Add Maine to the list of states vowing to block the Medicaid expansion from the Affordable Care Act. Of those states who have vowed to opt out, Maine is a little further down the scale in terms of impact. According to a Kaiser study, 43,468 low-income Mainers would get coverage under the expansion (for context, [...]

Liberal analysts have called out their own side on a misleading claim about the cost to seniors of the Ryan-envisioned premium support plan for Medicare. The real answer is that nobody knows how much this will cost seniors. The initial Ryan budget, which would have ended traditional Medicare entirely and given a voucher to seniors [...]

You can read the big prime-time speeches from San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and First Lady Michelle Obama. They tell a coherent story of success borne out of struggle, the importance of government investment in education and opportunity as a bridge from the bottom, and the need to give everyone those same chances. They were [...]

It’s worth pointing out where the differences do lie in this Presidential campaign. And actually, it’s not necessarily on Medicare, at least as a function of spending on the program. The two campaigns have radically different views in what the program ultimately looks like, with Romney-Ryan opting for VoucherCare while Obama-Biden seek the same traditional [...]

We’re told that we’re on the precipice of coming to a great reckoning with our major health care programs. Medicare and Medicaid are bloated and must be brought to heel. The truth is we’re already going through that reckoning. We’re already cutting back on these programs. The federal government just leaves it to the states [...]

The substance of the Medicare debate in the 2012 election is completely at odds with the realities. The Romney campaign hammers away at the $716 billion in “Medicare cuts” imposed by the Affordable Care Act, designed to blunt a traditional Democratic advantage on the topic, as it did in 2010. So far this has worked; [...]

When the Supreme Court removed the barriers to states opting out of the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act, one of the first states to say they would reject the extension of additional coverage was Texas. This would have an outsized effect on the reach of the expansion, since moving up the eligibility of [...]

Brian Beutler advances the story about the manufactured Medicare crisis Mitt Romney has planned, and gets a curious response from one of Romney’s health care advisors. The story so far: Romney has stated that he would roll back the savings that extended the life of the Medicare trust fund. By doing this, he would ensure [...]

The story I covered on Sunday about how the Romney-Ryan campaign would have to cut current Medicare benefits because of the box they’ve shoved themselves into by promising to “restore $716 billion in Medicare cuts” finally gets picked up by the New York Times in a front-page story. If the story gets a bigger platform, [...]

Amid Todd Akin day, here’s what we shouldn’t forget: yesterday Ed Gillespie basically acknowledged that a Mitt Romney Administration would have to raise the Medicare eligibility age in the first term. Romney would remove all the various budgetary savings that would keep the Medicare trust fund solvent beyond 2016, so something would have to happen [...]

It’s hard to even pack all of the falsehoods in Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story into one post, so I’ll have to outsource some of this. First of all, the thing to know is that Niall Ferguson is always wrong about economics. I mean with remarkable consistency. He has been spooked by imminent hyperinflation fears [...]