The Heartland Institute

Two years after President Obama signed it into law, there is evidence the slow economic recovery could be partly due to his namesake health care law. According to analyses conducted by the Heritage Foundation and others, the passage of President Obama’s law correlates with a dramatic slowdown in the economic recovery and in ...

A new report from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, using Congressional Budget Office data, reveals the federal health care law will impose $4 trillion in tax increases by 2035. Advocates of the law say the taxes will be paid by insurance companies through taxes on “Cadillac” health insurance plans, by “high-income” individuals ...

There are many reasons Americans dislike Obamacare: its tremendous and rising costs, which CBO recently revealed to have risen by $51 billion since just last year; the Administration’s unprecedented mandate that all employers, even religious schools and hospitals, pay for employees’ abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception ...

The controversy of the mandate announced by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius requiring all employers providing insurance to cover the costs of contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs has begun to move to the courts. Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, notes ...

According to a recently released study, President Obama’s expansion of Medicaid, intended to add upwards of 16 million Americans to the program, could actually restrict access to health care for those in the program unless the government increases provider reimbursement levels. The Center for Studying Health System Change published ...

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law this summer, Vermont will move forward in creating the first single-payer health insurance system in the United States. Under the system signed into law by Democrat Gov. Peter Shumlin in May 2011, a universal, taxpayer-financed ...

Today will bring the latest report from the Medicare trustees on the program’s solvency, or lack thereof. Expect a slight improvement to appear thanks to the 2 percent cut to providers mandated under the sequestration agreement – but that’s fool’s gold, and everyone knows it. An interesting side note to the trustees’ report ...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have announced plans to expand the controversial competitive bidding program for medical devices which has to this point been a pilot project. The New York Times reports: The experiment represented a sharp break from the usual fee-for-service Medicare program, under which beneficiaries ...

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 ...

A new report released by the Joint Economic Committee and authored by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) argues that the tax burden of President Obama's health care law is far larger than previously acknowledged - and that extending the burden out beyond the current windows of analysis reveals a heavy increased tax burden on America ...

According to a new report from the Joint Economic Committee, based on CBO data, Obamacare will impose $4 trillion in new taxes by 2035. The “Cadillac” tax will lead to reduced medical benefits and higher taxes across all income classes. The “high-income” surtaxes are not indexed and will eventually hit low- and middle-income ...

The name of President Barack Obama’s health care law is, of course, the Affordable Care Act. But a major clash has broken out in Washington regarding what that word “affordable” really means--and billions of dollars in subsidies hang in the balance. As we’ve noted in the past, Richard Burkhauser of Cornell was the first to ...

One of the big questions on the minds of many in Washington at the moment is: what comes after the individual mandate? Should the Supreme Court strike the requirement down but not strike down President Obama's entire law, some substitute will likely be proposed by the White House and its allies in Congress. Health policy ...

Health insurance companies have experienced dramatically higher stock prices in the two years since the passage of President Obama’s health care law, thanks to the individual mandate to purchase their product. Wellpoint (WLP) was at about $80/share in 2007, dropped significantly in price shortly after the 2008 election, and is ...

Pharmaceutical sales are coming under criticism based on what appear to be legitimate but rare abuses of pharmaceutical salespeople promising more from a drug than they should and doctors allowing themselves to be pressured into prescribing. Unfortunately, these isolated incidents are being held up as evidence of the need for ...

The average Illinois household could be facing higher hospital bills under Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn’s $33.8 billion proposed budget, which decreases how much the state compensates providers treating patients on Medicaid. Quinn’s office said under normal circumstances Medicaid spending should jump by $2.7 billion. But spending on ...

Academic Drug Detailing Problem A recent report from the Goldwater Institute highlights an upcoming issue in the pharmaceutical industry known as academic drug detailing. Through its academic drug detailing policy, the federal government will fund academics to reach out to physicians and specifically encourage them to prescribe generic ...

It didn't take long for Don Berwick, the controversial former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama, to start being honest again about his anti-market views once he left the administration. In a forum with health care policy expert Jim Capretta, Berwick reacted strongly to the idea that ...

A rise in shortages of key drugs is reaching crisis level for many patients nationwide as demand outpaces supply. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to address the issue, but questions remain as to whether the bill would address the real drivers of shortages. Cancer, Behavior Drugs Hardest Hit The American Society ...

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 ...