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Senators looking for ways to stabilize the individual health insurance market will hear from governors and state health insurance commissioners at their first bipartisan hearings next month. The hearings, set for Sept. 6-7, will focus on stabilizing premiums and helping people in the individual market in light of Congress’ failure to repeal and replace the…

A fast-approaching deadline for insurers to commit to selling health plans next year under the Affordable Care Act is pressuring Republican lawmakers to decide quickly whether to shore up the law and ease the path for insurers or continue efforts to roll it back. Lawmakers returning to the Capitol from recess on Sept. 5 will have only…

Between “80 to 85 percent of Americans are already covered by health insurance, and most of them are happy with what they’ve got.” It’s true that single payer would help extend coverage to those who are currently uninsured. But policy makers could already do that by simply expanding Medicaid or providing larger subsidies to low-income…

For all the attention on various ways to improve Medicaid’s finances and sustainability in recent months, another key area of Medicaid policy that deserves focus is improving the state waiver process. With all the recent calls for bipartisanship, this should be an area where Democrats and Republicans can work together to improve the program. Medicaid…

In Part 1, we learned that real per capita health spending saw a 25-fold increase the 8 decades starting in 1929 even as real per capita GDP grew only 5-fold during the same period. In Part 2, we learned that annual excess growth in inflation-adjusted health spending above and beyond general economic growth has been a persistent…

A recent study by Express Scripts Holding found that about a quarter of Medicaid patients were prescribed an opioid in 2015. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson presents intriguing evidence that the Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare may be contributing to the rise in opioid abuse. According to a federal Health and Human Services analysis requested by the…

In Iowa, the state’s sole remaining insurer announced on Thursday that it wants to boost ObamaCare premiums by 57%. This isn’t exactly the vibrant, competitive, low-cost market that Democrats promised. But it is the inevitable outcome of ObamaCare’s government-knows-best approach to health care. Earlier this year, Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield announced…

A majority of the public (57 percent) want to see Republicans in Congress work with Democrats to make improvements to the 2010 health care law, while smaller shares say they want to see Republicans in Congress continue working on their own plan to repeal and replace the ACA (21 percent) or move on from health…

Some strategists expect Democrats will consolidate around some form of single payer by 2020, though others won’t concede that as a given. The problem: most people don’t think a single payer system has a shot at becoming law anytime soon, and playing to the party’s base may ignore real concerns about affordability.
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The mere existence of ACA insurance policies can’t be the only metric for measuring the success of a major federal program. Another sensible measure of ACA success is the affordability of the policies being sold. For a broad spectrum of middle-aged persons in the middle class, premiums for even the cheapest bronze policy today are, in…