“Cut the grass, son!” Yep, that’s my Dad, circa early 1970s, encouraging 11-year-old me to get off my butt and do some work, which frankly at that age I was keen to avoid. But he was home from working offshore and would be for at least a week, and it was July in Morgan City. You could almost watch the grass grow, so I wasn’t getting out of it. Read more
You ever hear the expression “You just can’t make this stuff up?” It implies that reality is so bizarre, so unexpected, that it HAS to be unscripted and random.
If you’ve followed the fate of the Affordable Care Act through the courts over the past decade, you would become a believer of “you just can’t make this stuff up.” Read more
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional.
It’s a big ruling, the second step in a long process to determine the future of the law. But the Fifth Circuit stopped short of what the people who brought the lawsuit wanted. In fact, the judges on the Fifth Circuit, right here in Louisiana, sent the lawsuit back to the district judge in Texas to “conduct a more searching inquiry” into which parts of the law could survive without the mandate. Read more
I watched the Affordable Care Act completely change the way health insurance is paid for and delivered over the past decade. Today, I think it’s prudent to apply some of what I’ve learned on those front lines to the current healthcare debate: Medicare for All.
As you might expect, there are many risks and many unknowns in this proposed massive undertaking that would re-route 20% of our country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Here are the top 10 things I believe will have to be carefully thought out before such a program has a chance of success. Read more
According to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll, which asks Americans about healthcare topics each month, support for Medicare-for-all, which we’ve called “single–payer healthcare” in these pages, has narrowed in recent months. In a poll conducted Oct. 3 – 8, 2019, 51% of those polled said they favor a national health plan and 47% opposed. That’s a 5% drop since the beginning of the year.
It seems Americans are starting to think similarly to me – single-payer healthcare will narrow our choices when it comes to healthcare. Read more
Way back in 2009, when lawmakers were negotiating the Affordable Care Act, it was clear that it would cost a lot of money to pay out advanced tax credits, cost-sharing reductions and Medicaid fees for millions of newly covered people. So much money that the authors of the ACA were concerned enough to try and make the ACA revenue neutral.
