Obamacare has not done much to slow the growth of health care costs. Government actuaries project that health spending will grow 5.8% a year over the next decade — substantially faster than growth in the economy. Could Republican proposals to sell health insurance across state lines bend the cost curve and make premiums more...
Health Insurance
Selling Health Insurance Across State Lines––A Really Dumb Idea
Any candidate that suggests such a scheme only shows how unsophisticated he and his advisers are when it comes to understanding how the insurance markets really work––or could work. I gave a speech to 750 health insurance brokers and consultants in DC last week. When selling health insurance across state lines, something Trump and...
Major Companies Band Together to Control Health Care Costs
Twenty of the nation’s largest corporations have formed a coalition to create a more cost-efficient way of delivering health benefits to their employees. The Health Transformation Alliance (HTA), an initiative conceived by the American Health Policy Institute, wants to open the health care black box by increasing transparency of health care costs. The Institute...
Congress Must Stop the Flow of Corporate Welfare to Insurers
This could be a very merry Christmas for Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) of Texas. The Obama administration wants to stuff its stocking with $257,172,917.34 – at your expense – to compensate the company for losing scads of money last year selling Obamacare policies in the Lone Star State. That would bring that...
400,000 Citizens To Lose Health Insurance (Again) Because Of Obamacare Co-Op Failures
The two largest state health insurance co-operatives created as part of a grand ObamaCare experiment have announced they are closing at the end of this year, joining others that have failed and even more that are insolvent and likely to fail. The Kentucky Health Cooperative announced on Friday it is going out of business...
Highmark Health Shifts to Narrow Network Plans Due to ObamaCare Costs
According to a Sept. 3 report by Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal, Pittsburgh-based Highmark Health announced it will cut back its range of plans offered through the ObamaCare marketplaces. The nonprofit company currently covers around 380,000 marketplace enrollees in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia. During the first six months of 2015,...