The Heartland Institute

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…

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…