As if voters didn’t have enough reasons to question government-run health care, the Wall Street Journal provided yet another last week. The paper ran a lengthy expose highlighting numerous cases of doctors previously accused of negligence receiving “second chances” in the government-run Indian Health Service (IHS), resulting in incidents wherein at least 66 patients died in IHS care.
Earlier this year, the Journal ran a separate investigative article explaining how the Indian Health Service repeatedly ignored warnings about a physician accused of sexually abusing patients, moving him from hospital to hospital. Together, these articles describe a broken culture within the Indian Health Service, demonstrating how government-run health systems provide poor-quality care, often harming rather than helping vulnerable patients.
The share of recipients who aren’t eligible has grown sharply since the expansion began in 2014.
Medicaid expansion was a key component of ObamaCare. In 2014 when the expansion started, the feds stopped doing audits of states’ Medicaid eligibility determinations. The Obama administration’s goal was to build public support for the new law by signing up as many people as possible. Now, after a four-year hiatus, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have begun auditing program eligibility again. According to a report released Monday, the audits found “high levels of observed eligibility errors,” meaning a significant number of people are enrolled in Medicaid who shouldn’t be.
Hospitals and insurers will howl, but the Trump administration today took a big step toward consumer empowerment with administrative actions designed to increase price transparency for hospital and other medical charges.
Galen Senior Fellow Brian Blase, who was instrumental in developing the executive order on price transparency issued in June, congratulated the administration for its proposed and final rules today. “Transparent prices, particularly linked with incentives for consumers to search for value, will put downward pressure on health care costs and should reduce inefficient spending.”
On November 1, 2019, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) published a lengthy monograph describing how she would pay for her plan to replace the U.S. health care system with a single, federally-run insurance agency: what she describes as “Medicare for All.”
In this paper, we analyze each of Warren’s proposals in detail. While some of Warren’s proposals would in fact succeed in raising taxes or reducing spending, others would not.
Most Democratic presidential candidates are supporting some version of Medicare for All, a radical proposal to put Washington in complete control of the health-care system. Joe Biden, however, promises to “protect and build on the Affordable Care Act,” the last Washington health-care experiment, which is better known as ObamaCare.
Yet ObamaCare largely failed in its primary goal—to create a better market for individual health insurance. The ObamaCare exchanges are performing much worse than expected when they were launched in 2014. And this has nothing to do with the Trump administration. Rather, the law failed because of its perverse construction.
“Before now, Warren’s radical proposal never would have been introduced by someone with a serious shot at becoming president,” Galen Senior Fellow Brian Blase explains in a piece for RealClearPolitics.
“But the health care status quo is failing too many Americans. She is right that health care prices are generally too high, that provider consolidation is a serious problem, and that health outcomes are generally disappointing,” Brian writes.
However…“Her prescription to address these problems is all wrong,” he explains, including evidence of the harm a Washington-centric system does to innovation.
“For evidence of the devastating impact of Medicare’s control of payments, look no further than the sorry state of American kidney care, with high death rates and outdated, inefficient treatments. Only 12% of American patients undergo dialysis at home, where they could receive treatment while they sleep, compared to 80% in Hong Kong and 56% in Guatemala.