Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar sounded the alarm about Medicare-for-all during the Conservative Political Action conference on Thursday. “The threat is an immediate and complete takeover of healthcare,” Azar said. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta and Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon joined Azar on the panel led by Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute. Azar said that the new Democratic health care plan would dramatically crash the insurance industry in ways that President Barack Obama never dared to do politically. “They promised you that you could keep your insurance if you liked it,” he said. “This time they are not promising that.”
Price controls in health care could be one of the major policy issues of the 2020 Democratic primary and a key way of differentiating the most progressive candidates on the Left from others seeking the nomination, but Republicans are posing the question as well. It should come as no surprise to find the outspoken champion for an incremental approach to single-payer health care, Sen. Michael Bennet, (D-CO), promoting government-set rates, but the fact that a Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy, (R-LA), is joining him in leading the charge should concern conservative and moderate Republicans alike.
Democrats defeated Republicans in the Obamacare repeal fight by warning that 22 million Americans would be thrown off their health insurance. They pointed to data leaked from the Congressional Budget Office.
Well, it turns out that data was completely wrong.
According to a report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office wildly overestimated the number of people who would lose their health insurance with the repeal of the individual mandate penalty.
This is a special time of year in health policy nerd world — the arrival of another year of data on National Health Expenditures (NHE) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The journal Health Affairs published a preview on Wednesday, which the authors summarized thusly: “National health expenditures are projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.5 percent for 2018–27 and represent 19.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2027.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is introducing the most ambitious Medicare-for-all plan yet — one that envisions a quick transition to a public health plan with a robust set of benefits.
The co-chair of the Progressive Caucus is releasing a proposal Wednesday to transition the United States to a single-payer health care system, one in which a single, government-run health plan provides insurance coverage to all Americans.
Critics cried sabotage when political leaders took action to repair some of the damage done by the Affordable Care Act. They saw sinister motives behind the decision by the last Congress to repeal the individual mandate and in Trump administration regulations that made more affordable health insurance options available to individuals and small groups.
But a new study by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) finds that eliminating federal tax penalties on the uninsured and giving consumers more coverage options will provide economic benefits totaling $450 billion over the next decade.
The Trump administration wants to know what challenges employer and group health plans face in maintaining grandfathered status for Affordable Care Act plans.
The Treasury and Labor departments and HHS issued the request for informationlate Thursday. The request comes as the number of grandfathered plans fall.
The agencies want to understand “whether there are opportunities for the departments to assist such plans and issuers,” the rule said.
Today, Type 1 diabetes patients pay twice as much for insulin as they did in 2012. This is outrageous — but drug companies aren’t to blame. The problem is a dysfunctional supply chain that benefits everyone except patients.
In today’s system, insurers hire third-party firms, known as pharmacy benefit managers, to manage drug plans. These PBMs negotiate with drugmakers and have the power to decide which drugs are covered by each plan. Each year, manufacturers dole out $150 billion in rebates and discounts as a result of these negotiations. But patients rarely see these savings at the pharmacy counter.
The Democratic Party’s presidential hopefuls are diverse in all ways but one — their stance on healthcare reform. The front-runners want to eliminate private insurance and put everyone on a government-run plan.
But that’s not something they’ve been enthusiastic about revealing to voters. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently refused to say whether she would support a single-payer plan that eliminated private health insurance.
A new report from government actuaries has revealed that the Congressional Budget Office was scandalously off in its estimates of the impact of Obamacare’s individual mandate, a miscalculation that has had significant ramifications for healthcare and tax policy over the past decade.