Walmart, America's largest employer, announced that it will stop providing health insurance for around 30,000 part time workers, in order to cut costs.

The Congressional Budget Office now says Obamacare will cost $104 billion less and cover millions more people than it previously estimated. Also, more employers are offering workers health coverage. Open-market-sustainable socialism is on the march, comrades!

Writing in today's New York Times opinion section, the psychotherapist and Atlantic contributor Lori Gottlieb offers a shocking first-person account of why the Affordable Care Act is in so much political trouble: It's because many Americans are too stupid and too selfish to understand how health insurance works, on the most fundamental level.

While politicians argue incessantly around President Obama's healthcare system overhaul, one thing gets frequently lost in the din: Does Obamacare actually improve America's healthcare system.

Authorities in Oregon say a homeless man who held up a bank for $1 was just looking for a way to go to jail so he could receive free health care.

When Sergio Branco was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia earlier this year, his family knew the resulting medical expenses would rack up quickly.

A man being hailed as a hero for saving a 4-year-old girl from drowning in a Georgia creek remains in the Redmond Regional Medical Center's Intensive Care Unit after becoming paralyzed from the waist down during the rescue.

A Portland, Maine, physician believes he's found the cure for this country's ailing health care system: No more health insurance.

On 60 Minutes last night, Mitt Romney told Scott Pelley he does too have a solution to the problem of America's millions of uninsured citizens: Send them to the emergency room.

Staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, an Arizona State University doctoral student with Stage 4 colon cancer who ran out of insurance money to cover his treatment decided he had nothing to lose by tweeting the CEO of his health insurance company and asking for help.

Three of the five Colorado hospitals currently treating those injured in the Aurora theater massacre have announced that they will either limit or erase altogether the medical expenses of uninsured victims.

Well, this isn't exactly surprising. Under pressure from the religious right, Barack Obama made a concession about birth-control insurance coverage — while religious employers will not have to offer free contraceptives to workers, the insurers themselves will have to. It's a compromise he shouldn't have had to make in the first place, and Catholic Church officials (along with prominent Republic leaders) are being dicks about it, anyway.

Bedbug death! Brain collection! Obesity drug! Depression stroke! Lung cancer! Sexxxy kids! Soup disease! Killer cantaloupe! And young people who think they're pret-ty damn clever! It's your Thursday Health Watch, where we watch your health—before you're ready!

If anything will make it easier for House conservatives to back off on shutting down the government this week, it's the prospect of a different, and much larger fight over the federally funded social safety net. House Republicans are preparing to introduce a 10-year budget Tuesday that will eliminate Medicare and replace it with a private insurance system that closely resembles the new health care law, and end Medicaid as an entitlement program all together.

Tea Party Rep.-elect Joe Walsh is so not hypocritical that he'll turn down his "cushy" government health insurance next year. This sucks for his wife, who "has a pre-existing medical condition and is now forced to hunt for a plan."

New Maryland Republican Representative Andy Harris won his seat on a platform of resisting the expansion of "government-run or government-mandated insurance." He also spent Monday demanding to know why he had to wait 28 days for his own government-run insurance.

Many liberals' long-held theory about the health care reform debate has, essentially, been confirmed in a new memoir: The White House cut a deal with interest groups early on to exclude a public insurance option. Thanks for telling everyone!

Health insurance CEO pay doubled to $13.1m. Her company's rates increase 31 per cent.

Today news broke that Jay Bennett, a singer/songwriter most famous for his work with the band Wilco, died during his sleep on Sunday. Bennett, who earlier in the month sued Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, recently blogged that he needed hip replacement surgery, but lacked health insurance to cover its costs.

Another (self identified) REAL Starbucks employee has come forward to give us a peek behind the coffee company's chipper training day iron curtain of enthusiasm. This tipster confirms that Tuesday's mandatory job training was, in fact, for nerds, but then rises to a stirring defense of the company. The argument: "Sure, I got a nasty case of herpes on my hand because management is too cheap to buy more than one pair of rubber dishwashing gloves for a staff of fifteen. But hey, I'm insured to the hilt, so the Valtrex to quell said herpes is deeply discounted." Solid! The full, amusing email after the jump.