The Heartland Institute

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 ...

The Obama administration has announced a delay in implementing the insurance exchange designed for small businesses and their employees. The one-year delay in starting the new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses means employers in many states will not be able to provide workers with a choice of health plans ...

As a possible preview of what awaits us in the United States under President Obama’s health care law, Great Britain’s government-run health care system, the National Health Service, is slashing nearly $4.5 billion from its budget by eliminating appointments with a doctor and instead treating patients via computer. In addition ...

During the 2012 legislative session, Massachusetts passed its third law to address health care spending since the state’s landmark health insurance coverage reforms in 2006. The inability to curb the rising costs of insurance premiums and health care in the state whose system most resembles President Obama’s law could serve as ...

A new card program which combines the benefits of health savings accounts with health-focused incentives could provide consumers with new benefits for healthier living. In January, Medagate and MasterCard launched their new dual payment health incentives card, the first to combine a member account with a rules-based incentive rewards ...

As President Obama’s health care law goes into effect, restaurants across the country are preparing for the new expense of meeting informational requirements under the law which are likely to prove costly without any certainty of health benefits. Section 4205 of Obama’s law requires restaurants and similar retail food establishments ...

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe has embarked on an effort to reform the way his state pays for health care through a new initiative intended to rein in runaway costs by rewarding doctors with financial incentives to provide more efficient care. But in order to get there, his approach may incentivize rationing of health care. In ...

In a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Texas Gov. Rick Perry confirmed his state has no intention of implementing an insurance exchange or expanding Medicaid, despite the reelection of President Obama. Echoing an earlier letter written in July, in his November letter Perry, a Republican, noted ...

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has amended his state’s lawsuit against President Obama’s health care law to address a legal problem with the Internal Revenue Service’s distribution of insurance exchange subsidies—an issue which could effectively bar implementation of the law in certain states. Pruitt’s new challenge focuses ...

President Obama’s health care law requires that the administration define essential health benefits for the nation, a task which federal and state officials have found more challenging than expected. As of October 2012, only eleven states have settled on essential health care benefits packages or are close to doing so, while ...

The Obama administration maintains that pushing hospitals and physicians to adopt electronic medical records will improve efficiency, increase patient safety, and reduce health care costs. But as more providers transition to EMRs, there has been an unexpected consequence: Billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare, private ...

Even if you’ve been the nation’s leading job-creating state for the past four years, President Obama’s health care law is going to have an effect. Texas small businesses expect Obama’s law to impact them in a profoundly negative way. According to calculations by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), there will ...

Although politicians regularly cite rooting out Medicaid’s waste, fraud, and abuse as a potential source of savings, a new government analysis finds most of the audits designed to identify and stop unnecessary losses in the federal health care system for the poor have cost the taxpayers much more than they saved. According ...

The failure of a key element of President Obama’s health care law designed to lower costs and save taxpayers money could signal broader problems with the law’s approach to achieving savings. In an attempt to create cost savings through more coordination and top-down efficiency, Obama’s law allowed for the creation of accountable ...

In an attempt to impose top-down containment on Massachusetts’s soaring health care costs, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick signed a law which creates a statewide global cap on public and private health care costs. The law expands the state’s bureaucracy and specifies a target growth rate for overall medical spending based on ...

The annual report from Medicare’s trustees highlights concerns that bankruptcy could arrive for the program much earlier than previously anticipated. Medicare, the government’s medical insurance program for the elderly, covers 48.3 million people. With baby boomers now reaching the eligible age of 65 at the rate of 10,000 a day ...

President Obama has big changes planned for Medicare Advantage, which relies on private insurers’ plans that contract with Medicare to provide coverage. It is highly popular among rural seniors who have trouble finding doctors who accept Medicare payments. A significant portion of the Medicare cuts in Obama’s health care law ...

By Kenneth Artz In a ruling which surprised the federal and state governments alike, the Supreme Court decided states can opt out of President Obama’s sweeping expansion of Medicaid without losing access to their funds under their prior model. As envisioned under Obama’s law, the expansion of Medicaid, the government’s health ...

Like many other states, Colorado’s political leaders must decide whether to accept the Medicaid expansion mandated by President Obama’s law at a time when their program’s enrollment is already above prior levels. Some 200,000 more Coloradans are now poor enough to qualify for Medicaid than before the recession. The state’s Medicaid ...

Although President Obama promised that if you like your health care plan you can keep it, a new report shows more than half of all insurance plans for individuals in the United States won’t survive under his health care law. According to the study from the Commonwealth Fund, published in Health Affairs and conducted by researchers ...