If you look at President Obama’s State of the Union address as primarily a political speech to kick off his re-election effort, you get a strong sense of what the Obama campaign thinks are his strengths and weaknesses. The auto rescue and several foreign policy successes made up a huge part of the speech.  But [...]

Many of the design principles for the insurance market exchanges in the Affordable Care Act were based on unproven, discredited, and frankly absurd conservative notions about the economagic of free markets.  But too many liberals refused to acknowledge this. During the height of the debate on the ACA, the inherently conservative and flawed nature of [...]

During the debate over Obamacare Ezra Klein was a huge proponent of  health insurance exchanges using only private insurance companies. He called the exchanges the number one cost control idea in the new law. From Klein March 22, 2010 in his list of “five most promising cost controls in the health-care bill”: (1) Create a [...]

The op-ed “Obamacare to the Rescue” in the LA Times by Spike Dolomite Ward has been making the rounds among Democratic bloggers. Ms. Ward was an uninsured, disappointed Obama supporter until she got cancer.  Luckily, Ward was one of a few thousand Americans able to find, qualify for and afford the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan [...]

In a widely expected move the Supreme Court today decided that it will review the constitutionality of the new Affordable Care Act law and its requirement that all Americans carry health insurance. A final ruling from the Supreme Court will likely come in June, just a few months before the 2012 general election. It was [...]

By the incredible margin of 65.6 percent – 34.4 percent, voters in Ohio approved an amendment to “preserve the freedom of Ohioans to choose their health care and health care coverage.” The amendment was deliberately written so that voters would view voting for it as a way to reject of the individual mandate in “Obamacare.” [...]

You can add another court decision to the growing stack of rulings about the constitutionality of the new health care law and its individual mandate. A panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has affirmed a lower court ruling that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. You can read [...]

Instead of playing the part of a news organization that informs the American public, the “fact checkers” at the AP have sadly decided to label as “facts” things that aren’t true about what Congress can or cannot do.  This fact check about the Republican presidential candidates’ claims about repealing “Obamacare” is simply deeply and profoundly [...]

Support for the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s signature health care law, has hit a record low. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation poll, only 34 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the new law, while 51 percent have an unfavorable view of the law. The drop in overall support for the [...]

During the health care debate Democrats worked very hard to promote the myth that reconciliation is an incredibly limited legislative procedure. They did this to create an excuse so they could tell their base the rules “forced” them to go with a corporatist health care reform package. In reality Democrats didn’t pass a more progressive [...]