News
House Energy & Commerce | Joint Congressional Committee Report Details New Health Law’s Fiscal Burden on Fragile State Budgets, Sustainability of Medicaid Program
The joint Congressional Committee report, Medicaid Expansion in the New Health Law: Costs to the States, put together by the Senate Finance Committee, Minority and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Majority is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of state government estimates regarding the cost of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) to state Medicaid programs. The report estimates the health law will cost state taxpayers at least $118.04 billion through 2023--more than double the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) recent estimate of $60 billion through 2021.
New York Times | Feeling Budget Pinch, States Cut Insurance
Pennsylvania is one of several destitute states seeking to help balance budgets by removing adults from government health insurance programs.
WSJ | EU Closes Insurers' Gender Rate Gap
The European Union's highest court declared illegal the widespread practice of charging men and women different rates for insurance, setting in motion an overhaul of how life, auto and health policies are written across Europe.
Econ Comments
NationalJournal | Barbour Calls for Medicaid Block Grant as GOP Eyes Reform Alternatives
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, said he would push Congress to turn the federal-state Medicaid program into a block grant, where states receive a lump sum and the ability to redesign the program with little government intervention.
Blogs
Cato Institute | Congressional Republicans May Be Understating the Cost of ObamaCare
Gokhale projects that ObamaCare will force Florida to spend an additional $23.8 billion between 2014 and 2023. That is almost double the committees' estimate of an additional $12.9 billion in spending by Florida between 2013 to 2023.
NCPA | Two Visions for Health Reform
There are basically two approaches: a bottom-up, market-based approach and a top-down command-and-control approach:
Heritage Foundation | Obamacare Threatens American Medical Innovation
Until now, the United States has been the world leader in medical innovation, but this is by no means a given for the future. Due to burdensome, time-consuming regulations, medical innovation faces an uphill battle in the United States.
Reports
Cato Institute | Estimating ObamaCare's Effect on State Medicaid Expenditure Growth
Once ObamaCare becomes fully effective in 2014, the cost of newly eligible Medicaid enrollees will be almost fully covered by the federal government through 2019, with federal financial support expected to be extended thereafter.
AEI | ObamaCare in the Supreme Court
Recent district court decisions have fueled speculation over what the Supreme Court will do about ObamaCare if and when one of the challenges to the law’s “individual mandate” arrives on the justices’doorstep. Largely unnoticed amidst the agitation, though, cases that will have profound effects on ObamaCare’s future are already pending before the Court. They involve enormous amounts of money,and they have powerful implications for the implementation of the criminally misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” The justices will get these cases right, to good effect.
