The Heartland Institute

The failure of Medicare’s demonstration projects to reduce the costs of care has been the subject of much disappointment in the health policy world. Recall that these are critical to President Obama’s challenge “To find out what works and then go do it.” If nothing works, the fallback weapon in Obamacare is to reduce fees ...

A new report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University finds that contrary to promises by President Obama and others in arguing for the passage of his health care law, Obamacare actually adds to the deficit, as opposed to decreasing it. Much of this has to do with the double-counting of funding within the law, a ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) signed into law by President Obama in 2010 will significantly worsen the federal government’s fiscal position relative to previous law. Supporters argued that this comprehensive health care reform would deliver a much-needed correction to the government’s unsustainable fiscal outlook ...

A group of Republican lawmakers in Washington, DC introduced a new plan to return more power to the states by combining Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program into a single block grant. The State Health Flexibility Act—sponsored by Indiana Republican Rep. Todd Rokita, with Republican Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas ...

In response to questions from lawmakers, acting White House budget director Jeff Zients testified to Congress in March the individual mandate fine in President Obama’s health care law is not a tax, an admission which contradicted the claims the administration made before the U.S. Supreme Court. According to Galen Institute President ...

As states have been debating whether to implement a health insurance exchange, a key deterrent has been that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had released only draft rules. HHS now has released final insurance exchange rules, and many states are left with questions unanswered or suspicions confirmed. According ...

President Obama’s health care law is likely to significantly increase demand for primary care physicians even as the nation already faces shortages of doctors in this field. According to Kathryn Nix, a health care policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, decades of overregulation of the health care labor market coupled with ...

Seven states banded together in a lawsuit to block President Obama’s controversial preventive medicine policy which mandates all employers and institutions who provide insurance to their employees and students must supply contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization services without co-pays. The attorneys general of Florida, Michigan ...

First as a candidate and then as president, Barack Obama repeatedly promised his administration would “have a health care plan that would save the average family $2,500 on their premiums.” Yet since the president passed his health care law, with exclusively Democratic support in Congress, health premiums have continued to rise ...

The state of Illinois can no longer afford free or subsidized health care for retired state workers, according to a report released by the Illinois Policy Institute. The report, authored by Illinois Policy Institute health care policy analyst Jonathan Ingram, says benchmarking retiree contributions to the average contributions ...

In March, Oregon Democrat Gov. John Kitzhaber signed two key pieces of legislation affecting the state’s health care system. Senate Bill 1580 establishes Medicaid “coordinated care organizations,” and House Bill 4164 will implement Oregon’s health insurance exchange under President Obama’s health care law, instead of waiting for ...

A year after a controversial new procurement system was introduced, many Medicare beneficiaries are facing difficulties or delays as providers are squeezed by dramatically lower prices on lifesaving durable medical equipment and services. Medicare spends more than $8 billion a year buying durable medical equipment (DME) for the ...

The third and final day of arguments at the Supreme Court will focus on the severability of the individual mandate from the balance of the law and on the Medicaid mandate for the states. Already it's become clear the liberal-leaning justices are being more forceful on the issue of severability than they have on other areas ...

From the archives: A guide to severability and the individual mandate. Several state legislators have reached out to me recently with questions about the nature of severability and Obamacare . Since some folks seem to have questions as well , I thought I’d explain a bit about what this means. Most laws of large size and scope ...

From the archives: A guide to severability and the individual mandate. Several state legislators have reached out to me recently with questions about the nature of severability and Obamacare . Since some folks seem to have questions as well , I thought I’d explain a bit about what this means. Most laws of large size and scope ...

Kentucky’s $6 billion Medicaid system provides health care to more than 700,000 low-income residents. As with many states, the size and cost of the program has increased dramatically in recent years. This expansion and an attempt to shift to managed care have caused problems in several key areas, according to an evaluation ...

Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered the likely key player in the Supreme Court case over President Obama's health care law, asked a series of questions in today's hearings that has everyone in Washington buzzing. Here is every question Justice Kennedy asked today. PP 4-5: "Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?" PP ...

The most heavily debated element of President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the constitutionality of the individual health insurance mandate, which requires every citizen, with few exceptions, to purchase health insurance. The matter was debated by several district and appellate courts, and ...

Today is the day. Advance reading for President Obama's health care law’s week at the Supreme Court from: Richard Epstein, Ilya Somin, Jonathan Adler, George Will, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Avik Roy on the week ahead. Below is a liveblog I'm participating in covering the day's events. I encourage you to join in the conversation ...

Today I’m participating in a liveblog reacting to the Supreme Court’s first day of consideration of the case against President Barack Obama’s health care law. You can join in here. When it comes to what was discussed today, I’ll leave it to Tevi Troy to explain: The third issue would result in one of the biggest anticlimaxes ...