New Jersey Senator Cory Booker claims Medicare for All would “save lives.” Vermont’s own Senator Bernie Sanders promises it would end “the disgrace of tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from preventable deaths.”
But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds little evidence to support those assertions. The authors examined people who gained government health coverage in recent years and found no “statistically significant pattern of results consistent with . . . mortality changes.”
Legislators at both the federal and local level are trying to do something about the problem of surprise billing, what wonks often call “balance billing.” A modest, bipartisan measure proposed by state legislators in Texas would penalize emergency rooms that charge more than 200 percent above the average hospital charge for a comparable service.
A plethora of bills introduced in the U.S. Senate, including one from a group led by Sens. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.), Tom Carper (D., Del.), Bill Cassidy (R., La.), Chuck Grassley (R., Ia.), Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.), and Todd Young (R., Ind.), would limit out-of-network prices in the emergency setting to the greater of (1) the median in-network rate for a particular geographic area; or (2) 125 percent of the “average allowed amount” in a geographic area: a proxy for what hospitals charge regardless of insurer contracts.
Left-wing Democrats in Congress have decided on a new version of “Medicare for All.” Turns out its going to be nothing like the Medicare program seniors are used to. What they have in mind is what we see in Canada.
Everyone (except American Indians and veterans) will be in the same system. Health care will be nominally free. Access to it will be determined by bureaucratic decision making.
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.
The pre-existing condition scare tactics continue.
I testified yesterday—as the sole witness called by the Republican minority—during a House Education and Labor Committee hearing on “Examining Threats to Workers with Preexisting Conditions.”
It was the first hearing of the new Congress under the new Chairman Bobby Scott, D-VA, and virtually all members on both sides of the aisle stayed to ask questions. (The hearing lasted for three and a half hours!)
For decades, we’ve talked and talked and talked about the high cost of American health care. But we haven’t done anything about it. As the above chart shows, the problem has gotten so bad that, today, hospital spending reduces the average family’s take-home pay more than do federal taxes.
Overall, as a country, Americans spent $1.2 trillion on hospital care in 2018. That’s over $3,600 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project that, by 2026, hospital spending will rise to $1.8 trillion: over $5,300 per person.
In the wake of Republicans failing to repeal and replace Obamacare and the Democratic takeover of the House, where will the health care debate go from here?
No important health care legislation will come out of this gridlocked Congress. But the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign will produce at least a Democratic health care plan out of the nominating process.
People 65 and older accounted for over one third of U.S. medical spending. Yet despite the fact that government pays for 65% of the elderly’s medical expenses, the burden of health spending (out-of-pocket expenses as a percentage of income) is much higher among the elderly than among those below age 65. You might suppose that a policymaker in 2008 would look at these data and conclude that if there is a crisis in affordability within the U.S. population, it lies among the elderly.
Gallup polls have been asking some big picture questions about the major dimensions of health system performance–quality, coverage, costs and access–for nearly two decades now. This allows me to show you a long time series of trends that leave little doubt that despite many lofty promises made for Obamacare (or the high hopes of its proponents), Obamacare essentially left American health the same or worse on quality, coverage, costs and access . I found literally no evidence in these data that it made things better.
Last month, Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a ruling declaring Obamacare unconstitutional. The case was brought by 20 Republican state attorneys general. Seventeen Democratic state attorneys general responded January 3 by appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
Judge O’Connor appears to be on a bit of an island — the conventional wisdom on both the right and left is that his decision will be overturned by a higher court.