Portside

The Hospital Trust Fund accounts for only about half of total Medicare spending. Most of the rest goes to cover physician fees, prescription drugs and to provide incentives for health insurance companies to participate in the Medicare Advantage program and administer the Medicare drug program. The Affordable Care Act could have done much more than it does to curb spending in those areas.

The Obama Administration’s new rules will likely put an end to the Supreme Court’s ability to move the goalposts every time someone raises a new objection to the administration’s policy. Now, the country will have to wait to find out whether Hobby Lobby actually permits this latest set of rules — or whether the language in the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision was simply Lucy pulling away the football one more time

The Supreme Court’s ruling may prompt Americans to re-examine whether the traditional, employment-based health insurance that they have become accustomed to is really the ideal platform for health insurance coverage in the 21st century.

Expanding health insurance to the uninsured was never the big story. The most important benefit of Obamacare is the security it provides to the tens of millions of people who already had insurance – except that insurance, before the Affordable Care Act, was only as safe as their job.

Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. Obama took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and improved some of its provisions. In deciding what course, the question for the new administration, which successfully ran a campaign with a large plank to make major changes to the health care delivery system, try to go around the existing insurance industry or through it?

There's no reason to rollback the progress the ACA has made. But we should go all the way and dump the for-profit system.