Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Democratic Presidential candidates have a number of proposals on how to reform the health care system, including “Medicare for All” proposals. The goal of these reforms is to improve access, lower costs (both premiums and out-of-pocket) and improve quality. Achieving all these goals is not easy. Even access was improved and costs fell for patients,…
One piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that health insurance plans for individuals with yearly premiums exceeding $10,200 or family health insurance plans with premiums exceeding $27,500 would be subject to a tax. The tax originally was set to start in 2018, but has since been postponed to 2022. The Kaiser Family Foundation…
This is the question the N.Y. Times posed to five experts in the field. Medicare for all could potentially save money. For instance, if the government could reduce administrative cost, cut prices paid to physicians and hospitals, or reduce drug costs. Typically, however, federal government programs rarely save cost and some of the reduction in…
HHS has a policy paper titled “Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition“. In the paper, HHS describes four broad areas of reform. I describe each in term, some of the key policy recommendation under each of the four headings, and my thoughts on each reform. Here goes: Health care workforce and labor markets.…
How did Medicaid expansion affect prescription drug use? At first glance, one would think that prescriptions increased; more insurance lowers patient out-of-pocket cost so we would expect more prescriptions. Medicaid insurance may crowd out other forms of insurance; if those other forms of insurance covered more drugs, then perhaps utilization would go down. A study…
Proposed by Bernie Sanders and supported by a number of politicians on the left, Medicare for All (M4A) would provide all Americans access to government health insurance. Some proposals would even replace all current insurance with a government run program. So what do you need to know about this program? The Healthcare Economist gives some…
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conducted case study interviews of health insurance exchange marketplace (i.e., Obamacare marketplaces) in 10 states (i.e., California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia) to determine trends in the available plans. One general trend was that large commercial insurers were leaving the marketplace. Marketplace participation is…
Fung et al. (2019) conclude the following based on a 2017 survey of California residents: …19 percent reported that they would not have purchased insurance had there been no penalty. We estimated that premiums would increase by 4–7 percent if these enrollees were not in the risk pool. The percentages of enrollees who would forgo…
As reported in NPR: A federal judge in Texas issued a ruling Friday declaring the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, apparently setting the stage for another hearing on the health care law by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor invalidates what’s commonly referred to as Obamacare nationwide, and casts into…
Competition matters for markets…even health care markets. A paper by Van Parys (2018) relies on a database of plan premium and market characteristics among states with federally-facilitated health insurance exchange Marketplaces. In this analysis, she finds that: In 2018, Marketplace premiums were 50 percent ($180) higher, on average, in rating areas with monopolist insurers, compared…