The Burr-Coburn-Hatch Proposal

Yesterday’s announcement of a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), Richard Burr (N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah), is an important milestone in the healthcare debate. As I explain in a post at The Weekly Standard, this plan will not only put a stop to the disastrous consequences of the...

Obamacare’s Mandate Meltdown

Jeffrey Anderson and I have a column in the New York Post on why the individual mandate is unlikely to persuade Americans to buy into the Obamacare exchanges. The ObamaCare law thus made insurance a less valuable product for most people, even as it pushed up the cost of buying it. The coercion of the individual mandate was supposed to...

Unwinding Obamacare

Now that 2014 has arrived, the Affordable Care Act is no longer a theoretical proposition, but a policy that is in now being implemented. But, as my colleague Yuval Levin and I explain in a piece in The Weekly Standard, there are still parts of the law that conservatives can and should try to stop from being implemented, both to protect...

The Emerging Conservative Effort to Help the Poor

It seems likely now that the Democratic Party will be using income inequality as a wedge issue in the 2014 mid-term election, but, as I explain in a column at e21, conservatives have serious proposals for dealing with poverty and inequality, and  should welcome a debate on these issues in the coming election. The battle lines in...

The HHS Mandate Goes Live

In the midst of the disastrous launch of the federal and state insurance exchanges in the final weeks of 2013, it was easy to forget about one of the other seriously problematic elements of Obamacare that came into effect with the new year: the HHS contraception mandate.  But, as I argue in a column at National Review Online, one of...

The Enduring Myth of the Individual ‘Mandate’

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act have always had a difficult time talking about the “individual mandate,” since it is at the same time the most strikingly coercive and heavy-handed element of the law while also being essential for making the law work. As I argue in a column at National Review Online, however, the Supreme...

Obamcare’s Troubles Are Far From Over

Though the Obama administration appears to have fixed the most obvious problems with the healthcare.gov website, the troubles with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act are far from over. As I argue in a column at e21, it is far from clear that healthcare.gov is working as well as it needs to, and in any case, some glitches on a...

Another Broken Promise: Obamacare Is Driving Costs Up, Not Down

One of the few major promises made by the president about the Affordable Care Act that has not been exposed as empty and false in the wake of the law’s disastrous rollout has been that Obamacare will drive overall health care costs down. In a post on The Weekly Standard’s blog yesterday, I show why the recent claim by the...

Keeping the Pressure on Obamacare

The disastrous implementation of the Obamacare health insurance exchanges on October 1 has left the left health care law more vulnerable than ever. As I argue in a column at National Review Online, Republicans need to continue to push back against the most problematic and unpopular elements of the legislation to both protect Americans...

The Upton Bill Is No Small Matter

With millions of Americans facing the prospect of losing their health insurance in the new year because of the Affordable Care Act, something needs to be done to provide some relief for the people whose health care is threatened by this poorly thought out and poorly implemented law. A bill introduced by House Republicans, led by Energy...