Numerous commentators–especially those defending President Biden's economic record–have puzzled over why Americans are sour about the state of the U.S. economy. Unemployment rates have returned to pre-pandemic lows, commentators correctly point out, and the official rate of inflation is declining. So why are Americans ignoring the view of ...

There's a famous scene in Star Wars: A New Hope where Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and company are trapped in a garbage compactor on the Death Star. The walls of the compactor slowly squeeze in, threatening to flatten the protagonists before they can get out. Opponents of Medicare Advantage are hoping that the federal government will do ...

Today, the Congressional Budget Office published its annual 10-year Budget and Economic Outlook. According to the CBO's latest estimates, in 2024 the U.S. government will pass a grim and once-unimaginable milestone. The federal debt has gotten so large that spending on interest to service that debt now exceeds federal spending on ...

Central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, have come under withering criticism for the way they enable authoritarian governments to control their citizens. And yet, a number of leading figures in American financial regulation continue to advocate for what they call an "American-style" CBDC. But it is hard to reconcile the surveillance ...

Democrats are on the verge of passing legislation that, among other things, would empower the government to directly negotiate the price Medicare pays for a handful of the costliest prescription drugs. The measure has precipitated hyperbole from industry lobbyists, who say it represents an existential threat to medical innovation. One ...

Last month, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand unveiled their long-anticipated bipartisan legislative proposal to build a federal regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. If the bill, called the "Responsible Financial Innovation Act," were to become law, the U.S. could instantly leapfrog ...

It would do far more to transform the character of the U.S. economy than single-payer health care. China has established itself as a pioneer in yet another high-tech field: that of blockchain-based central-bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. It's not surprising that China would embrace such a technology. What is surprising is the interest ...

On June 5, at a conference in Miami, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced that the Central American country is in the process of adopting bitcoin as legal tender: a move that would make El Salvador the first country to deem bitcoin an official national currency. Despite El Salvador’s small size, Bukele’s effort is a major milestone ...

Nineteenth-century liberals offer lessons for today. Thirty-one> years ago, a mass gathering in front of an important government structure signified the high-water mark of the American conservative movement. It was November 9, 1989. Harald Jäger, an East German border officer, had watched a confused member of the Politburo announce that the ...

Contrary to naysayers, President Trump’s new executive order on prescription drug pricing is the most important policy change to date in the effort to reduce Medicare’s runaway drug spending. Here’s why. Last July, President Trumpsigned a series of executive ordersmeant to reduce what Americans pay for prescription drugs. But the most important ...

Americans have long complained about the fact that drug companies overcharge U.S. patients for medicines that cost much less elsewhere. A quartet of executive orders from President Trump, issued today, will change that. “We are putting patients over lobbyists, senior citizens before special interests, and we’re putting America first,” said ...

The COVID-19 economic lockdown hasn’t just affected your favorite local restaurants and bars, but also your primary care physician. Many independent practices may permanently close. Others will survive by embracing new ways of practicing medicine. In the traditional fee-for-service model of physician care, doctors get paid the more often they ...

Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Nursing homes and assisted living facilities: The #1 COVID problem ...

It’s not true that the only way to improve public health is by shutting down the economy and the only way to improve the economy is by sacrificing public health. As the Covid-19 shutdown enters its second month, policy makers and commentators have emphasized that we’re not yet out of the woods. Deaths and hospitalizations are continuing to ...

On January 29, President Trump established a Coronavirus Task Force, now led by Vice President Mike Pence, to coordinate the administration’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic. Less widely reported—until now—is that a smaller second group, organized by presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, is also playing a key role in ...

When can we end social distancing and get back to normal life?” It’s the question on everyone’s mind, and one without a clear answer at this time. Here’s what we do know: An effective treatment against the novel coronavirus would make a big difference in getting us there. Remember the old adage, “There’s no cure for the common cold”? Well, ...

Joe Biden’s sweeping success on Super Tuesday doesn’t just establish him as the 2020 Democratic frontrunner. It also elevates the contrast between Biden’s health reform plan and Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All.” Here’s what you need to know. Expanding Obamacare Biden describes his health reform plan as “building on the Affordable Care Act.” ...

On the presidential campaign trail, Democratic candidates are making all sorts of promises about how they’ll use federal power to reduce the cost of health care, either through “Medicare for All” or a “public option.” But this month, in a key House committee vote on surprise medical billing, Democrats showed that they prioritize the views ...

On December 18, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its long-awaited opinion in the latest Obamacare constitutional challenge, Texas v. Azar. By overturning the health law’s individual mandate, but remanding the rest of the ACA back to the lower court for further consideration, the 5th Circuit has created a pathway for ...

Congress is making progress on surprise medical bills in the emergency room, a problem that is affecting a growing number of patients. But health care lobbyists in Washington have been working overtime to undermine these reforms, by demanding the use of arbitration to increase patient costs. A good bill in the Senate First, the good news. ...

For years, observers from across the spectrum have called for more price transparency in health care, especially when it comes to hospitals. Thanks to initiatives from the White House and a key Senate committee, that moment is now close at hand. Proposed rule could revolutionize hospital markets On July 30, the Centers for Medicare and ...

Senate health care leaders have developed a bipartisan, fiscally responsible way to reduce the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, also known as Medicare Part D. But pharmaceutical companies, in a furious lobbying effort, are trying to blow up the deal by demanding that taxpayers spend tens of billions on drug ...

In the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, candidates proposed a number of far-left ideas. But when Lester Holt asked, “Who here would abolish private health insurance in favor of a government run plan?” only two raised their hands: Elizabeth Warren and Bill De Blasio. .@lesterholtnbc: 'Who here would abolish their ...

A new proposal from the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee could have a meaningful impact on the high cost of U.S. hospital care—if it survives an onslaught from industry lobbyists. The bill, called the Lower Health Care Costs Act, is the product of bipartisan negotiations led by the HELP Committee’s chairman, Sen. ...

Medicare’s prescription drug benefit is known as the one federal entitlement program that routinely comes in under budget. Now, a new push is on in Congress to make changes to the program that could increase costs even further. Medicare’s unique drug benefit Medicare, originally enacted in 1965, has many outdated design flaws. One of those ...

The Trump administration has shelved a proposal that would have stymied egregious price hikes in the Medicare prescription drug program. It’s a major win for the drug industry, and a defeat for Trump’s goal of reducing drug prices. How ‘protected classes’ lead to skyrocketing prices The rule revolved around Medicare’s program for ...

For generations, the prices that hospitals charge patients with private insurance have been shrouded in secrecy. An explosive new study has unlocked some of those secrets. It finds that employers and their insurers are failing to control hospital costs, increasing calls for transparency into insurer-hospital agreements. Growing frustrations ...

The Trump administration announced today that it has finalized anew rule requiring all drug companies to include the list prices of their drugs in direct-to-consumer advertisements. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, the White House hopes that more visibility about drug prices will hold drugmakers more accountable, and reduce costs for ...

Opponents of the role of consumers and markets in health care have one go-to argument above all others: that you can’t shop for health care when you’re unconscious. The rising problem of gargantuan, surprise medical bills in surgical wards and emergency rooms shows that they have a point. The good news is that constructive, bipartisan reforms ...

The topic of high prescription drug prices is now the dominant policy issue on Capitol Hill. The new Congress has held a half-dozen hearings on the topic. But one issue that is at the heart of high prices has attracted little attention: the role of biologic drugs in rising drug costs. In 2017, according to data from the IQVIA Institute, ...

For the average family, spending on hospitals now outpaces federal tax rates. For decades, we’ve talked and talked and talked about the high cost of American health care. But we haven’t done anything about it. As the above chart shows, the problem has gotten so bad that, today, hospital spending reduces the average family’s take-home pay more ...

Last Friday, a federal judgein Fort Worth, Texas opined that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional. The judge’s rulingin the case hinges on a misunderstanding of how to cover people with pre-existing conditions that’s shared by courts, journalists, and even Obamacare’s architects. Obamacare’s faulty logic on pre-existing conditions ...

Democrats’ 2010 health care bill was called the “Affordable Care Act.” But for hundreds of millions of Americans, premiums have risen even further because of Obamacare’s tax on insurance premiums. Congress has an opportunity to repeal this tax before members head home for the holidays. Taxing health insurance premiums is ...

On the last night of November 2018, former President George H.W. Bush passed away at the age of 94. Bush is best known for his foreign policy achievements, most notably his deft handling of the breakup of the Soviet Union. But what’s less well-known is how Bush’s presidency resulted in the balanced budgets of the 1990s. Balanced budgets in ...

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has suspended his presidential campaign, after losing his home state to Donald Trump by nearly 20 percentage points. It’s a disappointing end for Rubio, who was the Republican Party’s best hope for winning the general election, and for expanding the GOP tent to younger voters and minorities. But for Rubio supporters ...

In 2012, a liberal think tank called the Tax Policy Center published a report purporting to show that Mitt Romney’s plan for tax reform would raise taxes on the middle class. Though other tax experts debunked TPC’s claims, the Obama campaign gleefully deployed them to help win reelection. Well, TPC is back, this time with a 50-page report aimed ...

Yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its annual ten-yearBudget and Economic Outlook. The document contains the CBO’s updated estimates for economic growth, employment, and the nation’s fiscal health. The most notable change was to enrollment in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. The CBO, bowing to reality, ...

Nearly every Republican running for President—even Donald Trump!—has released a plan to overhaul the federal tax code. One of the more interesting proposals for reforming corporate taxes has come from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who favors replacing the corporate income tax with what Cruz calls a “business flat tax,” and what Canadians and Europeans ...

As Internet-driven innovation revolutionizes the U.S. economy, many have wondered: Why isn't there an Uber of health care? Why can't we deploy, in health care, the same forces that are improving quality and lowering costs in virtually every other sector of the economy? Health care professionals are neither dumb nor averse to new technology; ...

The Manhattan Institute's HEALTH CARE 2.0: USHERING IN MEDICINE'S DIGITAL REVOLUTION series delves into the details of how government policy stifles innovation in the delivery of health care. This paper, Part 1, surveys the key economic principles that drive innovative, dynamic sectors of the economy—and explains why American health care does ...

On Sunday, January 17—hours before the Democratic presidential debate on NBC—Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders released details of his proposal to replace the entire U.S. health care system with a universal, government-run, single-payer one. “Twenty-nine million Americans today still do not have health insurance,” said Sanders in a white ...

There has been some interesting coverage lately about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’ssuccessful effortto ensure that taxpayers were not on the hook for excess losses incurred by insurers participating in Obamacare’s exchanges. Today, however, two Associated Press reportersallegedthat this victory against the law was one that Rubio “didn’t deliver.” ...

Obamacare is a two-thousand-page jumble of costly and ill-designed mandates. But the health law contained one provision that, while imperfect, was the law’s best feature: its “Cadillac tax,” a feature that begins to end America’s discrimination against those who buy health insurance on their own. The Cadillac tax is the one thing in Obamacare ...

For years, we’ve heard from Obamacare’s supporters that the law has been a success, because, they say, it has provided more people with health insurance, and slowed the growth rate of health spending. Well, the returns are in. Last week, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its official estimates of ...

On Tuesday evening, House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) held a press conference, in which he announced that he would indeed be willing to serve as Speaker of the House, provided that the House could unite around him, among other conditions. If Ryan and House hard-liners agree, the consequences could be significant for the ...

Despite President Obama's best efforts to stop it, the energy economy of the United States is undergoing a profound transformation. No one who lived through the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970's would imagine that the United States would, in the 2010's, become the world's largest oil producer—and, in fact, the world's leading energy ...

For years, this blog has been warning about how the high cost of Obamacare-sponsored insurance would limit the law’s expansion of health coverage. Well, the chicken has come home to roost. Today, the Obama administration announced that it projected dramatically lower enrollment growth for Obamacare’s exchanges in 2016: only 1.3 million, ...

t suffices to say that Donald Trump has been all over the place on health care reform. Last month, at the first Republican presidential debate, Trump argued that socialized medicine in Scotland “ works incredibly well .” At the same time, Trump has said that Obamacare has “gotta go” and that he would “repeal and replace it something terrific.” ...

oday in Iowa, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton unveiled a set of policies designed to tackle the high price of branded prescription medicines. Her plan, such as it is, wouldn’t solve the problem of high drug prices; in certain ways, it would make that problem worse. But advocates of the free market are mistaken if they think ...

It's easy to forget, but the Tea Party emerged not in response to ObamaCare, nor illegal immigration, but to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. So why is it that the Tea Party's Republican allies have been mostly silent on the issue of Wall Street reform?
(DISCLOSURE: I am an adviser to former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, but the opinions ...

Today in Minnesota, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R.) will put forth his plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. The plan offers sizable health insurance subsidies that every American would be eligible for, regardless of income. It would increase Medicare spending by more than $800 billion over ten years. But there's one key question that ...

Last night in Cleveland, the 17 declared Republican presidential candidates participated in the first official debates of the 2016 election season. Health care policy was a bone of contention. "How can you run for the Republican nomination and be for single-payer health care?" asked former Texas Gov. Rick Perry of Trump. When Fox anchor Bret ...

Yesterday, the Supreme Court sided with the Obama administration in the King v. Burwell Obamacare case. In a statement after the decision, President Obama declared that his signature health law is "here to stay." But in his remarks, the President knowingly ignored the key concept in the case: that if the challengers had won, not one word of ...

Last fall, videos emerged showing MIT economist Jonathan Gruber—the architect of Obamacare—mocking "the stupidity of the American voter" for not perceiving the ways in which the controversial health law concealed its true costs. At the time, President Obama and others went through great lengths to deny Gruber's centrality to Obamacare. But ...

Majorities in both chambers of Congress strongly believe that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is too prescriptive and moves too much authority over the health system to the federal government. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell case, Congress will have the opportunity to advance health care policies ...

In March two freshman Republican senators—Mike Lee (Utah) and Marco Rubio (Fla.)—released an ambitious plan for tax reform. Nonpartisan experts believe the plan would turbocharge U.S. economic growth. But the plan is marred by a multitrillion-dollar effort at social engineering, one that would increase the deficit without expanding ...

Today, with bipartisan support, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a significant Medicare reform bill, by a vote of 392 to 37. The bill would repeal Medicare's "Sustainable Growth Rate," or SGR, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars increasing payments to doctors under Medicare, while modestly increasing Medicare premiums ...

Something odd has been happening with the Supreme Court battle over the legality of subsidies for Obamacare's federally-organized health insurance exchange. The Obama administration has been claiming—beyond credulity—that it has no "Plan B" should the Court side with the administration's challengers. "We don't have an administrative action that ...

On March 9, the Congressional Budget Office unveiled its updated budget projections for the years 2015 to 2025, including significant changes to its outlook for Obamacare's spending and coverage estimates. The CBO now thinks that 8 million fewer U.S. residents will gain coverage from the health law, compared to its original estimates. But the ...

As we await a decision in the big Obamacare Supreme Court case, King v. Burwell, progressive pundits have continued to predict a health care apocalypse if the Court sides with challengers to the Obama administration. That's a wild exaggeration. But there will be some disruption, and Republicans in Congress have been debating the best way ...

Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, a case with significant implications for the future of Obamacare. Most of the justices' questions proceeded along expected lines. Most notable was a series of questions by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who questioned whether it would be constitutional for Obamacare to ...

Yesterday, three key Republican senators on health care issues published an op-ed in which they outlined the broad principles of how they would address potential outcomes in the big Obamacare Supreme Court case, King v. Burwell. Today, three House Republican leaders—Paul Ryan (Wisc.), John Kline (Minn.), and Fred Upton (Mich.)—unveiled their ...

On Sunday night, three Republican senators—Orrin Hatch (Utah), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and John Barrasso (Wyo.)—published their plan to address the potential outcome of a Supreme Court in the King v. Burwell case, for which a decision is expected this June. Republicans aim to convince the Supreme Court's swing justices—particularly ...

Few Americans who read a newspaper didn't hear about last year's Veterans Health Administration scandal, in which VA officials manipulated patient waiting lists in order to deny care to ailing veterans. I observed at the time that the VA's brand of government-run medicine was far worse than Obamacare. And I questioned why lawmakers hadn't ...

Last night, the White House tweeted that "about 11.4 million Americans are signed up for private health coverage" through Obamacare's insurance exchanges. President Obama claims that this figure proves that his health law is working. But once you unravel the spin, what the latest numbers show is that the pace of enrollment in Obamacare's ...

In January, in his annual State of the Union address, President Obama bragged that "our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999." It's great news, to be sure. But according to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recent improvement in the labor market may be due to a policy change that ...

One year ago, three Republican senators permanently changed the Obamacare debate by publishing Congress' most credible plan yet to repeal and replace the health law. They called it the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act, or "Patient CARE." Last night, they published a new and improved version of their proposal, ...

Many American conservatives oppose universal health insurance because they see it as fundamentally antithetical to a free society. "If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price," wrote a guest editorialist in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. But according to the ...

The Obama economy has been great for some people. Thanks to Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, owners of equities and real estate have done very well since 2009. But things have been more challenging for those at the other end of the occupational ladder: those who work in jobs that pay by the hour. Due to ObamaCare, and to hikes in the minimum ...

On March 4, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the case that many pundits claim will "blow up Obamacare." That's an exaggeration; whatever the High Court decides, Obamacare will remain entrenched in federal law. But if the Supremes do end up ruling against the Obama administration—a distinct possibility—they will ...

On Sunday evening, CBS' 60 Minutes did a feature story on Steven Brill's new book, America's Bitter Pill, in which Brill complains that Obamacare didn't do enough to tackle the exorbitantly high price of U.S. hospital care. "Obamacare does zero to change any of that," says Brill. That's not exactly right. What Brill—and CBS—don't tell you—is ...

In 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a set of modest reforms to the Medicare program proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan. In response, Democrats charged that Republicans were seeking to "end Medicare as we know it," a claim that even liberal organs like PolitiFact called "the lie of the year." But there's a greater irony to Democrats' ...

Last week, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin (D.) announced that he was pulling the plug on his four-year quest to impose single-payer, government-run health care on the residents of his state. "In my judgment," said Shumlin at a press conference, "the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working ...

Among the CBO’s weaknesses is its inability to gauge the effect of private competition in reducing public costs. Most of us now are familiar with MIT economist Jonathan Gruber ’s boast that he and others took advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter” to push ObamaCare through Congress. Behind this boast is something that many ...

Despite the enduring unpopularity of Obamacare, Congressional Democrats have up to now stood by their health care law, allowing that "it's not perfect" but that they are proud of their votes to pass it. That all changed on Tuesday, when the Senate's third-highest-ranking Democrat—New York's Chuck Schumer—declared that "we took the public's ...

On Thursday evening, President Obama unveiled his plan to offer legal status to approximately 5 million undocumented aliens. "If you're willing to pay your fair share of taxes," said Obama, "you'll be able to apply to stay in this country." But the President neglected to mention that the income of the typical illegal immigrant is so low that ...

On Tuesday, it came out that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber—Obamacare's architect—had said that he and his Democratic colleagues had concealed the health law's true costs from the public in order to take advantage of the "stupidity of the American voter" and pass the bill. Gruber then went on MSNBC and claimed that his comments were "off the ...

You've got to hand it to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. The guy dubbed the "Obamacare architect" is a viral YouTube sensation. A few months back, he was caught on tape admitting that Obamacare doesn't provide subsidies for federally-run insurance exchanges; it's now the topic of a new case before the Supreme Court. Today, new video surfaced ...

Republicans have retaken the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. As of this writing, Republicans will gain somewhere between 7 and 9 seats—depending on what happens in Louisiana and Alaska—for a total of 52 to 54. The new Republican majority will doubtless hold a symbolic vote to repeal Obamacare. But more importantly, Republicans will now ...

Last year, Ohio governor John Kasich (R.) claimed that opponents of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion would, literally, rot in hell. This week, he claimed that it wasn't possible to be a sincere, principled critic of the Medicaid program. "The opposition to it was really either political or ideological," Kasich told the Associated Press. Kasich ...

In last night's U.S. Senate debate in New Hampshire between incumbent Jeanne Shaheen (D.) and challenger Scott Brown (R.), Shaheen uttered a flat-out, bald-faced lie: that Obamacare doesn't cut Medicare spending to pay for its expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It's a talking point that a number of Democratic Senate candidates—and ...

The other night in a debate between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and his challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes (D.), McConnell argued that it was "fine" to keep Kentucky's insurance exchange, called Kynect, while repealing Obamacare "root and branch." This has led the lefty blogosphere to explode in outrage. But Sen. McConnell ...

In 2012, the conventional wisdom among conservatives and Republicans was that the presidential election of that year was of paramount importance. If Mitt Romney didn't defeat President Obama, Obamacare's trillions in health care subsidies would go online, and the law would become "impossible to repeal." That was then. Today, repeal remains ...

Democrats are trumpeting preliminary estimates indicating that premiums on Obamacare's insurance exchanges will rise modestly, on average, in 2015. These early indications have led to a peculiar type of crowing from Obamacare supporters: "See, Obamacare isn't collapsing!" And it's true: Obamacare isn't collapsing. But in the real world, we ...

For years, experts in internet security have been warning of Obamacare's vulnerability to hackers. Given the amount of sensitive data that Obamacare requires you to disclose in order to take advantage of its various subsidies, and the incompetence of government website contractors, it was a disaster in waiting. Well, the disaster has happened. ...

For most Americans, Labor Day is an opportunity to take an extra day off of work and enjoy a long weekend with family and friends. But for more than 100 million Americans, Labor Day isn't a day off from work. That's because two-fifths of the population is either unemployed, or out of the workforce altogether. The U.S. economy is still not back ...

Last week, I released a new health-reform plan, entitled "Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency." The plan gradually replaces Obamacare and our other health-care entitlements with a set of reformed, consumer-driven health insurance exchanges. Since then, I've received some ...

For all the endless talk about reforming the health care system these past five years, it's remarkable how little we've done to solve its actual problems.Spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize insurance coverage for several million people? That's the easy part. The hard part is addressing the fact that American health ...

Today, the Manhattan Institute is publishing my 20,000-word, 68-page health reform proposal entitled “Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency.” It represents a novel approach to health reform: neither accepting Obamacare as is, nor requiring the law’s repeal to move forward. And ...

The significance and reach of the Civil Rights Act of 1964–signed by Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this July–goes without saying. People in 1964 could scarcely have imagined that we’d so quickly have a black President and black billionaires and a large black middle class. But midcentury Americans might also have been surprised by the persistence ...

Earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia—the second highest court in the land—ruled that Obamacare’s subsidies for individually-purchased insurance could only flow through exchanges set up by state governments. Because only 16 states set up their own exchanges, some on the left are hyperventilating that ...

If you visited certain corners of the media yesterday—left and right—you may have read that in a case called Halbig v. Burwell, a federal court in D.C. dealt a “lethal blow” to Obamacare, by limiting the flow of the health law’s insurance subsidies. The D.C. court made the right call, based on a strict reading of the law. But the probability ...

For all of the non-stop wall-to-wall coverage of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—in which the Court ruled that the government doesn’t have the authority to force “closely-held corporations” to violate their religious beliefs—a simple fact has been lost. The ruling did not overturn a single word of the “Affordable ...

Over the past twelve months, there has been an energetic debate among health policy researchers about the extent to which Obamacare will increase the underlying cost of individually-purchased health insurance: what observers have come to call “rate shock.” Yesterday, the Manhattan Institute published the most comprehensive study yet on the ...

There are hundreds of aspects of Obamacare that people argue over. But there’s one question that matters above all others: does the Affordable Care Act live up to its name? Does it make health insurance less expensive? Last November, our team at the Manhattan Institute published a study indicating that Obamacare had increased the underlying ...

Labor unions have, of course, been among President Obama’s most reliable supporters. Unions’ support was critical to the passage of Obamacare in 2010. But unions are continuing to learn, to their apparent surprise, that their members will bear many of the costs of the new health law. Now we learn that some laborers are preparing to strike, if ...

There’s been a lot of talk in the conservative commentariat about how the emerging scandal at the Veterans Health Administration is a preview of what is to come under Obamacare. “If the government can’t even make such a system work for our vets, what makes anyone think it will work for the rest of us?” asks the New York Post. But the VA—our ...

As regular NRO readers will know, one of the key races that Republicans need to win in order to retake the U.S. Senate is occurring in Arkansas, where Representative Tom Cotton is challenging Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor. The race to replace Cotton in the House of Representatives, while not nearly as consequential, is also quite ...

One of the principal flaws in the coverage of Obamacare’s enrollment numbers to date has been that the press has not made distinctions between those who have “signed up” for Obamacare-based plans, and those who have actually paid for those plans and thereby achieved enrollment in health insurance. A new survey from McKinsey indicates that a ...

The American left has worked itself into another one of its frenzies about income inequality. This one has been triggered by a French economist named Thomas Piketty, whose new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that capitalism “automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities” in times like ours because “the rate ...

As you may know if you’re a regular reader of The Apothecary, the left has systematically ignored the mountains of clinical evidence showing that the Medicaid program doesn’t actually make people healthier. Given that Obamacare is designed to achieve half of its coverage expansion via Medicaid, you can understand why: if Medicaid doesn’t ...

Ramesh is kind enough to cite a recent piece of mine for Forbes, describing it as a continuation of my “lonely campaign to get conservatives to drop the idea of ‘repealing and replacing’ Obamacare and instead to embrace reforming it.” But it’s only lonely if by lonely he means “shared by a large plurality of the electorate.”Let me cite the data. ...

For years, we’ve heard Republicans claim that they want to “repeal and replace” Obamacare with a better set of reforms. (What those reforms would exactly be, nobody can say for sure.) But there was always one critical problem with the “repeal and replace” plan: it stands no chance of passage until at least 2017. By then, as many as 35 ...

Last week, I wrote about an article in the Los Angeles Times, on a then-as-yet unpublished report from the RAND Corporation, indicating that only one-third of Obamacare’s purported 7.1 million exchange sign-ups were from the previously uninsured. But Noam Levey, the author of the Times article, didn’t disclose RAND’s actual findings as to ...

It has been one of Democrats’ favorite talking points: that thanks to Obamacare’s mandate that family-based insurance coverage cover “adult children” aged 18 to 26, “an additional 3 million young adults have gained coverage.” There’s only one problem. That figure is based on a misleading and superficial study by the Obama administration. ...

Today is March 31, 2014: in theory, the last day you can sign up for coverage under the subsidized Obamacare insurance exchanges. If you’ve been a regular reader of this space, you know that the numbers routinely paraded by the Obama administration regarding Obamacare website sign-ups don’t tell us much about the actual number of ...

Earlier today, Marilyn Tavenner of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that “more than 6 million Americans have signed up for coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplaces since October 1, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.” Given all of the technical problems that dogged healthcare.gov last October, this is an ...

In 2012 the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What was once the European Coal & Steel Community, the committee wrote, had evolved into a “successful struggle for peace, reconciliation and for democracy and human rights.” There’s much to be said for the thought that Europe’s economic integration has led to lasting peace. But ...

Though the Obama administration repeatedly insisted that its March 31 enrollment deadline for Obamacare’s first year was “firm,” many observers predicted that the administration would combat lagging sales of health law-sponsored insurance plans by extending that deadline. Sure enough, on Tuesday night the White House indicated that it would ...

As we reach the end of the first year of enrollment in Obamacare’s subsidized health insurance exchanges, we’ve been trying to solve a couple of mysteries. First: how many people who have signed up for coverage were previously uninsured? Second: will the botched rollout and design flaws lead to even higher health insurance costs next year? ...

If you listen to the President, and other supporters of Obamacare, you might get the impression that the reason why tens of millions of Americans go without health insurance is because these people have pre-existing conditions, and health insurers are too mean to cover them. The truth is quite different. Less than a million Americans lack ...

The Obama administration has, for months now, been peddling nice-sounding numbers as to how many people are gaining health coverage due to Obamacare. But their numbers have been inflated on two fronts. First, not everyone who has “selected a marketplace plan” under Obamacare has actually paid the required premiums, payment being required ...

Yesterday, the Obama Administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a six-page report predicting that Obamacare could cause premiums to increase for nearly two-thirds of small- to medium-sized businesses. “This results in roughly 11 million individuals whose premiums are estimated to be higher as a result of the ACA and ...

The other day White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said something that can, and should, define the debate between conservatism and progressivism for years to come. The Congressional Budget Office had published a report estimating that ObamaCare would shrink the size of the U.S. labor force by 2.5 million full-time-equivalent workers. ...

Left-wing Washington—led by labor unions—is once again full of zeal to raise the federal minimum wage. It turns out that some of the best arguments against raising the minimum wage come from an unlikely source: the editors of the New York Times, who a generation ago editorialized in favor of abolishing the minimum wage. “Raising the minimum ...

For quite some time now, a cohort of conservative pundits and politicians has confidently predicted that Obamacare will “collapse under its own weight.” But the latest sign-up numbers from the Obama administration tell a different story. While fewer people than projected are signing up for Obamacare-based insurance, the numbers aren’t so far ...

Last July, just before the Independence Day holiday, the White House quietly announced that it was delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate—the law’s requirement that medium and large businesses sponsor health insurance for every worker—until 2015. It turned out to be the first of dozens of unilateral decisions by the Obama administration to ...

Yesterday, Washington’s official non-partisan bean-counter, the Congressional Budget Office, dropped a bomb. By 2024, says the CBO, Obamacare will reduce the size of the U.S. labor force by 2.5 million full-time-equivalent workers. That’s roughly triple what the CBO had estimated three years ago. Such a sizeable decline in the labor force ...

When Republican senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), Richard Burr (N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) proposed on Monday a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, I called it “the most credible plan yet” devised to achieve that goal. On Thursday, a new think tank called the Center for Health and Economy provided a fiscal score of the plan. The good news? ...

“Repealing and replacing” Obamacare with market-oriented reforms has been the Republican mantra for years now. If you’re a long-time follower of this space, you know that we’re skeptical that Obamacare will ever be repealed, GOP slogans to the contrary. Today, however, a trio of experienced Senate Republicans—Tom Coburn (Okla.), Richard ...

At the end of the day, for all of the rhetoric and promises about what Obamacare would achieve, the health law’s most ardent supporters have stuck to their guns because of one thing: coverage expansion. But new data suggests that Obamacare may fail even to achieve this goal. Instead of expanding coverage to those without it, Obamacare is ...

PYRRHIC VINDICATION FEELS PRETTY DAMN GOOD. As Obamacare's problems continue to mount, conservative morale has improved. For example, in 2008, despite vigorous objections from the right, PolitiFact rated as “true” then-Sen. Barack Obama's promise that his health plan would allow Americans the choice to keep their existing health coverage. ...

It’s been the top concern since the Obamacare bill was written. Would healthier and younger people sign up for Obamacare-based insurance, despite the fact that the law forces those individuals to pay far more for health insurance than they otherwise need? If healthy people stay away, the cost of health insurance under Obamacare will increase ...

On January 9, health insurance bellwether Humana formally announced something that industry observers have long suspected: that healthy and young people don’t think Obamacare’s insurance plans are a good deal for them. Those people, Humana indicated, are choosing to stay on their previous health plans, where allowed, instead of participating ...

This week, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson (R.) filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing members of Congress, and their staffers, from receiving subsidized health insurance through Obamacare’s exchanges. “Americans are justifiably outraged when members of Congress exempt themselves from the very laws they impose on everyone else,” says. Johnson. ...

For years, it has been the number one talking point of Obamacare supporters. People who are uninsured end up getting costly care from hospitals’ emergency rooms. “Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it—about $1,000 per year that pays for the uninsureds’ emergency room and charitable ...

2012 was a Presidential election year, in which health care policy was front-and-center. We figured 2013 would revert back to normal, and we at The Apothecary wouldn’t match our 2012 traffic. Boy, were we wrong. As Obamacare moved from theory to reality, Americans were looking for real-world information on how the law would affect them. And ...

On Sunday, the Obama administration announced that a total of 1.1 million Americans have signed up for health insurance coverage on Obamacare’s federally-run exchange at Healthcare.gov. While that number falls well short of the administration’s previous expectations of 3.3 million, it is a big step up; as of the end of November, only ...

On December 12, the self-appointed guardians of truth and justice at PolitiFact named President Obama’s infamous promise—that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it”—its 2013 “Lie of the Year.” An understandable choice. But in its article detailing why the President’s promise was a lie, PolitiFact neglected to mention an ...

It’s hard to come up with new ways to describe the Obama administration’s improvisational approach to the Affordable Care Act’s troubled health insurance exchanges. But last night, the White House made its most consequential announcement yet. The administration will grant a “hardship exemption” from the law’s individual mandate, requiring ...

Of all of the last-minute delays, website bungles, and Presidential whims that have marred the roll-out of Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges, what happened on Thursday, December 12 will stand as one of the most lawless acts yet committed by this administration. The White House—having canceled Americans’ old health plans, and ...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported today that Obamacare’s subsidized health insurance exchanges signed up 258,497 Americans in November. That’s about two-and-a-half times the number that they signed up in October, roughly in-line with expectations. While these numbers fall well short of the administration’s ...

President Obama’s credibility has taken a significant hit since it became clear to the public that his signature promise—that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan”—turned out to be dishonest. Polls now suggest a realistic chance that Republicans can retake the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections. But the irony is that the GOP, ...

When President Obama appointed Jeffrey Zients to take over the troubled Healthcare.gov Obamacare website, Zients made a promise: “By the end of November, Healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” he said. We’re now at the end of November, and it’s pretty clear that the Obama administration will miss its ...

If you’ve been following these pages, you’ve come to know a bit about Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Chao has played a key role in overseeing the construction of Obamacare’s federal insurance exchange. In March, Chao expressed concern that the launch of the exchanges would be ...

Over the past two weeks, there’s been a lot of coverage of the President’s misleading promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. No matter what. Period.” But we mustn’t forget that there was a second part to that promise: “If you like your doctor, you will be keep your doctor. Period.” It turns out that isn’t necessarily ...

Yesterday, President Obama announced that his administration would unilaterally decline to enforce the provisions of Obamacare responsible for millions of insurance policy cancellations around the country. “The bottom line is insurers can extend current plans that would otherwise be canceled into 2014,” he said. The real bottom line is this. ...

One of the most underappreciated, but important, problems with Obamacare’s troubled health insurance exchanges are their inadequate safeguards against identity theft and misuse of private information. We’ve now learned that an important government report detailing “high risks” to the security of the Obamacare website was concealed from a ...

In the market for individually-purchased health insurance, more than 4.8 million Americans have received notices that their preexisting plans are soon to be illegal, and will be cancelled. Many more cancellation notices are imminent. But yesterday, the Wall Street Journal obtained information regarding the number of people who have signed up ...

Yesterday, in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, President Obama addressed the problems caused by his incessantly-repeated pledge to the American public that “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” As millions of Americans receive cancellation letters ...

One of the fundamental flaws of the Affordable Care Act is that, despite its name, it makes health insurance more expensive. Today, the Manhattan Institute released the most comprehensive analysis yet conducted of premiums under Obamacare for people who shop for coverage on their own. Here’s what we learned. In the average state, Obamacare ...

There’s been a lot of spin coming out of the White House regarding the botched launch of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. When it was clear that people were having problems with the healthcare.gov website on its launch day, October 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called it a “great problem to have.” The ...

On Wednesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius testified before Congress about the continuing issues with the rollout of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. “Hold me accountable for the debacle,” said Sebelius. “I’m responsible.” I attended the hearing, and I was struck by the scope, scale, and depth of the health ...

Yesterday afternoon, chief executives of 12 major health insurers—including Aetna, Humana, WellPoint, and Kaiser Permanente—trudged to the White House to “discuss…ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act.” The meeting was off the record, but we have a pretty good idea of what happened. Insurers were likely to urge the White House to ...

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive ...

President Obama’s signature health law achieved a major milestone on Oct. 1, when its subsidized insurance exchanges went online. But Obamacare is already reshaping the health insurance landscape. If you want to track how well the law is working, keep an eye on three aspects of it.

Is it driving up the cost of insurance?

According to ...

On October 1, the debut of the Affordable Care Act's subsidized insurance exchanges, many visitors saw a graphic informing them that the web site was not accessible.

On October 1, Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges went live. Most of the exchange websites crashed on the first day, a development that led some of the law’s supporters to conclude that there was overwhelming demand for Obamacare’s insurance products. But the Obama ...

Polls consistently show that Americans aren’t happy with Obamacare. They think the law will make health care more expensive, and decrease its quality. But a new survey of 1,976 registered voters finds that only 33 percent believe that the health law should be repealed, delayed, or defunded. 29 percent believe that “Congress should make changes ...

For months now, we’ve been waiting to hear how much Obamacare will drive up the cost of health insurance for people who purchase coverage on their own. Last night, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finally began to provide some data on how Americans will fare on Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchanges. HHS’ press ...

Back in 2008, three eminent Harvard economists who were advising the Obama campaign—David Cutler, David Blumenthal, and Jeffrey Liebman—wrote a memo claiming that Senator Obama’s health-care plan could reduce national health spending by $200 billion a year. As Kevin Sack recounted in the New York Times, the authors of that memo then took ...

In most states, premiums will increase. Imagine that Congress passed a law requiring all cars sold in America to use hybrid engines. If you're concerned about our consumption of fossil fuels, such a law might sound great. However, as anyone who has shopped for a car knows, hybrid cars are much more expensive than ...

There are a number of misperceptions of the internecine dispute taking place among conservatives, and within the Republican Party, around the effort by some to use the continuing resolution and the possibility of a government shutdown, to attempt to defund Obamacare.

Myth #1: The debate pits the conservative movement against the Republican congressional leadership. Some of the coverage of the debate states or implies, incorrectly, that conservatives are united behind the shutdown strategy, and GOP leaders like John Boehner are the locus ...

There are a number of misperceptions of the internecine dispute taking place among conservatives, and within the Republican Party, around the effort by some to use the continuing resolution and the possibility of a government shutdown, to attempt to defund Obamacare.

Myth #1: The debate pits the conservative movement against the Republican congressional leadership. Some of the coverage of the debate states or implies, incorrectly, that conservatives are united behind the shutdown strategy, and GOP leaders like John Boehner are the locus ...

The centerpiece of President Obama’s new health law is a collection of government-sponsored insurance exchanges, in which people who shop for coverage on their own can purchase health insurance, and gain a taxpayer-funded subsidy if their income is low enough. The exchanges are set to roll out on October 1, in less than two weeks. In other ...

The entitlement-reform movement will continue to grow even if Obamacare remains law. A long time ago (2011) in a galaxy far, far away (Washington, D.C.), South Carolina senator Jim DeMint voted for a continuing resolution that would fund the government, including Obamacare. Today, Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint says that any attempt ...

On Saturday, I wrote about the White House’s decision to reject labor unions’ demands to alter Obamacare such that certain union members with health benefits could qualify for subsidies intended for the uninsured. One of the most interesting aspects of this story is what happened behind the scenes. Some unions were agitating for the AFL-CIO ...

Well played, Mr. President. Last week, prior to the big AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, President Obama personally spoke to AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, asking him to water down several anti-Obamacare resolutions that union leaders were planning to pass there. Trumka obliged, keeping a call to repeal Obamacare out of the official ...

This week, in Los Angeles, leaders of the nation’s labor union movement gathered together for the AFL-CIO’s annual convention. Along with the usual sessions on ‘political action,’ ‘solidarity’ and the like, union leaders shared their concerns about the impact of Obamacare on union-sponsored health insurance plans. Terence O’Sullivan, president ...

Liberal reporters and bloggers are trumpeting today a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation which claims that premiums under Obamacare will be “lower than expected.” Talking Points Memo describes the Kaiser paper as, potentially, a “big blow to one of the main conservative talking points against the Affordable Care Act: ...

Obamacare makes many significant changes to the U.S. health-care system, but one category of change stands out above all others: the degree to which the law reshapes the market for individually-purchased health insurance. Will the “Affordable Care Act” live up to its name and make health insurance less expensive? To help the public understand ...

A few weeks ago, I discussed the fact that labor unions have been increasingly vocal about their objections to certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class,” wrote three ...

On Tuesday, the Obama administration released the final regulations for Obamacare’s notorious individual mandate—the provision in the health care law that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance, or pay a fine. Tuesday’s entry in the Federal Register, spanning 75 pages, contains all of the fine print related to the individual ...

In states that remain undecided about whether or not to expand Medicaid, as Obamacare prescribes, hospitals have lobbied furiously in expansion’s favor. That’s not surprising, on its face; hospital executives’ eyes widen at the possibility of hundreds of billions in additional taxpayer subsidies under the law. But an analysis from the Lewin ...

We know that Obamacare will significantly increase the cost of individually-purchased health insurance in nearly every part of the country. But we’ve generally assumed that disruptions in the market for employer-sponsored health insurance will be less severe. In particular, large employers who self-insure should be exempt from most of ...

In recent months, President Obama and his subordinates have waived or delayed a number of Obamacare’s notable features, such as the law’s employer mandate, and its procedures for protecting taxpayers from fraud and identity theft. Earlier this month, in that context, I obtained a heretofore-unpublished memorandum from the Congressional ...

Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have a plan — to make Obamacare permanent. Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, among others, believe that Republicans ought to use Congress’s continuing resolution (CR) as an opportunity to defund Obamacare. The CR must be passed by Congress in order to keep funding the government. Cruz, Lee & Co. think Democrats will be ...

First, there was the delay of Obamacare’s Medicare cuts until after the election. Then there was the delay of the law’s employer mandate. Then there was the announcement, buried in the Federal Register, that the administration would delay enforcement of a number of key eligibility requirements for the law’s health insurance subsidies, relying ...

When I speak to conservatives about health care policy, I’m often asked the question: “Do you think that Obamacare is secretly a step toward single-payer health care?” I always explain that, while progressives may want single-payer, I don’t think that Obamacare is deliberately designed to bring about that outcome. Well, yesterday on PBS’ ...

It hasn’t been a dull summer for Obamacare news. But there’s been one important issue that has been burbling under the surface, one that hasn’t garnered as much attention as rate shock, subsidy fraud, and the like. It’s this: In order for Obamacare to work, the government will need to know a lot about your financial, medical, and ...

Last month, we discussed the stunning turnabout from leaders of prominent labor unions, who stated that “unintended consequences” from Obamacare were “causing nightmare scenarios” that would “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.” ...

All over the country, people are worried about how Obamacare will affect the cost and quality of their health coverage. Members of Congress and their staffs were especially panicked, because it appeared that the Affordable Care Act required them to purchase coverage on the law’s new insurance exchanges, but without the generous subsidy ...

Last week, Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R.) sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), “informing Senator Reid that we will not vote for a continuing resolution that funds Obamacare,” risking a government shutdown if Lee’s objectives are not achieved. While eleven other Senate Republicans have signed on to Lee’s letter, ...

Yesterday, fans of Obamacare were cheering. A front-page story in the New York Times announced that individuals shopping for health insurance in New York would see their premiums halved, based on figures released by the Cuomo administration. It was an “extraordinary decline” that “demonstrates the profound promise” of Obamacare, said one ...

Labor unions are among the key institutions responsible for the passage of Obamacare. They spent tons of money electing Democrats to Congress in 2006 and 2008, and fought hard to push the health law through the legislature in 2009 and 2010. But now, unions are waking up to the fact that Obamacare is heavily disruptive to the health benefits ...

I thought I would share the key points from my detailed blog post yesterday at Forbes. First, the decision by the Obama administration will have a useful policy impact — it will lead fewer employers to sponsor health coverage, leading more people to shop for it on their own. This is something that free-market health wonks have long ...

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney maintained that the health-reform law he signed in Massachusetts was not the same as Obamacare. “Our plan was a state solution to a state problem,” Governor Romney insisted. He was trying to fix Massachusetts’ uniquely broken insurance market, he said; Obamacare, by contrast, was a “a power grab ...

Over nearly a century, progressives have pressed for a national, single-payer healthcare system. When it comes to health reform, what have conservatives stood for?

For far too long, conservatives have failed to coalesce around a long-term vision of what a free-market healthcare system should look like. Republican attention to healthcare, in turn, has only arisen sporadically, in response to Democratic initiatives. ...