The Heartland Institute

One talking point about Obamacare that has received little pushback is that whatever you can say about what the law will do to premium costs, or taking away a plan and a doctor you like, it’s going to put you on a better – meaning more comprehensive – insurance plan at the end of the day. Jonathan Cohn probably uses ...

Robert Samuelson has an interesting column on the Oregon Medicaid study and what it means, finding increased costs, increased use of care, but no improved health outcomes. The most overlooked finding is that the uninsured already receive considerable health care. On average, the uninsured had 5.5 office visits annually, used ...

This week, the incredible health policy story was the new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine concerning Oregon’s Medicaid experiment. In 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid program, but because the state could not cover everybody, lawmakers opened up a lottery that randomly drew 30,000 names from a waiting ...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is listening to his Democratic colleagues, and what he's hearing are loud concerns about the implementation of Obamacare. Reid's answer? We need more money to implement it: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says he shares colleagues’ concerns that the Affordable Care Act could become ...

This Obamacare thing is not going as well as some had hoped. Democratic senators, at a caucus meeting with White House officials, expressed concerns on Thursday about how the Obama administration was carrying out the health care law they adopted three years ago. Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of ...

Last week, the Arkansas legislature finally approved the Medicaid waiver request that makes up their appeal for a “private option” within President Barack Obama’s Medicaid expansion: After three tense days, an initially-failed vote in the state House, and an unexpected amendment in the Senate, the Arkansas legislature has ...

This week, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post had a lengthy back and forth with me about the future of health care policy and Republican plans for replacing Obamacare. I encourage you to read the full post here , but I’ll excerpt just a portion of it for you. Ezra’s accusation, in part, is that Republicans think we have ...

At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein wrote a lengthy piece responding to a list I assembled last year of the outline of a Republican replacement for Obamacare. Here's his essential argument: This isn’t a plan to “replace Obamacare.” It’s a plan to do the opposite of replacing Obamacare. It’s as if I said I had a plan to ...

So it turns out the whole Arkansas Medicaid expansion alternative is looking more and more like one big April Fool’s joke, and one in poor taste to boot. The restrictions indicated by the administration’s newly released rule on the subject illustrate the problems. What’s inside it? Unfortunately, a lot of buzzkilling. A ...

Surprise, surprise: Kathleen Sebelius is now admitting that President Obama's health care law is going to lead to higher premiums, and in short order, too. Not even cabinet secretaries can escape math forever: Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters that "there may be a higher cost associated ...

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announced today that he'd be expanding Medicaid by not expanding Medicaid under President Obama's health care law. If that sounds confusing, it should, considering the way Haslam himself framed it: Republican Gov. Bill Haslam today said he will not pursue an expansion this year of the state’s version ...

James Capretta makes an argument on the Medicaid strategy states ought to use that is worth considering and warns against accepting the Arkansas deal without knowing what’s in it: The GOP governors engaged in these direct negotiations with the White House are playing a loser’s game, and throwing away a historic opportunity ...

Today’s the three year anniversary of the final House vote on Obamacare. It is one ugly toddler, and its first steps are turning out to be disastrous. But is it here to stay? From the beginning, there were three ways to replace Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement. The first and best option was that you could replace ...

A few weeks ago I commented on the pushback about the GAO’s report that highlighted the deficit damage done by President Barack Obama’s health care law over the coming years. A much more sophisticated critique comes now from Christopher Conover of AEI: But things go to hell in a handbasket under either the alternative ...

I wrote earlier about the inaccuracies in criticisms of the GAO’s recent report on the costs of Obamacare. Christopher Conover of the Duke school of medicine and AEI has a more thorough critique here . “But things go to hell in a handbasket under either the alternative or baseline extended scenario. It is merely when ...

This new report from The Heritage Foundation outlines the incentives for each state to expand or not expand Medicaid . It simply charts the Urban Institute assumptions out over the next decade, illustrating the Medicaid expansion really amounts to an enormous bailout for the state of New York and a raw deal for red states ...

I missed Jon Chait’s initial criticism of a GAO report requested by Senator Jeff Sessions a couple of days ago. That first post makes me wonder if Chait even read the report before using his jump to conclusions mat, but this second one, which is even more dismissive , caught my eye. As did its quote from liberal pediatrics ...

With the passage of Obamacare came the vaunted Accountable Care Organizations, those modern breeds of HMO which were supposed to create all sorts of cost savings from higher efficiencies in health care systems. Instead, it looks like these systems are failing before they've even begun: Cleveland [Clinic], along with other model ...

The news that Arkansas’ Medicaid expansion had been approved by the feds is huge, largely because it’s not a Medicaid expansion at all. Arkansas will start the eligibility for entering the federally run health insurance exchange at 0% of the federal poverty level – meaning every newly eligible Arkansan in the pool of people ...

The health care providers who stand to reap enormous benefits from Obamacare's implementation are pushing for it to be enforced to the maximum degree in states across the country. Tim Carney outlines how they're doing this in Idaho: Idaho Gov. Butch Otter supports a state exchange, arguing that otherwise Idaho would "be at ...