In The News

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.

Failing to gain the votes needed to repeal and replace Obamacare, President Donald Trump and some Senate Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), are today calling for a return to the original Republican strategy of passing repeal legislation immediately, and then put together a replacement bill, perhaps in August.

The Trump administration’s ambitious agenda for unleashing, rather than obstructing, U.S. energy is a game-changer for not only promoting the U.S. economy and creating jobs, but a stabilizing factor for peace around the world, said IPI's Merrill Matthews, Ph.D.

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.

As countries try to reduce their carbon emissions in accord with their Paris agreement commitments, transitioning to natural gas power generation may be one of their first steps. 

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."

The information about Californians moving to Texas confirms what some people already know. "We've been identifying that situation for some time," says Merrill Matthews, PhD, a resident scholar for the Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation.

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. 

It may be the GOP is willing to sacrifice the individual market in order to achieve the bill’s other important reforms. 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.