacare tax does not kick in until the 2014 tax year.

Drudge indicated in his followup tweets that since he is self-employed as the proprietor of The Drudge Report, he files as a small business. According to the IRS’s website for self-employed individuals, they are required to pay taxes quarterly.

“As a self-employed individual, generally you are required to file an annual return and pay estimated tax quarterly,” the IRS website reads.

So, when they file and pay those 2014 first quarter taxes, such individuals have to pay the Obamacare Individual Mandate tax if they opted to not have health insurance—like Drudge just did.

Additionally, the IRS form (1040-ES) for estimating quarterly taxes specifically recommends adding the mandate penalty to line 12 for "other taxes" -- to pay before the first quarterly deadline of April 15.

“It is true that thousands of small businesses will be forced to pay Obamacare taxes quarterly in 2014,” a Senate Budget Committee aide told Breitbart News on Friday afternoon.

Drudge even indicated as much in followup tweets, but the left-wing reporters—and the White House—have left their criticisms of him intact.

“Dazed team Obama media reporters think Opt-Out tax 'year away’?” Drudge tweeted. “Not for small businesses that file Qtr estimates. We're there NOW, baby #pay.”

With the deadline for enrolling in the Obamacare exchanges just days away, the White House is scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas — including turning to cat GIFs, or animated videos made of multiple still photos.

The cats are just some of the goofy GIFs the White House has posted, according to the Florida Times-Union, which said the White House is trying to catch the latest retro Internet craze.

Some of the GIFs don’t seem terribly related to the points the White House is trying to make.

Indeed, they seem to be near-desperate grabs for attention as the administration is still short of the goal of enrollees, particularly among younger Americans who are needed in order to make the economics of the Affordable Care Act work.