Recent Articles

UnitedHealth Group’s shock $425 million downgrade to its earnings forecast for 2015 was almost entirely driven by losses on the ObamaCare exchanges. UnitedHealth is the largest U.S. insurer by enrollment, and the company is warning it may withdraw from ObamaCare in 2017. The insurer has already suspended advertising for its ObamaCare coverage and stopped paying…

James Capretta & Joseph Antos argue that one of the most consequential provisions of the Affordable Care Act is also one of its most obscure. The “productivity adjustment factor,” inserted by the ACA into the Medicare program, is a massive spending cut included to make room in the federal budget for the ACA’s expensive new…

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has proposed mandating minimum network standards for health plans sold on the federal marketplace in 2017 as part of an effort to handle the broad shift toward narrow provider networks. The Affordable Care Act requires that all medical policies on the exchanges have enough in-network hospitals and doctors…

The annual rate of healthcare inflation is at a 6 decade low. At the end of the day, reasonable people will disagree about the exact proportion of credit ObamaCare deserves and neither side has (or will have) conclusive empirical evidence to prove their view beyond a shadow of a doubt. In reality, parsing out credit…

This week, newspapers donned headlines about the sharp rise in premiums for health insurance plans available this open enrollment season on the ObamaCare exchanges. Increased premiums paired with sky-high deductibles have consumers paying for catastrophic health insurance at comprehensive-plan prices. Ed Morrissey argues that consumers have become “victims of a bait-and-switch scheme that the government…

UnitedHealth Group just announced they expect to lose $700 million in the Obamacare exchanges and are seriously considering withdrawing from the program in the coming year. Why is this happening? Because nowhere near enough healthy people are signing up to pay for the sick. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute have come…

The Urban Institute’s Robert D. Reischauer and Brookings Senior Fellow Alice M. Rivlin highlight three main health care issues the candidates should focus on that are likely to dominate the election debate. Republicans must form consensus around a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act and Democrats must develop ways to improve the law. Both…

One of the untold elements of the rapid decay underway in the ObamaCare exchanges is the massive shift toward the Medicaid managed care companies, and away from the traditional commercial insurers like UnitedHealth Group and Aetna. In short order, ObamaCare is evolving into a Medicaid marketplace. Not only in terms of the design and quality…

The new individual marketplace created under ObamaCare was intended to rival that of the employer sponsored insurance marketplace in stability and predictability, while premiums were to rise at rates much lower than the historical average. This study from the American Action Forum evaluates the degree to which these promises have been fulfilled. AAF found that the cost of…

High-deductibles are problematic insofar as markets for health care services are dysfunctional. Fixing those markets should be a priority. An important element here that’s often ignored, however, is the physician or hospital. Much of the focus on price and quality transparency looks to insurers and other tools that patients can use before ever interacting with the…