Recent Articles

“States and the federal government will have to work hard to make sure that new insurance exchanges in President Obama’s healthcare law actually create more competition, a new study says… The Health Affairs study says people in those areas generally pay higher out-of-pocket costs than people in more populated areas with greater competition. ‘If experience with the federal benefits program is an indication of how much competition can be expected in the exchanges, then people obtaining coverage from exchanges will not benefit much from competition unless the exchanges are at least modestly assertive in setting conditions of participation for qualifying health plans,’ the authors wrote.”

“The Health and Human Services Department has missed nearly half of its legal deadlines while implementing President Obama’s healthcare law, according to an analysis by the American Action Forum. HHS has faced 42 statutory deadlines in the roughly two years since the Affordable Care Act became law — and it missed 20 of them, according to the AAF’s count.”

“Early this year, I was briefly involved with one of the Affordable Care Act’s bureaucracies called the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, or CMMI. Despite its lofty ideals, it is one more pork program and venue for political cronyism, as I learned firsthand.”

“Perhaps you thought that the Affordable Care Act is all about making insurance more affordable. Too bad no one told Americans that the law also turned the Health and Human Services Department into a giant venture capital investor for health care. This won’t turn out well. Awash in ObamaCare dollars, HHS has a growing investment portfolio that includes everything from new insurance companies to health-care start-ups to information technology.”

“There is bipartisan concern that the IPAB could harm Medicare and limit access to care for seniors. The IPAB is a panel of 15 unelected, unaccountable government bureaucrats empowered to ‘reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending.’ In the text of the healthcare law, it states that while the law prohibits ‘any recommendation to ration health care,’ it does not prohibit slashing payments to physicians and other medical providers.”

“The purpose of this paper is to describe why the health insurance exchanges defined in PPACA won’t
work, won’t increase access to affordable health care, and won’t do anything to improve health
outcomes or increase value. The solution to affordable coverage isn’t to be found in these new
bureaucracies, but rather in reducing barriers to competition and consumer choice and removing
regulations that make coverage unaffordable today.”

“To develop a more conservative projection of the likely reduction in employment, we estimated the relationship
between revenue and employment in the industry. Through our analysis, we found that an average of 1.274 direct
industry jobs and 2.210 indirect jobs are lost per year for each $1 million reduction in industry revenue that year.”

“Some colleges are dropping student health-insurance plans for the coming academic year and others are telling students to expect sharp premium increases because of a provision in the federal health law requiring plans to beef up coverage. The demise of low-cost, low-benefit health plans for students is a consequence of the 2010 health-care overhaul.”

“The final bill would subsidize prescription drugs, force states to include drug coverage in Medicaid, and expand private insurance coverage of drugs. Also, the White House pledged to oppose policies that Obama had promised on the campaign trail: allowing reimportation of prescription drugs and empowering Medicare to negotiate for lower prices on the drugs Medicare is paying for. In return, drug companies would offer a discount to some senior citizens, and would spend millions of dollars on ads supporting the bill and the lawmakers who backed it.”

“Top administration officials cut backroom deals with the nation’s top drug companies to win support for President Obama’s health care overhaul, threatening them with steeper taxes if they resisted and promising a better financial deal for the industry if they acquiesced, according to internal documents released Thursday by House Republicans. In some of the key deals, Mr. Obama agreed to drop his long-standing support for letting Americans buy cheaper foreign prescription drugs — something the pharmaceutical industry vehemently opposed — and the drugmakers promised to mount a public campaign to sell the public on the health care legislation.”