Recent Articles

The ACA significantly altered the rules governing the individual insurance market, and the general effect was to lower premiums for older and less healthy people and raise premiums for younger and healthier people. To induce younger and healthier people to enroll, the law contained the individual mandate and subsidies for both buyers and, for the…

It’s not surprising that UnitedHealthcare is high-tailing it out of Arizona’s health-insurance marketplace. The exchanges — a major part of the Affordable Care Act — are money losers. Not enough young, healthy people have signed up in Arizona and elsewhere to use the plans. Some rural counties in Arizona may have no options on the exchange, which could complicate…

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services on Monday announced a massive update to managed care in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. In doing so, it attempts to bring the program in line with the changes Medicaid has undergone over the last decade. The new rule is the agency’s guideline for modernizing the low-income health…

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University released a new working paper on the Affordable Care Act. The study, authored by Brian Blase of the Mercatus Center, Doug Badger of the Galen Institute, and Ed Haislmaier of the Heritage Foundation contains two key findings: First, insurers incurred substantial losses overall despite receiving much larger back-end subsidies…

The conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) on Friday submitted its recommendations for a Republican replacement for ObamaCare as it seeks to shape a plan being formed by a group of House chairmen. The recommendations come from the RSC’s already-existing legislation, the American Health Care Reform Act, which would completely repeal ObamaCare and replace it with a…

During the healthcare debate of 2009 and 2010, conservatives screamed a simple fact from the rooftops: ObamaCare will not work. No one wanted to listen then, but their warnings are now coming into fruition. ObamaCare, as constructed, attempted to fix a dysfunctional health care payment system by creating an even more complicated system on top…

President Barack Obama is calling on taxpayers to shell out more money for his health reform law’s disastrous Medicaid expansion. The president recently asked Congress to approve $106 billion in new Medicaid spending over the next 10 years. Nevermind that the Congressional Budget Office just concluded that, as is, Medicaid spending will add $1.3 trillion…

Beginning next year, the annual out-of-pocket limits for all health plans sold in the (Obamacare) health insurance exchanges will be $7,150 for an individual and $14,300 for a family. To put those numbers in perspective, a $10-an-hour employee only earns about $20,000 a year. One way to help families meet the burden of these medical…

One provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that has been delayed until 2017 is a federal mandate for standard menu items in restaurants and some other venues to contain nutrition labeling. Drawing on nearly 300,000 respondents from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 30 large cities between 2003 and 2012, we…

A new note from JPMorgan economist Jesse Edgerton looks at what is happening with Americans who are working part-time for “economic reasons” — or Americans involuntarily working part time.  As you can see in the above chart — the red line — the numbers remains elevated despite big declines in the U-3 and U-6 jobless rates.…