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 [...]

The Supreme Court will likely rule on the Affordable Care Act in the summer of 2012, just months before the election. If they uphold the constitutionality of the law, that could be a modest political win for the Obama campaign. It would serve to undercut the Republican attack that the law was an “unconstitutional” government [...]

The percentage of Americans who don’t have health insurance continues to grow slowly, increasing slightly since last year according to the latest data from Gallup. An average of 16.8% of all American adults were uninsured in the first half of 2011, similar to the 16.4% in 2010. This percentage, however, has been edging up each [...]

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 [...]

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.

Given the incredible structural similarity between the Massachusetts health care reform law signed by Mitt Romney and the new national Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama, the release of the annual physician workforce survey (PDF) from the Massachusetts Medical Society has generated a lot of attention. But I would caution everyone involved that on [...]