Category: health policies

Single-Payer Extremists: Obamacare Has Increased Health System Overhead

  • May 28, 2015
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Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhander are the Bernie Sanders of health policy. For decades, they have advocated that the U.S. adopt a government monopoly, single payer, health system. They write economically illiterate articles asserting that Medicare is great because it has low administrative costs. Nevertheless, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the good doctors’ latest article nails Obamacare for increasing the overhead of U.S. health insurance. Who would have even thought that was possible? The roughly $6 billion in exchange start-up costs pale in comparison to the ongoing insurance overhead that the ACA has added to our health care system — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars through 2022.

Headwinds for Health Insurers as Obamacare Stumbles

  • May 28, 2015
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(A version of this Health Alert was published by Forbes). You might think this headline is a gag, given how deeply health insurers are dug into Obamacare. Only a month ago, I wrote that health plans’ mastery of Obamacare poses challenge to repeal. Losses in Obamacare’s controversial exchanges are not yet apparent in the publicly listed insurers’ financial statements. However, exchanges comprise of a small (but not trivial) market of about 11 million people. Through 2016, health plans losing money in Obamacare can rely on taxpayers to help them out. After that, they are on their own. Already, many plans are finding participation painful and increasing Obamacare premiums significantly for 2016. According to Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal, In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is

Can You Pay Poor People To Quit Smoking?

  • May 28, 2015
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Peter Orszag was President Obama’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Like many high-ramking Democrats, he landed on his feet as Vice Chairman of Citibank. He also writes a very good column for Bloomberg View. His latest column discusses financial incentives to quit smoking. Unfortunately, it ignores an obvious challenge to the thesis he supports: That poor people can be paid to quit smoking. The income gap between smokers and nonsmokers has grown. And it’s something companies may need to address directly in their efforts to help employees kick the habit. Over the past several decades, smoking rates have fallen sharply among high-income, highly educated Americans and not as much for less educated, low-income people The good news is that

Preventive Care Does Not Want To Be “Free”

  • May 28, 2015
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One conceit behind Obamacare is that if the government mandates preventive care be “free”, people will use it. The notion should appeal to free-market types, too: As the price of a service drops, the quantity demanded should increase. However, it is not that simple in health care. Let’s take another dive into the always heated and controversial discussions about preventive care for women (such as our recent entry about mammography). New research shows that women under 65 are over screened for osteoporosis, and women aged 65 and over are under screened, although older women get screened for “free”: Osteoporosis screening rates jumped sharply at age 50, despite guidelines suggesting that screening only begin at age 65, unless a woman has certain risk factors. However, the study also found that