"Death panels" are back. Just in time for Congress' August recess, conservatives are resurrecting Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year to once again rile up right-wing rage. But while the GOP lie four years ago concerned the Affordable Care Act's proposed funding for end of life counseling for those patients seeking it from their doctors, […]

During his press conference on Friday, President Obama pondered why the GOP's "number one priority, the one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care." But in attributing the 40 Affordable Care Act repeal votes, the threats to shut down the government over […]

Fox News is having a field day with its new poll regarding the Affordable Care Act, gloating that majorities of respondents want Obamacare repealed and call its implementation "a joke." Predictably, Fox does not set the record straight about Americans' misperceptions of the ACA. Instead, the network further spins the cycle of conservative disinformation about […]

They say everything is bigger in Texas. That's certainly the case when it comes to the mega-failure that is the Lone Star State's 46th ranked health care system. Six million people or 24 percent of all Texans--and 30 percent of those ages 18 to 64--have no health insurance. Twenty-two Texas counties are among the nation's […]

Florida Senator and obvious 2016 GOP White House hopeful Marco Rubio used a Fox News op-ed last Thursday to publish one of the most comical acts of budgetary extortion in recent memory. Demanding that Congress shutter the federal government rather than pay for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in its next short term […]

Former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean may like to claim he represents "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," just not on health care. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, the one-time 2004 frontrunner turned K Streeter warmed conservative hearts by declaring "the Affordable Care Act's rate-setting won't work." Sadly for […]

The past week brought two big waves of Obamacare news. In the first, Maryland became just the latest state to announce that its new health care exchange will deliver lower than expected insurance premiums beginning in 2014. In the second, a slew of contenders for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination took the op-ed pages to […]

With Congress set to adjourn for the summer, Republican leaders are hoping to reprise the recess of 2009, when furious Tea Partiers armed with incendiary signs, bogus GOP talking points and occasionally guns (though not the truth) ran roughshod over town hall meetings nationwide. But along with their streams of sound bites and planted questions, […]

Last week, former Bush Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt offered a very instructive look back at the rollout of the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. In what the Washington Post's health care reporter Sarah Kliff praised as a "great piece," Leavitt recounted the technical troubles, process pitfalls, rapid responses and lessons learned […]

For most Americans now living, those long-ago events were as unthinkable as they were forgotten. In Little Rock, Arkansas (1957), Oxford, Mississippi (1962), and Tuscaloosa, Alabama (1963), Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy dispatched federal troops to enforce the law of the land in the face of local segregationist officials proclaiming "states' rights" as their rallying cry. […]