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The big rate increases announced last week for health insurance policies sold by California’s version of the federal health reform are the latest evidence that the Affordable Care Act, despite its name, cannot do much to tame the rise of health care costs. The government-run health insurance market is facing all the same cost pressures…

Bernie Sanders celebrated the health care concessions he won from Hillary Clinton Monday night as he gave a rousing endorsement to his former presidential rival. In a Democratic convention speech that revisited the agenda of his surprisingly competitive campaign for the nomination, Sanders reminded the audience that while he may have lost the race, he…

Progressive supporters of health reform wanted a public plan option to compete with private insurers offering insurance in the state and federal health exchanges. To draw support from progressives, proponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) created a type of nonprofit health insurance cooperative that would compete with established health insurers. Consumer…

In a presidential campaign that has been much more about personality than policy, here’s some news: A lot of Americans really do care about health care. Terrorism and the personal attributes of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton top a list of 10 issues that registered voters consider “extremely important” in a recent poll, but not…

Pence has always been a vocal opponent of the Affordable Care Act, even after the federal law passed in 2010 and was upheld by the Supreme Court. But when faced with the choice of whether to expand Medicaid to cover Indiana residents who earn incomes that are 138 percent or below the federal poverty level…

The Obama administration went to court Thursday to block two major health insurance mergers, siding with consumer advocates and medical groups worried that the consolidation of large national health plans could lead to higher premiums. The long-anticipated move by the Justice Department and attorneys general in California and 10 other states,  will at least temporarily prevent…

The Journal of the American Medical Assn. recently published a very unusual article: a scientific study authored by a sitting president of the United States. That’s never happened before. In a sense, it’s cool that President Obama cares enough about science to want to publish a paper in one of the world’s leading medical journals.…

Politicians tend to be most enraged by the problems they cause, and the liberal fury against insurance mergers is a classic of the genre. ObamaCare was designed to create government-directed oligopolies, but now its authors claim to be alarmed by less competition. Last week federal and 11 state antitrust regulators filed a double lawsuit to…

The man selected by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as her vice presidential running mate is a strong ally of Clinton’s in her push for improving the Affordable Care Act and expanding Medicaid to more states. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, whom Clinton named Friday as her running mate, has sponsored several bills to fix…

Hillary Clinton led a health care reform effort in the 1990s, promoted medical research as a senator, and has been bashing price-hiking drug companies on the campaign trail and in TV ads. So there’s every reason to expect her to make health care a major theme when she accepts the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia…