One of the most ill-advised promises President Obama made during the health care reform debate was this: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." He should have known better.

The conservative American Action Network (AAN) is out with its first ad of the general election, going after Democratic congressional candidate David ...

If Paul Ryan's proposal to largely privatize Medicare becomes a reality, those not already 55 and older will be putting far more "skin in the game" than current beneficiaries do, and they'll be required to peel off increasing amounts of skin every year for the rest of their lives.

Last week, Aetna's CEO got a real-world understanding of how inadequate some of the company's policies are. And thanks to Twitter, the rest of us got a better understanding of how insurers are able to profit so handsomely from the inadequate policies they sell.

Don't pay any attention to the votes and rhetoric coming out of Washington. Health care reform can turn out to be very profitable indeed for some of the GOP's biggest benefactors -- the giant insurance companies.

The President was led to believe that insurance industry leaders would do their best to get their Republican friends to support reform if he would agree to the mandate and drop the public option. The problem for the President was that industry executives could not deliver any Republican votes.

Goodwill gestures aren't enforceable when you're sick. Insurance companies can't be trusted to behave as good actors unless laws are on the books to prevent them from being bad actors.

CO-OPs could be one of the sleepers in the health care reform law that truly transforms how care is financed and delivered in this country. And they could even hasten the day when the big investor-owned corporations cede the marketplace to nonprofits and move on to other ways of earning a profit.

If there is a group of people more anxious about how the Supreme Court will rule on the health care reform law than President Obama and the millions of Americans who are already benefiting from it, it is health insurance executives.

Now you know why more than 50 million of us are uninsured. It is not because most of those people are being irresponsible. Most of them either can't afford to buy coverage or can't buy it at any price.

When insurers behave this way, they are demonstrating that they care more about their bottom lines than their policyholders. Which makes it all the more imperative for California voters to sign those petitions and vote for the ballot initiative this fall.

Despite the ceaseless spin, Vermont lawmakers last May demonstrated they could not be bought nor intimidated when they became the first in the nation to pass a bill that will probably establish a single-payer beachhead in the U.S.

Obamacare haters try to make us believe that the law will reduce "choice and competition" -- that insurers are competing vigorously to sign up Americans. But the world of health insurance doesn't operate that way -- and it never will without intervention.