Category: Impact

Ryan’s plan embraces the idea that refundable tax credits can be used to give people universal access to “quality, affordable health care.” It recognizes that we can’t return to the pre-Obamacare status quo, which was too arbitrary, too expensive, and too bureaucratic. It concedes that reforming Medicaid—including Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion—will be a gradual process, requiring a new infusion of federal funds to help cajole states into reforming their own health-care markets (which were hardly free and efficient before Obamacare).

These reforms envision portable, affordable coverage. Routine health expenses would be channeled through Health Savings Accounts. Private exchanges would compete to offer affordable insurance—as they already do for employers. Currently, employers’ spending on health insurance plans is tax-deductible and uncapped—meaning that if organizations want to buy $100,000 health plans and write them off, they can.

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Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is cutting back its participation in the state’s Affordable Care Act insurance exchange next year after losing nearly $300 million in the individual market in 2015.

However, the large Blues insurer is not completely exiting the state-based marketplace. Fully withdrawing has its consequences: Federal law bars insurers from re-entering the marketplaces for five years, assuming they discontinue all types of individual policies.

Instead, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is dropping health plans with the broadest networks sold on and off the exchange and will push people toward its narrower HMO option called Blue Plus, according to the Star Tribune.

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This is a story about how the Obama administration simultaneously stretched the Affordable Care Act possibly beyond its limits and diminished the prospects of that law achieving a sustainable health insurance market. It’s a case of regulators gone wild in a fit of pique. Basically, the Obama administration needlessly eliminated any pressure on individuals, most of whom would be healthy, to obtain decent health insurance policies for free. The pools are less stable as a result and some individuals may needlessly have been cast into medical bankruptcy.

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The Republican House is methodically laying out a comprehensive agenda to spread prosperity, protect the nation, uphold the Constitution, reform health care, and—with its presentation Friday of a comprehensive tax-reform plan—create jobs, grow paychecks and boost the economy.

This agenda, dubbed “A Better Way: Our Vision for a Confident America,” is Speaker Paul Ryan’s brainchild, but the work of the entire Republican conference.

Mr. Ryan rolled out its first plank June 7 with an audacious reimagining of policies to help Americans rise out of poverty. The initiative would require those on welfare to seek work while providing them better access to job training and assistance. It would reform poverty-fighting programs to help people move from dependency on government to lives of independence and personal responsibility.

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The House GOP today released the final of their six major policy blueprints that they will be running on in 2016 and passing in 2017.

Today’s iteration is in many ways the touchstone of the whole effort: tax reform. The plan is, as the report boldly proclaims, “Built for Growth.” But it wisely does so in a way that doesn’t forget middle class working families struggling to get by, and in a way that passes a basic test of common sense and practicality.

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A new poll of voters in battleground states finds a rare opportunity for bipartisan agreement on healthcare, with Americans strongly favoring action on public policies that support medical discovery into new treatments and cures. The poll was jointly commissioned by the Galen Institute and Center Forward, center-right and center-left think tanks.

Purple Insights interviewed 800 registered voters earlier this month and found that nearly all those surveyed believe it is important for the United States to continue to develop new treatments and cures for diseases and believe these new discoveries are an opportunity to help the United States maintain its competitive edge.

A strong 78% say that fostering policies that support medical innovation should be a top priority for members of Congress and candidates for Congress.

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Paul Ryan has gotten his often fractious House Republicans to endorse an outline of a plan to replace Obamacare, although not yet an actual piece of legislation. While the outline contains many of the health policies conservatives sought even before Obamacare, those policies may have particular appeal against the backdrop of the health-care system Obamacare has created.

In the past Republicans have argued about how to reform tax policy on health care: Should employer-provided coverage remain untaxed, or should this tax break end? Should people without access to such coverage get a tax credit or a tax deduction? The House plan lets the tax break stay — avoiding the political disaster that a less compromising free-market plan would have courted — but trims it for the most expensive plans.

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House Republicans have estimates from the Congressional Budget Office on how their health care plan, released Wednesday, would affect the federal deficit. They’re just not releasing them.

The 37-page white paper doesn’t include cost and savings estimates, according to a senior GOP aide, because Republicans may want to break up the plan into smaller bills and some of the numbers depend on major decisions yet to be made.

Health analysts say there’s another reason for not offering estimates — it keeps Republicans from publicly making tough decisions about tradeoffs between cost savings and coverage. These decisions could open them up to harsh criticism from Democrats and would likely divide members of the GOP caucus itself.

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John McCain is running for reelection like it’s 2010.

The Arizona Republican has made his opposition to Obamacare — which dominated Senate races across the country six years ago — a central point of his campaign, by all accounts, the toughest reelection fight of his career.

He’s betting that shrinking coverage options and premium increases that could go as high as 65 percent if insurers get their way will resonate with Arizona voters, even as most of his Republican colleagues running this year have moved on to other issues.

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Is the new House Republican plan to replace Obamacare politically viable? Two factors weigh in the plan’s favor: First, after the administration sold Obamacare as a program for middle-class families who were anxious about losing their coverage if something went wrong, Democrats delivered a plan that made a lot of middle-class families worse off, and few of them better off. Second, the continuing problems in the insurance exchanges mean we remain at risk of seeing the number of uninsured start to march back upward, as unsubsidized consumers start to drop their high-priced, high-deductible, narrow-network insurance.

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