Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Today we will discuss how the tax code affects health care. Tax exemption of employer-provided health insurance. “In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service (ruled) that employees could exclude the value of employer-paid health insurance premiums from their taxable income. In 1954, Congress excluded by statute the value of employer-purchase health insurance from gross income.” To…
Marketplace reports that the FDA has blocked sales from one of India’s largest drug producers, Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals. “It prevented sales of Ranbaxy’s generic versions of the antibiotic Cipro and the cholesterol pill Zocor.” This begs the question: should the FDA put office in foreign countries? On the one hand, it is important to ensure that imported…
A recent paper by Kitchener et al. (HSR 2008) investigates the actions of one nursing home chain to find how they maximized their profits. The authors find that Sun Healthcare Inc. employed three strategies to maximize shareholder value: rapid growth through debt-financed mergers; labor cost constraint through low nurse staffing levels; and a model of…
The N.Y. Times reports (“Concerned about costs…“) that Congress is trying to impose new restrictions on physician-owned, for-profit hospitals. The legislators fear that these hospitals 1) drive up costs and 2) provide poor quality. Legislators worry that when physicians own the hospital, they may have more of an incentive to order more procedures to increase…
Many reform advocates have claimed that the federal government should mandate a package of insurance benefits that all private and public health insurers would be legally compelled to provide. Switzerland is one country in which the government defines a what the insurance benefit will be for all standard health insurers. The National Coalition on Health…
Libertarians often complain that the government intrudes too much in our lives. Nanny State, a book by Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi, claims that the government is regulating what we do to an extent that it is becoming a surrogate parent. “Why are we allowing politicians, bureaucrats, and social activists to dictate what we eat,…