I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about PPACA (aka, Obamacare) and its effects. It hasn’t been something that has interested me a great deal until the last week or so, so I am approaching this from a position of ignorance. But I have been reading through as much material as I can find. […]

I don’t follow healthcare as much as others at this blog. I started playing around with some graphs at FRED and got a bit confused. I don’t mind being confused, but I like to clear up that confusion eventually. So perhaps someone can tell me what’s going on. First, this graph of healthcare expenditures / […]

A story that is getting some traction, though mostly lost against the New York primary, is that for profit health insurance company United Health Care is looking to drop its Exchange Plans under PPACA. For example this from Fox: UnitedHealth pulls back on ObamaCare exchanges amid huge losses This is of course presented as some […]

Nicholas Kristof  ✔@NickKristof Clinton is accusing Sanders of being anti-Obama. Feels fake and contrived to me, and rather nasty. 10:47 PM – 11 Feb 2016 Twitter ___ What worries me more than anything else about a Clinton general election campaign is her propensity to say obviously silly things. Elsewhere in that speech, in Clinton, IA […]

Second, single-payer would require a lot of additional tax revenue — and we would be talking about taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy. It’s true that higher taxes would be offset by a sharp reduction or even elimination of private insurance premiums, but it would be difficult to make that case to […]

UPDATE: To see the winning Clinton claim, read my my comment to Robert Waldmann’s post above.  —- Last week when Chelsea Clinton made he now-infamous statements about Sanders’ single-payer healthcare insurance plan—specifically, the one he proposed as a bill in 2013, but presumably a blueprint for the one he plans to propose—I wondered how Sanders […]

Democrats should take continued GOP opposition to Obamacare very seriously. It has serious real-world consequences. As long as states hold out against the Medicaid expansion, it could slow the law’s efforts to realize its goal of expanding coverage. One thing this means is that Democrats should redouble their efforts to regain electoral ground on the level […]

[T]oday’s victory may have been even more decisive than it looks at first glance. It isn’t just that the Court ruled six-to-three in favor of the government’s position, with John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy joining the Court’s liberals in support of a single, non-splintered decision, though that’s important. It’s also that Roberts’ opinion may have precluded […]

The chief justice said almost nothing. — Supreme Court Appears Sharply Split in Case on Health Law, Adam Liptak, New York Times Okay, so how well did my predictions from three days ago hold up at the argument yesterday* in King v. Burwell? Well, I got the outcome right, but not the particulars of how it will […]

I have known for the last five weeks—since January 27, to be exact—that the Supreme Court will uphold the Administration’s interpretation of the federal-subsidies provisions in the ACA when it issues its decision in the infamous King v. Burwell case whose argument date at the Court is Wednesday.  I also have known since then that […]