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Kaiser Health– This month’s Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds public opinion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continues to be almost evenly split, with 43 percent reporting a favorable view and 42 percent reporting an unfavorable view. The share with a favorable view exceeds the share with an unfavorable view for the first time since November 2012, albeit by one percentage point, and the difference is within the survey’s margin of sampling error and is not statistically significant.

Kaiser Family Foundation: This month’s Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll finds that 43 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the health care law, while 42 percent have an unfavorable one — the first time since 2012 that the law has been in positive territory. That difference is not considered statistically significant.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) unveiled legislation on Tuesday that would allow people to temporarily keep their ObamaCare plans if the Supreme Court guts the law’s subsidies.

Johnson’s bill is the latest Republican effort to put forward contingency plans for the possibility that the high court could strike down subsidies that help 7.5 million people afford health insurance.
Many Republicans, including Johnson, who is up for reelection next year, worry that without a plan, they will face intense political pressure to simply restore coverage under ObamaCare to the millions of people who would lose insurance in the case King v. Burwell. A ruling is expected in June.

Aiden Hill’s introduction to the secretive culture at Covered California came in his first days on the job. He had just been hired to head up the agency’s $120 million call center effort when he emailed a superior April 18, 2013, and got a text message in reply:

Please refrain from writing a lot of draft contract language in government email … And don’t clarify via email … No email.

Later, concerned about contractor performance, Hill conducted an Internet search for “best practices” information to forward a superior. Afterward he got this text:

Aiden—Please stop using government email for your searches.

King vs. Burwell is on the horizon. If the plaintiffs are successful, so goes the theory, subsidies end in 37 exchanges operated by the Department of Health and Human Services and serviced by HealthCare.gov. Coverage gets more expensive, and people won’t be able to afford their policies.

But, this outcome was foretold all the way back in the Senate mark-up of the proposed ACA legislation. Purposely requiring subsidies in state-run exchanges remains the incentive for states to set them up. The administration did not expect so many states elected not to set up their own exchanges, and it is now a big problem. As was noted in 2009 by critics of the bill, if states don’t hand out subsidies, people won’t be able to afford to buy coverage.

In the health savings account industry, the problem is compounded. The ACA law also created a perpetual rule change engine.

The fight over ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion escalated Monday, as Texas’s Republican governor backed a lawsuit from Florida fighting the expansion effort.

Last week, Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott announced he would sue the Obama administration over what he calls an effort to force the state to expand Medicaid under ObamaCare.

Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced his support for the lawsuit.

“When the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority, the States must take action,” Abbott said in a statement. “[I] commend Governor Rick Scott’s decision to take legal action to protect these important constitutional principles.”

At issue is the Obama administration move to link Florida’s rejection of a Medicaid expansion to separate federal funding that helps hospitals in the state care for the uninsured.

During the 2008 financial crisis, “too big to fail” became a familiar phrase in the U.S. financial system. Now the U.S. health-care system is heading down the same path with a record number of hospital mergers and acquisitions—95 last year—some creating regional monopolies that, as in all monopolies, will likely result in higher prices from decreased competition.

(Reuters) – If the U.S. Supreme Court blows up the tax subsidies at the heart of Obamacare in June, Republicans hope to deliver on their promise to offer an alternative healthcare plan.

But key parts of it may resemble the one President Barack Obama delivered five years ago in the Affordable Care Act, partly reflecting Republican concerns that they could pay a political price if insurance subsidies are yanked from millions of Americans later this year.

Two front-running Republican options at an early stage in Congress include a refundable tax credit that experts say is virtually the same thing as the Obamacare tax subsidy being challenged before the Supreme Court. Republicans deny that their ideas are tantamount to “Obamacare Lite” but acknowledge they will need bipartisan support for their plans to stand any chance of avoiding an Obama veto.

Today the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a report by finance expert Scot Vorse that shows many states knew as early as 2011 that they might not receive tax credits if they opted out of establishing a state-based health insurance exchange. Whether nonparticipating states had adequate knowledge that they were putting their Obamacare subsidies at risk is a critical question in CEI’s Supreme Court case, King v. Burwell.

Vorse obtained emails related to a January 2012 letter sent by seven states to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). While Obamacare supporters have dismissed this letter as a “spoof,” these state emails show the letter was a carefully crafted and coordinated effort by the states to get detailed information about the exchanges from HHS.

Normally, market competition is good for consumers. More competition generally means competitors are battling each other to lower their prices and/or raise the quality of their goods. But when it comes to Obamacare, the market is working backwards, at least for people receiving health insurance subsidies through the exchanges. The more competitive the marketplace, often the more people have to pay for insurance.

How did this happen?

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, created a series of exchanges where people can shop for health insurance if they don’t already receive it from the government (e.g. Medicare or Medicaid) or from their employer. The exchanges are a pro-market approach to healthcare reform. But they aren’t a simple market, by any means. In part, they are complicated because most people purchasing insurance through the exchanges receive subsidies. If you earn less than 400% of the federal poverty limit, you’ll probably qualify.