A second Biden administration would likely have limited ambitions when it comes to health policy. Health-care policy has been a major political battleground in recent years. More than two-thirds of Americans say that the nation's health-care system has major problems. From 2003 to 2023, the average health-insurance premium paid by employers ...

To reduce coverage costs and encourage more people to enroll in plans while healthy, Republicans should demand changes to insurance-pricing rules. Former president Donald Trump recently revived a pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, noting on Truth Social: "The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it's not good ...

Misunderstanding the New Deal has encouraged ideological overreach. Two years ago, President Biden's inauguration was accompanied by excited talk that his administration represented a revival of the New Deal. The president proposed a sweeping package of public-works and new entitlement programs, which would have added a further $7.5 billion to ...

Congress should avoid the innovation-killing habit of using Medicare drug-price cuts to fund other pet projects. On August 28, the Biden administration announced the first set of drugs that would be subject to the Medicare price caps established by last year's Inflation Reduction Act. The administration justified this move as necessary to curb ...

A bipartisan group of 51 senators recently called for Congress to cancel an impending $8 billion cut to federal Medicaid allotments for "uncompensated" hospital care. No limit currently exists on the federal matching funds that states can claim to provide Medicaid benefits to eligible beneficiaries. The $8 billion cut would only trim the degree ...

Medicare was originally operated as a single-payer health care system, with the federal government directly purchasing medical services for elderly and disabled beneficiaries. Yet, the proportion of beneficiaries opting to receive those healthcare benefits through privately managed Medicare Advantage plans has increased from 25 percent in 2010 ...

As a condition of providing extra funds to support the existing benefit, legislators should let younger workers opt for a better-focused safety net. In his 2024 budget proposal, President Biden promised to oppose any cuts to Social Security — pledging to defend the current structure of the program. The past four decades have seen enormous ...

Trust fund’ financing makes Social Security and Medicare needlessly costly.As congressional Republicans search for ways to rein in federal spending, Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) has sought to revive the Time to Rescue United States Trusts (TRUST) Act. That bill would force Congress to consider legislation to restore the solvency of trust ...

State-level “public options” for health insurance are leading to higher costs. In his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden proposed to establish a "public option"–the choice to buy health insurance operated by the government, rather than from private insurance companies. The idea made little headway in Congress, but Colorado recently secured ...

Should a future recession necessitate another round of state-welfare bailouts, the federal government should nationalize currently split entitlement programs. America's state governments are currently flush with funds and expanding their spending commitments. Congress had provided over $1 trillion in pandemic aid to state governments, fearing ...

The Inflation Reduction Act consists largely of an agenda put together when inflation was not a pressing concern. As they took control of Congress at the beginning of 2021, Democrats eyed the opportunity for an enormous increase in public spending to rebuild the post-pandemic American economy. It has taken almost 18 months for them to assemble ...

In his two campaigns for the presidency, Bernie Sanders regularly cited a favorite statistic to assail American health care: "In 2015, the United States spent almost $10,000 per person for health care; the Canadians, Germans, French and British spent less than half of that, while guaranteeing health care to everyone." Furthermore, he noted, ...

Not where prices are highest. Last month, Mark Cuban, the billionaire serial entrepreneur and star of NBC's Shark Tank, announced the launch of an online pharmacy with a mission to drive down the cost of generic drugs. Generic drug prices often greatly exceed manufacturing costs, though competition is generally uninhibited by patents. But ...

The Biden administration’s proposal to use a new Medicare metric to alleviate racial disparities won’t have much effect. Medicare has historically advanced the desegregation of American hospitals, but the Biden administration's attempt to use the program's physician-fee schedule to address racial disparities is likely to generate little more ...

Lawmakers use Medicare's trust fund to kick the can down the road on entitlement reform. In 2020, the federal government for the first time spent more on Medicare than on national defense. Absent legislative reform, Medicare funding as a share of GDP is projected to increase by another 50 percent over the next 20 years. Medicare's ...

Congressional Democrats want to throw more money at Medicaid, but that won't improve long-term care. The reconciliation bill being prepared by congressional Democrats is so substantial that specific provisions as large as $400 billion in proposed extra funds for Medicaid's long-term-care benefit have attracted little attention. America ...

Congressional Democratic leaders are assembling a multitrillion-dollar omnibus spending package, bringing together their main legislative priorities for the Biden administration's first year in office. Though the health care reforms proposed have received much less news coverage than the Affordable Care Act of 2010, they would, in fact, ...

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing to investigate consolidation in healthcare markets. Hospitals are increasingly buying up other medical providers to increase negotiation leverage with insurers. Over recent years, rising hospital expenditures have been the primary factor in rising healthcare costs.
Yet, whatever market ...

On February 27th, the House of Representatives voted 219 to 212 to pass the American Rescue Plan Act. As part of $1.9 trillion in omnibus spending, the bill represents congressional Democrats' first serious attempt to amend the Affordable Care Act since that reform went into effect. The legislation would provide additional funds to entice ...

Healthcare reform seems set to return to the top of the political agenda if Biden wins the presidency. The issue dominated the Democratic presidential primary, and even though Biden explicitly ran against sweeping single-payer reforms, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently argued that “Bidencare Would Be a Big Deal.” Biden has endorsed ...

Obamacare Mandate Failed to Make Health Insurance More Affordable. It has not served to make health insurance more affordable and attractive. This November, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of California v. Texas, which centers on the constitutionality of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. The case ...

Since the Democratic Party secured a majority of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, a new cohort of legislators led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has eagerly advanced ambitious plans to expand federal spending known as the “Green New Deal” and “Medicare for All.” These names both recall the mid-20th century, when major expansions ...

Identifying Overpriced Elements of America's Health-care System. Hospital billing arrangements in the United States often seem designed to cause the maximum possible confusion, frustration, and irritation. Prices get negotiated secretly between hospitals and insurers and vary enormously and unpredictably; patients typically have little sense ...

As COVID-19 was causing the nation’s economy to suddenly shut down in March, Congress moved swiftly to provide financial assistance to millions who were abruptly thrown out of work. These entitlement payments temporarily played an important role in helping Americans get through a public health emergency, but if extended in their current form ...

Saving nursing homes from Covid-19. The Trump administration has called nursing homes “ground zero for Covid-19,” and the analogy is apt—one New York City facility has seen 98 residents die from the disease, while more than two-thirds of Massachusetts nursing homes have reported infections. Though the link to long-term care facilities from ...

In a widely cited article, the New York Times recently warned that health “insurance premiums could spike as much as 40 percent next year.” Such a scenario would clearly add an enormous burden to businesses and individuals already struggling with hardship induced by the coronavirus. But the assumed average cost of treating coronavirus cases, ...

State governments are at the forefront of America’s response to the coronavirus. Yet, while they will be required to pay for rising healthcare costs as medical needs increase and unemployment rises, states will likely see their tax revenues plummet. Congress is rightly considering providing additional assistance to help states cope. But ...

The expansion of Medicaid to low-income, able-bodied adults was the largest element of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, both in terms of cost and enrollment. But the structure of this expansion – whereby the federal government, without limit, gives $9 to states for every $1 they spend on enrollees – provides little incentive to control costs. ...

Elizabeth Warren recently proposed bringing down the cost of health care by appointing “aggressive antitrust enforcers who recognize the problems with hospital and health system consolidation.” Rising prices for hospital care are indeed responsible for much of the rising cost of health insurance, but these prices have risen almost as rapidly ...

A public option is only likely to expand overall health-insurance coverage to the extent that it is subsidized with additional funds. Americans appear eager for more affordable health-insurance choices, but don’t want major middle-class tax increases or the government to ration their access to medical care. Whereas a November 2019 Quinnipiac ...

When presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren released her plan for a single-payer health-care system, she claimed that it would require “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” Warren argued that health insurance premiums for staff are already like a tax on employment, so instead of “companies sending those payments to private ...

Reimbursement arrangements for medical services are usually negotiated between insurers and networks of hospitals and physicians. But what if patients need emergency care from a provider who is not in their network? Current law allows hospitals and physicians to charge whatever they deem fit for such care, and requires that insurers reimburse ...

Her plan proposes ‘global budgets’ to control costs. That will inevitably lead to rationing of needed services. Until now, Medicare for All proposals have been pleasantly vague. They plausibly allowed voters to imagine that more medical services would be covered, without premiums, out-of-pocket costs or the inconvenience of networks or ...

It has the thankless job of saying ‘no.’ But policing claims allows you to get better benefits. Private health insurers are punching bags of choice in the Democratic presidential primary. “The insurance companies last year alone sucked $23 billion in profits out of the health-care system,” Elizabeth Warren fulminated in a June debate. ...

While millions of Americans were vacationing this summer, the seemingly impossible happened in Washington: On July 17, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and Steve King (R-IA) all voted in favor of the same healthcare legislation. The bill in question, H.R. 748, sought to repeal the so-called ...

“Medicare for All” advocates, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), argue that single-payer health care could help pay for a major expansion of coverage by greatly reducing the cost of purchasing medical services. They base their argument on two principal observations: that Medicare pays 40 percent less than private insurers for hospital ...

Away from the headlines and ideological food fight over Medicare for All, Congress has quietly been working to fix the problem of “surprise medical bills”—a situation whereby individuals with insurance coverage nonetheless find themselves facing exorbitant unexpected bills from out-of-network providers. The problem has become so bad ...

The privately managed Medicare Advantage does a better job, though it could use improvement. Democrats enamored by the idea of Medicare for All should keep in mind that the standard existing Medicare benefit package falls well short of what they are proposing. If Medicare were a private insurance plan, it wouldn’t even qualify as adequate ...

Emergency medical care is an exception to the general principle of market exchange, whereby services are voluntarily bought and sold, with sellers competing on price. Under federal law, hospitals are required to treat patients that arrive needing emergency medical treatment, regardless of their ability to pay—but allowed to subsequently ...

The core appeal of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate’s Medicare-for-All proposals, whether it’s optional buy-ins floated by moderate Democrats or Sen. Bernie Sanders’s comprehensive single-payer reforms, is the notion that enormous savings could be generated by dispensing with private insurance. Advocates claim that that insurer ...

In a 2016 Republican primary debate, then-candidate Donald Trump promised to “replace Obamacare with something so much better.” Like every Republican in the race, he endorsed proposals to allow Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines. This month, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a formal Request for ...