President Trump was elected on his promise to stop other nations from taking advantage of the United States. Our allies let us pay for most of their own national defense needs. Treaties allowed once poor countries to hit American products with tariffs and trade barriers. The Paris agreement on climate change burdened our manufacturers and workers, while letting China and India build and expand without such onerous restrictions.
As several states consider expanding Medicaid eligibility to able-bodied individuals above the poverty level, Virginia state officials have announced huge, unexpected Medicaid costs are threatening to siphon funding from programs such as education.
Although Virginia lawmakers insist the new cost burden is not related to Medicaid expansion, they acknowledge the program’s share of the budget has been growing for years and has led to $460 million in unforeseen Medicaid costs.
Health-care companies are making a last-minute push to delay ObamaCare taxes as part of a year-end government funding deal, but they face resistance from Democrats who want to punt the issue until next year when they control the House.
Powerful health-care lobbies are pushing lawmakers to delay the implementation of the taxes, worried about taking a financial hit. Lawmakers have voted to push off the health law’s medical device tax, health insurance tax, and tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health plans in the past with bipartisan support.
Rather than opting for the cheap, politically expedient trick of “blaming Big Pharma,” our national leadership should insist that all members of the health-care ecosystem create expert-vetted, user-friendly education programs so that patients know the real costs of what they’re buying, where the profits are going and, most importantly, how they can use this knowledge to become savvier consumers.
The House on Tuesday passed a bipartisan bill aimed at reversing the maternal mortality crisis in the U.S. in what supporters say is the strongest action yet that Congress has taken on the issue.
The bill from Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) would support state-level efforts to track and investigate pregnancy-related deaths, and then look for ways to prevent future deaths from occurring.
This year, dozens of Democratic candidates ran — and won — on a promise to fight to give all Americans access to government-run health care. A new Medicare-for-all Caucus in the House already has 77 members. All the likely 2020 Democratic nominees support the idea, too.
“Medicare-for-all” has become a rallying cry on the left, but the term doesn’t capture the full scope of options Democrats are considering to insure all (or at least a lot more) Americans. Case in point: There are half a dozen proposals in Congress that envision very different health care systems.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb blasted insulin makers Tuesday for what he called unacceptably high prices for a decades-old drug. And he rolled out a slate of new guidances for the industry he says will spur competition in the insulin market and bring down the drug’s cost when they take effect in 2020.
But in a speech at this week’s FDA/CMS Summit, Gottlieb stopped short of endorsing policies gaining steam on Capitol Hill that would dramatically change how insulin makers do business.
The Trump administration issued a proposed rule that would allow workers in large companies to use employee-provided tax-exempt health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) to help pay premiums for individual health insurance.
The goal, according to administration officials, is to empower employees to make their own decisions regarding the health care they choose to purchase. Rules imposed under President Barack Obama prevented employers from covering medical costs tax-free via HRAs, declaring they would not meet the federal government’s mandate requiring companies with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance covering all items the Obama administration deemed “essential.”
The U.S. labor market is as healthy as it has been in a long time, especially for those with limited education and skills. Yet enrollment for the nation’s two largest means-tested safety-net programs, Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, remains near historic highs.
In previous periods of rising employment and income, takeup rates in assistance programs dropped. This hasn’t been the case in the years following the Great Recession, even after accounting for ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid. What gives?
Last week, the econowonks at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the 2017 National Health Expenditure (NHE) data. Links below.
For 2017, drug spending grew by a mere 0.4%—significantly below the growth of spending on hospitals, physician services, and overall national healthcare costs. These latest CMS data confirm the drug spending slowdown that I have highlighted in previous Drug Channels articles.