Senior Administration officials outlined the imminent compromise to be announced by President Obama, which follows the “Hawaii compromise” by mandating that insurance companies reach out directly to employees at religiously affiliated institutions and offer them contraceptive care. The officials described a process that “accommodates religious liberty while protecting the health of women.” Under the new [...]

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has reportedly rejected a proposed compromise with the Obama Administration on birth control access rules for religiously affiliated institutions. The working assumption was that the “Hawaii compromise” would come into play. Under this regime, any exempt religious organization would have to tell enrollees how they could directly access contraceptive [...]

Adding another to a string of small victories as we begin this election year, the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that employers will need to cover contraception in their health insurance plans, ensuring close to universal contraceptive coverage. Earlier, the Administration added birth control to the essential benefits package on the [...]

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the government $148 billion from 2012 to 2021. For context, letting the Bush tax cuts expire would save $3.6 trillion over the same ten-year window. So anyone who tells you that we must increase the Medicare age [...]

If people want to say that Mitt Romney “likes to fire people,” I’m not going to stop them. Lord knows that liberals have put up with egregious misstatements of fact and lines ripped out of context for years, if not decades. In fact, Romney did it just a couple months ago. So blowback’s a bitch. [...]

Now that Democratic politicians have taken their shot at Ryan-Wyden, liberal wonks are having their turn puncturing the Medicare/premium support hybrid plan. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is pretty unsparing in their analysis. Here’s a taste: Its sponsors say the proposal would avoid shifting health costs to beneficiaries, but that’s not so. It [...]

While less prominent than the Ryan-Wyden plan yesterday, the Obama Administration took a step to actually implement its health reform product, by denying a waiver to the state of Florida on the medical loss ratio. Previously, the Administration approved waivers on the MLR for six states – Nevada, Iowa, Kentucky, Georgia, New Hampshire and Maine. [...]

On yesterday’s Virtually Speaking Sunday, Stuart Zechman and I spent the first segment discussing Rick Ungar’s article theorizing that the medical loss ratio is a “bomb” inside the Affordable Care Act waiting to explode. The MLR mandates a minimum percentage of insurer premiums that must be spent by insurance companies on medical treatment. There’s a [...]

With continued uncertainty with the Super Committee and the future of the safety net, I feel compelled to once again explain why raising the Medicare eligibility age is a completely misguided idea. Here is Matt Tobias with yet another set of particulars: A report by the Kaiser Family Foundation said that much of the cost [...]

So Mitt Romney released a fiscal plan. I hope his idea to eliminate Title X family planning funding, going much further than even many House Republicans, gets more attention. And there are some other far-right proposals in there as well, like raising the retirement age and capping spending at 20% of GDP and block-granting Medicaid. [...]

It’s sad that it took the demise of the CLASS Act for the media to take notice that the problem the measure was trying to solve, long-term care, is both serious and growing. But whether or not the CLASS Act comes off the books, the problem it was meant to address remains: A gap in [...]