Recent Articles

“Now, there’s a new study that suggests that employer dumping under Obamacare could be significant, leading to an explosion of the law’s costs and thereby the federal debt. A working paper by economists Richard Burkhauser and Sean Lyons of Cornell and Kosali Simon of Indiana, published by the National Bureau for Economic Research, examined various reasonable assumptions regarding the behavior of employers under the law.”

“State legislators are concerned that a new program in the healthcare reform law will reopen a series of problems that states tackled years ago. The National Conference of Insurance Legislators is worried about the law’s new long-term-care insurance program, known as CLASS.”

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on Tuesday that it has awarded $28.8 million to 67 community health centers with funds from the Obamacare health reform law. Of that $28.8 million, ‘approximately $8.5 million will be used by 25 New Access Point awardees to target services to migrant and seasonal farm workers,’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Spokeswoman Judy Andrews told CNSNews.com. HRSA is a part of HHS. Andrews said that grant recipients will not check the immigration status of people seeking services.”

“The bad news for ObamaCare’s proponents? ObamaCare won’t help contain health costs, as the president so often claimed while lobbying for passage of his reform package. Instead, it will exacerbate them. Remember his oft-repeated statement that his plan would ‘cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.’ As the CBO rightly explained, premiums will rise by $2,100.”

“In any event, there is no problem that cannot be made worse when legislators convene. And when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) it definitely made things worse than they otherwise would have been… Here’s one immediate problem: no one knows how to define ‘administration.’ Just as there is no line item in the federal budget called ‘waste fraud and abuse,’ there is also no line item in any organization’s budget called ‘administrative costs.'”

“Investors believe that the government guarantee of millions of customers to health plans will lead to profits. Unfortunately, this optimism is likely unfounded.
ObamaCare distributes federal grants to states that encourage their insurance departments to increase power of prior approval of premium increases.
And the coming wave of political interference will threaten health plans’ very solvency. We already know that such laws do not keep a lid on health costs.”

“Reformers are mostly right when they argue that Congress hasn’t done a great job of controlling health costs or the growth of tax-financed health spending. But where they go wrong is in thinking that a small number of experts in positions of government-granted authority will somehow be more successful. The basic problem with the bureauwonk model of health reform is that it assumes that technocrats can not only identify but successfully scale local innovation to the national level.”

“There are 34 million ways to order a Domino’s Pizza, so, thanks to President Obama’s national health care law, the chain’s franchisees may have to spend more than $5 million attempting to squeeze calorie data next to every one of their menu items.”

“Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation.”

“The Budget Control Act of 2011 ties increases in the federal debt limit to cuts in spending on a dollar-for-dollar basis. In a deal described by one opponent as a ‘sugar-coated Satan sandwich,’ President Obama agreed that Medicare should be put on the chopping block along with other federal programs. That could prove to be the thread that unravels the massive expansion of health spending created in last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”