Health

GUEST EDITORIAL By Kenneth Artz, The Heartland Institute President Obama has big changes planned for Medicare Advantage, which relies on private insurers’ plans that contract with Medicare to provide coverage. It is highly popular among rural seniors who have trouble finding doctors who accept Medicare payments. A significant portion of the Medicare cuts in Obama’s health care law come from Medicare Advantage, taking $150 billion from the program over the next decade. As with other…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Kendall Antekeier, The Heartland Institute Wheaton College, an evangelical college in Illinois, has appealed a federal judge’s decision to dismiss its lawsuit against the Obama administration over the mandate that all employers and institutions provide free access to contraceptives regardless of their religious views. Wheaton had joined the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the Catholic University of America in their lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS),…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Kenneth Artz, The Heartland Institute The annual report from Medicare’s trustees highlights concerns that bankruptcy could arrive for the program much earlier than previously anticipated. Medicare, the government’s medical insurance program for the elderly, covers 48.3 million people. With baby boomers now reaching the eligible age of 65 at the rate of 10,000 a day, the future of the program is in serious doubt. Just two years after the passage of President…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Loren Heal, The Heartland Institute In an attempt to impose top-down containment on Massachusetts’s soaring health care costs, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick signed a law which creates a statewide global cap on public and private health care costs. The law expands the state’s bureaucracy and specifies a target growth rate for overall medical spending based on the growth rate of the state’s economy. Joshua Archambault, director of health care policy at the…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Benjamin Domenech, The Heartland Institute We’ve documented in the past the concerns among America’s physicians about how they will adapt to a new reality under President Barack Obama’s health care law, particularly considering the need for more than 30,000 primary care physicians by 2015 even under the most optimistic assumptions of the law’s effects. Now comes a new survey from the Physicians’ Foundation that finds six in 10 doctors are considering quitting…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Benjamin Domenech, The Heartland Institute You may have heard that in reaction to President Barack Obama’s health care law, small businesses and franchises are considering shifting employees to part-time work. The Darden Restaurant group is the latest company to attract attention for this, responding to the requirement to cover full-time workers by shifting existing workers to 28 hours per week: In an experiment apparently aimed at keeping down the cost of health-care…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Benjamin Domenech, The Heartland Institute At long last, in 2016 we will learn which is more: $4,316 or $2,085. That first number, $4,316, is the average employee cost for buying an employer-sponsored family health care plan in 2012, up from $2,137 a decade ago. The second number is the cost of the individual mandate tax for a family of four. For a family of four earning $24,000, and for their employers, the…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Benjamin Domenech, The Heartland Institute A rather surprising amount of time was spent in the first presidential debate discussing the Independent Payment Advisory Board and its role in cutting the costs of Medicare. It’s worth drilling down into the defense President Barack Obama offered of IPAB’s approach. President Obama, from the transcript: Let’s get all the doctors together at once into one test instead of having the patient run around with 10…

GUEST EDITORIAL By Loren Heal, The Heartland Institute The Internal Revenue Service is hiring thousands of agents as the agency prepares to become the primary enforcement mechanism for President Obama’s health care law. Although the IRS cannot come after taxpayers who fail to abide by the individual mandate alone, it can target them for additional investigation for other aspects of their return and threaten to withhold tax refunds. The IRS will determine whether taxpayers have…