A new study by the RAND Corporation found that while simply removing the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act would result in fewer individuals choosing to buy insurance, it would not produce the so-called premium death spiral predicted by some of the mandate’s strongest supporters.

Some Connecticut legislators are seriously looking into creating a Basic Health Plan for people who make between 133 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level, instead of forcing them to use the new private health insurance exchanges.

Health care policy expert Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, makes the bold prediction in the New York Times that in just eight years the health insurance industry will be extinct in America. He claims it will be replaced by accountable care organizations, or ACOs. Emanuel’s description of how these future new ACOs will work sounds incredibly similar to how Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) are supposed to work.

During Thursday night’s GOP debate, a woman from Florida told the candidates she’d lost her job and with it her health insurance. What would each of the candidates do to get her covered or otherwise provide the health care she needed?

You had to listen carefully, but the effective answer they all gave her was, “this is your problem, not ours.”

There is no way Obama could have spent more time talking about the biggest legislative action of his presidency and still have received the incredibly broad approval he did get from people who watched the speech. Don’t expect the issue of health care to be brought up by choice by Democrats in the upcoming campaign.

President Obama’s State of the Union address gave us a sense of what the Obama campaign thinks are his strengths and weaknesses. The auto rescue and several foreign policy successes made up a huge part of the speech. But if you weren’t paying extremely close attention, you may have missed Obama’s few passing references to his signature health insurance law.

A common mistake is claiming that the Affordable Care Act will bring “universal health care” to the United States. Ryan Lizza’s makes this claim in his defense of President Obama at the end of his long story in the New Yorker, but insurance is not care, and the ACA’s insurance coverage isn’t universal.

On December 30, Governor Beshear announced that he was rejecting the merger to protect taxpayer property. “University Hospital is a public asset with an important public mission,” the governor said. If the merger were to take place, “the public would have only indirect and minority influence,” he said.

Every attempt I’ve seen by defenders of ACA to claim a mandate for health insurance is different from a mandate for any other product/service because the insurance market is special is logically incoherent. The same arguments can equally apply to thousands of products.

Many of the design principles for the insurance market exchanges in the Affordable Care Act were based on unproven, discredited, and frankly absurd conservative notions about the economagic of free markets. But too many liberals refused to acknowledge this until they saw Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney make the same arguments.