Media Hit

Insurers including Blue Cross, United Healthcare, Cigna, Humana — which last month said it will limit its participation to a handful of areas — have seen a gradual decline in stock prices, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation.

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.”

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

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.

For now, both candidates appear happy to peddle a re-packaged version of President Obama’s job-killing agenda. 

Tom Giovanetti at the Institute for Policy Innovation says Obama is the first president in U.S. history not to have at least one year in office with a national GDP growth rate of at least 3 percent.

An oft-cited study from 2006 commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and conducted by the Institute for Policy Innovation found that film piracy cost the US economy $20.5 billion annually.

Tim LaHaye's view of the end times as expressed in his 'Left Behind' series was influential in expanding the market for Christian fiction," said Merrill Matthews, IPI resident scholar. "The basic tenets of premillennial dispensationalism that emerged in the series were already embraced by many evangelicals. LaHaye's contribution was to put that theology in a format that was more accessible and relatable to readers.