The bad design of the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act has led some businesses to look at cutting part-time employee’s work to just under the 30 hour threshold, but that is  not the only loophole business could exploit. Because the new law does not apply the same standards to large businesses and self-insured [...]

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who is arguably the prime author of the Affordable Care Act, is “very concerned” that implementation of it is not going well. During a Senate Finance Committee hearing with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Baucus repeatedly expressed concerns that the administration has completely failed to do proper outreach and [...]

A big sign that the federal implementation of the Affordable Care Act is not going smoothly is the Obama administration delaying two big components of the law for at least a year. Last week Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) announced that the Obama administration will delay the Federal Basic Health Plan Option (FBHPO) until 2015. Cantwell [...]

With Obamacare set to go fully into effect in less than a year, the administration is finally publicly talking about how ACA will create higher premiums for certain groups of people. From the Wall Street Journal: “These folks will be moving into a really fully insured product for the first time, and so there may [...]

The number of Americans that get their health insurance through their employer continues to shrink. According to Gallup in 2011 44.6 percent of Americans got insurance from their employer and in 2012 it dropped to 44.5 percent. While overall the drop is small it more significant if you look only at non-government employees. From Gallup: [...]

Something remarkable happened yesterday. Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) decided to endorse using the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid in his state. Though he did this only after getting the administration to provide a major concession regarding how the program would be run. This is an important policy development because it means roughly a [...]

If you really just can’t wait to find out what President Obama is going to talk about in his State of the Union speech this evening, the best indications come from the First Lady’s guest list. Normally the President will refer to the guests during the speech to highlight a particular issue. Immigration should be [...]

Ben Smith has made a splash at Buzzfeed pointing out that the age-rating regulation in the ObamaCare bill will result in a subset of young people paying substantially more for health insurance. Since older people can only be charged three times as much as young people, some young people will see big rate increases next [...]

As part of his budget proposal Governor John Kasich (R) will support taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid in Ohio. This move comes as a bit of a surprise given that Kasich as been one of the biggest opponents of Obamacare, but in the end Kasich decided the expansion was too [...]

The one upside to the Supreme Court making the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act optional is that it has stopped the Obama administration from trying to cut it. Senior economic adviser Gene Sperling confirmed that the administration sees taking Medicaid completely of the table as necessary to make Obamacare function; but since President [...]