With the deadlines looming for Americans to enroll in health insurance plans for 2014, conservatives are shocked--shocked!--that the Obama administration is "strongly urging" insurance companies to start coverage on January 1 even in advance of receiving new subscribers' premium payments. For the Wall Street Journal and Forbes' Avik Roy, these and other HHS contingency measures […]

Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed what at first blush seems like a very unusual lawsuit against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Her life jeopardized by the refusal of Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon, Michigan to perform or even inform her of the need for an abortion, the […]

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 […]

The refusal of Republican-led states to accept the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid will rank among the greatest self-inflicted wounds in the recent history of American public policy. But in the red states where the GOP calls the shots, that act of pure political spite will produce not one crisis but three. For starters, […]

In 2010, the GOP steamrolled to its House majority by scaring the bejesus out of seniors about $716 billion in Obamacare cuts to Medicare. Three years later, House and Senate Republicans are repeating their tried and untrue talking point. Untrue, that is, not just because the savings from private Medicare Advantage insurers and providers do […]

Despite the massive--and tightly scripted--Republican effort to dominate the media reporting about the troubled launch of the Affordable Care Act, slowly but surely success stories are beginning to appear in the headlines. Just this week, articles detailed the growing Obamacare enrollment momentum--and lives changed for the better--in Kentucky, California and other states. Meanwhile, the pressure […]

Last week, Americans learned about the GOP playbook laying out the strategies, tactics and talking points the Republican faithful should use to demagogue the Affordable Care Act. A quick glance at Monday's headlines from the Chicago Tribune ("Employers could drop health care"), the Wall Street Journal ("Companies Prepare to Pass More Health Costs to Workers") […]

Six years after the start of the Great Recession, there should be little disagreement what America's number one domestic priority should be. With unemployment still stuck around 7 percent four plus years after that recession was declared "over," creating jobs has to be Job #1. That urgency is underscored by the new analyses warning that […]

As he tries to right the course with the troubled launch of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama finds himself at the mercy to the American insurance industry. And that's not a good place for him--or the American people--to be. After all, while Obama now needs the insurers to work overtime to manually enroll […]

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 […]