newsletter

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...

Washington Examiner: Obamacare insurer says Americans have to break the 'choice habit' In a line that says a lot about where health care is heading under Obamacare, an insurance executive offering plans through the law was quoted in the New York Times on Tuesday as saying, “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.” Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, made the remark in an article describing the trend toward narrow networks in health care...

New York Times: More Insured, but the Choices Are Narrowing These so-called narrow networks, featuring limited groups of providers, have made a big entrance on the newly created state insurance exchanges, where they are a common feature in many of the plans. While the sizes of the networks vary considerably, many plans now exclude at least some large hospitals or doctors’ groups. Smaller networks are also becoming more common in health care coverage offered by employers and in private...

Forbes: New McKinsey Survey: 74% Of Obamacare Sign-Ups Were Previously Insured The new McKinsey report…indicates that the proportion of uninsured individuals paying for coverage has shot up, from 53 percent in February to 83 percent in April. For previously insured individuals, the percentage of payers increased from 86 to 89 percent. The proportion of individuals purchasing ACA plans who had been previously uninsured remained low. In February, McKinsey reported that only 27 percent of...

CNBC: One by one, states shutter health insurance exchanges Massachusetts' crippled Obamacare exchange is just the latest to throw in the towel and scrap its existing software, but health-care experts said it likely won't be the last. Those same observers Tuesday told CNBC that almost half of the existing state-run Obamacare marketplaces could, in the coming years, end up turning enrollment operations in private insurance plans over fully to the federally run HealthCare.gov for a variety of...

You do some strange things in politics…but petting a pig in a bandana is a first! All to emphasize the Citizens Against Government Waste 2014 Pig Book, released today, chronicling government waste. Too bad our government's pork problem isn't as cute as this fella. pic.twitter.com/L3Q3QtfXDw — Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) May 7, 2014  

The New York Times: Insurers Say Most Who Signed Up Under Health Law Have Paid Up [but importantly, many of these are duplicate enrollments] Most of the people choosing health plans under the Affordable Care Act — about 80 percent — are paying their initial premiums as required for coverage to take effect, several large insurers said Tuesday on the eve of a House hearing about the law. But the health insurance industry said the total of eight million people who signed up included...