The Senate Democrats had a conference call with reporters to extol all the great “improvements” they have made to the bill. They listed three improvements they wanted to talk about: The manager’s amendment to the bill, introduced yesterday, strengthens key reforms that benefit consumers like the medical loss ratio, patient’s bill of rights protections, and [...]

The manager’s amendment would eliminate the state regulation gutting “nationwide” plans and replace them with “multi-state plans” in a new OPM exchange. This is a positive change I was hoping would be made. If you are going to allow insurance companies to sell their plans on a national basis you need a national regulator to [...]

Last night, Harry Reid announced that there would be tentative deal (or deals) on the public option. The deal has not been scored by the CBO and, in fact, the deal may only be a deal on what ideas they will have the CBO score, so that they then can than use that information to [...]

One of the ideas currently being floated around right now is to have the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) create an exchange for private, non-profit insurance plans that would be sold within all the state-based exchanges. As a new idea, I don’t think the proposal has any merit. There would be some value in having the [...]