The Heartland Institute

“Already,” President Obama claimed last night, “the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.” That’s consistent with this report in the New York Times: “In figures released last week, the Congressional Budget Office said it had erased hundreds of billions of dollars in projected spending on ...

Is Obamacare bad for the young? In a short answer, yes -- if "bad" means "forcing young people to buy more expensive health insurance than they need" is bad. And for most young, healthy people, that impact on your wallet isn't viewed as good. We already know that young people are in for sticker shock: The survey, fielded ...

A similar model, a similar result. Massachusetts is the model for President Obama's national health care overhaul, and there, insurers continue to see higher costs despite efforts to bend the cost curve, including all-out government price controls. Here's the latest from the Boston Globe: Despite more modest increases in recent ...

The latest report from the Congressional Budget Office highlights a number of reasons why the CBO is concerned about the implementation of Obamacare. It boils down to this: Obamacare is going to be more expensive than the Obama administration thought, disrupt the marketplace more than it thought, and be tougher to implement ...

Benjamin Domenech discusses the latest CBO report on the implementation of Obamacare. ...

Benjamin Domenech talks about how smokers are singled out for Obamacare rate hikes. ...

The latest report from the Congressional Budget Office highlights a number of reasons why the CBO is concerned about the implementation of Obamacare. It boils down to this: Obamacare is going to be more expensive than the Obama administration thought, disrupt the marketplace more than they thought, and be tougher to implement ...

When is a compromise not a compromise? When only one side thinks it’s a compromise. The Obama administration said Friday that it will not provide broad exceptions to the contraception mandate in its signature healthcare law. The Health and Human Services Department rejected calls to let any employer opt out of the mandate ...

We've seen a torrent of news from HHS over the past few days, particularly on the question of whether affordability would be determined by the price for individual coverage or for family coverage. This was a critical question because of a glitch in Obamacare which we've covered before . Essentially, the government had to ...

Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the expansion of Medicaid won't help people as much as its supporters think it will - and that many of those forced into the program will find it insufficient for their needs. A more relevant issue is how access to necessary care will change when Medicaid is significantly ...

Benjamin Domenech chats with Christina Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute about how Obamacare conflicts with state health care freedom acts. ...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, head of the Republican Governors Association, has called for a meeting of governors with President Obama over the issue of Medicaid. Writing in a January 28th oped in The Washington Post, Jindal made the case that the Medicaid expansion mandated by Obama's health care law would not serve poor Americans ...

Delayed payments to hospitals continue to be a problem when it comes to Medicaid reimbursements -- a problem which could be exacerbated under President Obama's health care law. Medicaid's costs are difficult to predict, and many states were unprepared for the significant rise in costs seen in 2008-2009, when the recession made ...

Michael Cannon of the libertarian Cato Institute has laid down the gauntlet to supporters of President Obama's health care law, inviting them to debate him anytime or anywhere on a critical point of the law's implementation: whether state refusal to implement health insurance exchanges blocks the penalties packaged within Obama ...

It’s clear that under President Barack Obama’s new health care reality, there will be at least two sets of people who will see the most significant premium increases from what they’ve experienced in recent years: people who are young and healthy who no longer experience any premium cost benefit from being young and healthy ...

Cate Long of Reuters' Muniland talks with Ben Domenech about how California's funny math results in a "balanced" budget. ...

Michael Whatley of the Consumer Energy Alliance talks with Ben Domenech about the Keystone XL pipeline and what to expect from the Obama administration on energy policy. ...

So that Medicaid expansion – it’s very tempting, isn’t it? All those Medicaid dollars just sitting there, free of charge from the federal coffers … and you get to claim you’ve expanded coverage for hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, at no cost to the state. It all sounds too good to be true. That’s because ...

Benjamin Domenech discusses how Obamacare is increasing your insurance premiums. ...

You might think the Affordable Care Act’s primary aim, as the name indicates, would be to make affordable health insurance available to every American. You’d be wrong: Its aim was actually to make health insurance available to every American and empower the federal government to manage the insurance marketplace from on high ...