Health Care

A benefit mandate is simply a state law that requires a health plan to pay for (or at least offer) a specified treatment, but there is nothing simple about quantifying the costs of such mandates. This paper reviews 28 original actuarial and econometric articles that attempt to estimate the cost ...

Health Care News, Heartland Institute (Chicago, IL), July 1, 2008 As many as 90,000 eligible children in Maryland are not enrolled in the state’s subsidized health insurance program, according to state estimates, despite several expensive and lengthy marketing campaigns commissioned by the state government. This element of the uninsured population ...

PRI released a new paper today, which examines one critical area where states interfere in residents’ ability to buy health insurance of their choosing. According to From Heart Transplants to Hairpieces: The Questionable Benefits of State Benefit Mandates for Health Insurance, benefit mandates increase health insurance premiums, reduce wages, increase ...

Health officials in Maryland are working with state Comptroller Peter Franchot to identify children eligible for, but not enrolled in, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The comptroller’s office will use state income tax records to locate families whose incomes qualify their children for enrollment. The heads of eligible ...

Health Care News, Heartland Institute (Chicago, IL), July 1, 2008 Government-run health care has imposed huge costs on patients and businesses by denying treatments and medications, despite the fact that the National Health System ran a $4.67 billion surplus in 2007. According to a report by the National Center for ...

California politicians like Senator Sheila Kuehl believe that they can run health care better than Californians themselves can. Here’s a question for anyone tempted to believe this: Will the government-monopoly health care “system” work better or worse than Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program? The news on Medi-Cal gets grimmer by ...

We’ve all heard the statistic “47 million Americans do not have health insurance” as an underlying argument for massive health care reform. But did you know that 57 percent of the 47 million uninsured have annual incomes above $50,000? Or that two-thirds of the 47 million are between the ages ...

California’s budget crisis has caused Gov. Schwarzenegger to propose putting the brakes on Medi-Cal’s out-of-control, autopilot, growth. Of course, the governor is only doing it because California law requires him to close the deficit. Once he’s patched it for this year, he’ll be back on the bandwagon, selling his intrusive ...

The California Medical Association has released its annual ranking of the state’s health plans. No, the ranking does not measure health plans by the degree to which their reimbursement policies hew to medically recognized standards of care, which I believe most laymen would consider a public service. Instead, they’ve measured ...