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Congress is within reach of trashing the old and unworkable formula that Medicare uses to pay doctors. By itself, this is what it sounds like -- a bureaucratic maneuver that matters little to anyone but the doctors who treat Medicare patients. The system that Congress replaces it with, however, could represent a big step forward in improving the quality, and lowering the cost, of everyone's health care. (3/20)

House Republicans have no qualms about leaving millions of low-income Americans without health coverage, as evidenced by their repeated votes to repeal Obamacare. But they're so skittish about reducing access to Medicare, the federal insurance program for senior citizens and the disabled, that they may vote for a bill to shore up the program in defiance of their party's deficit hawks. It's past time they did. (3/20)

House leaders filed “doc fix” legislation Thursday afternoon, but they have not yet released the legislative language surrounding the parts of the bill that would be paid for. A summary circulating among lobbyists in Washington suggests as one of the “pay-fors” a Medicare Advantage timing shift—a budget gimmick that would shift plan payments into a future fiscal year, masking overall Medicare spending levels. (Chris Jacobs, 3/20)

President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law five years ago Monday, an anniversary that congressional Republicans will soon observe with another symbolic vote to repeal it. The general public isn't as eager to do away with the law, widely known as Obamacare, but surveys show little love for it — a view that hasn't shifted much over time. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is considering a legal challenge that could render the law's landmark insurance reforms unsustainable in most states. So it's not exactly a happy birthday for Obama's landmark legislative achievement. Despite the relentless attacks, however, the act has been a notable success on one front: It has helped millions of Americans obtain insurance coverage that would otherwise be out of their reach. (3/22)

Kevin Drum, whose penetrating blog posts at Mother Jones are must-reading for anyone with a serious interest in economics and public policy, was diagnosed last year with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood plasma cells. Since then, he has allowed his readers to traverse the healthcare landscape with him via regular updates. This week he connected the dots between his medical condition and the Republican Party's oft-expressed determination to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Drum wrote that, because of his condition, Republican healthcare policy sharply raises the stakes of the 2016 election for people in his position. By undoing the Affordable Care Act, he observed, a Republican Congress and Republican president could leave millions of Americans without access to affordable coverage. (Michael Hiltzik, 3/20)

Republicans are wrong on Obamacare, and they are hypocrites in the way they oppose the law. The House GOP’s latest budget is yet another example. Republican opposition to Obamacare, at its core a centrist health-care reform, stepped out of the realm of the rational and into the realm of the theological long ago. One indication has been the hysteria over the law’s “death panels.” Experts and professional fact-checkers have debunked the notion that the Affordable Care Act would empower a faceless government board to deny critical health-care procedures, the Obama-era equivalent of pushing inconvenient seniors onto ice floes. But the GOP’s death-panel nonsense still has a hold on the party, its illogic written explicitly into the House’s budget. (Stephen Stromberg, 3/22)

From Social Security to Medicare, Republicans have pushed to privatize government entitlements. Now Gov. Terry Branstad seeks to hand over management of Iowa’s $4.2 billion Medicaid program to a few private companies. The public should be skeptical. The more than 500,000 poor and disabled individuals and families in Iowa who rely on Medicaid should be asking questions. The federal government should be reluctant to approve the waiver that Iowa needs to privatize a program funded by state and federal dollars. (3/22)

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback recently traveled to Jefferson City to tutor Missouri legislators on tax cuts. But while visiting the neighboring state’s capital, he made a stunning remark that had nothing to do with his controversial supply side experiment. Brownback said he was neither for nor against expanding Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, “if it meets his own personal financial concerns.” But he said if he was presented with a proposal to expand Medicaid in Kansas, he would likely sign the bill. This is a complete turnabout for Brownback and a thrilling one, indeed. (Steve Rose, 3/21)

If I were to tell you there was a pipeline project that would generate 4,000 permanent jobs and have a 28 to 1 return on investment, and that certain elected officials were stopping it, Alaskans might teeter on the verge of riot. Well, this project isn’t a pipeline with all its inherent obstacles to fruition; it is much simpler than that. This project can be done with a simple vote of 21 members of the Alaska State House and 11 members of the Alaska State Senate. So what is this can’t miss project? Medicaid expansion. In addition to all the benefits listed above, this bill would allow about 40,000 Alaskans to access badly needed health care. (Vince Beltrami, 3/22)

The Supreme Court has not even decided King v. Burwell, and the case is already producing new legal scholarship. For instance, Chapman law professor Ronald Rotunda has a new paper discussing King v. Burwell, “King v. Burwell and the Rise of the Administrative State.” (Jonathan H. Adler, 3/22)

In the past five years about $30 billion of federal incentive payments have succeeded in rapidly raising the adoption rate of electronic health records. This computerization of health care has been like a car whose spinning tires have finally gained purchase. We were so accustomed to staying still that we were utterly unprepared for that first lurch forward. Whopping errors and maddening changes in work flow have even led some physicians to argue that we should exhume our three-ring binders and return to a world of pen and paper. This argument is utterly unpersuasive. (Robert M. Wachter, 3/21)

[At Noah's funeral, a] minister read the poem “There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves.” That was Noah. Gentle, and then the disease sunk in its claws. Sometimes, I think of the ones who brought the drugs as wolves, because a dark part of me hates them. But maybe they are just broken boys. One has a father who is an addict. Another lost a sister to drugs. One of the wolves is now clean, and I learned that he'd made amends to Noah. Did the wolf make amends to Noah's parents, who lost their only child? Are parents worthy of amends? Or are we the ones who need to make amends for not protecting our children? (Kerry Madden, 3/20)