With an estimated 2 million Americans having signed up for private health insurance plans on the federal and state exchanges, the Affordable Care Act is now making real progress towards the goal of 7 million new enrollees by the end of 2014. But as the Washington Post cautions, Obamacare's first real test comes on January […]

Back in November 2010, I wrote a piece titled "The End of the Tea Party." A year later, a version of that essay ("Tea Party Activists Are Just Republicans by Another Name") appeared in The Tea Party Movement, an anthology published by multi-billion dollar education publisher, Cengage Learning, Inc. But in the intervening two years, […]

Charity, it is said, begins at home. But as Tuesday's Wall Street Journal suggests, charity clearly ends with America's health insurance companies. As the Journal reports, insurers are battling charities and hospitals who have launched pilot programs to help pay for the health care premiums of lower-income Americans. But the carriers' campaign to prevent potentially […]

For weeks, Medicare Advantage insurer UnitedHealthcare has been a poster child for conservative grievances against the Affordable Care Act. The company, which covers 2.9 million of the 14 million elderly or disabled American enrolled in the private insurance program, announced it was dropping over 10,000 physicians from its network nationwide due to "substantial funding pressure […]

Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. So it would seem with the reaction of American conservatives to Evangelii Gaudium, the new 85-page apostolic exhortation issued by Pope Francis. Just days after Sarah Palin fretted that some of the Pope's statements "sound kind of liberal," Rush […]

During the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Americans were introduced to a dictionary of terms used by health insurers to maximize their profits by denying or dropping coverage for the costliest customers. For example, a "pre-existing condition" allowed the insurance companies to reject millions of potentially sicker applicants--as many […]

In the 1978 classic Animal House, Kent Dorfman (Flounder) is distraught after seeing the damage his frat brothers had done to his brother's brand new Lincoln Continental. In response, Eric Stratton (Otter) famously tells him, "You f**ked up. You trusted us." That scene came to mind as President Obama announced his "fix" to the policy […]

President Obama on Thursday apologized to Americans whose existing health insurance was being significantly altered or cancelled altogether just as enrollment for the Affordable Care Act was commencing. "I am sorry," the President announced, "that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me." But those Americans waiting for a […]

On March 5, 2009, President Obama hosted a White House Forum on Health Care Reform. That day, the audience heard a very bold promise not from Obama, but from Karen Ignani, the president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). The top lobbyist for the nation's health insurance companies pledged: "We want to work […]

"When I say if you have your plan and you like it," President Obama explained about the Affordable Care Act during a June 2009 press conference, "what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform." Employers and insurers, unfortunately, are another matter. After all, the share of […]