The Supreme Court agreed Friday to settle a widespread dispute between the Obama administration and religious non-profits over insurance coverage for birth control, which is sure to elevate issues of religious freedom and reproductive rights in next year’s presidential campaign.
As Congress considers year-end legislative options, one small change in the Affordable Care Act could make a big difference in access to quality health care for millions of Americans: Lifting the ban on creation and expansion of physician-owned hospitals.
A lack of oversight when implementing the consumer operated and oriented plans (CO-OPs) as well as their inability to compete are to blame for the small insurers’ recent string of failures, experts said Thursday at a hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
Health plans that offer coverage of doctors and hospitals outside the plan’s network are getting harder to find on the insurance marketplaces, according to two analyses published this week. Two-thirds of the 131 carriers that offered silver-level preferred provider organization plans in 2015 will either drop them entirely or offer fewer of them in January, an analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found. Those cutbacks will affect customers in 37 states, according to the foundation.
Advocates in Washington of the Affordable Care Act have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve the president’s signature health-care law—and they’re fighting even harder to expand it in the states. Conservative lawmakers in our home states of Utah and Florida recently defeated a combined three proposals to expand Medicaid under ObamaCare. They were absolutely right to do so, as the fiscal messes in states that did expand Medicaid demonstrate.