Barack Obama, Health Care Reform | featured news

Americans overwhelmingly want the president and Congress to get to work on a new bill to change the health care system if the Supreme Court strikes down President Barack Obama's 2010 overhaul as unconstitutional, a new poll finds....

Investors could be excused for avoiding health insurance and hospital stocks as a U.S. Supreme Court decision nears on President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul law - an outcome that could send the companies' shares down 10 percent or more.

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein make the case that President Obama's insistence on pursuing health care reform in 2009 was not a mistake. Specifically, they claim that there wasn't a real trade-off between the pursuit of reform and helping the economy.

Tossing out President Barack Obama's health care law would have major unintended consequences for Medicare's payment systems the administration has quietly informed the courts.

U.S. consumers and businesses will receive an estimated $1.3 billion in rebates from insurance companies this year, according to a new study quantifying a key early benefit of the healthcare law that President Obama signed in 2010.

Rep. Barney Frank , D-Mass., said he advised President Obama against taking up health care reform following a special election in 2010 that changed Democrats' fortunes in the Senate, saying that he should have instead turned his focus to financial reform.

"In another attempt to re-fight the battles of the past, one former Bush administration official is wrongly claiming that some of the savings in the Affordable Care Act are 'double-counted' and that the law actually increases the deficit," said Jeanne Lambrew, a deputy assistant to the president for health policy. "This claim is false."

President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

There was something rather unsettling in President Obama’s preemptive strike on the Supreme Court at Monday’s news conference. “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” Obama said. “Well, here’s a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that, and not take that step.”

President Barack Obama weighed in Monday on last week's Supreme Court arguments about health care reform, saying he expected the justices to rule the act is constitutional.