Sally C. Pipes
Commentary
It’s Time For Medicare To Move Beyond Location, Location, Location
What’s the difference between getting an x-ray at the hospital and getting one at the doctor’s office? The former could cost a lot more than the latter. Medicare often reimburses hospitals more than it pays doctor’s offices for the same procedure. Hospitals claim these payment differentials are necessary because they are subject ...
Commentary
Medi-Cal Bad Idea for Golden State from the Start
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is now learning fortunes can change quickly in the Golden State. Less than a year ago, Newsom was celebrating a projected $100 billion budget surplus — a fiscal boon that prompted the governor and legislature to craft a budget exceeding $300 billion. Now, California faces a $22.5 billion ...
Commentary
Shouldn’t doctors be allowed to own hospitals?
Experts from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission , and the American Medical Association just released a paper urging Congress to peel back the Affordable Care Act’s restrictions on creating and expanding physician-owned hospitals. Their analysis is correct. Such hospitals inject much-needed competition into the healthcare market. Consequently, repealing restrictions on them could help ...
Commentary
States Sad, Unhealthy Obsession Over Single-Payer Won’t End
Single-payer healthcare is back on the legislative agenda in New York, California, and Oregon. And just like previous efforts by state governments to take over their health insurance markets, these new ones are nothing to celebrate. Single-payer healthcare invariably leads to long waits for low-quality care, all paid for by ...
Commentary
Why Medicare as We Know It Can’t Last
Which party will cut Social Security and Medicare? Democrats and Republicans have spent much of this month pointing fingers at one another. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggests that both parties have cuts to old-age benefits on the docket. According to the CBO, the Social Security Old-Age and ...
Commentary
The Time Has Come For Expanding Health Savings Accounts
The House of Representatives returns to Washington this week. Some of the chamber’s Republicans have begun to make noise about health reform. In a recent opinion piece for The Hill, Rep. Michael Burgess, a medical doctor from Texas, and co-author Eric Hargan, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services during the ...
Commentary
Bernie Sanders Twists the Truth about American Health Care
Senator Bernie Sanders, the tireless champion of “Medicare for All,” has just assumed the chair of the Senate’s powerful Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Unfortunately, that means we can expect to hear more bogus statistics about the supposed failures of the American health-care system. Lately, Sanders has been asserting that “85 ...
Commentary
A Short-Term Solution To Our Long-Term Health Insurance Affordability Problems
President Biden hit the road last week to castigate Republicans for supposedly proposing to make healthcare more expensive. The president is upset that Republicans want to undo the innovation-destroying price controls on prescription drugs included in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and rein in the billions of dollars in subsidies he’s handing out ...
Commentary
Politics aside, fixing Medicare isn’t brain surgery
Democrats and Republicans are accusing one another of trying to “cut” Medicare . The finger-pointing obscures the reality that both parties will eventually have to make cuts to the program. It’s a matter of arithmetic. The country has fewer and fewer workers available to fund the healthcare of more and more seniors. ...
Commentary
Nothing Life Giving About ‘Quality Adjusted’
Should the government put a price on human life? The new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., doesn’t think so. She recently introduced legislation alongside several of her colleagues to ban the use of “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs, in federal healthcare programs. A QALY ...
It’s Time For Medicare To Move Beyond Location, Location, Location
What’s the difference between getting an x-ray at the hospital and getting one at the doctor’s office? The former could cost a lot more than the latter. Medicare often reimburses hospitals more than it pays doctor’s offices for the same procedure. Hospitals claim these payment differentials are necessary because they are subject ...
Medi-Cal Bad Idea for Golden State from the Start
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is now learning fortunes can change quickly in the Golden State. Less than a year ago, Newsom was celebrating a projected $100 billion budget surplus — a fiscal boon that prompted the governor and legislature to craft a budget exceeding $300 billion. Now, California faces a $22.5 billion ...
Shouldn’t doctors be allowed to own hospitals?
Experts from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission , and the American Medical Association just released a paper urging Congress to peel back the Affordable Care Act’s restrictions on creating and expanding physician-owned hospitals. Their analysis is correct. Such hospitals inject much-needed competition into the healthcare market. Consequently, repealing restrictions on them could help ...
States Sad, Unhealthy Obsession Over Single-Payer Won’t End
Single-payer healthcare is back on the legislative agenda in New York, California, and Oregon. And just like previous efforts by state governments to take over their health insurance markets, these new ones are nothing to celebrate. Single-payer healthcare invariably leads to long waits for low-quality care, all paid for by ...
Why Medicare as We Know It Can’t Last
Which party will cut Social Security and Medicare? Democrats and Republicans have spent much of this month pointing fingers at one another. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggests that both parties have cuts to old-age benefits on the docket. According to the CBO, the Social Security Old-Age and ...
The Time Has Come For Expanding Health Savings Accounts
The House of Representatives returns to Washington this week. Some of the chamber’s Republicans have begun to make noise about health reform. In a recent opinion piece for The Hill, Rep. Michael Burgess, a medical doctor from Texas, and co-author Eric Hargan, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services during the ...
Bernie Sanders Twists the Truth about American Health Care
Senator Bernie Sanders, the tireless champion of “Medicare for All,” has just assumed the chair of the Senate’s powerful Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Unfortunately, that means we can expect to hear more bogus statistics about the supposed failures of the American health-care system. Lately, Sanders has been asserting that “85 ...
A Short-Term Solution To Our Long-Term Health Insurance Affordability Problems
President Biden hit the road last week to castigate Republicans for supposedly proposing to make healthcare more expensive. The president is upset that Republicans want to undo the innovation-destroying price controls on prescription drugs included in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and rein in the billions of dollars in subsidies he’s handing out ...
Politics aside, fixing Medicare isn’t brain surgery
Democrats and Republicans are accusing one another of trying to “cut” Medicare . The finger-pointing obscures the reality that both parties will eventually have to make cuts to the program. It’s a matter of arithmetic. The country has fewer and fewer workers available to fund the healthcare of more and more seniors. ...
Nothing Life Giving About ‘Quality Adjusted’
Should the government put a price on human life? The new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., doesn’t think so. She recently introduced legislation alongside several of her colleagues to ban the use of “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs, in federal healthcare programs. A QALY ...
