By Michael F. Cannon
Here’s the story from WIUS, the NPR affiliate at the University of Illinois Springfield: A health exchange is one of the main initial components of the Affordable Care Act. It’s basically a table of insurance plans people who don’t currently have coverage could choose from once the national health care law hits its stride. If [...]
From the Annals of ObamaCare: ‘Illinois Suspends Insurance Exchange Setup’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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The contraception mandate has met yet another foe. On Monday, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) filed a complaint against Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius on behalf of Hercules Industries, Inc., a family-owned HVAC manufacturer based in Denver, Colorado. Hercules Industries is owned by five family members, all practicing Catholics, who seek to operate the business in accordance with their beliefs. As such, the self-insured company’s health plan does not include coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, or sterilization procedures—and had no intention of doing so. Until Obamacare, … More
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The House Ways and Means Committee just released a report that shows that the most successful companies would save billions of dollars if they stopped offering coverage to their employees and dumped them into the taxpayer-funded Obamacare exchanges. On a confidential basis, 71 Fortune 100 companies supplied information to the committee regarding the cost and coverage of their health insurance plans. The committee used the data to calculate the potential savings of dumping employees into the exchanges and paying the employer mandate penalty. The report’s findings will likely scare the … More
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The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health held a hearing last Friday to discuss the bipartisan effort behind competing premium support plans. These plans would restructure traditional Medicare and guarantee its fiscal stability in the future. As Chairman Wally Herger (R–CA) said: Unless Congress acts, the Medicare program that seniors and people with disabilities rely on will go bankrupt in just a few short years.… The premium support model holds promise to place Medicare on sound financial footing while transforming and modernizing the program to provide greater choice for … More
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A new study by the Urban Institute reconfirms a vital fact: Medicare’s massive increase in enrollment, largely attributable to retiring baby boomers, is driving its fiscal instability. This is an important finding, because during the health care debate of 2009, advocates of Obamacare insisted that excess health care cost inflation was the more urgent problem contributing to Medicare’s fiscal nightmare. A recent report by Charles Blahous, a public trustee for Medicare, explains: This viewpoint increased in prominence when Peter Orszag, one of [Obamacare’s] leading advocates, was named to head the … More
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President Obama has called Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country,” but as this week’s chart illustrates, if something radical doesn’t happen, entitlement spending will nearly double by 2050. The amount of spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Obamacare subsidies will soar over the next 38 years, leaving future generations with an alarming debt burden. Congressional Budget Office predictions show that in 2010 entitlement spending attributes 10.3 percent of GDP, then jumps to 19 percent of GDP by 2050. David John, Heritage’s … More
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One of the biggest fears Americans have about Obamacare is who will ultimately control health care decisions: the government or patients and their doctors. New research by Heritage health policy analyst Kathryn Nix explains that while the law does not explicitly put those decisions in the hands of the government, it does allow government bureaucrats to unduly influence medical care. Enter comparative effectiveness research (CER), which compares different methods for preventing, diagnosing, or treating a specific disease or condition. In her paper, Nix explores the many ways CER might be … More
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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a report that reviewed 10 Medicare demonstrations designed with the intention of reducing spending and improving quality of care. The demonstrations did not produce the desired results. But the answer to the challenge is right under everyone’s nose: the private market. Private health plans participating in Medicare Advantage (MA) are making strides in what Congress has tried—and failed—to achieve in traditional Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) for decades. Competition among private plans has maintained patient satisfaction, lowered costs, and increased the quality of care. Success … More
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By Michael F. Cannon
(This blog post first appeared at Cato@Liberty following the release of the 2006 Medicare and Social Security trustees’ reports. I repost it, with updated links and “exhaustion dates” because sadly nothing else has changed.) Sometimes, Governments Lie Year after year, federal officials speak of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds as if they were [...]
Sometimes, Governments Lie (6th Anniversary Ed.) is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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Earlier this week we learned that former Obama Administration official Elizabeth Warren is calling for a repeal of one of Obamacare’s many taxes, and today The Hill is reporting that several Democrats in Congress are starting to regret President Obama’s signature health care law. First there’s Representative Brad Miller (D-NC), who is retiring at the end of this session of Congress: “I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had … More
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