Executive Summary The long-term solvency of Medicare is the most serious domestic policy problem this country faces in the 21st century. Despite the rosy forecasts from politicians, the Medicare Trustees confirm that …
This report presents our analysis of the Medicare proposal as described in the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) report, “A Framework for Medicare Reform,” as published in September 2008, …
Executive Summary Compared to spending on doctors and hospitals, prescription drug therapy is a bargain. Generic drugs are especially cheap; accounting for 88 percent of prescriptions filled but only 28 percent of …
Driving to my medical office one spring morning on the Dallas North Tollway, I was taken aback by a massive billboard extolling the virtues of electronic health records (EHRs) at a local …
Much ado has been made about Obamacare’s mandate requiring most health plans to cover 100 percent of the cost of prescription contraceptives with no deductibles or copays. Many believe the mandate lessens …
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in King v. Burwell, the lawsuit which asserts tax credits currently being paid to health insurers in 34 to 37 states that use the federal health insurance exchange (healthcare.gov) are illegal, could require almost seven million people to pay the full premiums for their Obamacare policies. This will cause a crisis, and demand a response, giving Congress the opportunity to remove some of the Affordable Care Act’s most harmful features.
Many supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) wanted a public plan option to compete with the private insurers offering insurance in the state and federal health exchanges. To placate these progressives, the ACA created a type of nonprofit health insurance cooperative that would borrow funds from the government for start-up costs and solvency reserves.
One million Alabamans are enrolled in Medicaid, a joint federal-state program that provides medical care to nearly 70 million low-income individuals nationwide. Medicaid is one of the two primary expenditures in most state budgets, and Alabama is no exception. Medicaid consumes over one-third of the General Fund, and costs state and federal taxpayers nearly $6 billion annually — about one-tenth of which participants spend on drugs and drug therapies.
While Social Security has received considerably more attention in recent years, Medicare is actually a much larger problem. It is growing at a faster rate and has an unfunded liability six times the size of Social Security. Medicare is on a spending path that is impossible to sustain. The program must deal not only with the demographic pressures Social Security faces, but also the soaring cost of medical care.
To confront America’s health care crisis, we do not need more spending, more regulations or more bureaucracy. We do need people, however, including every doctor and every patient. All 320 million Americans must be free to use their intelligence, their creativity and their innovative ability to make the changes needed to create access to low-cost, high-quality health care.
Compared to hospital and physician care, drug therapy is by far the most cost-effective way to treat most diseases and health conditions. Americans spend twice as much for physician care and three times as much on hospital care as they do for drugs. And drug therapy often eliminates, lessens or delays the need for more invasive treatments such as surgery or inpatient care.
On March 26, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives voted for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). Secretly negotiated between Republican and Democratic leaders, this bill is the so-called Medicare “doc fix,” a prize that has been chased for many years but never caught by politicians eager to break out of the fiscal discipline a previous Congress imposed on them.
President Obama recently proposed requiring employers to pay sick leave to the estimated 43 million American workers who not receive this benefit. Many of these workers cannot afford unpaid sick days to for an illness or to care for a sick child.
The rate of growth of health spending remains moderate, but one area where prices appear to be increasing faster than in recent years is brand-name prescription drugs.1 Many blockbuster drugs lost their patents by 2012 and many people looked forward to a future when we could all get a month’s-long supply of generic drugs for $4. It did not quite work out that way.
Health Information Technology (HIT) includes a wide range of products, technologies and services, such as electronic health records (EHRs), mobile and telehealth technology, cloud-based services, medical devices, and remote monitoring devices, assistive technologies and sensors.
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964 and followed up a year later with an avalanche of domestic social and antipoverty programs known collectively as the Great Society. Johnson persuaded Congress to support his welfare agenda — sending him more than 80 pieces of legislation to sign in a short period of time.
In the five years since Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the validity of the law has been litigated in federal courts throughout the United States. From infringements on religious liberty to violations of the legislative process, lawsuits challenging the ACA have reflected the dissatisfaction of many with both the substance of the bill and its implementation.
In 2014, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan introduced a proposal to consolidate federal antipoverty programs called Expanding Opportunity in America. Ryan’s plan focuses on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), housing and home-energy assistance, education assistance, food stamps (SNAP) and criminal sentencing reform.
The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) required each state to expand Medicaid eligibility to individuals and families with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level or risk losing federal funding for its entire Medicaid program. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that provision of Obamacare unconstitutional.
Americans spend nearly $3 trillion annually on medical care. Nearly one-third of health care spending is on hospital care, and an additional one-fifth of health care dollars are spent on physician care. By contrast, drugs are a bargain at only about 10 percent of medical spending.
Over the next few years, the population of 85-year-olds in Wisconsin will grow more than 3 percent a year, faster than the U.S. average of around 2 percent. This means an increasing need for long-term care and future challenges in funding it.
Patients benefit enormously from safe and effective drug therapies. However, many of the drugs Americans take are not safe when they are taken recreationally, consumed in quantities larger than prescribed or diverted for illicit sale. More than 16,000 people die annually from prescription drug overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — double the number that die abusing either cocaine or heroin, combined.
Today, more than 800 million people are malnourished, meaning they do not get the minimum energy requirements set by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of 1,690 calories per day for an urban adult and 1,650 calories for a rural dweller.
A well-known provision of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) required states to expand Medicaid eligibility to individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) or face the loss of federal matching funds for the joint federal-state health program for the poor.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is having a profound effect on the labor market and raising the cost of health benefits for both employers and individuals. The impact on small businesses is especially acute.