Recent Articles

What happens to Obamacare after its namesake leaves the White House? The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has faced fierce opposition from congressional Republicans and many GOP-led state governments, survived unexpected legal challenges, and overcome a disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov. Through it all, ACA supporters could count on President Barack Obama to defend the law. But…

  One of the more controversial parts of the Affordable Care Act is its expansion of Medicaid. A new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University reviews Medicaid’s longstand­ing problems, discusses the incentives states face as a result of the elevated federal reim­bursement rate for the ACA Medicaid expansion population, and analyzes the…

  If Donald Trump is elected president, one thing that is fairly certain is that we’d hear loud calls from some quarters for the incoming administration and Congress to move quickly in 2017 on a “clean” repeal of Obamacare. “Clean” means that the bill would go as far as possible to repeal the health care…

What are the prospects for action on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during the next Congress and presidential administration? There is no easy answer to that question in this unusual election year, although one’s first reaction might be “not much.” As Larry Leavitt, MPP, noted in the JAMA Forum recently, the presidential platforms suggest fundamentally…

The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control suggests that the number of uninsured has declined roughly 22 million since 2013, and 17.8 million since 2010 (darn you, financial crisis!). And today we got data from the Census Bureau, which suggests that the number of uninsured people has fallen from 13.3 percent to 9.1…

Obamacare used the law’s vast authority to get control over the design and composition of health benefits. Clintoncare will try to use these same administrative riggings to get power over the pricing of these products and services. To rescue President Obama’s struggling health-care law, Hillary Clinton has proposed resurrecting the “public option.” This failed idea—a government-run…

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest long-term forecast, released last month, is a bracing report. As President Obama’s term comes to end, CBO finds that the federal government is on track to run up historically large deficits over the coming three decades, pushing federal debt to 141% of GDP, up from 39% in 2008. The president…

Eight of the states that will determine the Senate majority in November are likely to see significant reductions in the number of insurers participating in ObamaCare marketplaces. The likely departures of insurers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona and Missouri are pushing the healthcare law toward the center of some of the…

This week, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce released a new plan to impose more of Obamacare on their state. The Chamber acknowledged that their “guiding principle” in crafting the Medicaid expansion plan was simply to “take advantage of all federal dollars available.” As such, they’re lobbying for policymakers to expand Medicaid to a new welfare…

The state-run insurance marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act may not be sustainable, a GOP report released Tuesday by a House committee concludes. The Energy and Commerce Committee report concludes that the $5 billion the federal government committed to building state-based exchanges has resulted in a failed experiment, and says that none of the exchanges are…