Alec MacGillis of the NewRepublic has been doing some fine campaign reporting this year and here he offers a smart look at what may be the most important state of all in November–Ohio. The most striking part of the piece for me, one that illuminates an essential conundrum for Barack Obama, occurs when MacGillis goes [...]
Health Care
A rash of news stories have been published this week examining how the GOP will handle things if the Supreme Court votes next month to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Amazingly, they all leave out the single most important and obvious impact a court rebuke would have. Hint: It’s not about Republicans.
If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual health insurance mandate, but leaves most or all of the rest of the Affordable Care Act intact, Congress will have some work to do. Without some way to push uninsured healthy Americans into the marketplace, insurance prices could creep upward until they become unaffordable for everyone.
If the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s sweeping new health care law, seems complicated, the Supreme Court case parsing its constitutionality is far more so. This week, over three days, justices on the High Court are hearing six hours of arguments on four distinct but intricately related pieces of the law. The first session, on [...]
It’s going to take a while to sift through the entrails of Paul Ryan’s latest budget, but it seems obvious that his Medicare proposal, jointly made with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, is going to get most of the attention. I’m a big fan of Wyden’s when it comes to health care policy. He’s proven [...]
Clearly, health care reform was a losing political issue for lots of congressional Democrats, especially those who were up for reelection in 2010. The issue helped mobilize Republican voters who managed to unseat enough Democrats to shift the balance of power on Capitol Hill. Democrats lost their Senate super majority and Republicans now hold a [...]
In the face of mounting pressure from Catholic leaders and politicians, the White House on Friday tweaked its position on contraception coverage mandates in the Affordable Care Act. Rather than require large religious institutions like Catholic colleges and hospitals to provide employees with free health insurance coverage for contraception, insurance companies themselves will have to [...]
It’s no secret that passing health care reform was a balancing act from beginning to end. For President Obama, keeping the legislation alive meant making sure congressional Democrats stayed happy, along with for-profit industries like insurers and Big Pharma and powerful non-profit interest groups like the AARP and the American Medical Association. Through health reform’s [...]
The Medicare reform plan released Thursday by GOP budget prophet Paul Ryan and wonky Democratic Senator Ron Wyden is a rare hybrid strain. Politically, it’s the result of a collaboration between two men with very different ideological inclinations. On the policy, it maps out a kind of DMZ for the entitlement debate: an expansion of [...]
With all this presidential politics going on, it’s hard to keep up with some of the subtler and wonkier public policy developments. The always-excellent Matt Miller has a fascinating column in the Wapo today on the proposed health care compromise backed by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Paul Ryan. This could be a big [...]
