Recent Articles

As goes Iowa, so goes the nation — or at least that’s the conventional wisdom during presidential elections. Let’s hope the same rule applies to healthcare reform. Earlier this month, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law that takes advantage of a major loophole in Obamacare. The legislation, based on a similar effort in Tennessee,…

Arizona has asked the CMS to allow it to end retroactive coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries. If granted, the waiver request now under review at the CMS, would nix providers’ ability to bill for services provided in the three months before a beneficiary applies for Medicaid coverage, assuming the patient was eligible during that time. Providers in the…

A group of Democratic senators on Wednesday introduced an expanded public option for health insurance as the party debates the next steps to build on ObamaCare. The new proposal, called the Choose Medicare Act, was introduced by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), both seen as potential presidential contenders, though Murphy has said he is not running in 2020.…

Congressional leaders were poised last month to spend tens of billions of dollars in the omnibus bill to temporarily shore up Obamacare’s failing health insurance system. That money, however, never would have given Americans the long-term relief they so desperately need. After this idea was struck from the spending bill, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who…

The Trump administration hopes to move forward with a rule expanding alternatives to ObamaCare plans by this summer, Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta said Monday. The rule allows for small businesses and self-employed individuals to band together to buy insurance as a group in what are known as association health plans. “We hope to have that by this…

Medicaid expansion is back on the ballot. Organizers in Utah submitted signatures on Monday to put an initiative expanding Medicaid on the state’s ballot in November. They got 165,000 signatures, or about 50,000 more than they needed. State legislators are actually pushing a limited form of Medicaid expansion, but, as we covered before, the Trump administration…

This paper examines the impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – which substantially increased insurance coverage through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid expansions – on behaviors related to future health risks after three years. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and an identification strategy that leverages variation in pre-ACA uninsured rates…

In 2005 and 2009, Elizabeth Warren and her co-authors released two papers claiming that more than 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings in the U.S. were caused by medical debts. I wrote about the problems with these studies when they first came out, and even testified in Congress against reading too much into the findings of these studies because they…

According to a new brief from Altarum, health care prices have risen 2.2% since March of last year, the fastest annual growth rate since January 2012. One of the largest drivers of that price growth was hospitals. Altarum found that hospital prices have been growing annually at nearly 4%, the highest level in eight years.…

Murphycare could look a lot like Obamacare. Lawmakers Thursday sent to Gov. Phil Murphy a bill that will require nearly all New Jerseyans to have health insurance or pay a penalty in a bid to stabilize premiums for consumers in the Obamacare marketplace. They approved another bill that would set up a reinsurance plan that would…