Podcast: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’ Insurance Enrollment Is Lagging — And There Are Lots Of Reasons Why

With less than a week to go before the deadline in most states, enrollment in health insurance for 2019 under the Affordable Care Act is lagging compared with the pace of previous years. That was expected, given last year’s tax law eliminated the tax penalty for not having coverage starting Jan. 1. But analysts say there are other reasons for the downturn as well.

Reproductive health is also in the news. The Supreme Court declined to take a case that could have allowed states to disqualify Planned Parenthood from participating in the Medicaid program. And the National Institutes of Health is quietly preventing researchers from obtaining samples of fetal tissue for their research, despite the fact that such research has been explicitly legal for 2½ decades.

This week’s panelists for KHN’s “What the Health?” are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Alice Ollstein of Politico, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News and Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The Wall Street Journal’s “The Loneliest Generation: Americans, More Than Ever, Are Aging Alone,” by Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg

Alice Ollstein: Politico’s “Establishment Looks to Crush Liberals on Medicare for All,” by Adam Cancryn

Rebecca Adams: Bloomberg News’s “This Killer Opioid Could Become a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” by Anna Edney

Anna Edney: The Washington Post’s “Investigation of Generic ‘Cartel’ Expands to 300 Drugs,” by Christopher Rowland

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to What the Health? on iTunesStitcher or Google Play.


This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Exit mobile version