Health Care Innovation

Commentary

Myths and Realities of the Health Care Affordability Problem

According to the five-second rule, you can still eat your food that has fallen on the floor, so long as you picked it up within five seconds. Only, this common perception is bad advice. In reality, if a person eats food that has fallen on a dirty floor, he risks ...
Commentary

Keep Big Government Out of Medicare Drug Pricing Negotiations

Tomorrow, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee (HELP) will discuss a proposed alteration to Medicare. The proposal comes from a report released in late November by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NASEM urges Congress to allow federal bureaucrats to negotiate Medicare drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. Currently, private insurance ...
Blog

PRI-Manhattan Institute Forum Addresses California’s Drug Pricing Challenge

Earlier this week, PRI joined with the Manhattan Institute to host a well-attended Sacramento panel discussion on California’s drug pricing challenge. Many thanks to my friend and former longtime Capitol reporter Marcey Brightwell, who did an outstanding job moderating the event. Drug pricing emerged as one of the hottest issues ...
Blog

The Price Control Hammer Will Break the Health Care System

From California to Washington D.C. legislators continue to confirm Abraham Kaplan’s famous insight that if you, “give a small boy a hammer, he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” In the case of our legislators, that hammer is price controls; and, what needs pounding is the price of ...
Business & Economics

Price Controls Will Reduce Innovation and Health Outcomes

Abraham Kaplan famously noted that if you, “give a small boy a hammer, he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” Put differently, solving problems requires the right tool, not the convenient tool. Congress should remember this wisdom in its upcoming deliberations regarding the cost of prescription drugs. The ...
Blog

Price Transparency Occurs in Markets, Not Government Offices

The wrong model, no matter how hard it is worked, always provides the wrong answer. And, so it is with a bill being considered in Sacramento (SB 17). SB 17 is supposed to address the problem of skyrocketing health care costs by requiring pharmaceutical manufacturers to give 60-day notice for ...
Commentary

Here’s What Single-Payer Advocates Don’t Want You To Know

Single-payer is back on the docket in California. Late last month, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced that he’d formed a special committee “to develop plans for achieving universal health care in California.” Rendon has been under pressure from progressive activists all summer, ever since he shelved SB 562, a bill ...
Blog

U.S. Pharmaceutical Spending Is Below Average?

For the 30 nations that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which promotes policies to improve the well-being of people around the world, pharmaceutical spending comprised, on average, 16.9 percent of total health care spending as of 2015. The OECD defines pharmaceutical spending as the expenditures on ...
Commentary

Piecemeal Repeal Is The Least Bad Obamacare Option

The demise of the Senate’s “skinny” repeal of Obamacare may be a blessing in disguise. Nobody should have mistaken that measure for genuine repeal of the Affordable Care Act — much less for the free-market healthcare reform that most of the GOP has long clamored for. Yet the collapse of ...
Business & Economics

Obstacles To Cutting Edge Cancer Treatments

Disincentives plague the U.S. health care system, driving costs higher and the quality of care lower. Improving health outcomes requires reforms that remove these disincentives. With respect to health insurers, this means returning payers to their proper role of providing effective risk management services to patients. In contrast to other ...
Commentary

Myths and Realities of the Health Care Affordability Problem

According to the five-second rule, you can still eat your food that has fallen on the floor, so long as you picked it up within five seconds. Only, this common perception is bad advice. In reality, if a person eats food that has fallen on a dirty floor, he risks ...
Commentary

Keep Big Government Out of Medicare Drug Pricing Negotiations

Tomorrow, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee (HELP) will discuss a proposed alteration to Medicare. The proposal comes from a report released in late November by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NASEM urges Congress to allow federal bureaucrats to negotiate Medicare drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. Currently, private insurance ...
Blog

PRI-Manhattan Institute Forum Addresses California’s Drug Pricing Challenge

Earlier this week, PRI joined with the Manhattan Institute to host a well-attended Sacramento panel discussion on California’s drug pricing challenge. Many thanks to my friend and former longtime Capitol reporter Marcey Brightwell, who did an outstanding job moderating the event. Drug pricing emerged as one of the hottest issues ...
Blog

The Price Control Hammer Will Break the Health Care System

From California to Washington D.C. legislators continue to confirm Abraham Kaplan’s famous insight that if you, “give a small boy a hammer, he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” In the case of our legislators, that hammer is price controls; and, what needs pounding is the price of ...
Business & Economics

Price Controls Will Reduce Innovation and Health Outcomes

Abraham Kaplan famously noted that if you, “give a small boy a hammer, he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” Put differently, solving problems requires the right tool, not the convenient tool. Congress should remember this wisdom in its upcoming deliberations regarding the cost of prescription drugs. The ...
Blog

Price Transparency Occurs in Markets, Not Government Offices

The wrong model, no matter how hard it is worked, always provides the wrong answer. And, so it is with a bill being considered in Sacramento (SB 17). SB 17 is supposed to address the problem of skyrocketing health care costs by requiring pharmaceutical manufacturers to give 60-day notice for ...
Commentary

Here’s What Single-Payer Advocates Don’t Want You To Know

Single-payer is back on the docket in California. Late last month, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced that he’d formed a special committee “to develop plans for achieving universal health care in California.” Rendon has been under pressure from progressive activists all summer, ever since he shelved SB 562, a bill ...
Blog

U.S. Pharmaceutical Spending Is Below Average?

For the 30 nations that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which promotes policies to improve the well-being of people around the world, pharmaceutical spending comprised, on average, 16.9 percent of total health care spending as of 2015. The OECD defines pharmaceutical spending as the expenditures on ...
Commentary

Piecemeal Repeal Is The Least Bad Obamacare Option

The demise of the Senate’s “skinny” repeal of Obamacare may be a blessing in disguise. Nobody should have mistaken that measure for genuine repeal of the Affordable Care Act — much less for the free-market healthcare reform that most of the GOP has long clamored for. Yet the collapse of ...
Business & Economics

Obstacles To Cutting Edge Cancer Treatments

Disincentives plague the U.S. health care system, driving costs higher and the quality of care lower. Improving health outcomes requires reforms that remove these disincentives. With respect to health insurers, this means returning payers to their proper role of providing effective risk management services to patients. In contrast to other ...
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