Category: Health and Education

So, Al Capone lives in your city. Do you talk about it? Do you mention that this Mafia guy got his mansion by breaking the law, blackmailing people, buying and selling politicians, not to mention killing people?  Seriously, do you ever talk about Al Capone? Or do you look the other way and pretend that […]

An increasing number of businesses are figuring out that continuing to offer health benefits puts them at a competitive disadvantage versus firms which socialize the costs of health care by shifting their employees onto Obamacare exchanges. However, these employers are handing their employees a risk that they likely do not appreciate. If they are operating […]

Joan Swirsky February 10, 2015 Last March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) released its latest data on autism. After surveying medical and school records from 11 states, the CDC found that autism has more than doubled since the new century began only 14 years ago. Today the condition affects […]

An internal investigation into how the federal government awarded contracts for developing and building the Affordable Care Act’s most important public element — the online exchanges that were to be used by millions of Americans to purchase health insurance — has found the process was flawed. The investigation showed that The Department of Health and Human Services […]

Only 102,000 people enrolled in Obamacare via the federally operated exchange during the week of December 27 – January 2, bringing the total to 6.5 million. This supports my previous expectation that Obamacare enrollment is petering out. Charles Gaba at acasignups.net figures about two million are enrolled via state exchanges, bringing the total to just over 9 […]

Ani Turner of the Altarum Institute has examined the growth in healthcare jobs in states which expanded Medicaid versus those which did not expand Medicaid. This preliminary analysis shows that the recent acceleration in health care job growth should not be attributed primarily to Medicaid expansion, in part because (1) overall job growth accelerated, (2) […]

One theme of NCPA’s Health Policy Blog is that health insurers in Obamacare’s exchange plans have perverse incentives to attract healthy patients and deter sick ones from enrolling. This is because the law forbids insurers from charging premiums that reflect applicants’ likelihood of incurring high medical costs. Although there are risk-mitigation mechanisms to overcome this, […]

The CROmnibus, with which the lame-duck Congress keeps the government open in 2015, takes small but important steps to repeal Obamacare. For the short term, the most important anti-Obamacare achievement is eliminating taxpayers’ liability for Obamacare’s risk corridors, often described as a “bailout,” to health insurers participating in Obamacare’s exchanges. In June, I testified before […]

Suppose someone wanted to dumb down a country. How would they accomplish this? In fact, no research is required. We don’t need to speculate about what the most brilliant Pavlonians might do. American public schools have been dumbing down students for most of a century. The best techniques have been discovered, refined, and locked in place for […]