Government price controls and other price interventions distort the market. They also threaten patient access because the only way the government can enforce price controls is by denying patients access to a drug if the manufacturer won’t sell it at a low enough price. Such policies inhibit choice and access.
These battles never get to the root cause, not only of high pharmaceutical prices, but of the denial of the best possible health of all Americans. That root cause is the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
With the collapse of choice and competition in the Obamacare health insurance exchanges, combined with major premium and deductible increases, “progressives” in Congress are looking for new ways to expand the role of government in Americans’ health care.
Dollars would flow not to insurance companies, but to the states through block grants that would replace Obamacare’s payments to insurers. With new flexibility, states could use the money to lower premiums and stabilize turbulent health insurance markets, among other things.
The Vermont Senate on Tuesday voted to amend a bill which will create a summer study committee to examine potential penalties for not purchasing health insurance in Vermont.
Roughly 400,000 fewer people signed up for Obamacare in 2018, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma announced Tuesday afternoon. That is a significant drop in enrollment from 2017, when 12.2 million Americans obtained coverage through the Obamacare state exchanges.
The vast majority of mental health patients are nonviolent, and often the most vulnerable in our society. If we can’t care for them in a timely fashion, what does that say about our chances of preemptively treating the unknown violent delusional nihilist desperate for his or her 15 minutes of fame?
Legislators are worried that without the threat of an Obamacare-type penalty, some of these young, healthy people will escape the state’s clutches. Hence the new mandate.
In this episode of Vote for Vermont, co-hosts Pat McDonald and Ben Kinsley interview Tom Pelham about his career before joining the board, as well as what is being done to fix the ever-increasing cost of health care.
So why aren’t we moving rapidly toward direct primary care coupled with independent specialist centers, paid for by health savings accounts and backed up by high deductible health plans?
Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion program and subsidies have made major health insurance companies extremely profitable, according to a White House economic report released this week.
The omnibus spending bill set to be released Monday will likely contain a provision that would send Obamacare insurers $10 billion in “reinsurance” payments a year for three years — 2019, 2020, and 2021. That’s a bailout.