Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How much money will IRA save Medicare? A paper by Hernandez et al. (2023) aims to answer this question. The methods they use are as follows: For the 10 drugs likely subject to negotiation by Medicare in 2026 based on 2020 gross spending and loss of exclusivity, we extracted 2020 data from 5 sources: (1)…
No, that is not a typo. The cost of Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All (M4A) plan is $13 trillion dollars. How does this stack up to other candidates? The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget does the math. Whereas Mr. Sanders plan would cost $12.95 trillion between 2021 and 2030, Mrs. Warren’s plan would cost $6.1 trillion,…
What do physicians thing about the ACA? How have these opinions changed over time? These are the questions that a paper by Riordan et al. (2019) in Health Affairs. The authors surveyed physiicans in both 2012 and 2017 and found that the share of physicians who thought the ACA was good for health care increased…
In short, most of them want to expand government payment for and control of health care in the United States. Looking at the top 10 candidates (Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, Yang, Castro, Gabbard) according to recent polls captured on 538, I staked out the candidates current positions on reforming the health…
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.…
From Sen and DeLeire (2018): …premiums of Marketplace plans are 11% lower in Medicaid expansion states, controlling for demographic and health characteristics as well as measures of health care access. These results are consistent with evidence on the composition of the private insurance risk pool in expansion versus nonexpansion states and associated differences in expected…
The ACA is here…for now. The AHCA is dead…for now. Where will the health insurance market be 1 year from now, let alone in 5 or 10 years? These questions have not yet been answered and the uncertainty is especially taxing for small businesses, especially as their premiums have risen. Marketplace has an interesting story…
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…
There has been a lot of criticism of the Republican’s “repeal and replace” bill known as the American Health Care Act. The critiques are coming from both the left and the right. Let’s look at just one provision–the premium age bands–to better understand why both people on the left and right do not like the…
Tonight, President Donald Trump delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress. Although the speech touched on a number of topics, I give my line-by-line commentary on the portions of the speech related to health care. “Tonight, I am also calling on this Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare with reforms that expand choice,…