Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queuesfor nine months or more.
Long waits for care are endemic to government-run, single-payer systems like the NHS. Yet some U.S. lawmakers want to import that model from across the pond. That would be a massive blunder.
President Trump has tasked three Republican senators with coming up with a replacement for Obamacare if courts strike it down. It’s a prudent contingency plan. Republicans should, for that matter, advance their own health-care plan even if the lawsuit fails. They cannot prevent Democrats from attacking them over health care by abandoning the issue.Obamacare’s key innovation was not the subsidization of Americans’ health-insurance purchases, an enterprise in which the federal government had been engaged for decades, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. It was the centralization of health-insurance regulation in Washington, D.C. It is that centralization, and accompanying curtailment of choice and raising of costs, that Republicans tasked with replacing Obamacare should now work to undo.
On Tuesday, Americans for Tax Reform held a Capitol Hill briefing on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposal to subject Medicare Part B drugs to an “International Pricing Index” (IPI).
As ATR has written extensively, the IPI payment model will effectively import foreign price controls into the United States, lowering quality and access to lifesaving medicine. In November, ATR led a coalition of 56 conservative groups in opposition to the IPI.
ATR President Grover Norquist opened the panel by highlighting the effects of the proposal on trade, saying: “Under this rule, every time we win on trade, the administration would have to raise drug prices on Americans. This is a truly bad idea.”
The Trump administration has decided to challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare in court. Some Republicans in Congress and even some in the administration resisted this decision. Critics assume that if there is no Obamacare, we would revert to the pre-Obamacare health system. If so, how bad would that be? Let’s take a look.
“If the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out,” President Donald Trump said last week, “we’ll have a plan that is far better than Obamacare.”
A look at his fiscal year 2020 budget shows that the president has a plan to reduce costs and increase health care choices. His plan would achieve this by redirecting federal premium subsidies and Medicaid expansion money into grants to states. States would be required to use the money to establish consumer-centered programs that make health insurance affordable regardless of income or medical condition.
The president’s proposal is buttressed by a growing body of evidence that relaxing federal regulations and freeing the states to innovate makes health care more affordable for families and small businesses.
Two Democratic senators rolled out a proposal Tuesday that would allow anyone to buy Medicare plans.
The introduction of “Medicare X” comes as the Democratic Party debates its next steps on health care, with the left wing of the caucus pushing for a single-payer “Medicare for all” system and more moderate members supporting efforts to strengthen the ACA.
“I just think this is a much more practical way of trying to achieve the objective of universal coverage, and over time, a reduction in our expenditures on health care, then practically any other proposal that’s been made since the ACA was passed,” said Sen. Michael Benet (D-CO), who sponsored the bill with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA).
There’s a new entry into the rising Democratic debate over wide-ranging overhauls of the US health care system, this one from a House Democratic freshman who flipped a Republican district in 2018.
New York Democratic Rep. Antonio Delgado plans to introduce legislation Monday that would allow all Americans to buy into a version of Medicare — an approach designed to avoid the substantial system-wide overhaul that would come with any effort to create a government-run health care system.
The Trump administration today approved Utah’s request for a scaled-back Medicaid expansion with a work requirement just days after a federal judge blocked similar rules from taking effect in Kentucky and Arkansas.
The approval also lets Utah cap program enrollment if the state runs out of money and marks the first phase of a plan to replace a Medicaid expansion voters approved last November with a scaled-down program covering roughly 60,000 fewer people.
On Wednesday, conservative policy leaders met with reporters at the Heritage Foundation to discuss the framework for Republican health care reform. The policy experts admitted that Republicans start with a “credibility gap” on health care, but argued that limited government approaches will better achieve the goals of driving down costs, providing more options, and helping the most vulnerable obtain health insurance.
“There is a credibility gap,” Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, admitted to PJ Media in the briefing. “I think the reason conservatives are in that gap is because they spent so much time talking about these little levers that they would pull from a government perspective, and not enough time talking about goals.”
In order to bridge the “credibility gap,” Turner directly addressed the key goals of health care reform and explained how the Health Care Choices Proposal presented by the Health Policy Consensus Group would accomplish those goals.
Under a plan announced Monday, the newly eligible for Medicaid in Nebraska will have different benefits and requirements than others on Medicaid. To get full coverage, they would have to work, care for a family member, volunteer, look for work, or attend college or an apprenticeship. Matthew Van Patton, the state Medicaid director, said the newly eligible would be offered two levels of coverage, basic and prime. He said basic coverage would be modeled after a Blue Cross Blue Shield small group insurance plan, rather than traditional Medicaid coverage.