newsletter

The Wall Street Journal: What’s ‘Success’ in Lowering Health-Care Premiums During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly promised that his health care plan would “cut costs” and “lower premiums” by $2,500 per year for the average family. Now that Obamacare is coming into effect, supporters have shifted their talking points: the law will lower premium increases relative to what they  have been without the law—a tougher metric...

The Federalist: 12 Reasons Why Medicaid Expansion Is A Terrible Idea Medicaid doesn’t actually improve health outcomes. Medicaid promises people health coverage, but often denies them access to quality doctors. Expanding Medicaid without reform accepts a broken status quo that fails patients and taxpayers. Obamacare’s expansion is a one-size-fits-all, all-or-nothing approach. Medicaid expansion could increase the cost of private health care. Medicaid expansion crowds out other...

Reason: FDA to Save Us From Scourge of Wood-Aged Artisanal Cheese As part of a new push to enforce certain aspects of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), passed in 2011, the agency announced that it will no longer allow cheesemakers to use wooden boards in the aging process. Traditionally, the FDA has mostly deferred cheese inspections to the states. But the FDA recently inspected several New York cheesemakers and cited them for using wooden surfaces to age cheeses. …Many of the...

From Breitbart: Americans are naturally eager to end the long war in Afghanistan, but that does not mean we should dismiss the threat that violent terrorist groups, such as the Taliban, pose to our nation.Without any consultation with Congress, the Obama Administration plunged into negotiations with terrorists to release five terrorist leaders in exchange for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. The men released from Guantanamo Bay, the “Taliban 5,” were all high-level officials in the...

Washington Post: GOP has claimed control of Va. Senate, forced Democrats to cave over Medicaid impasse Virginia Republicans snatched control of the state Senate on Monday, immediately ending a budget stalemate by pushing Democrats to agree to pass a spending plan without Medicaid expansion, Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s top priority. The power shift forced Senate Democrats to yield after a protracted standoff that had threatened to shut down state government in less than a month, according to...

USA Today: More patients flocking to ERs under Obamacare [Similar to how the state of Mass. experienced greater ER volume after its insurance reforms, so too will hospitals around the country as a result of Obamacare] It wasn't supposed to work this way, but since the Affordable Care Act took effect in January, Norton Hospital has seen its packed emergency room become even more crowded, with about 100 more patients a month. That 12 percent spike in the number of patients — many of whom...

From The Wall Street Journal: For two centuries there has been bipartisan agreement that American democracy depends on free speech. Alas, more and more, the modern Democratic Party has abandoned that commitment and has instead been trying to regulate the speech of the citizenry. We have seen President Obama publicly rebuke the Supreme Court for protecting free speech in Citizens United v. FEC; the Obama IRS inquire of citizens what books they are reading and what is the content of their prayers;...

Politico: The VA's Socialist Paradise For the left, the Department of Veterans Affairs is how health care is ideally supposed to work. No insurance companies, no private doctors, no competition — just the government and the patient. Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist, has held up the VA as a model for the entire country [a "huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform…yes, this is 'socialized medicine."] The Washington Monthly ran a...

The Los Angeles Times: Federal funds earmarked to offset Affordable Care Act insurer losses The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money. The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to...

Reuters: Obama allies revive push for Obamacare CEO A group of healthcare experts close to the White House is urging the Obama administration to appoint a new chief executive officer to oversee Obamacare's online health insurance exchanges and safeguard the next open enrollment period that begins in six months. The recommendation, in a report due to be released by the Washington-based Center for American Progress think tank, calls for a major shakeup within the U.S. Department of Health and...

Forbes: How American Doctors Lost Their Professional Autonomy About the same time that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was botching the rollout of healthcare.gov, the agency also announced its successful creation of two mobile apps designed to help doctors keep track the stuff they get from drug makers. It lets doctors electronically tabulate (and report to the Feds) each consulting fee, pen, and jelly doughnut that they receive, right on their I-Phone. The aim of this de rigueur...

Associated Press: Cost-Control Plan For Health Care Could Cost You [This so-called reference pricing, when presented as a choice as a health care contract in a free market is one efficient way to increase competition and reduce costs – but it should not be centrally planned by the federal government] The Obama administration has given the go-ahead for a new cost-control strategy called "reference pricing." It lets insurers and employers put a dollar limit on what health plans pay for some...

Bloomberg: Best Argument Yet Against Medicaid Expansion Opponents of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion have traditionally argued that it will significantly burden state budgets and provide people with substandard health coverage. A new academic paper suggests what may be the strongest argument yet against the expansion: that it will keep many beneficiaries in poverty because it creates strong disincentives for work. ...a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper [argues] that...

From TribTalk: One San Francisco billionaire with a Super PAC shouldn’t be able to deprive thousands of lower- and middle-class Americans from good-paying energy jobs. Yet this is exactly what hedge fund manager turned green energy investor Tom Steyer has pledged to do by promising up to $100 million to Democrats for the 2014 elections on the condition that they oppose construction of the Keystone pipeline. Of course, Steyer is free to exercise his First Amendment rights, but it’s a...