Will using the power of the executive branch bring healthcare prices down? Recent events suggest otherwise.

Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is set to run out of money by 2026.

HHS must reimburse states for unlawfully compelling them to pay the Affordable Care Act’s Health Insurance Provider Fee (HIPF).

Telemedicine providers have faced burdensome and complex regulatory structures at the state and federal level.

AHIP, the trade association for health insurers, has a nifty infographic answering the question: “Where does your premium dollar go?” Obviously designed to defray accusations that health insurers earn too much profit, the infographic shows “net margin: of only three percent. A full 80 percent of our premium dollar goes to paying medical, hospital,...
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A new study of past-due medical debt, by Michael Karpman and Kyle J. Kaswell of the Urban Institute, shows that the expansion of health insurance coverage subsequent to the Affordable Care Act is associated with a reduction in the proportion of adults with past-due medical debt. In 2012, 29.6 percent of U.S. adults had...
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One reason public policy favors employer-based health benefits instead of individually owned health insurance is that policymakers believe it equalizes access to health care among workers of all income levels. Insurers usually demand 75 percent of workers be covered, which leads to benefit design that attracts almost all workers to be covered. Employers do...
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Readers know I disagree with using measurements of “coverage” as measurements of access to health care. New data from the Louisiana Department of Health, which cheers the expansion of Medicaid dependency in the state, shows (unwittingly) exactly why. Healthy Louisiana’s Dashboard shows that 402,557 adults became dependent on Medicaid as a result of Obamacare’s...
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Writing in The Week, Ryan Cooper shares a chilling story about an Obamacare Gold-level health insurance policy that let its beneficiary down when he needed it most: Stewart is 29 years old, and was pursuing his Ph.D in American history at Texas Christian University until ill health forced him to withdraw. He lives in...
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Sonia Jaffe and Mark Shepard of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) have written a new paper, which compares the effects of fixed-dollar subsidies for health insurance to subsidies that are linked to premiums. They conclude that fixed-dollar subsidies reduce taxpayers’ costs and improve access. Unfortunately, the structure of subsidies in U.S. health...
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