In The News

The major health insurers that are finally pulling back from Obamacare have seen a 15% to 20% decline in their stock prices since the middle of last year, while the one insurer that signaled last year it was getting out has climbed about 15%.

There's a provision in Obamacare that says if you cannot find an ACA-qualified policy for less than 8 percent of household income after taxpayer-provided subsidies, you’re exempt from the mandate to have coverage. If there are no Obamacare-qualified plans available to individuals in a given area, then those individuals can’t buy one for less than 8 percent of their income.

Aetna is planning to pull out of most of the public health insurance exchanges in 2017 and move from serving 778 counties to only 242 counties.

"About 7 million people are getting subsidies under the Affordable Care Act," said Merrill Matthews, Ph.D. "That certainly makes for a huge pool. But the structure of it is designed to fail.”

It would streamline the tax process and bring American businesses home. 

A number of health payers have been dropping out of the health insurance exchanges due to significant financial losses.

The Sixth Circuit Court’s rejection of the FCC's unconstitutional preemption of state laws regulating municipal broadband projects is a win for constitutional federalism and taxpayers. 

Merrill Matthews said the decision provides some much-needed clarity. “The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling in Coyote Lake is helpful because it provided some clarity in water rights, which in Western states are extremely important. The decision also reaffirms the role of contracts in an efficiently working economy.”

“What the Affordable Care Act was intended to do was to bring everyone into a relatively low deductible, low co-pay health insurance policy that was going to cover the vast majority of their expenses. What we have are very high-deductible policies that are forcing people to pay for an awful lot of care out of pocket that they used to pay for with health insurance,” Dr. Merrill Matthews said.

The Obama administration’s efforts to keep four insurers from becoming two may mean that only one or none will continue selling on the Obamacare exchanges.