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It’s been just over seven years since President Obama declared: “It is not sufficient for us simply to add more people to Medicare or Medicaid to increase the rolls, to increase coverage in the absence of cost controls and reform. Another way of putting it is we can’t simply put more people into a broken system that…

Senate Democrats are escalating their attack on Republicans’ plans to repeal Obamacare this week, though their party remains divided on how far to take activists’ demands that they shut down the Senate in protest of the GOP’s dismantling of the Affordable Care Act. Democratic senators are planning to hold the Senate floor until at least…

Insurers must submit applications by next Wednesday to sell plans through HealthCare.gov, and these will give us some of the first indicators of how high Obama Care costs will skyrocket in 2018. ObamaCare supporters can’t wait to blame the coming premium increases on the “uncertainty” caused by President Trump. But insurers faced the same uncertainty…

Conservatives inside and outside the Senate GOP are sounding alarms over the emerging shape of the chamber’s bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, a sign that the faction’s support may be increasingly difficult to secure. Pressure from outside groups has intensified in recent days, and conservative lawmakers have signaled their concern that the Senate…

Health care has been central to U.S. political debate for nearly a decade as Democrats created a new entitlement with little public support. Compared to that effort, the Senate this time has been a model of deliberative democracy. On Dec. 19, 2009, a Saturday, then Majority Leader Harry Reid tossed the 2,100-page bill the Senate…

Obamacare provides states with a greater incentive to expand Medicaid to able-bodied adults than to cover services for individuals with disabilities. States receive a 95 percent match this year (declining to 90 percent in 2020 and all future years) to cover the able-bodied, but a match ranging from 50-75 percentto cover individuals with disabilities, while more than half a…

Section 1332 of the ACA permits states to submit simultaneous and combined “superwaivers” for Medicaid and for provisions of the ACA itself. These superwaivers could make it easier for states proposing plausible ways to allow states that serve Medicaid beneficiaries more efficiently to reprogram federal and state savings into health programs for non-Medicaid eligible households. For households with…

To estimate the impact of the AHCA, the CBO had to compare it to predictions of coverage under the current law, the ACA. If the prediction for the current law is incorrect the prediction of lost coverage will be too.Yet the CBO has consistently overestimated future ACA coverage gains. In 2012 it predicted an additional…

The House-passed Obamacare repeal bill would leave 12.6 million more Americans uninsured over the next decade and reduce federal spending by $328 billion, according to an analysis released today by CMS’ Office of the Actuary. The coverage estimate is well below the 23 million more uninsured that the CBO has projected under the American Health Care Act. The congressional…

Senate Republicans raced Tuesday to bridge divisions over rickety insurance markets and billions of dollars in insurance subsidies in their pursuit of a health-care deal. While President Donald Trump predicted a deal would emerge, hard work remained behind the scenes. Much of this week’s negotiations have focused on specific measures to help shore up the individual insurance…