Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

George Will Comes Out for Single-Payer Healthcare Insurance! Cool!

WASHINGTON — Someone you probably are not familiar with has filed a suit you probably have not heard about concerning a four-word phrase you should know about. The suit could blow to smithereens something everyone has heard altogether too much about, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ACA). … The four words that […]

Oh, dear. Another loopy challenge to yet another ACA provision, this one concerning the Independent Payment Advisory Board.*

A legal-news blog I read mentions an article published today on the National Review Online aspirationally titled “A Strike at the Heart of Obamacare” and subtitled “A case against IPAB is heard by the Ninth Circuit — and eventually by the Supreme Court?”  I don’t normally read the National Review and am not familiar with […]

Memo to Dems and Pundits: The disastrous healthcare.com rollout is very old news.*

Democratic operatives tell me that this basic message is, broadly speaking, how Dems will respond (where appropriate) to attacks over the law. The ad says: “Ann Kirkpatrick listens and learns. It’s why she blew the whistle on the disastrous health care website, calling it ‘stunning ineptitude,’ and worked to fix it. She fought to hold […]

Obamacare horror stories

Maggie Mahar at healthinsurance.org takes a look at stories easily fact checked in Anatomy of an Obamacare horror story For months, health reform’s opponents have been feasting on tales of Obamacare’s innocent victims – Americans who lost their insurance because it doesn’t comply with the ACA’s regulations, and now have to shell out more than […]

Marco Rubio Says Farm Subsidies and Hurricane-Disaster Funds Should Not Be Federal Programs. Really. [Updated and typo-corrected.]

For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it. All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a […]

Why Attorneys Will Not Always Sue In Malpractice

Hat Tip to Crooks and Liars; ProPublica When Attorneys Refused My Medical Malpractice Case”. I wrote on this topic one time before. What attracts me to it again is newer data as presented by Publica, which expresses the same finding I noted before. Attorneys will not take a case unless they can win and make […]

Yes, Virginia, there really IS a (rapidly-increasing) possibility of a healthcare insurance public option. The private insurance companies are inviting it.

  When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies. But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through […]

Sunday Reads

50% of Congress Are Millionaires “The nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics reports at least 268 of the 534 lawmakers were worth an average of $1 million in 2012. These millionaires are the people debating issues like unemployment benefits, food stamps and the minimum wage, which affect people with far fewer resources — it’s no wonder […]

On the Horizon "After Obamacare"

Many of us have talked about bending the healthcare cost curve by changing the services for fee healthcare cost model to a model of better outcomes for those fees. This is precisely what the PPACA does. Phillip Longman based his book “Best Care Anywhere” on how the VA brought about such a change in the […]

Oregon medicaid report and use of the hospital ER

The current buzz revolves around a study suggesting increased access to health care by medicaid recipients may actually increase visits to the ER, not decrease them as the White house claims. The people at The Incidental Economist tackle the issues A few thoughts on the latest Oregon Medicaid results, the latest results aren’t actually counter […]