The bill, AB 52, which would give California regulators the power to control and deny unreasonable private health insurance premium increases late yesterday clear a critical Senate Committee vote. The Senate Health Committee approved the measure in a 5-3 vote. The bill, AB52, now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Jonathan Gruber, the economist paid by the White House to consult on the health care reform law, has put out a paper for the Commonwealth Fund that reaches the conclusion that the law is pretty good. What is interesting is that even this supporter and part architect of the law is forced to admit that [...]

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 [...]

The private, for-profit health insurance companies will always be the enemies of true health care reform. The problem is that they are a pure waste in the system. They are the financial equivalent of a parasite. Medicare does a better job than they do. Even if they could play a limited, positive role in a [...]

When Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and the entire Republican Senate caucus stepped up to kill the public option in the Senate, it is important to remember that the health insurance industry won a victory—a victory worth $300 billion. As Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) now [...]