GW Faculty and Staff Submit Comments to HHS on Proposed Title X “Gag” Rule

July 28, 2018

A group of 17 members of the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health’s (GW Milken Institute SPH) faculty and staff submitted comments on July 26 in response to a recent rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The GW Milken Institute SPH group said they are “deeply concerned about any proposed changes to Title X policies that could adversely impact health center participation, given Title X’s major role in strengthening and enhancing health centers’ family planning performance.”

The New District of Columbia Policy to Protect Insurance Coverage

July 6, 2018

The District of Columbia recently took an important step to protect health insurance coverage by creating a District-specific health insurance requirement.  This is in response to the unexpected termination of the federal health insurance requirement, which Congress narrowly passed last December. 

Public Health Scholars Respond to a New Effort to Repeal the Affordable Care Act

June 19, 2018

Last December’s tax law eliminated the tax penalty associated with the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) individual shared responsibility penalty (or individual mandate).  Although the mandate still exists in the ACA, the financial penalty associated with not purchasing affordable insurance has been eliminated.  On the heels of the tax law’s enactment, 20 states — 18 state attorneys general and two governors — filed a new lawsuit in Federal District Court in Texas that argues that eliminating the penalty means that the entire ACA must be repealed.

Will the Courts Do What Congress Did Not? Unpacking the Latest Assault on the Affordable Care Act

June 12, 2018

Last year the legislative effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act collapsed, and it seemed that the ACA’s most important protection – non-discriminatory access to health insurance for people with pre-existing health conditions – was saved.   Now Americans once again are facing an existential threat to this most basic guarantee. 

Terminating the DACA Program Would Harm Health and the States

February 17, 2018

Stymied by years of Congressional gridlock concerning immigration reform, in 2014 President Obama used executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to provide temporary legal status to children and young adults who came to the U.S. as undocumented children, also known as “DREAMers.” 

States Including DC Considering Individual Mandates

January 27, 2018

Washington, DC, is among the states that began considering implementing individual responsibility mandates to require citizens to purchase health insurance after the Affordable Care Act’s mandate was terminated by the Tax Act of 2017 signed into law last month.  In his role as an executive board member for the District of Columbia’s health insurance exchange, Milken Institute School of Public Health Professor Leighton Ku is chairing a working group examining how DC should respond to the mandate’s termination, which takes effect in 2019.

It Makes More Sense to Strengthen SHOP Than to Expand Association Health Plans

January 5, 2018

The Trump Administration has just proposed a new rule which seeks to expand the scope of Association Health Plans (AHPs), arrangements in which small businesses can pool together to get the purchasing clout of large employers to get a better deal on private insurance coverage.

The Senate’s Tax Reform Bill Puts Public Health at Risk

December 6, 2017

In a sneak attack akin to Pearl Harbor, the Senate sought to deal a death blow to health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act by its last minute addition of the repeal of the individual responsibility mandate into its tax reform bill. 

The Impacts of the Trump Administration’s ACA Decisions on Public Health

October 19, 2017

With news of at least the beginnings of a bipartisan Senate deal to at least temporarily stabilize the health insurance marketplace, it’s time to take stock of what will happen if Congress does not move fast.

May You Live in Interesting Times: The Challenges of Health Policy Analysis in a Turbulent Period

October 3, 2017

A purported Chinese curse -- “May you live in interesting times” -- seems apt for this current chaotic period of American public policy.  (It appears that the quote does not actually have Chinese origins and was simply coined by an English politician in the 1930s to sound sagacious.)  As a student (and teacher) of health policy, there is no question that the past year, during which Congress and President Trump tried repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), had high political drama, with fingernail-biting day by day action and revelations, backroom deals and arm-twisting, heroes and villains and all the stuff of front page news in the Trump era.