News
National Journal | Health Care Law Should Boost Employer Insurance, Research Finds
Fewer and fewer Americans get health insurance from employers, but the trend will likely reverse after the major provisions of the health care law come into effect in 2014, according to two new reports released Tuesday.
National Journal | AP: Millions of Early Retirees Could Qualify for Medicaid
Under the health care law, most Social Security benefits would no longer be counted as income in determining eligibility. Because of that, a married couple with a combined annual income of $64,000 would still qualify for the insurance program for the poor.
Econ Comments
NYT | Seriously, Some Consensus About Health Care
But beneath this veneer of partisanship lie a few fundamental agreements. Consider health care, which will be at the center of the political debate. Here are four aspects of the issue in which Republicans and Democrats have stumbled into consensus.
Blogs
Volokh Conspiracy | An End to ObamaCare Waivers
The Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it will cease issuing waivers from the health care reform law’s requirements in September.
Heritage Foundation | More Americans Using HSAs—Under Threat from Obamacare
HSAs represent a market-based solution which, as America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) explains, “give[s] consumers incentives to manage their own health care costs by coupling a tax-favored savings account used to pay medical expenses with a high-deductible health plan (HDHP).”
AEI: American | Have Rising Health Costs Driven Income Inequality?
The conclusions from all this aren’t clear: the increase in income inequality could be more benign than we’d originally thought, but if there’s a lot of waste in U.S. health outlays then low earners are still seeing a greater share of their compensation thrown away than high earners simply because health coverage is a larger share of their overall pay.
