Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration abruptly revoked the narcotics license held by the distributor Cardinal Health, preventing that firm from shipping prescription pain drugs to thousands of Florida pharmacies and hospitals. It's the latest tactic in the DEA's struggle to stem the illicit use of prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin.

Since when do elected officials get to decide that they are “done compromising,” as the president’s chief of staff asserted?

The PPACA's rate review and MLR provisions represent costly, bureaucratic interference with insurers' legitimate business decisions and state regulatory prerogatives. This will do little to enhance competition in health insurance markets and the availability and affordability of health insurance.

Perhaps we will be forced by then to go back to basics and demand a new Magna Carta.

Despite President Obama's oft-repeated promise that people would be able to keep their health insurance, the actual implementation of ObamaCare makes clear that people will lose their plans and Washington bureaucrats will be making core decisions about medical care.

The temptation on Capitol Hill is for Republicans to just crow briefly that "we told you so," issue a few press releases, hold a hearing or two, and then wait for another low-hanging rotten fruit of ObamaCare to fall off the tree through the forces of economic and political gravity. They should instead think more strategically about this opportunity.

The Institute of Medicine finally released its long-awaited set of recommendations for how the Secretary of Health and Human Services should accomplish the impossible--determining the "essential health benefits" for tens of millions of Americans under the to-be-implemented Affordable Care Act.

The Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate committees that oversaw health reform have weight on the interpretation of the law, in effect arguing that insurers would have to spend even more money on medical expenses to offset every dollar they spend on administrative costs.