Tag: "Health Care Costs"

The Silly Appeal of Expanding Medicaid for All

DocsMeanMany people believe Obamacare was a conspiracy, with asinine design features intended to cause the program to fail. The primary goal in the minds of conspiracy buffs’ was to usher in a single-payer program of Medicare for All once Obamacare collapsed under adverse selection. The theory goes something like this: with nowhere to turn except the government, Americans would finally throw up their hands and acquiesce to government intervention. Seniors purportedly all love their Medicare, so why not expand the program to cover even more people?

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Jun 07, 2017 | 21 comments | by

The Opioid Crisis Obeys the Law of Unintended Consequences

Capture71A letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1980 is thought to have been the nudge that set the opioid crisis in motion. The letter claimed only four addictions were documented out of nearly 40,000 patients who were prescribed powerful opioid pain pills. The article arguing addiction to prescription opioids is rare has been cited 600 times — often incorrectly.  Doctors and drug makers used this as evidence that it was safe to prescribed opioids to more patients with chronic pain.

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Jun 01, 2017 | 12 comments | by

CBO: Other Peoples’ Money is Popular, as is Freedom to Choose

stethoscope-on-moneyThe big news on Thursday was that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its score of the American Health Care Act (AHCA). The CBO claimed 23 million people would lose coverage within a decade under provisions found in the AHCA.

  • About 10 million people would purportedly lose coverage due to the repealing of the individual and employer mandates.
  • Another 5 million are low-income individuals living in states that did not expand Medicaid.

Basically, this is another way of saying 10 million people will decide they’d rather keep their money than have poor-value health coverage. It’s hard to understand how someone can lose something they never actually had?

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May 25, 2017 | 13 comments | by

Technology & Cost Containment—Why Doesn’t Medical Technology Bring Down the Cost of Healthcare?

Capture14Technology is a significant driver of high health care spending. For instance, many treatments common today were not available 40 years ago. Yet, treatments and therapies that have been in use for decades are still quite expensive. In typical consumer markets, the quality of technology gets progressively better while the (real) inflation-adjusted prices often fall as older technology is surpassed by newer technology. This is especially true of consumer electronics but also of true of automobiles, appliances and other types of consumer goods. The inflation-adjusted prices of consumer goods have held steady because consumers are price sensitive, rewarding the firms who successfully compete for their business.

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May 04, 2017 | 2 comments | by

Interactive Group Therapy in the Information Age

Laptop and Stethoscope --- Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

Laptop and Stethoscope — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

Imagine attending private lectures and taking all your college exams in your professors’ offices individually, one-on-one. Your instructors lecture you, then pepper you with questions, grading your answers and recording your scores. This is not unlike traditional physician visits. Contrast this to attending classroom lectures and taking online multiple choice exams where a computer algorithm tallies your answers and calculates your grade. Classroom instruction with standardized testing is much more efficient that private tutoring. Hundreds of people can learn and take their online exams simultaneously. What if medical productivity could be similarly improved?

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May 01, 2017 | 20 comments | by

A Bill to Establish a Single-Payer Health System Advances in California

Capture47A bill has passed its first legislative hurdle to establish a government-run program of universal coverage in California. The California Senate Health Committee passed the measure 5-2. Next it will be debated by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The sticking point is how to fund such an endeavor.

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Apr 28, 2017 | 19 comments | by

Weak Idea at Bernie’s: Bureaucrats Should Not Negotiate Seniors’ Drug Prices

Capture14Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Elijah Cummings — along with a few other liberal Members of Congress — want to change the way Medicare purchases drugs for seniors. It is a popular talking point mainly because many Americans naively assume Medicare does not bargain over the price of drugs. Even President Trump has perpetuated the bogus idea that having the government negotiate the price of drugs would lower Medicare’s drug costs. This may sound appealing to many because drug makers don’t elicit much sympathy these days. Yet, seniors, drugmakers and taxpayers alike have a stake in the outcome because drug therapy is the most convenient and efficient way to care for patients.

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Apr 19, 2017 | 55 comments | by

Shopping for Health Care is Easier than You Realize

yuConventional wisdom holds that it is nearly impossible to compare prices for medical care like consumers do in other markets. It’s easier than you realize — my wife and I do it just about every time we see our doctors or fill a prescription. Health plan deductibles have nearly tripled over the past decade. Shopping for medical care is more important than ever.

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Apr 12, 2017 | 111 comments | by

Advice to the New FDA Commissioner

prescription-drug-shortageWriting in The Hill, Mercatus Senior Research Scholar Robert Graboyes discussed ways to boost the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s productivity.  He and coauthor Jordan Reimschisel discussed seven things the FDA could do to speed approval of drugs and medical devices.

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Apr 07, 2017 | 4 comments | by

Invisible High-Risk Pools

Five people waiting in waiting roomThere has been some discussions about invisible high-risk pools. That is a condition where the state assumes responsibility for some subset of sick enrollees’ high claims cost. For instance, Alaska began subsidizing the cost for a few individuals so the remaining 25,000 Alaska Obamacare enrollees would not be priced out of the market.

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Apr 05, 2017 | 25 comments | by
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