By Abby Borovitz, 02/05/14 04:38 PM

The Obama Administration keeps defending the Affordable Care Act, but a majority of Americans still disapprove according to a new poll.

In a Gallup Poll released Tuesday, 51% of Americans said they disapprove of the Affordable Care Act and 41% said they approve. While the disapproval is still high, it is a slight improvement from Gallup’s poll last month which revealed 54% disapprove and 38% approve of the law.

“Even if the Affordable Care Act fulfills its purpose of improving the overall health of the nation by expanding individuals’ access to insurance, public opinion of the law itself remains sickly,” Gallup data says. “Americans’ disapproval of the law has declined slightly since its peak late last year during the flawed rollout of the federal health exchange website, but a majority still disapprove of the law, and few believe it will make their current or future healthcare situation better.

Larry Husten, Contributor, 2/05/2014 @ 3:11PM

AT&T T -0.5% announced today that it had appointed cardiologist Eric Topol as its Chief Medical Advisor. The company said he will “impact the design, development and delivery of AT&T’s healthcare IT solutions, connecting the healthcare ecosystem to enhance health outcomes and care delivery processes for patients and their caregivers.”

In addition to his duties at AT&T Topol will continue to serve as the the Chief Academic Officer at Scripps Health and as the editor-in-chief of Medscape. He is the author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care.

By Henry Hebeler, Feb. 4, 2014, 5:00 a.m. EST

Over the years many different income drawdown rules have been sold as “safe” for retirees.

The idea has been to give retirees a tool to know how much they can take out of savings each year that will meet two criteria: (1) Provide the maximum inflation-adjusted income each year, and (2) not exhaust savings before death.

The various rules to satisfy the two criteria above were based on research using statistical representations of past investment return histories, sometimes with a fixed average historical inflation rate and sometimes with a statistical correlation of returns and inflation.

By ANDREW TAYLOR and RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press, Feb 4, 9:44 PM EST

WASHINGTON (AP) — Several million American workers will cut back their hours on the job or leave the nation’s workforce entirely because of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, congressional analysts said Tuesday, adding fresh fuel to the political fight over “Obamacare.”

The workforce changes would mean nationwide losses equal to 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, in large part because people would opt to keep their income low to stay eligible for federal health care subsidies or Medicaid, the Congressional Budget Office said. It had estimated previously that the law would lead to 800,000 fewer jobs by that year.

By Alex Wayne Feb 4, 2014 9:01 PM PT

Obamacare will reduce the hours Americans work by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs in 2017, the Congressional Budget Office said, sparking renewed Republican criticism of the law and a fresh defense from the White House.

The total number of hours worked will fall about 1.5 percent to 2 percent from 2017 to 2024 as a result of the health-care overhaul, the CBO said yesterday in a report. The reduction, about twice the agency’s estimates in 2010, is due “almost entirely” to low-wage employees who may choose to give up extra hours of work to avoid losing subsidies or tax advantages under the law, the report said.

Insurance, Health Reform, Feb 04, 2014

But news outlets report that the computer and phone systems designed to address those appeals have yet to be launched. So far, an estimated 22,000 requests for fixes have been submitted via the mail. Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a statement Monday saying it was reaching out to customers who encountered errors during the signup process to assist them in completing applications without going through a formal appeal.

Reuters: U.S. Says Healthcare.Gov Enrollment Appeal Hearings To Begin Soon
The Obama administration on Monday said it will soon begin hearings to resolve problems for people who enrolled in health insurance through the Obamacare website healthcare.gov, only to encounter errors including unnecessarily high costs.

By Justin Sink, February 03, 2014, 02:51 pm

The White House on Monday vowed to help the tens of thousands of ObamaCare enrollees who contend that the HealthCare.gov website improperly enrolled them during the sign-up process to purchase new insurance.

“We are going to get them help,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that approximately 22,000 Americans had filed appeals with the government to correct errors with their enrollment data. The complaints charge that the ObamaCare marketplace had charged them too much for insurance, incorrectly enrolled them or didn’t enroll them at all.

By Chris Farrell February 03, 2014

The latest Gallop poll for January shows that only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. It’s an abysmal number, a bare fraction above the all-time low of 9 percent reached in November 2013. Still, there are faint signs that the title of the least productive Congress in modern history lies uneasy with some lawmakers. President Obama’s State of the Union address on Jan. 28 gave lawmakers from both sides of the aisle an opportunity to come together to solve a real problem—America’s lack of retirement savings. “Let’s do more to help Americans save for retirement,” the president said. “Today, most workers don’t have a pension. A Social Security check often isn’t enough on its own. And while the stock market has doubled over the last five years, that doesn’t help folks who don’t have 401ks.”

By Kelly Greene, Feb. 3, 2014 4:21 p.m. ET

Experts are starting to rethink how much stock people should hold in retirement.

In general, the new thinking goes, people should be more heavily invested in equities than is suggested by some traditional rules of thumb, such as subtracting one’s age from 100 to determine a portfolio’s stock allocation. One new, and controversial, theory even goes so far as to suggest that stock exposure should increase the further one moves into retirement.

By Anne Tergesen, Feb. 3, 2014, 5:02 a.m. EST

You probably know the conventional wisdom: People just entering retirement should have a big portion of their savings—say, 40% to 60%—invested in stocks to help their nest egg grow over time. And as they age, all but the wealthiest should gradually reduce their equity exposure to protect against 2008-style market declines.

Now, a study in this month’s issue of the Journal of Financial Planning is calling that advice into question.

The report finds that those who take the opposite approach—by reducing equity exposure right after retirement and then gradually raising it over time—are likely to make their money last longer.