Will Better Care deliver better care?

The Senate’s new health care bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, proposes a number of changes to the Affordable Care Act.  The Kaiser Family Foundation has a detailed breakdown of the bill and compares it with the Affordable Care Act that President Obama passed and the American Health Care Act that was proposed…

Interpreting evidence on value

Value is the latest jargon to hit the health care sector.  One potential way value could manifest itself is through value-based insurance design (VBID).  Under VBID, patients would pay lower copayments for treatments that are highly effective and/or low cost would pay higher payments for treatments that have low effectiveness or high cost to the…

How does payment reform affect providers in competitive vs. non-competitive markets?

How does payment reform affect access to care?  And what does payment reform mean? Payment reform can mean manythings but in this context we will mean substituting fee-for-service or cost-plus reimbursement schemes for fixed reimbursement for a fixed episodes of care or fixed bundles of services during a specific time frame. One example of how payment reform worked,…

Supply side health reform

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution notes that designing a health care system that focuses on benefits to consumers and is important, but one should not ignore how any health care system design affects the supply of health care, in particular incentives to create innovative goods and services. By greater spending on medical research, I mean not…

How the AHCA will affect the Federal Budget

On the positive side, the American Health Care Act (AHCA) will decrease the federal budget deficit due largely to reductions in Medicaid spending and subsidies for the Health Insurance Exchanges enacted by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  On the other hand, the AHCA will greatly increase the number of people without health insurance. Federal Spending…