Bloggers are back on the new health overhaul law as they dig into Supreme Court nomination hearings as well as new polls and studies.
Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky explores the difficult situation for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. He writes that yesterday Republican senators questioned her at length about whether she would be a “judicial activist” and today they may well try to prod her to become one when they “ask Kagan if she believes Congress has the authority to impose an individual mandate under its authority to regulate interstate commerce.”
The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Anderson disagrees with a post from Ezra Klein in which Klein noted that popular support for reform has increased. Anderson rebuts: “The number of polls has dwindled substantially — from 22 in the month before Obamacare’s passage and 19 in the month afterward, to just 4 in the past month — and hasn’t included a poll of likely voters in the past two months (compared to 7 in the month before passage). This is important because Obamacare has consistently polled far better among Americans as a whole than among Americans who vote — and far better among those who are largely indifferent than among those who care deeply.”
Brad Wright of Wright on Health looks at a new study about states and the new Medicaid expansion, noting that “it seems that many states are worried that currently eligible, but non-enrolled individuals will suddenly decide to enroll because of the high visibility of the health reform efforts. Such individuals would not fall under the federally-funded expansion, and the states are guarding their checkbooks.”
Heritage’s Vincent Coglianese looks at comments from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, about repealing the health overhaul bill. Hatch said, “I’ve been working to dismantle Obamacare … We have to fight this terrible law that’s a threat to liberty itself.”
In a separate post for Critical Condition, Jeffrey Anderson gives four reasons Republicans should support high-risk state insurance poolsfor people who have trouble getting insurance because of preexisting conditions. Among his reasons are the lower cost of expanding high-risk pools and that they wouldn’t “invite government control of our entire health-care system.”
Insurance broker Henry Stern of Insure Blog looks at news that the temporary early retiree reinsurance program is now accepting applications and quips, “As a side note, ObamaCare©’s certainly turning out to be quite the cash cow for those evil, greedy, heartless insurance carriers, isn’t it? Funny how that happened.”
Elsewhere, Merrill Goozner says the Supreme Court decision’s on business patents is bad news for biotech firms. Goozner writes that “the ruling could lead to more patent challenges against overly broad patents that claim ownership of genes and pathways based on their proven relationship to a disease, even when the claimant has no ‘machine or apparatus,’ i.e., a drug, that would affect the disease.”
Health Beat Blog’s Maggie Mahar disagrees with reports suggesting Dr. Donald Berwick’s nomination to head Medicare and Medicaid is in trouble. She interviews Tom Scully, former director of CMS under President George W. Bush, who says, “He’s universally regarded and a thoughtful guy who is not partisan. I think it’s more about … the health care bill. You could nominate Gandhi to be head of CMS and that would be controversial right now.”
