Battle over Obama health law reaches high court

By the AP – The monumental fight over a health care law that touches all Americans and divides them sharply comes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. The justices will decide whether to kill or keep the largest expansion in the nation’s social safety net in more than four decades. Two years and three…

Read More

The Conservative Case for Single Payer Health Reform

By Dr. Joe Jarvis for Utah Healthcare Initiative Blog – Recently, Charles Krauthammer, conservative Washington Post commentator and Fox News analyst, who is also a physician, spoke to an audience of mostly physicians in San Antonio (find coverage of the speech in the San Antonio press here). Excerpts: If President Barack Obama’s health care reform…

Read More

Health care law faces legal, fiscal pressure

From USA Today – More than half of Americans say President Obama’s health care law is unconstitutional as it heads to the Supreme Court this month, a new poll shows. At the same time, Congress’ official scorekeeper says the law could cost a bit more and leave more people uninsured than forecast. The combined dose…

Read More

“Because this is Wrong”

John is from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His son is an X-ray tech, and one day while he was working a woman presented in the ER with a splitting headache. After running scans they discovered she had a brain tumor — but she also had no job and no insurance. The doctors in the ER told…

Read More

Action Alert: Never Mind the Mandate

The Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “Obamacare,” in late March. The mandate would require that almost everyone in the US be covered by some form of health insurance, public or private, by 2014 or be fined. Therefore, it’s no surprise that…

Read More

Court action could prolong health care fight

From USA Today – Next month’s challenge to the Obama-sponsored health care law could affect the care available to most Americans, alter the balance of power between Washington and the states and remain a flash point through this presidential campaign. Yet there is a path the Supreme Court could take when it hears the case…

Read More

California single-payer health care bill stalls in state Senate

From the Sacramento Bee – California’s “Medicare for all” universal health care legislation fell short of the 21 votes needed to pass the state Senate today. Senate Bill 810 failed on a 19-15 vote during this morning’s floor session, with four moderate Democrats abstaining and one voting no. Democratic Sen. Mark Leno, who authored the…

Read More

When Medicare Isn’t Medicare

By Wendell Potter for the Huffington Post – Let’s say you have a Ford and decide to replace everything under the hood with Hyundai parts, including the engine and transmission. Could you still honestly market your car as a Ford? That question gets at the heart of the controversy over who is being more forthright…

Read More

Insurance Mandate May Be Health Bill’s Undoing

From the New York Times – As Barack Obama battled Hillary Rodham Clinton over health care during the Democratic presidential primaries of 2008, he was adamant about one thing: Americans, he insisted, should not be required to buy health insurance. “If things were that easy,” Mr. Obama told the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres in…

Read More