Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“If you do not have insurance you can choose to enroll in the new public plan, which will offer benefits similar to what every federal employee and member of Congress gets. Or you can choose private plan options…” Barack Obama.com Should the government develop a health plan that would compete with private health plans? Thomas Rice thinks…
In her California Healthcare Foundation report, Katherine Wilson does a nice job describing the health insurance market in California. A little over health of individuals received health care from their employer or themselves (56%), a quarter of individuals receive health insurance through public programs, and 19% of Californians are uninsured (see chart). The private health…
Many policy experts have been proponents of value-based cost sharing. Under value-based cost sharing, medical care that is seen to provide a higher marginal benefit to the patient will have lower coinsurance rates than medical care with lower marginal benefits. If value-based cost sharing would be implemented, preventive care should have low coinsurance rates because…
If economists decided to re-write the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt love Competition” may make the list. However, does competition always improve quality? Even in the case of health care? A paper by Scanlon et al. (2008) “…found no evidence of a strong and consistent relationship between HMO competition (measured either by the HHI or the…
What percentage of your prescription drug costs should your insurance company cover? You may say “100%, of course!” However, if health insurance cover all pharmaceutical costs this will drive up premiums. One solution to this problem is reference pricing. If generics are available for $10 and name brand drugs are available for $100, the…
Most physicians, public health officials and economists believe that most individuals do not receive sufficient levels of preventive care. Only half of American adults receive all recommended screening and preventive care. The Partnership for Prevention has a plan to increase preventive care utilization. The organization proposes introducing: “..federally funded insurance programs [that] would provide highly…
Marketplace reports that UnitedHealth Group has just reached a large settlement with the State of New York. What did UnitedHealth Group do wrong? According to the State of New York, it was overcharging patients who went out of the network. The N.Y. Times gives a good example: “The patient might receive a doctor’s bill for $100,…
A paper by Buchmueller, LoSasso and Wong (2008) recounts that “6 million children who are eligible for public insurance remain uninsured.” One question that remains to be answered is whether or not the 6 million children eligible for SCHIP who did not take it up were disproportionately from immigrant groups. If this was true, public…
The pharmaceutical industry is well known for taking doctors (and medical students) out to nice dinners, giving them presents, and doing whatever they can to entice physicians to prescribe their drug. Now, health insurers are following the pharmaceutical companies lead. The AP reports that in order to convince physicians to prescribe generic drugs, a Rochester…
“Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product-—$700 billion per year –goes to tests and procedures that do not actually improve health outcomes…The unreasonably high cost of health care in the United States is a deeply entrenched problem that must be attacked at its root.” This…