The Heartland Institute

With President Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats twisting themselves like pretzels to get something -- anything -- passed on health reform with no Republican support, it's instructive to review what might have been. During the campaign, Obama promised to work in a bipartisan fashion to solve problems. He told one interviewer ...

The lust to score a political win on health care is making Tiger Woods look like a saint. Congressional Democrats are willing to throw all common sense overboard in their frenzy for a conquest. Of all the desperate ideas in the current health care proposals before Congress, the absolute worst is the " Medicare buy-in" slipped ...

As virtually everybody in America now knows, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin recently posted the following on her FaceBook page:" The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective ...

As part of the federal government s economic stimulus package, Congress has authorized spending about $20 billion on health information technology (health IT) and another $1 billion on comparative effectiveness research. These provisions achieved wide bipartisan support in Congress and in the health care industry, based on the hope ...

By overriding President George W. Bush's veto of the Medicare "sustainable growth rate" (SGR) fix, the U.S. House and Senate delayed for 18 months a planned 10.6 percent cut in physician reimbursements for Medicare cases. But Congress also killed a new approach to the way Medicare pays for medical equipment that would have ...

Although presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and John McCain (R-AZ) have wide differences in their positions on health care, it may not matter much what they or other politicians have to say on the matter. It is a mistake to think of health care reform as primarily a political issue. Health care is an enormous ...

On May 12, 1992, The New York Times breathlessly reported Vermont's governor, Howard Dean (D), had "signed a law here today that sets in motion a plan to give Vermont universal health care by 1995." It was part of a whole movement, the article said: "Oregon, Minnesota and Florida have also passed comprehensive health insurance ...

Brian McManus of the Health Care Freedom Coalition and Dan Perrin of the HSA Coalition, both member organizations of Consumers for Health Care Choices, are mobilizing a defense of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) against a new threat in Congress. The threat is a proposed requirement, passed by the House of Representatives on ...

The recent decision of a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned a federal judge's ruling on San Francisco's "play or pay" employer health insurance mandate, highlights one important fact: The 1974 federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as ERISA, is a mess. It was bad ...

Businesses and employees in San Francisco are facing higher health costs and likely job losses after a three-judge panel from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled a federal district court judge's finding that San Francisco's new health care ordinance violated the 1974 federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act ...

Proponents of government-provided health care continue to tout Massachusetts as a model for the nation. The state has enrolled some 300,000 people in free MassHealth, the heavily subsidized Commonwealth Care, and the unsubsidized Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority. All but 63,000 are in the first two programs, and ...

California continues to stumble along down the road in dealing with health care. The state is facing a $14 billion budget deficit in the coming year, and this estimate does not include the impact of reduced revenues from falling real estate values and sales. So what does the governor decide to do? He joined the speaker ...

Most of the legislative action on health care in the past year has been in the states, and it will continue to be so in 2008, though we don't expect a lot of achievements this year at the state level, either. It is an election year, and increasingly when the politicians are facing elections, nothing else matters. In fact ...

I was pretty excited when I heard Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina was getting on the medical-tourism bandwagon, but then I heard a presentation at the Consumer Health World conference by David Boucher, an executive from that company. He said the employers they are working with want to reap the savings of sending ...

November 15 marked the first day in Medicare's open-enrollment season, which runs until December 31. During this time, every Medicare beneficiary can choose the health plan he or she will use in 2008. In 2007, for the first time in history, virtually every beneficiary was able to select a Medical Savings Account (MSA) within ...

Mandating that every American be forced to purchase health insurance is the latest fad among politicians. From Massachusetts to California, they are embracing the idea as an expression of "personal responsibility" that will help alleviate the "hidden tax" of free care provided to the uninsured. What the idea really expresses ...

If you go to see Michael Moore's new film, Sicko , you will probably leave the theater wondering why nobody ever presents the other side of the story. Most people agree that Moore's critique of American health care is about right, but his answers are seriously off-base. I mean, c'mon--Cuba should be our model, for Pete ...

Just about everyone in California is coming up with a swell idea for creating a new health insurance system. Though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) swell ideas have yet to be written into legislative language or even defined very well, an article in the Sacramento Bee indicates he would require only "universal" coverage ...

Consumers for Health Care Choices raised some hackles with its letter in late March to the Justice Department opposing United Healthcare's acquisition of Sierra Health in Nevada. The complaints against us fell into three categories. Libertarian purists think the federal government has no business interfering in the market and ...

The hospital industry is slowly waking up to the new environment created by empowered consumers. In an interesting twist, the awakening is being led by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), the trade group of hospital chief financial officers and other hospital managers. Usually trade associations are slower ...