Recent Articles

ObamaCare plans have substantially raised the amount of cost sharing they require for drugs. Often they don’t cover any specialty drug costs until a patient has hit their deductible. There is also the issue of the dwindling number of specialty drugs that health plans include in their formularies, and provide any coverage for. Almost all…

Instead of more federal regulation and subsidies, what U.S. health care needs is adoption of market principles, starting with broad empowerment of the patient-consumer. The proposals advanced in this volume would replace many counterproductive and outdated federal policies with practical, market-based reforms that aim to provide all Americans with access to high-quality health care at…

Community Health Options, a not-for-profit co-op insurance company based in Maine that also sells health plans in New Hampshire, will limit individual enrollments later this month because of “higher-than-expected claims costs.” It’s an inauspicious sign for the company, which was one of the few successful co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act. Twelve of the…

Last week, the U.S. Senate approved legislation that would repeal the majority of ObamaCare. The bill will almost certainly pass the House. From there, it will go to the president’s desk, where it faces an even more certain veto. Even so, we are witnessing a historic moment. The House and Senate have held dozens of votes…

Individuals who do not obtain health coverage, through any source, are subject to a tax penalty unless they meet certain exemptions. The penalties under the so-called individual mandate were phased in over a three-year period starting in 2014 and are scheduled to increase substantially in 2016. This analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation provides estimates…

Those without health in­sur­ance have a lot to con­sider. On one hand, the fine for re­main­ing un­in­sured steeply in­creases for next year. On the oth­er, the cost of the in­di­vidu­al man­date pen­alty is cheap­er than buy­ing the least ex­pens­ive in­sur­ance plan for 7.1 mil­lion of the nearly 11 mil­lion un­in­sured eli­gible to en­roll in health…

“Woefully sloppy and willfully ignorant” is how Chairman Tim Murphy (R-PA) described the oversight of the state-run health insurance exchanges at an Energy & Commerce oversight hearing Tuesday. Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), testified before the subcommittee on the use of federal funds provided to establish state-based…

Sen. Marco Rubio’s efforts against the so-called risk corridor provision of the Affordable Care Act, which was intended to help insurance companies cope with the risks they assumed when participating in the health care law’s new marketplaces, has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage. Because of Rubio’s efforts, the administration says it will pay…

There is a political duty to prevent the coming bailout of big health insurers if Congress is serious about achieving repeal of ObamaCare. Individual Americans who have been harmed by the health care law aren’t eligible for an administration-provided bailout. Nor did doctors get help with the increased costs of bureaucratic compliance. Instead, the administration…

Federal officials said Monday that if uninsured people don’t obtain coverage within the health law’s official enrollment period, which ends Jan. 31, they won’t get an extension to avoid the law’s penalty for going without insurance this time around. Earlier this year, the Obama administration offered uninsured people a reprieve if they missed the sign-up deadline…