Paul Ryan’s Republican budget plan would privatize Medicare and dramatically slash Medicaid over time. The result: senior citizens, poor children and the disabled paying dramatically more for care, getting worse health insurance coverage and/or losing coverage altogether, according to a report by the CBO. Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their [...]

Again, some of my darkest predictions about the new health care law are coming true. With businesses again clamoring for corporate tax reduction, the go-to in Pay-Go-obsessed Washington are the affordability subsidies for people who will be using the new health care exchanges. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that he supported the House Republicans’ [...]

The Illinois’s health care reform implementation panel has released its initial recommendations. They concluded that the private insurer exchanges created by the new health care law are likely to be a relatively bad deal for low-income residents, and that the state would be able to provide them better and cheaper coverage through a new public [...]

Yesterday, Dr. William Hsiao presented a draft proposal by health care policy analysts to the Vermont legislature about the creation of a single payer health care system in the state. According to the report, adopting single payer would result in roughly 25 percent savings on health care between 2015 and 2024. The report contained two [...]

The subsidized private health insurance exchanges created by the new health care law are going to do a very poor job of providing affordable health care to the low income Americans they are meant to serve, according to a new draft report to the Connecticut General Assembly from the Sustinet Health Partnership Board of Directors. [...]

Health care reform has steadily decreased in popularity since its passage as the Kaiser tracking poll shows; the individual mandate is deeply and extremely unpopular. Using the IRS to force Americans to buy a product from one of the most unpopular industries in America is so clearly a terrible idea that Democratic congressional candidates in contested races should think about suing the White House and their leadership for gross political malpractice. (If only some progressive blog had warned them about how unpopular the individual mandate would be without a public option.)

While not passing a COBRA extension, Congress did manage to vote for an incredibly expensive second engine for the F-35, which the military says it doesn’t need and really doesn’t want. We are literally wasting billions on hardware the military is asking Congress to cut while causing economically besieged Americans to lose their insurance.

It’s been a little over a week since the new health care law was signed into law and already the process of gaming the new regulations to maximize health insurance industry profits has begun. We first heard of the health insurance industry’s plans to the game the system when they started talking openly about not [...]

Today, Kent Conrad (D-ND) basically declared the current Senate bill–with a plan to pass fixes using reconciliation–dead. Conrad said the only way forward is that the Senate bill must first pass completely unchanged in the House. There is simply not (nor will there be) the votes for that in the House. From TPM: “The only [...]

If Democrats are looking for a political “win” on health care reform and a brand new bill that would be easy to sell to American people, one option is a reconciliation-only bill that just provides block grants to states. The concept is very simple. Democrats would decide how much they wanted to spend (say, $600 [...]