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Health Care Policy Studies
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Health Care Bill’s 1099 Reporting Burdens Businesses
By Curtis Dubay, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 09/10/2010
One the most troubling policies in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a new requirement that businesses report more information on their activities to the Internal Revenue Service. This new requirement will force businesses to divert scarce resources to complying with additional bureaucratic red tape that they could better use creating new jobs.
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Government Greed, Not Human Need, Drives the Growth of Medicaid
By John R. Graham, Pacific Research InstituteHealth Policy Prescriptions, 08/26/2010
Medicaid is the joint federal-state program that funds health care for low-income Americans. Since its creation four and a half decades ago, Medicaid spending has accelerated out of control, largely because of the formula: The federal government must pay at least 50 percent of a state’s Medicaid costs, which creates an extraordinarily perverse incentive. For the governor or state legislator who gets federal funds, Medicaid offers “free” money. We have previously argued that the short-term solution is to convert the funding formula, known as FMAP (Federal Medical Assistance Percentages), to a per-head block grant to the states. Unfortunately, things have been moving in the wrong direction.
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Deregulating Health Insurance and Health Care Providers in North Carolina
By Joseph Coletti, John Locke FoundationPolicy Report, 08/26/2010
North Carolina policymakers should eliminate provider licensing, certificate-of-need laws, and mandated health insurance benefits. Short of this, the state can accept alternative forms of credentialing and ensure consumers have the right to purchase optional benefits at additional cost.
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How Obamacare Empowers the Medicare Bureaucracy: What Seniors and Their Doctors Should Know
By Clete DiGiovanni, Robert Moffit, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 08/25/2010
The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (PPACA) is projected to yield $575 billion in Medicare savings over the next 10 years, mostly from Medicare payment reductions to doctors, hospitals, and health plans. But beneath these payment reductions, the PPACA also makes statutory changes that could challenge the autonomy of physicians to treat patients as they think best, undercut the freedom of physicians to remain in private practice, and threaten the continuation of fee-for-service medicine regardless of the preferences of doctors and patients.
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The Impact of Federal Health Care Reform on Young Adults in Washington State
By Roger Stark, Washington Policy CenterPolicy Note, 08/19/2010
The biggest impact on the younger generation is the high level of deficit spending by the federal government. Deficits simply pass the government’s current cost from the older generation to the younger. The 18- to 34-year-olds are already facing an unfunded liability burden from Social Security and Medicare of more than $100 trillion. The new federal health care law will continue to add to this liability, and will adversely affect the younger generation’s standard of living and quality of life.
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Consumer Power: 5 Lessons from Utah’s Heath Care Reform
By Gregg Girvan, The Heritage FoundationBackgrounder, 08/19/2010
Obamacare is on the march, and state policymakers must decide by 2014 how they will respond to this encroachment on states’ rights to control their own health insurance markets. The state of Utah has been on the reform path since 2005. With its system of defined contributions (as opposed to the standard defined benefits), a functioning health insurance exchange, and appropriate risk-adjustment mechanisms, Utah has given its workers the freedom to choose among many health plans with different levels of benefits, instead of remaining tied to the one-size-fits-all approach dictated by Washington. The Heritage Foundation has discerned five distinct lessons that the other 49 states can learn from Utah’s experience. The time for learning—and for action—is now.
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Taking Control of the Health Care Debate: Avoiding the Mistakes of the 1990s
By John Shadegg , Robert Moffit, Grace-Marie Turner, Michael Franc, The Heritage FoundationHeritage Lecture, 08/12/2010
The reason that America needs health care reform, and the reason that the cost of health care is going up dramatically faster than we can afford and faster than everything else in the economy, is that government has broken the system. The health care system we have today is a product of policy decisions that were made in the 1990s, but it is also true that the debate on those decisions was decisive in 1994 in effecting a political revolution. Today, with enactment of the Obama health care plan, conservatives once again have such an opportunity, but merely replicating the posture of the 1990s is not enough. They have to pursue an aggressive, consequential health care reform proposal that will positively affect the lives of millions of Americans. It is equally important that Members of Congress, who represent the American people, do their will and fix this program and at the same time preserve individual freedom and personal choice.
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Medicare Trustees Issue Report Disavowed by Chief Actuary
By J.D. Foster, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 08/10/2010
Obamacare was enacted on the basis of a great many dubious and implausible assumptions. These assumptions now permeate the traditional analysis of Medicare as presented in the annual Trustees’ Report, rendering the document largely useless and little more than dense propaganda. Medicare continues to be a critical program for the nation’s seniors, continues to be grossly unaffordable as currently constructed, and continues to pose a clear and present danger to the nation’s financial health. It will be reformed because it cannot continue as is. The sooner Congress and the President cease their political games and get about the serious business of Medicare reform, the sooner the danger will subside.
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When You Need a Hospital, Will It Be There?: The Stifling Impact of Illinois’s Certificate of Need Program
By Illinois Policy Institute, Illinois Policy InstituteSpotlight, 08/10/2010
As costs of health care rise, Illinois needs to re-evaluate the state’s health care system to ensure the system best serves citizens’ needs. High regulatory barriers to entry create an anticompetitive environment and long travel times to hospitals—issues that can literally be a matter of life and death. In addition, rather than keeping health care costs down, Certificate of Need programs can actually have the opposite effect, creating scarcity and ramping up prices for people who need health care. Removing this bureaucratic process for approving health facilities will also remove opportunities for political corruption in the health care realm—and, most importantly, increase health care access throughout the state.
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Massachusetts Shows Federal Reform Headed for Trouble
By Grace-Marie Turner, Galen InstitutePaper, 08/03/2010
If Massachusetts is a harbinger—and all evidence indicates it is—the new federal health overhaul legislation is headed for serious trouble. Massachusetts and the federal government built their reform efforts using similar architectural plans—strict regulation of health insurance, mandates on individuals and businesses, expensive new taxpayer-funded subsidies, and a major expansion of Medicaid—and both share a central structural flaw in failing to address rising health costs. Health reform in the Bay State has increased demand without increasing the supply of health care providers, it continues to keep people in the dark about the true cost of health care and health insurance, and has not changed incentives for people to seek more affordable options or for a truly competitive marketplace. Washington’s health overhaul law has the same structural flaws.
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Health Care Features
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The Benjamin Rush Society: Doctors for Health Care Freedom
March 01, 2010
Pacific Research Institute President Sally Pipes started the Benjamin Rush Society after realizing that medical schools have the same problem as other institutions of higher learning: They tend to transmit, with little critical examination, the leftist faith in centralized control over society. On health care policy, that faith works out...
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The Government’s Health Care Fraud Problem: Why a Public Option Is Hazardous to Your Health and Pocketbook
By Merrill Matthews and Meredith R. MatthewsSeptember 09, 2009
The following article is excerpted from the Center for Health Transformation’s excellent new book Stop Paying the Crooks: Solutions to End the Fraud that Threatens Your Healthcare www.healthtransformation.net. As the book reveals—and as Merrill Matthews and Meredith Matthews note in our excerpt below—fighting health care fraud is an enormous opportunity...
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Fix Health Care by Tackling “the Wedge”
By Arthur Laffer, Donna Arduin, and Wayne WinegardenSeptember 09, 2009
President Barack Obama has stated: “Soaring health care costs make our current course unsustainable.” And he’s right. The growth in per capita expenditures on health care has exceeded the growth in overall consumer prices every year for nearly the past 50 years. Such a trend cannot continue forever. The President’s...
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Denying Care in Britain
By Helen EvansJune 01, 2009
For the British government, the practice of health technology assessment facilitates rationing by delay. It is a tool that aims to ensure that expensive new technologies are initially provided only in hospitals that have the technical capacity to evaluate them. While the National Health Service Research and Development Health Technology...
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Denying Care: How Comparative Effectiveness Research Really Works
By Peter J. PittsJune 01, 2009
If knowledge is power, then what are we to make of various proposals to fund federal research on the comparative effectiveness of different medical treatments? Surely we want those purchasing health care to have the best available information about what works and what doesn’t, right? The problem is that the...
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The Myth of Efficient Government Health Care
By Sally PipesJune 01, 2009
In August 2008, the prestigious British medical journal Lancet Oncology published the results of an extraordinary study. The study found that America is much better at treating cancer than Europe or Canada. As it turns out, Americans have a better survival rate for 13 of the 16 most common cancers....
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Health Care Consumers Know Something Government Planners Don't
By John GoodmanJanuary 16, 2008
Many, many years ago, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote an article about asymmetry of information in medical care (your doctor knows more than you do). Since then, countless textbook authors, op-ed writers, and policy wonks have seized on Arrow’s observation to argue that a free market will not...
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Truly Caring For This Nation's Most Needy?
By Star ParkerApril 01, 2003
As a rebellious teenager, I broke into houses, torched my teachers’ cars, abused drugs and sex, all just for kicks. Abortion was my birth control and welfare was supposed to be my savior. After all, welfare was created to save people like me, right? By age 22, I had my...
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Welfare Reform Critics Were Wrong
By Robert E. RectorApril 01, 2003
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D–N.Y., apparently was in no mood to mince words that day in 1996 when he described the welfare-reform bill that had just been enacted by a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. Requiring welfare recipients to work and limiting the length of time they could collect...
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From Personal Autonomy to Dependence on Government
By Charlotte A. TwightMarch 01, 2002
Today a nation whose people more than two hundred years ago fought a revolutionary war over comparatively low taxation by the British stands passively by while its governments seize more than one third of everything Americans produce each year, burdening us with marginal tax rates often exceeding 50 percent. Total...
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