Browse by Media Hit and Health Care

To be clear, this is not the free-market approach that many of us would like, but neither the House nor the Senate has enough votes to return health insurance to a free market, said Merrill Matthews. What Cruz is trying to do is create a situation where the vast majority of people in the individual health-insurance market would have a wide range of affordable health-insurance options — just like they used to before Obamacare.”

If Republican lawmakers had stuck to their first strategy of immediately repealing the Affordable Care Act without worrying about a replacement that bill would probably be law by now, said Institute for Policy Innovation resident scholar Merrill Matthews.

The Senate may come to terms on a healthcare bill, but one observer warns it won't stop the collapse of the individual health insurance market.

The individual mandate has not been effective in convincing healthy people to buy insurance, especially if they don't qualify for subsidies, or have smaller subsidies, experts agree.

"I was never optimistic that was going to work," said Merrill Matthews. "My statement is most major legislation starts out asking what's good policy and ends up asking what's good politics," he said. "We're at the what's good politics now."

IPI says that the Senate Republicans’ Health Care Bill Won't Stop the Collapse of the Individual Health Insurance Market. It may be the GOP is willing to sacrifice the individual market in order to achieve the bill’s other important reforms, says IPI's Dr Merrill Mathews in Forbes. The risk is that premiums continue to rise and insurers flee and Democrats, the media and maybe even the public say the Republicans’ “free market” approach didn’t work, so let’s move on to a government-run, single-payer health care system. 

The combination of keeping the guaranteed issue and preventing medical underwriting would make the Senate version actuarially unsound, said IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews.

Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation examined state high-risk pools and determined what made certain state pools successful. 

The American Health Care Act is now in the Senate’s hands, and Wednesday’s score will inform senators’ work as they draft their own version of the bill, experts say.

Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, said Wednesday that "Republicans will think they dodged the bullet with this. They will feel it could have been worse."

Just ahead of the report's release, the Institute for Policy Innovation issued a statement reacting to yet another health insurer's decision to pull out of Obamacare. "Democrats sold Obamacare as a way to expand access to health insurance and lower the costs. Just the opposite is happening," said Merrill Matthews, IPI resident scholar. "What we are seeing is a collapse of the individual insurance market."