Perhaps the most under-covered aspect of health reform is its dramatic expansion of coverage for the treatment of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will finance care for millions of low-income Americans, now uninsured, who suffer from these conditions.

The latest greatest edition of Health Wonk Review is live over at Managed Care Matters and, as host Joe Paduda notes, it’s all about health care cost trends, reform implementation. This edition includes a collection of posts speculating about the likelihood of decreasing health care costs over the next decade. It also offers several pieces focused [...]

It will be almost five months before the states’ health insurance exchanges will be up and running and already we’re seeing media stories suggesting that some insurance companies will not sign up to sell their policies on the exchanges – at least not right away. “Big insurers wary of entering new Obamacare markets,” read the [...]

We at Families USA estimate that nearly 26 million Americans will be eligible for premium tax credits to help make health coverage affordable.

In fact, one of the real objectives of the “Time for Affordability” PR and advertising campaign the insurance industry is waging is to obscure a reality they want us and our lawmakers to ignore or forget: insurance premiums have become unaffordable not because of health care reform but because insurers have been able to get away with raising rates as high as necessary to meet profits expected by board members, shareholders and Wall Street financial analysts.

I was stunned when Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.), accused me of being disingenuous because I told the story of a Florida woman who might be alive today had she not been blackballed by insurance companies after being treated for breast cancer several years ago.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin uses some pretty fuzzy “facts” (and we use that term loosely) in his attempts to badmouth the Affordable Care Act.

Harold Pollack continues his series of interviews with health policy experts, talking this month with Michael Chernew, Professor of Health Care Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. The two discuss a wide range of topics, including the ACA’s daunting goal of controlling spending while improving quality.

Escape Fire, The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, describes how health care in America has turned into a business. How the quest for money has hurt the quality of care provided to patients and how it has kept millions of us from having access to even mediocre care.

If conservatives and insurers join to make young Americans afraid of Obamacare, they might persuade a fair number to opt out of insurance, and pay the penalty instead. This could, indeed, hurt health care reform.

What’s “basic” in health care is an issue of heated debate. Individuals and groups as diverse as cancer advocates, children’s hospitals, parents of disabled children, physical therapists, dentists, and optometrists have been waiting for final clarification from HHS.

The claim that – as a result of an IRS ruling – “millions” will be left uninsured under Obamacare is “fear-mongering, pure and simple,” says healthy policy writer Maggie Mahar.

Last week, President Obama signaled that he is ‘open to making modest adjustments to programs like Medicare.’ Should seniors brace for bad news? No. There are many ways to cut Medicare spending without drawing blood. It’s a matter of using a scalpel, not an axe, to trim the fat.

If you’re a 20- or 30-something and have health coverage, you’re being targeted by insurance industry campaign to eliminate two important consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act.

Today, many Americans are asking, “Will my premiums go up in 2014?” There is no simple answer … but the answer for many Americans is that premiums will actually fall.

Harold Pollack talks with blogger Aaron Carroll about how he became a policy wonk, about his favorite health policy charts and the road ahead for health reform.

Health reform critics claim Americans will soon feel “sticker shock” over climbing health premiums, but Maggie Mahar says they aren’t telling the whole story … and that coverage will actually cost less for many small firms and individuals.

Beginning in 2014, millions of Americans will discover that they qualify for subsidies designed to help them purchase their own health insurance. The aid will come in the form of tax credits, and many will be surprised by how generous they are.

Now, the president will have to decide where he is willing to compromise on cutting government spending. There are, in fact, places where he could rein in Medicare without hurting beneficiaries.

Being what it is, Health Wonk Review is chock full of great blog posts – including a handful of them addressing the issue nearest and dearest to our hearts at healthinsurance.org: health reform.

The governors and the president needs the other. Each side has a (possibly perverse) stake in the other’s success. Each would also be wise to make some concession, if for no other reason than to provide their counterpart with a dignified path to compromise during the second Obama term.

It’s hard not to think about the movie “Thelma and Louise” with all the dire predictions about the coming”fiscal cliff.” House Speaker Boehner and President Obama may be our modern day Thelma and Louise, playing a little chicken with us all, with Obama proposing some pretty dramatic solutions and Boehner and the Republicans offering little except “no” to tax rate increases and raising the Medicare eligibility age.

U.S. workers may think ACA-mandated health benefits from their employers are “priceless,” but some business owners believe employees and customers should think twice.

Health policy historian Paul Starr, author of Remedy and Reaction, explains why Barack Obama succeeded on health reform while Bill Clinton failed … and why the battle over reform is far from over.

Bottom line: The President doesn’t need to come up with new ideas. He just has to stand firm on implementing what we have.

Joe Paduda over at Managed Care Matters put together a great collection of posts focused on the Affordable Care Act and what’s ahead now that President Obama has won re-election.

EDITOR’S NOTE: HIO Curbside Consult is a periodic informal dialogue with medical and health policy experts about pressing issues of the day. For this edition, I conversed by Gchat with Dr. Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the health care program at the National Bureau of [...]

Even if Mitt Romney were elected, he alone could not overturn major provisions of healthcare reform. Only Congress can pass the legislation needed to change the ACA. Republicans are expected to maintain control of the House, but if Democrats hold the Senate, they will be able to block House bills aimed at eviscerating “Obamacare.”

Extreme statements of a few Senate candidates have brought the abortion issue center-stage in this electoral campaign. Abortion certainly deserves attention. Yet it should not overshadow other women’s health issues, which were a major focus of health reform. – Harold Pollack

If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out the most recent edition of Health Wonk Review, no worries: it’s still live over at HealthBeat. Maggie Mahar, who blogs regularly here, hosted this week’s edition, and spared no ink … uh pixels … in reviewing a nice collection of election-related health policy blogs. Her [...]

In 2014, 12 million Americans will begin purchasing health insurance in the new marketplaces known as “exchanges.” Some are now uninsured and will be gaining coverage for the first time. Others have insurance through a small employer, or purchase their own policies. But few have the comprehensive coverage that will be available in the Exchanges [...]

Mitt Romney’s web site makes a bold promise: ‘On his first day in office, Mitt Romney will issue an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all 50 states. He will then work with Congress to repeal the full legislation as quickly as possible.’

Many of Romney’s supporters assume that this is what will happen if he wins. But in truth, even if Republicans take both the White House and the Senate, Romney wouldn’t have the power to ‘repeal the full legislation.’ Nor could a new president grant waivers that would let states ignore the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We live in a nation ruled by law, not magic wands.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to our first HIO Curbside Consult – a periodic informal dialogue with medical and health policy experts about pressing issues of the day.  Tonight, President Obama and Governor Romney will face off in their first debate. Medicare and Medicaid will be central topics of the conversation there. HIO’s Harold Pollack caught up [...]

We almost forgot to remind you that the latest edition of Health Wonk Review hit the virtual stands on Wednesday over at Wing of Zock. Fortunately, it’s filled with plenty of great articles that aren’t yet past their wonkspiration date.

ACA opponents are using scare tactics to convince Americans that a mandate to buy comprehensive health insurance represents a tax on the middle class they can’t afford.

“For 30 years, Republicans have been getting away, politically, with providing fuzzy numbers about so many things. The Romney campaign has rather explicitly decided that it’s better to offer vague bromides about the virtues of limited government than it is to get down to the specifics in proposing unpopular measures required to make their proposals work.” – Harold Pollack

Harold Pollack: Clinton delivered the best speech of the 2012 campaign. “No one in American politics can rival Clinton’s ability to weave history and policy detail into a stem-winding performance that remains somehow compelling to average voters.”

From the explicit mention in the Democratic platform of the Affordable Care Act to the embrace of the term “Obamacare”, Democrats started off their 2012 Convention by praising health reform not burying it. In contrast to the Republicans, who mentioned it only in terms of opposition to the President, Democrats proudly and loudly touted the benefits of Obamacare in the first night of their convention.

Romney running mate Paul Ryan’s speech last week criticized President Obama for enacting “a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for.” But health policy writer Harold Pollack says the WE Ryan embraced left many people out.

On the eve of the Republican Convention, blogger Maggie Mahar wonders, “What would a Republican victory in November mean for women’s health?” A review of GOP votes in Congress and recent campaign rhetoric offer solid – and sobering – clues.

Alleged Obamacare-related increase in price of Papa John’s pizza ? 11 cents. Ensuring working Americans have a health care safety net? Priceless.

The latest edition of Health Wonk Review is hosted by the kind folks over at the Disease Management Care Blog t’s chock full of health reform blog posts, from “obscure legal theorizing over the constitutional legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act” to an Olympic tribute to universal health care and look at what insurance brokers think about the law.

Aetna CEO Mark T. Bertolini obviously heard Arijit Guha’s Tweets – and felt the resulting heat – ultimately deciding that Aetna would cover an Arizona graduate student’s mounting medical expenses and give the student a new policy with no lifetime cap.

In states where governors have vowed not to expand Medicaid, health insurance premiums are likely to go up as hospitals struggling to care for millions of uninsured patients pass the cost on to private sector insurers, who will, in turn, pass the bill on to their customers.

The July 19 edition of Health Wonk Review is up over at Worker’s Comp Insider, and this week’s reviewer, Julie Ferguson, says it’s a sizzler.

Inevitably, opponents of the Affordable Care Act will continue to hunt for ways to undermine reform, says Washington & Lee law professor Timothy Jost, though “they may be shooting themselves in the foot.”

Thanks to the publicity, some learned that the Affordable Care Act’s mandate will apply only to Americans who don’t have employer-based insurance, Medicaid or Medicare. And while that relatively small group will be subject to a penalty if they don’t buy insurance, they also will be eligible for a subsidy if they do.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney appears amused during 15 seconds of booing that followed his comment that he would “eliminate every non-essential expensive program I can find … that includes ObamaCare …” Romney made the comment Wednesday during his speech at the NAACP National Convention.

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act breathed a sigh of relief after Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling. Yet many remain worried about the decision’s Medicaid section. Although the court upheld the constitutionality of expanding Medicaid, it also ruled that the federal government may not withhold all of a state’s Medicaid funding to induce a state’s participation in ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

I was not entirely surprised by the Court’s decision. Indeed, on March 26, the day that the Supreme Court began to hear oral arguments, I wrote about why I felt the law would not be overturned by the Court.

If the Supreme Court overturns the individual mandate that would require most Americans to buy insurance, it may rule that if everyone doesn’t have to buy insurance, insurance companies shouldn’t have to insure everyone.

Since when did breast pumps become an “essential benefit?” Answer? Since we realized that if 90 percent of women nursed their babies for six months, giving them breast milk only, we could save 900 lives per year, and reduce health care spending by $13 billion annually.

The goal of the mandate is to draw more healthy people into the insurance pool, so that the cost of care when we become sick can be spread over a larger group. But the mandate is only one of many provisions in the PPACA that makes health insurance more attractive and more affordable.

This legislative program is why the 2012 elections are the most important in living memory. Conservatives could achieve goals long in gestation and fervently sought. Liberals could see seventy-five years of social welfare legislation undone.

This week, Maggie Mahar edits the Health Wonk Review, a biweekly compendium of the best of the health policy blogs.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) calls on the states to create health insurance exchanges – marketplaces where individuals and small businesses can shop for and compare health insurance plans. Beginning in 2014, insurers peddling policies on an exchange will have to meet the ACA’s standards by covering “essential benefits,” capping out-of-pocket expenses for individuals, and [...]

Under reform legislation, insurers selling policies in the individual or small-group markets can charge older boomers up to three times more than a younger adult would pay for an identical policy – unless the older person lives in a state that limits age-rating.

Mr. and Mrs. Romney might ponder why so many people whose lives have been altered by chronic disease and disability become passionate supporters of health reform. Some of these advocates directly experience medical-economic hardship. Others have not faced the most punishing financial consequences. They merely see what happens to others, less-privileged, who face the same medical challenges with fewer resources.

When they buy their own health insurance in the individual market, women must lay out an extra $1 billion a year, simply because they are women.

Two years from now, when the main pillars of health reform become operative, young families will be able to buy decent coverage through an insurance exchange. Families will receive financial help if they can’t afford to buy such coverage.

The Court might damage or destroy the centerpiece of the Obama presidency. This would be an abuse of judicial power. It would also hurt millions of people whose pleas for help seem quite abstract to men in robes who might snatch that help away.

For nearly 20 years the GOP trumpeted the virtues of the individual mandate … until it was enacted by a Democratic president.

As Rachel Maddow observed last night: this case was “built up as the Super Bowl of American partisan politics.” Thus, the Supreme Court was left with little choice: it had to hear “The Case of the Century.”

I cannot believe for a minute that this Court wants to go down in history as the Gang of Nine that quashed the most important piece of legislation that Congress has passed in 37 years. If it did, we could find ourselves on the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Give your member of Congress a ‘health reform checkup’ at HealthReformVotes.org before the November elections.

More good news for health care reform. The Congressional Budget Office – that nonpartisan referee that scores the financial impact of legislation – now says its revised figures show the 10-year cost of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be $50 billion less than it estimated just a year ago. Considering that health reform was [...]

While critics have been wailing about the impact of reform on health care costs, health care costs have been moderating and in some cases even going down.

The new summary of benefits was mandated in the federal health reform law to help consumers make sense of complicated insurance plans and compare them with one another when shopping for coverage.

Dr. “H” Rob Huizenga of “The Biggest Loser” knows that education equals motivation for folks who need to change unhealthy behavior. The individual mandate could do the same: getting more folks back to doctors for the treatment – and education – that they need. (Photo courtesy of NBCUniversal)

These are telephone hotlines providing callers with knowledgeable human beings to help with health insurance problems. Now, sadly, Congress seems to be allowing the program to die an early death, declining to fund it beyond the initial $30 million, which was distributed to 35 states.

For anyone who wonders how the battle over health reform came to dominate so much of the nation’s attention over the past few years – and whether the battle will ever end – Paul Starr provides answers in Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Reform.

You will hear a lot of bashing of “Obamacare” during the current political season. But while we wait for full implementation of health reform in 2014, there have been meaningful changes that are helping American families every day.

The fact that the Affordable Care Act defines ten mandatory categories of “essential benefits” provides a “floor” of coverage that can not be taken away. After 2014, no plan offered to individuals or small groups can exclude maternity care, prescription drugs, rehabilitation or habilitation services, or mental health services, to mention a few.

Ensuring young adults are covered now saves us all money down the line and gives parents and their kids the peace of mind that they’ll have coverage they can count on when they need it the most.

We always love when politicians make witty jabs and then later get jabbed back. We love it, especially, when they’re jabbing health reform. Mitt Romney’s feeling a return jab right now. The GOP Presidential contender wisecracked in the spring that President Obama was giving Romney way too much credit for helping set the stage for national health [...]

Not entirely sure when state health insurance exchanges will take effect? Curious about Grandma’s new free preventive services? Call someone who cares.

How ‘ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree?) We love that old post-World War I tune, but we feel like it’s due for an update – and we think it could go something like this: How ‘ya gonna keep ‘em satisfied with the health insurance status quo after they’ve seen [...]

After months of assuring Americans that they don’t hate everything about the recently passed Affordable Care Act – and that there’s room to improve the law – Republican legislators are now being cautioned to change their tune and their strategy. By improving the law too much, the memo says, legislators could make the law more popular.

Kay, over at Balloon Juice, brings up an excellent point today about coverage of yesterday’s ruling by a federal judge that the health reform law is unconstitutional. Her point, simply, is that the ruling from this particular federal judge – Roger Vinson – isn’t the nail in the casket for the health reform law. The [...]

House Republicans took one more step today toward repealing last year’s sweeping health care overhaul, as it approved a rule allowing a repeal bill to proceed to a vote. The vote is purely symbolic because it will never pass the Senate and will never be signed by the President. But since the nonpartisan Congressional Budget [...]

Health reform’s individual mandate provision – the requirement that all taxpayers purchase health insurance beginning in 2014 – has been struck down by a federal judge appointed by none other than President George W. Bush. What is it with America’s continuing suffering inflicted by the former President? The deficit is about to go into hyperdrive [...]