US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has claimed that cuts in Medicare spending help Medicare’s Trust Fund, making it easier to pay benefits in future years.[1] Yet CBO Director Douglas W. Elmendorf rejected such claims, saying that they amount to impermissible double counting.[2] The money that is saved by cuts...
Read More »

If you are on Medicare, you and others like you are probably going to be more affected by the new health reform law than any other population group. Benefits of Reform There are a number of new benefits, including the following: Medicare will pay for an annual checkup. Deductibles and co-payments for many preventive...
Read More »

Unless you qualify for an exception, beginning in 2014, the new law will require you to obtain a health insurance plan. For the first two years, state governments will have the power to dictate most of the benefits the plans must include. Beyond that point, the benefits will probably be mandated under federal law....
Read More »

Probably not. No promise was repeated more often by Barack Obama than the pledge that, “If you like the plan you are in, you can keep it.” For the vast majority of people, however, this promise almost certainly will not be kept. Here’s why. Your Employer May Be Forced to Switch to Another Plan...
Read More »

Even if you are not enrolled in a traditional Health Maintenance Organization or an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), you can expect a return to some of the heavy-handed health insurance industry practices that were so unpopular in the 1990s and gave rise to the “patient bill of rights” proposals. The reason? The new healthcare...
Read More »

Accountable Care Organizations are the portal through which we will all march toward a truly nationalized healthcare system. I don’t know any advocates of ACOs who are not also advocates of global budgets, under which providers are given a fixed amount of money to spend and forced to ration care if the funds prove...
Read More »

In these blog posts and in my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, I have focused on the effects of the new healthcare law on quality and access to care. But what about the hidden economic cost to you? Let’s look at some of the taxes that have received too little public attention. You...
Read More »

My top recommendation for improving healthcare for the poor is to replace Medicaid with subsidies that enable them to access the same healthcare system that everyone else has access to. My second pick would be to turn Medicaid into a competing health plan and make it available to everyone. If those proposals aren’t adopted...
Read More »

In my previous blog post and in my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, I make the case for abolishing Medicaid altogether. If this proposal turns out to be too radical for the body politic, my second suggestion is to keep Medicaid in its current form and let everybody enroll in it, regardless of...
Read More »

In my previous post I discussed the case for replacing the current Medicaid system with block grants to the states; the states would spend this money on indigent healthcare, and nothing more. But must we think only in terms of keeping the poor in a separate healthcare system? Is there any reason to partition...
Read More »