Roger Collier
he second of three federal Appeals Court decisions on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was handed down on Friday, and it was a defeat for the Obama administration.
The first of three anticipated federal Courts of Appeals decisions on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was handed down by a Sixth Circuit panel in Cincinnati—and it was a win for the Obama administration.
The past week’s appellate court hearing in Atlanta on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, one of a series along the inevitable road to the Supreme Court, showed that the opposing legal arguments are beginning to be firmly established—with each seeming to confuse the purchase of health insurance with the purchase of health care.
Last week’s startlingly gloomy annual report from the Trustees of the Medicare Trust Funds lent new urgency to the need for further Medicare expenditure reforms. Whether Washington DC politicians will respond with more than sound bites is less likely.
In just a few days, Vermont's Governor Peter Shumlin will sign into law what the media is calling "single payer health care reform." But is it?
Republicans and Democrats have each offered proposals to reduce projected Medicare expenditures. Neither proposal has any realistic chance of passage. Maybe it’s time to blow the cobwebs off the 1999 proposal from the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare.
How to slow Medicare’s escalating costs has been the big health care policy issue this month, with Republicans and Democrats offering competing proposals, each part of broader plans for reducing the federal deficit—projected to be $1.5 trillion this year, with the government borrowing 40 cents for every dollar it spends.
A year after the passage of health care reform, fewer than half of Americans support it, a similar percentage believe that it has already been found unconstitutional or soon will be, health care costs are continuing to rise far faster than the CPI, and the Republican Party has seized on the issue as a sure election winner.
Sometimes, in the middle of a hotly-argued partisan battle, it can make sense to look at the opinions of more distant and possibly more objective observers. When the battle involves American politics, the international press sometimes offers valuable—and possibly more realistic—perspectives than those available to readers and viewers of domestic media.
HHS's bellwether decision of last week to grant the State of Maine a three-year waiver from the medical loss ratio provision of the ACA may lead to new efforts by insurers across the country to persuade states to demand similar waivers.