Recent Articles

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…

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…

The nation’s health care tab hit $3.5 trillion last year, or $10,739 per person, the government reported Thursday. But behind those staggering figures was some fairly good news: The rate of growth slowed for the second year in a row, according to economic experts at the federal Health and Human Services department. Health care spending…

Deep-pocketed hospital, insurance and other lobbies are plotting to crush progressives’ hopes of expanding the government’s role in health care once they take control of the House. The private-sector interests, backed in some cases by key Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign alumni, are now focused on beating back another prospective health care overhaul, including…

Insurers’ involvement in nearly every primary care visit is causing health care expenses to rise, and the direct primary care model is a good solution. Patients are being forced to pay extra so insurance companies can facilitate transactions they really don’t need to be involved in.

Officials in states across the U.S. showed little interest for years about looking into the black box of pharmacy benefit managers, the pharmacy supply-chain middlemen who have been shrouded in secrecy as they pour billions of dollars worth of prescription drug rebates into state coffers.

According to a new NPR-IBM Watson Health Poll, about one in five people said they have delayed or canceled some kind of health care service, such as a doctor’s appointment or medical procedure, because of cost in the preceding three months. The proportion of people who said cost had deterred them from getting care varied…

Spending on prescription drugs was nearly flat during President Trump’s first year in office, according to the latest report from nonpartisan government actuaries. In 2017, drug spending rose by 0.4 percent to $333.4 billion, the Office of the Actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported Thursday. That was the lowest rate of…

When the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) added healthy, able-bodied adults without dependent children to the list of beneficiaries, policymakers overlooked the substantial price paid by these recipients who, as the Congressional Budget Office once forecasted, forego hourly wages and earnings in order to maintain their Medicaid eligibility. Without a work requirement for…