The Heartland Institute

If President Obama's administration has its way, health care providers will soon be forced into a massive new government coding scheme where they will have to distinguish for filing purposes between whether your injury was caused by walking into a lamppost, having your water skis light on fire, and whether you were struck ...

An early ObamaCare health insurance program that has been operating for nearly three years is foreshadowing big problems to come with the larger health overhaul law. The law allocated $5 billion for a program to help uninsured people with preexisting conditions get insurance. It was designed to provide temporary bridge coverage ...

By John C. Goodman President Obama recently proposed raising the federal minimum wage. If the president gets his way, the mandate will jump from its current $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour and be indexed for inflation. In addition, next January the employer mandate goes into effect, which will increase labor costs even more ...

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 ...

Idaho Gov. “Butch” Otter—one of the most prominent opponents of Obamacare—announced his state would implement its own health insurance exchange under the law. Idaho Freedom Foundation executive director Wayne Hoffman, who was a member of the governor’s task force studying implementation, had recommended the alternate path of allowing ...

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has confirmed that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who already has been invested with enormous power under President Obama's health care law, is essentially empowered as the rationer in chief should the Independent Payment Advisory Board fail in its mission. The ...

Patients in New Mexico could take a big financial hit when the health care overhaul, known as Obamacare, takes effect. The Society of Actuaries has released a report concluding premium costs for individual health plans—an industry expected to get more crowded as the Affordable Care Act kicks in starting in 2014—will rise by ...

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock waited until nearly 60 of the 2013 legislative session’s 90 days had passed before making a Medicaid expansion proposal that essentially said, “Do what the feds want.” That’s a wasted opportunity. Since Medicaid rules are made in Washington, DC, our state frittered away a chance to negotiate reforms ...

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 ...

Virtually all the costs of the so-called Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—have been invisible thus far. But that is beginning to change. As the controversial law passes its third anniversary and the Obama administration struggles to get a whole new national health care system up and running by next January, a visible sign of the ...

Learning from Oregon's Medicaid Expansion? With many states still considering whether or not to expand their Medicaid programs a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine sheds some light on what health, financial, and other outcomes to expect. In 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid program to 30 ...

The Ohio House of Representatives rejected Gov. John Kasich’s calls to expand Medicaid under President Obama’s health care law as legislators refused to legislate the necessary waiver requests and called for further debate about the issue. The Ohio House passed biennial budget House Bill 59 (HB 59) on April 18 without Kasich ...

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 ...

A new insurance entity created under the auspices of President Obama’s health care law may have been allocated millions of taxpayer dollars it was not qualified to receive. At issue is the New York-based Freelancers Insurance Company (FIC), a company founded by a former associate of Obama, which received a $340 million federal ...

An Ohio Roman Catholic university is appealing the dismissal of its lawsuit against the Obama administration regarding the HHS mandate to provide free contraception to employees and students. Father Terence Henry, the president of Franciscan University of Steubenville, vowed to continue fighting the ObamaCare provision. “We will ...

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 ...

From the beginning, Obamacare’s largest expansion of coverage to the uninsured has come not through the form of subsidized insurance in the exchanges – a middle class entitlement – but through the expansion of Medicaid, the health program with outcomes which largely vary between the subpar and the terrible. Liberal supporters ...

New research from the Employment Benefits Research Institute shows health savings accounts, a key part of consumer driven health plans, continue to grow in popularity despite President Obama’s efforts to discourage their use via his health care law. According to the EBRI report, in 2012 more than 18 million adults ages 21–64 ...

More than a quarter of the nation’s state attorneys general signed a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, requesting broader religious exemptions to the contraception mandate she has interpreted as being in the Affordable Care Act. “We’re going to do everything we can under the rule of law ...

Medicare Part D, the Medicare prescription drug benefit for low-income seniors, has been one of the few entitlement success stories since it was passed in 2003. Medicare Part D was designed to mobilize the market and use competition to provide prescription drug coverage to seniors at competitive prices. By almost all accounts ...