September 19, 2013
Contrary to the expectations of its early critics, the Medicare prescription drug benefit has been very successful at using market forces and consumer preferences to keep the cost of drug coverage down over the past decade. In a column at e21 I argue that, instead of bringing more government regulation to the drug benefit program, as the...
September 16, 2013
While there is widespread recognition among conservatives that the Affordable Care Act should be their chief target in the fiscal debates between now and the end of the year, there is some disagreement about whether Republicans in the House should seek to delay or defund the health care law. In a piece in The Weekly Standard, Jeffrey...
August 26, 2013
One of the core provisions for “bending the cost curve down” contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are the Medicare accountable care organizations (ACO), which are intended to serve as integrated health plans that will be able to deliver health care more efficiently than the current Medicare fee...
August 5, 2013
One of the challenges facing opponents of Obamacare has been that there is so much wrong with the law, it can be difficult to choose a single target to focus on. But as Yuval Levin and I explain in an article in The Weekly Standard, the individual mandate, one of law’s most important provisions is also one of its most problematic...
July 10, 2013
Today, the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee held a hearing on the Obama administration’s decision to delay enforcement of the employer mandate, where I gave testimony on the implications of both the delay in the employer mandate as well as the administration’s recent decision to abandon income verification for...
July 9, 2013
Following close on last week’s announcement that the employer mandate provisions of Obamacare will be delayed by a year, the administration just announced another problem in the law’s implementation. In a 606-page regulation, issued the Friday after July 4, the administration announced that income and employment...
July 3, 2013
On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that they would be delaying the implementation of the employer mandate provisions of Obamacare from 2014 to 2015. Over at the Weekly Standard, I explain how this strange decision highlights the underlying weaknesses of the entire health care law: For starters, the delay confirms precisely...
July 3, 2013
The Obama administration’s “HHS mandate”, which requires that all employers provide free contraception, sterilization procedures, and abortifacients in their health-insurance plans for their workers has met with stern resistance from both the religious employers who are forced to choose between obeying their consciences...
June 25, 2013
There has been considerable debate among conservative opponents of Obamacare over proposed federal legislation that would fund high-risk pools for people with expensive pre-existing health conditions. In a column at e21 I explain why and how the federal government should help protect people with pre-existing conditions by funding...
June 19, 2013
Obamacare apologists have been touting last month’s news from California about the effect that the law will have on insurance premiums, but, as I explain in a column on National Review Online, the law’s critics have been right to point out how Obamacare will increase rates in the individual insurance market. Obamacare is...