The Heartland Institute

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the individual mandate in President Barack Obama’s health care law, the conversation on Capitol Hill is focused on the parliamentary issue of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a parliamentary method that can be used to bypass the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate. Since reconciliation ...

The policy centerpiece of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget proposal this year is his Medicare reform. While Ryan’s approach builds on prior efforts, it differs in important ways from his prior legislative solutions, including last year’s Path to Prosperity. Ryan’s modified approach is essentially the same as one ...

The massive and complex package of proposed health exchange rules released recently by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services illustrates once again why states should think twice before implementing the exchanges mandated by President Barack Obama’s health care law. The announced requirements offer more questions than ...

As many legislators are now learning, perhaps the greatest impact President Barack Obama’s health care regime will have on state budgets comes from the dramatic expansion of Medicaid to cover millions of additional Americans. A program already fraught with problems, Medicaid has terrible outcomes for those individuals forced to ...

There is little question that the key issue for most voters in November’s election was the economy. In President Barack Obama’s first term, the principal piece of legislation affecting the jobs picture was not a budget or a tax package, but rather the health care law that bears his name and was clearly the major legislative ...

Recent hearings in Virginia regarding the commonwealth s case against the individual health insurance mandate in President Barack Obama s health care reform raised important questions hinging on the issue of constitutional severability. If the Supreme Court rules the individual mandate unconstitutional, will it render the entire law ...

The question keeps coming up from concerned citizens: Under President Barack Obama s new health care regime, what s going to happen to my health savings account (HSA)? The answer is that the popular accounts will still exist, but in what could be a very different form. Under Obama s law, HSAs will be dramatically regulated ...

While everyone in Washington is chatting about a different nominee, President Barack Obama s choice of Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is an equally unique one and in some ways the more surprising choice. Berwick is known as a leading academic and technocrat and is generally respected ...

When the governor of your state compares it to " an accident victim bleeding to death on the side of the road" and has to go to Washington seeking $6.9 billion just to keep the lights on, it takes a certain kind of political hubris to propose a vast new state health care program expected to cost in excess of $200 billion ...

President Barack Obama's February Blair House summit made little difference in the push toward national health care reform, but an increasingly popular idea for cutting costs was raised by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), a doctor himself: rooting out fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid. Coburn suggested the president consider a ...