The dirty little secret of American healthcare is that the mandate wouldn’t save taxpayers a dime. Why? Because the tax subsidies for people with health insurance are bigger than the unpaid medical bills left behind by the uninsured.

This book discusses tax treatments and how they relate to employer-provided health insurance.

AEI health policy scholar discusses the pressures of rising costs on employer-provided health care.

The conventional ways of cataloguing and reporting health spending significantly understate the government share of health spending.

For all the public wrangling we are seeing over the super committee — mostly centered on tax reform and revenues as a key component of a compromise — the big issue facing policymakers in the coming years is health care costs.

Repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will not be enough, for a simple reason: Although Obamacare would worsen many of the problems with our system of health-care financing, that system clearly does call out for serious reform.

The latest Census figures show the United States now has 49.9 million uninsured, an increase of nearly 1 million over the preceding year. Both in terms of absolute numbers and the percentage of Americans without coverage, this is the highest figure recorded since the Bureau began asking questions about health insurance in its annual survey three decades ago.

Forcing consumers to buy today's health insurance may benefit insurance companies, health-care providers and other special interests, but it is not good public policy.