It can’t be stressed enough how much our projected deficit problem basically fixed itself while most of Washington was trying to scaremonger the debt to justify cutting benefits. Paul N. Van de Water at CBPP did the math and found that since the recent round of deficit hysteria began in back in 2010, the CBO [...]

Next year the federal government should spend over $340 on each person enrolled in the federally-run exchanges just to operate these marketplaces. My estimates are based on the new Health and Human Services (HHS) budget and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports. It puts per enrollee federal exchange spending at $341 for fiscal year 2014.* To [...]

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: [...]

Two researchers at Indiana University believe they have created a computer program that can better and more cheaply diagnose medical problems. From Indiana University: Using an artificial intelligence framework combining Markov Decision Processes and Dynamic Decision Networks, IU School of Informatics and Computing researchers Casey Bennett and Kris Hauser show how simulation modeling that understands [...]

As I pointed out last week, there has now been a three year trend of Medicare per beneficiary spending growing at a very slow rate. These three years of slow growth have already produce substantial reductions in the deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s new budget outlook.

For several years now, the so called “deficit hawks” have been demanding that the federal government get $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, because somehow that is the magical number to stop some vague disaster, which also seems to be exactly a few years on the horizon. The push for a mythic [...]

Even though raising the Medicare retirement age is both deeply unpopular with voters and a terrible policy that saves the federal government only a modest amount of money, it is still treated by the Washington media as an idea to be seriously considered. During what little TV news I’ve watched in the past week, I [...]

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that roughly four million fewer Americans will likely gain insurance coverage in 2014 and three million fewer in 2022 as a result of the Supreme Court ruling. Most of the drop in coverage will be the result of states exercising their option to not expand Medicaid. In previous estimates [...]

In the very near future the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. One likely outcome is the court strikes down the individual mandate but leaves the rest of the law intact. Here is what eliminating just the mandate would actually mean for policy. Reduce the cost of the Affordable [...]

I’ve been discussing arguments about the role of the individual mandate, how its possible absence might affect participation in the individual insurance market, and whether it is needed to prevent an insurance death spiral.  A related point is that the individual mandate will actually have almost no impact on what a majority of people using [...]