A substantial increase in eligibility qualification for the Medicaid program is a crucial measure in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), designed to decrease the numbers of Americans without insurance coverage. Now the newly-elected Democratic governors of the two most populous states in the nation intend to sharply reduce funding of their Medicaid programs. What does this say about the wisdom of the PPACA policy of using Medicaid to expand coverage?

Should a health care system be designed to ensure that patients receive appropriate medications that they should have to relieve symptoms or cure disease? Of course. Yet co-payments (a dollar amount) and coinsurance (a percentage of the cost) impose on the patient financial barriers to the medications – barriers which frequently are not surmounted, and thereby may result in impaired health outcomes.

Although long, the new Republican rules for the House of Representatives read somewhat like those jokes that are circulated around the Internet. When the fact sinks in that this is no joke but that these rules are very real, the inhumanity implicit in these new rules induces a feeling of despair.

When you hear that the nation’s largest (in revenue) investor-owned insurer is looking at taxpayer-financed Medicaid as “a significant long-term growth opportunity,” be afraid. Be very afraid.

Winston Churchill represented the view of most conservative politicians in recent history when he said that “everybody in the country irrespective of means, age, sex or occupation shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”

One of the highly touted transitional programs of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the temporary high risk health insurance pool program designed to provide health insurance for individuals with preexisting conditions. Until the state insurance exchanges are in operation in 2014, this program provides a source of insurance coverage for eligible individuals who have been rejected by private insurers because of preexisting conditions.

Although these views on the constitutionality of Medicare have been discussed by others, including PNHP’s leadership, this NEJM article is of prime importance in the continuing health reform debate because it represents the views of respected ethicist George Annas and his colleagues.

Besides being sure that everyone is covered by a comprehensive system of financing health care, the other important goal of reform was to slow down the intolerable increases in health care costs. The token cost containment measures included in the legislation will likely have little impact, so attention was given to the false proxy of health care costs: the increases in insurance premiums. So how effective will the proposed regulations be in controlling the inexorable rise in insurance premiums?

McKinsey and Co. estimates that as many as 30 to 40 million people will still be uninsured after the new health care law goes into affect. Telling people to do something they can’t do – buying subsidized health insurance that they still can’t pay for – will never succeed as a policy to eliminate the uninsured.

One concern of the authors of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was that the state insurance exchanges called for in the legislation might be subject to adverse selection. That is, individuals with greater health care needs would buy the government-subsidized plans if they could afford them, whereas healthy individuals might well choose to remain uninsured, feeling that their portion of the premium was too expensive or frankly unaffordable. This would concentrate high-cost patients in the insurance plans, resulting in the death spiral of skyrocketing premiums.