“The federal health-care overhaul is prompting some colleges and universities to cut the hours of adjunct professors, renewing a debate about the pay and benefits of these freelance instructors who handle a significant share of teaching at U.S. higher-education institutions.”
“The American Medical Association praised the reintroduction Wednesday of a bill to repeal the controversial Medicare payments board in President Obama’s healthcare law. Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) reintroduced his bill to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a panel of 15 healthcare experts with the power to cut Medicare payments to doctors if spending grows faster than a prescribed rate.”
“A willow, not an oak. So said conservatives of Chief Justice John Roberts when he rescued the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a.k.a. Obamacare — from being found unconstitutional. But the manner in which he did this may have made the ACA unworkable, thereby putting it on a path to ultimate extinction.”
“The Obama administration says it’s identified hospitals that provide patients with the most value under a new ObamaCare bonus program. Unfortunately, they turn out to be the very same facilities that the sweeping health care law tries to block from expanding. ObamaCare has impeded the expansion of the hospitals that may provide patients with the most value according to the results of an ObamaCare bonus program.”
“Republicans never got their chance to chop down President Barack Obama’s health care law, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe from the clippers as Congress looks for solutions for tough fiscal times. The Affordable Care Act brings in a lot of new taxes and savings, but it also dishes out as much as $1.7 trillion in new spending over the next decade — money that looks awfully tempting to lawmakers scrounging around for ways to fund other projects or pay down the deficit.”
“‘Even though’? In fact, Obamacare is simply doing what a lot of people predicted it would. Critics of ObamaCare warned that it would produce precisely the kind of premium increases we are now seeing, for precisely the reasons that new reports are now citing. I was one of those critics, and I take no joy in pointing out that we told you so.”
“This note analyzes the ACA through the use of a large-scale microsimulation model of insurance markets. We
find a rich array of impacts across a variety of insurance products. As shown in the table below, on balance the ACA will raise the costs of exchange-based insurance products (and, accordingly, raise the cost of government subsidies). In particular, consumers may be expected to suffer sharp ‘sticker shock’ upon full implementation of the ACA in 2014 as premiums will at best remain unchanged, and for others may rise as much 13 percent.”
“Around the country, insurers are fixing to raise rates by double digits. They’re privately briefing politicians in Washington on what’s in store. Those briefings are leaving a lot of folks up and down Pennsylvania Avenue jumpy.”