Some consumers and businesses might see a little extra cash this summer as a result of the 2010 health care law. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported an estimated $1.3 billion in rebates will be delivered from health insurers who spent more than the law allotted on administrative expenses and profits.

President Obama promised that the brunt of any financial reckoning will fall mostly only on those making more than $250,000 annually. Under his healthcare plan, the economic agony starts at income levels that fall much lower than that.

For all the talk about the Affordable Care Act's mandate to purchase insurance, you might think that the mandate is the linchpin of the entire law. It isn't, at least from the standpoint of whether the insurance market will collapse without it. 

Which politicians do you trust more to micromanage your health care: federal or state? That’s the false choice presented by two versions of “federalism” intended to divide responsibility for health policy between the national government and the states.

We estimate that a family affordability rule could initially lead to as many as 1.3 million more workers accessing exchange subsidies for themselves and their families than under a single affordability rule. If employees pay 50 percent of the premiums in the future, this number increases to 6 million.

So men and women who faced death at Fallujah or Kandahar or Desert Storm are now to face death panels at home? That’s the upshot of the administration’s plans for military health care.

Better-designed provider-level measurement can make the cost containment tools of differential reimbursement, high-performance tiered networks, valuebased benefit design, clinical re-engineering, and the responsible choices they offer more visible and effective.

The problem of coverage for pre-existing conditions remains relatively small and limited to the individual health insurance market, despite exaggerated claims used to advance passage of the Affordable Care Act. Nevertheless, too many people still remained at risk of falling through the cracks of protective measures provided by HIPAA, COBRA, and state-run high risk pools.