Health Care
March 8, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Sen. Tom Cotton says “I think we’re moving a little bit too quickly on health care reform.” He explains: This is a big issue. This is not like the latest spending bill that gets released on a Monday night, [passed] on Wednesday and everybody goes home for Christmas, and we live with it for nine months. We’re going to live with health care reform that we pass forever, or until
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March 8, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Peter Nelson, my colleague at Center of the American Experiment, is one of the country’s leading experts on health care policy. On the Center’s web site, he urges conservatives to take a deep breath and understand the constraints that Congressional Republicans are working under. In particular, a full repeal of Obamacare must get through the Senate, which means it must get 60 votes. There are only 52 Republican senators. Therefore,
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March 7, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I found this analysis of the proposed House Obamacare repeal and replace legislation to be a useful starting point in understanding the proposal. The author is “Asclepius,” a sensible sounding guy. His verdict: The proposal contains sound and much needed Medicaid reforms; sensible but very modest insurance market reforms; and the entirely misguided creation of new subsidies, in the form of tax credits, for participants in the ACA exchanges. In
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March 7, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Health care policy, like K-12 education and college sports handicapping, is an abyss I try my best to avoid, because energy and environment are so much more fun! Almost 25 years ago I wrote a cover story for Reason magazine about “The Medicare Monster,” and resolved never again to go through the torture of investigating health care policy, despite the fact that the great Richard Epstein still talks today about
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December 7, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
James Capretta and Scott Gottlieb of AEI lay out the four reforms around which they say the effort to replace Obamacare should center. They are: 1. Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans. Obamacare provides all sorts of health care coverage, including lots of coverage the purchaser doesn’t need (e.g. child birthing care for people not capable of having children). Making people pay for coverage they don’t
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August 28, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Mylan NV has been taking a lot of abuse for sharply raising the price of its popular EpiPen. The Wall Street Journal explains the background on the price increase. It isn’t, as I would have assumed, a case of patent protection. The patent on epinephrine ran out years ago. Rather, it turns out that keeping the anti-allergy dose sterile is difficult and expensive. Mylan’s competitors have had a hard time
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May 2, 2016 — John Hinderaker
We don’t normally just steal posts from others, but this one deserves it: Glenn Reynolds writes: ANALYSIS: TRUE. Every Industry Gets Worse When Government Gets Involved. “This is easily provable with Public Choice Theory, and consistently proven in practice.” I would add two points about the chart. First, the increased cost of health care obviously has something to do with the metastasizing administrators. But it also is caused, in part,
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January 19, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Bernie Sanders has proposed “Medicare for all Americans.” It sounds sweet, but how much would it cost? Avik Roy, a health care analyst and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, finds an answer in work performed for the Sanders campaign by economist Gerald Friedman. The price tag: $41 trillion over ten years. Actually, the correct number may well be higher. Friedman claims that Sanders’ plan would reduce national health-care spending
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September 25, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Now that Carly Fiorina has emerged as a top-six candidate (at worst) for the GOP nomination, she will receive serious scrutiny. The little scrutiny she has received to date focuses on her record as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. That record is relevant to her candidacy. For me, however, her past positions on the major issues are more important. Has she been a consistent, hard-line conservative? The early returns aren’t good
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May 22, 2014 — John Hinderaker
At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto pulls together liberals’ endorsements of Veterans Administration health care. It goes beyond just claiming that VA medicine was top notch; liberals often claimed that the supposed success of the VA is proof that government is superior to the private sector. Taranto titles his post “Socialist Supermodel.” You should read it all, but here are a few highlights: [I]n January 2006, … former Enron
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March 16, 2014 — Scott Johnson
A reader writes in response to the congressional testimony of Sally Pipes linked in “The Pipes proviso”: As a former medicine resident and current cardiology fellow, I have spent more time working at various VA hospitals than all but those courageous physicians who make a career of working within its bureaucracy and unions. (As the joke goes, what’s the difference between a bullet and a VA nurse? You can fire
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March 15, 2014 — Scott Johnson
When our oldest daughter was in second grade her best friend was a classmate who was the daughter of an ophthalmologist from Canada. He devoted much of his practice to treating Medicaid patients at the county hospital. The family moved to Ottawa at the end of the school year and we traveled to visit them. We had lunch at a deli near the doctor’s office, close by the Parliament building.
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December 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In my Forbes.com column this week, I suggest that the field is wide open for a leader of imagination to employ a back-to-basics approach, explaining to Americans how markets are superior to centralized government control especially in health care. I suspect Americans are much more amenable to this message than Beltway Republicans know. They’ve been drinking the DC Kool Aid for too long to perceive this. Today’s article in the
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November 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
With Obamacare shaping up as a public policy disaster that is the equivalent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Hindenburg, the Bay of Pigs, and Desert One combined, perhaps we should go back and take in Ronald Reagan’s warning about this back in 1961. Reagan said that socializing health care would require socializing the patients, and voila, we have Obamacare canceling insurance plans previously agreed to between consenting adults. But
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November 15, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Some years ago, a British filmmaker was visiting us, and we started talking about health care. He acknowledged that the National Health Service is pretty bad, but said that he favors socialized medicine because health care is so important. That’s right, I responded, and because health care is so important, it is vital that we use our best system on it. Our best system is free enterprise. The worst system
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August 22, 2012 — John Hinderaker
One of the high points of Mitt Romney’s primary campaign was when he answered a Democratic voter who said: “So you’re all for like, ‘yay, freedom,’ and all this stuff. And ‘yay, like pursuit of happiness.’ You know what would make me happy? Free birth control.” Romney’s answer, which we posted in video form here, included: “You want free stuff? Vote for the other guy.” The new Romney ad that
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August 9, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
E.J. Dionne delivers two pieces of hack sophistry for the price of one in his latest column. One of them is foolish; the other dishonest. The foolish attack is his claim that if you “hate” Obamacare, you “must” return any rebate check you receive from an insurance company as a result of that Act. This, Dionne claims, is “just common sense.” If you believe in free enterprise, then the government
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