Last quarter, spending on health care grew an astounding 9.9%. That’s the biggest percent change in healthcare spending since 1980. What’s the reason? Many people blame it on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more popularly known as Obamacare. But this assessment contrasts markedly with the picture the president painted for us only a few...
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Previously, Chris Conover showed that the medical risk of being uninsured is small: ...[T]he evidence that having health insurance will reduce mortality risk by any significant amount is pretty thin...even if we assume that having coverage reduces the chance of early death by 22 percent, this is comparable to a half dozen other risks...
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But so is access to doctors and hospitals in the plans offered on the health insurance exchanges. A Congressional Budget Office report estimates lower federal spending (see the figure). The reason: Health plans in the exchanges look more like Medicaid than like employer-based coverage. Jason Millman reports: The CBO report points out that it...
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Paul Krugman has written another one of those columns where almost every single sentence is wrong. But he did get one thing right: The crucial thing to understand about the Affordable Care Act is that it’s a Rube Goldberg device, a complicated way to do something inherently simple. The biggest risk to reform has...
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The reason we have so many problems in health care is that almost everywhere we look, people face perverse incentives—patients, doctors, employers, employees, etc. When they respond to those incentives, they do things that make costs higher, quality lower, and access to care more difficult than otherwise would have been the case. At the...
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It’s a 2,700 page bill. There are 20,000 pages of regulations. Major provisions seem to change every other week. And despite Nancy Pelosi’s promise, four years after it passed most of us still aren’t sure about everything that’s in it. How can something like that possibly be fixed? It’s easier than you might suppose....
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Over the next 10 years, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is scheduled to cut Medicare spending by $716 billion, primarily by reducing payments to doctors and hospitals. Further, those cuts in spending will continue indefinitely into the future. By 2060, one-fifth of Medicare will be gone. The Medicare actuaries and others have warned that...
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Normally, I don’t think Zeke Emanuel has much to say that is both true and interesting. But this insider’s view of the making of ObamaCare is fascinating. Apparently there were people inside the White House who wanted to adopt John McCain’s approach to health reform. We ended up with only a timid step in...
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What’s wrong with the business economists? Have they forgotten everything they learned in Econ 101? Casey Mulligan explains it for the umpteenth time: As far as I know, before this month the only place that one could read about the Affordable Care Act’s new employment tax was in this paper by David Gamage, in...
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President Obama and Congressional Democrats have a standard talking point when defending Obamacare these days: no longer can insurance companies cancel your insurance after you get sick. They are lucky they are not subject to the same FTC regulations that apply to commercial businesses. This practice has been illegal under federal law since the...
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