The White House has rather swiftly and strongly come out against the Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) plan to make Medicare worse. From the Huffington Post: “We are concerned that Wyden-Ryan, like Congressman Ryan’s earlier proposal, would undermine, rather than strengthen, Medicare,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “The Wyden-Ryan scheme [...]

The biggest Congressional news story yesterday was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoking the rarely used procedure of appealing the ruling of the chair to the full Senate. When this is done, a simple majority of the Senate decides how the Senate rules should be interpreted. A majority of current senators are the people in [...]

It seems President Obama as expected grabbed hold of the Joe Lieberman’s trial balloon and is now also pushing to raise the Medicare retirement age to 67. From Huffington Post: According to five separate sources with knowledge of negotiations — including both Republicans and Democrats — the president offered an increase in the eligibility age [...]

At a recent meeting with House Democrats, President Obama shot down the members’ hopes that he might step up his rhetoric against the Republicans. He’s concerned how the markets would react to his statements. From Huffington Post: Obama also told the assembled Democrats not to count on more fiery rhetoric from the Oval Office. “He [...]

Administration of High Risk Pools
Administration of High Risk Pools

In a move that should provide some help to relatively few additional Americans the HHS is making changes to the high risk pools created by the Affordable Care Act. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will have its premiums reduced and eligibility restrictions loosened. From the Huffington Post:

To boost enrollment, Sebelius said monthly premiums, which vary by age and region, will drop in 17 of the states where HHS runs the program starting in July. In Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, premiums will plummet by 40 percent. Come July, people older than 55 who enroll in the Virginia PCIP’s standard plan will have to pay $297 a month, a steep drop from the current $498 monthly premium.

Sebelius also said PCIP applicants will no longer have to brandish rejection letters from insurance companies to prove they have pre-existing conditions. Instead, a doctor’s note will suffice.

Currently PCIP only provides insurance to roughly 18,000 people. This move should help modestly boast the number getting insurance through the program but the HHS will probably still need to maintain a difficult balancing act to prevent too many more people from signing up.

The ACA only provide $5 billion in funding for the high risk pools, which according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be insufficient to keep the program going until 2014, if total national enrollment reaches even the low six figures (PDF). Given the both the current anti-spending and anti-Obamacare mood in the House of Representatives, it is safe to assume Congress is unlikely to appropriated any more money to the program if it ran out of funds early.

I truly fear the next financial collapse, which indeed will happen, because over the past three years, both Republican and Democratic administrations haven’t just killed moral hazard for the larger financial sector, they have dragged its corpse down Wall Street in an elaborate funeral procession for all to see. The latest example of comes from [...]

This article in the Huffington Post about how Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is pushing the state attorneys general to quickly as possible “bring to bed” their investigations of the wide-scale systematic violations of law by the nation’s largest financial institutions is a great reminder that, in America, there is a very important theft-to-punishment inflection point [...]

To understand how ridiculous the “serious” people are in Washington, and how broken our political debate is, let me draw your attention to the three biggest political stories of the day. Together, they make the clear case that all this so-called concern about the “deficit” is simply a justification the powerful use to attack the [...]

We can only hope that Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s recent shift away from the individual mandate is a sign that the Democratic Party is beginning to acknowledge what a massive political and policy mistake they made.

The Libertarian Party contacted us this morning following the launch of our campaign to get Facebook to relent on their decision to ban the Just Say Now logo with a marijuana leaf from advertising. Libertarian Party spokesman Kyle Hartz said Facebook had also censored their logo, which likewise contained a marijuana leaf: Here at the [...]