Recent Articles

Although it’s said that victory has hundreds of fathers and defeat is an orphan, the temporarily triumphant Trump White House might need to engage more effective “adoption” counselors. If and when a Senate bill to repeal and replace the ACA passes, it’s highly likely to differ from the House measure and require working out a…

With the House’s passage of the American Health Care Act, House Republican leaders have handed their Senate counterparts the biggest legislative weapon they have held in their entire careers. At this point, Senate Republicans should learn from a bit of wisdom often attributed to one of the wittiest and most clear-eyed Founders, Ben Franklin: “We…

In the United States, the difference between being in poverty and out of poverty is a job. The nation’s public assistance programs successfully alleviate suffering among low-income households, but they fail to raise self-sufficiency because they do not connect able-bodied people to work. Going forward, policymakers must incorporate work requirements throughout the safety net, which…

Years of promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act took a major step last week with the House passing the American Health Care Act. The years of rancorous debate leading to this vote have highlighted the profound divisions in our political system. But, it has also obscured the encouraging reality that most Democrats…

The following are some of the most important changes the Senate GOP should make to the House bill:

Strike a Medicaid Compromise.

Provide More Generous Subsidization of Lower-Income Households.

Fix the AHCA’s Premium Surcharge.

Embrace Auto-Enrollment.

Limit the Tax Preference for Employer-Paid Premiums.

Provide More Flexible Use of HSAs.

. . .

Almost every promise made eight years ago about ObamaCare turned out to be a falsehood. You couldn’t keep your insurance plan, doctor or provider in many cases. It didn’t save $2,500 per family (more like $2,500 more). It didn’t lead to expanded patient choice. And the tax increases badly hurt the economy and jobs market,…

Health care has become an ongoing source of pain for many small-business owners. It was the top issue owners wanted Trump to address in a survey of 700 owners and prospective buyers in late February by BizBuy Sell, a marketplace for small businesses. Among respondents, 60 percent favored an ACA repeal. The major reason: spiraling…

Our ongoing troubles with health care stem from an unwillingness to deal with certain facts. One of those facts is scarcity. “Scarcity” is a term from economics, and it refers to the fact that there is never enough of anything to satisfy every possible desire — the universe holds only so much, and human desire…

We pride ourselves on being a compassionate society, and insurance companies use this to manipulate us into sharing the costs of other people’s excessive health care. Meanwhile, 5 percent of Americans generate more than 50 percent of health care expenses. Why shouldn’t a patient who continues to see me unnecessarily pay more? The government’s job…

Two years ago, I was a 7-month-pregnant widow with one toddler who got a letter two weeks after my husband died informing me I’d lost my third or fourth health insurance plan since the ACA passed. If you’ll remember, the promise was that I could keep my plan if I liked it. I could not.…