health insurance

A new plan from the Center for American Progress shows how health-care reform could go big—while also limiting the mess it makes.

Both parties say they support the Children's Health Insurance Program. So why isn't it funded?

Taking away medical care for millions of Americans is not the right thing. Paying millions to politicians to ensure that healthcare will end for Americans is morally deplorable.

Caring for the sick means keeping them in our risk pool.

Forget 2010. The baseline is now.

Remember in the fall, when Obamacare's insurance exchanges got off to a shamefully bad start, and people who never liked the health-care law in the first place started cheering its impending doom?

Yeah, they were wrong.

Several GOP governors have made plans to go along with Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid. This is very good news.

In case you missed it last Friday, the Obama administration quietly issued a proposed update to regulations coming out of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as "Obamacare."

The verbiage is a bit dense, but here's the upshot: the ACA requires health plans to provide contraceptive coverage to all insured members. Some religious organizations and even a few for-profit companies objected to this requirement, citing religious beliefs.

I've so far declined to comment on Wheaton College's decision to join the election-year culture war skirmish du jour by suing the feds for stomping all over its religious freedom requiring insurers to cover basic women's health needs while allowing faith-based employers to themselves stay out of it. I was sad but not surprised to learn of this move. Wheaton takes it as not only one legitimate view but an article of evangelical conviction that the morning after pill is unacceptable? Sure, okay. I disagree with my alma mater, but it's hardly the first time.

With the Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court, Americans have yet another chance to learn about what the law actually contains.

The first is wonky fun; the second is just the regular kind.

So, the Blunt amendment got killed in the Senate. And good riddance: you wouldn't know it from the L.A. Times's writeup, but the measure was a good bit broader than a reversal of the Obama administration's contraception mandate (which itself would have been nothing to celebrate). From the amendment text (pdf):

A health plan shall not be considered to have failed to provide the
essential health benefits package...on the basis that it declines to
provide coverage of specific items or services because...providing
coverage (or, in the case of a sponsor of a group health plan, paying
for coverage) of such specific items or services is contrary to the
religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other
entity offering the plan.

In other words, essentially a line-item veto of whatever the boss is morally opposed to, based on church teaching or otherwise.

In
a response to complaints from Catholic leaders, last week the Obama
administration revised its rule requiring some religious institutions to
include birth control in health insurance. The new stance was welcomed by some
Catholic organizations, including the
Catholic Health Association but was firmly
rejected by the Catholic bishops--who in doing so shifted the ground
of their own argument.

Are Protestants more in line with
the Catholic bishops on contraception than Catholics
are? Or is it just that there's some correlation between being
Protestant and being politically inclined to oppose most any proposal
that starts with "Employers should be required..."?

We disagree with the Catholic bishops' stance on birth control. Nevertheless, we think HHS should offer a broader religious exemption.

Recently my father-in-law's Medicaid plan stopped covering Lexapro—with little notice. By the time he could get authorization for a "preferred" antidepressant, he had quit cold turkey.