Recent Articles

“Even as leading Democrats offered assurances to the contrary, government experts repeatedly warned that a new long-term care insurance plan could go belly up, saddling taxpayers with another underfunded benefit program, according to emails disclosed by congressional investigators. Part of President Barack Obama’s health care law, the program is in limbo as a congressional debt panel searches for budget savings and behind the scenes, administration officials scramble to find a viable financing formula.”

“The White House is quietly implementing a shrewd new strategy of silence on Obamacare. Its goal: making sure the revolt against the unpopular health care overhaul that swept Republicans into power across the country in November 2010 isn’t repeated in 2012. After two years of nonstop focus on health care, the president has stopped talking about the law’s far-reaching effects. Now he is concentrating on a few micro changes. Meanwhile the administration is working hard to dampen controversy by handing out buckets of waivers and attacking Republicans over Medicare.”

“During the health care debate, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Health System and Intermountain Healthcare were repeatedly touted as models for a new health care delivery system. Now, they have something else in common: All four have declined to apply for the ‘Pioneer’ program tailor-made by the Obama administration to reward such organizations.”

“Liberals in Congress were aware of these problems and continued to push for CLASS’s inclusion in Obamacare. That suggests that they either had an ideological commitment to a long term care entitlement program that overrode any concerns about its actuarial soundness, or that they were determined to include the program as a means to game the bill’s budget score. Since premium contributions into the CLASS program are front-loaded, its inclusion in the health care bill meant that it would reduce the budget deficit over 10 years (the standard CBO measurement window). But as the program begins to pay out benefits, its budget will sink into the red.”

“Republican state politicians are clearly hardening their stance against exchanges. It appears that they are no longer fooled by the argument that if they do not collaborate to establish state-based exchanges, the federal government will enter their state and do it for them. Recent close reading of the law has debunked this notion. As written, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) has (at least) two clauses that will prevent this from happening.”

“This afternoon, the District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania became the latest court to strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s (Obamacare) individual mandate, holding that ‘[t]he power to regulate interstate commerce does not subsume the power to dictate a lifetime financial commitment to health insurance coverage.’ The challenge was brought by a Barbara Goudy-Bachman and Gregory Bachman, who are both self-employed and have chosen to drop their health insurance because it exceeded their monthly mortgage payments. Instead, Bachmans opted to pay for health care out of pocket. The Administration, unless it wants to concede that Obamacare is unconstitutional, will have to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.”

“The report Doyle ordered before leaving office certainly reveals something about how the law will affect hundreds of thousands of individuals in the state he used to govern, it’s not all flattering. Indeed, it’s telling that despite bring ordered and authored by true-blue ObamaCare backers, a big part of what this report suggests is that the law will ultimately raise the health insurance costs for large numbers of the state’s residents.”

“The latest rulings focused only on judicial procedure and not on the merits of the law, leaving a split decision between the Sixth and Eleventh circuits on the actual constitutionality of the individual mandate. (The Sixth Circuit in Michigan said the individual mandate can stand because it is important to the overall working of the law. The Eleventh Circuit — in which 26 states are challenging the law – disagreed and said the individual mandate is not only unconstitutional but ‘is breathtaking in its expansive scope.’)”

“Because of a quirk in ObamaCare, people who buy health insurance through a federally run exchange may not be eligible for premium subsidies… Section 1311 of ObamaCare instructs state governments to set up an exchange. If a state refuses, Section 1321 lets the federal government establish an exchange in the state. Yet ObamaCare states that the tax credit is available to people who are enrolled in an ‘an exchange established by the state under (Section) 1311.’ It makes no mention of people enrolled in federal exchanges being eligible for the tax credit.”

“One provision of the new healthcare law is a 2.3% excise tax on the medical device industry which will take effect in 2013. This study estimates the potential effect of the device tax on employment in the medical device industry. The study finds that the tax could reduce employment in the industry by cutting back on the demand for medical devices and by encouraging American firms to shift production overseas.”