Public outrage over double-digit rate hikes for health insurance may have helped push President Obama’s healthcare overhaul across the finish line, but the new law does not give regulators the power to block similar increases in the future.

And now, with some major companies already moving to boost premiums and others poised to follow suit, millions of Americans may feel an unexpected jolt in the pocketbook.

Although Democrats promised greater consumer protection, the overhaul does not give the federal government broad regulatory power to prevent increases. Read more…

Report health coverage on W-2 forms: Employers will have to report the value of an employee’s health care plan on W-2 forms.

“This is not the value of your claims but the value of the coverage you elected,” said Watts.  Read more…

Indoor tanning salons will charge customers a 10 percent tax beginning today in just one of the changes Americans will see as a result of the U.S. health-care overhaul signed into law by President Barack Obama. Read more…

Americans went on binges buying guns and ammunition in early 2009, worried that a radical leftist president and Democrat-dominated Congress would violate their Second-Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. The effects? Less murder, robbery, rape, and property crime, according to an FBI report released Monday. This gives the young president and Democrat Congress at least one proud but unintended accomplishment for which they’ll never claim credit.

Indeed, gun buyers were out in droves in late 2008 and early 2009. While it’s easy to infer that increased gun ownership figures align precisely with the drop in crime in the same calendar period, you won’t see that headline in the New York Times, despite their penchant for such inferences about increases in crime coinciding with increasing “guns on the street.”  Read more…