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 [...]

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 [...]

This is a deeply disappointing move by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). He has joined with Paul Ryan (R-WI) to push for a bipartisan “reform” of Medicare, but like every recent plan for Medicare the word “reform” just means “make it worse” for regular Americans. While it is almost impossible to fully judge the proposal because [...]

Obama’s plan to raise the Medicare retirement age is functionally the equivalent of voucherizing Medicare for many seniors age 65 and 66. It is just like the Paul Ryan plan, but in a small increment for now. It would radically restructure Medicare as we know for millions of new retirees, and more importantly set the precedent for how to slowly voucherizing all Medicare using a series of small retirement age increases.

I’ve often find Ezra Klein’s writing about health care policy confusing because from blog post to blog post there is often a jarring disconnect that can best be described at policy schizophrenia. The issue is most pronounced in his alternating from defender of health insurance exchanges, mostly when defending Obama, and his acknowledging they have been a proven failure, mostly when criticizing Republicans.

On the monumental issue of how to deal with rising health care costs, there are no two political leaders in America whose actions are more diametrically opposed than Democratic Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin and Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, destroying America’s extremely popular and effective single-payer system for [...]

Almost any national health care debate in this country is almost entirely disconnected from real-world examples, which is tragic given that facts have a well-known liberal bias. That is why it is incredibly depressing to see a senior fellow from the Center for American Progress is using his platform to spread incoherent ignorance. I don’t [...]

When basically the entire House Republican caucus voted for Paul Ryan’s budget, which includes a “plan” to destroy the very popular Medicare program and replace it with insufficient private vouchers, I couldn’t tell if they made such a terrible political move because they were so trapped in their own ideological bubble that they actually thought [...]

I’ve recently started being covered by a new insurance policy. As a result, I just received this over-hundred-page packet about it: the coverage rules, co-pays, benefits, requirements for getting proper approval for procedures, what counts toward the deductible, rules about out of network coverage, etc. I thought I could use this as a teaching moment [...]

The House Republican budget written by Paul Ryan has received a huge amount of criticism for its plan to replace Medicare with a poorly indexed private voucher program that could result in more and more seniors every year being unable to afford health care. Less focus has been put on how equally devastating the Ryan [...]