Health Care, Health Care Reform | featured news

Tossing out President Barack Obama's health care law would have major unintended consequences for Medicare's payment systems the administration has quietly informed the courts.

At dispute is how to provide funding that would prevent a jump in the interest rates for subsidized loans made by the federal government to undergraduate college students. The House of Representatives voted last week to keep the rate from doubling, but funded it by eliminating the Prevention and Public Health Fund that is part of President Obama’s health care law. (The House measure has little chance in the Senate controlled by Democrats.)

After my posts of the last two weeks which spoke to the growth of health care spending and the coming-of-age of customer-driven health care, I was intrigued to see the same story break in the mainstream media, such as the New York Times article linked above. It looks like the Times reads Forbes ;-).

U.S. consumers and businesses will receive an estimated $1.3 billion in rebates from insurance companies this year, according to a new study quantifying a key early benefit of the healthcare law that President Obama signed in 2010.

Six years after Mitt Romney signed into law a signature health care reform package in Massachusetts, it's his chief political rival, Barack Obama, who's celebrating. President Obama's re-election team on Thursday released a three-minute web video marking the sixth anniversary of the law that's now known as "Romneycare," reminding voters that the signature effort in Massachusetts helped inspire Mr. Obama's landmark legislation.

"In another attempt to re-fight the battles of the past, one former Bush administration official is wrongly claiming that some of the savings in the Affordable Care Act are 'double-counted' and that the law actually increases the deficit," said Jeanne Lambrew, a deputy assistant to the president for health policy. "This claim is false."

President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

The White House was forced on the defensive on Wednesday as it sought to explain controversial remarks President Barack Obama made earlier in the week about the Supreme Court's review of his signature healthcare reform law. "What he did was make an unremarkable observation about 80 years of Supreme Court history," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters during a White House briefing dominated by the topic.

Obama expressed confidence on Monday that the Court would not take an "unprecedented, extraordinary step" by ov

There was something rather unsettling in President Obama’s preemptive strike on the Supreme Court at Monday’s news conference. “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” Obama said. “Well, here’s a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that, and not take that step.”

President Barack Obama weighed in Monday on last week's Supreme Court arguments about health care reform, saying he expected the justices to rule the act is constitutional.