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.

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.

Given how many people actually expect the Supreme Court to strike down the mandate, it is hard to guess whether a favorable ruling for the administration would be a political positive or negative for Obama. On one hand, the court upholding the mandate could get people to resign themselves to the idea of the mandate and the new law.

Since President Obama took office the percentage of uninsured people in America has been steadily raising and has now reached a new high. That’s primarily the result of long term trends, rising health care costs, and the huge spike in unemployment during the economic crash, as workers lost their employer-provided insurance. But if puts a focus on the political decision to delay the ACA’s coverage expansions until 2014.

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.

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.

If you actually wanted to reduce health care spending you need to reduce how much we are actually paying for health care products and services. Not only do we spend way more than the rest of the industrialized world on administrative costs, we also pay way more for the exact same drugs and treatments. Forcing people to pay more for their health care out of pocket, i.e. have “skin in the game,” will not fix our problems.

The Supreme Court has officially set the schedule for oral arguments regarding the Affordable Care Act. Arguments will be heard over three days from March 26th to March 28th, 2012, with separate issues considered on each day.