Healthcare
Safeway CEO Stephen Burd explains: While comprehensive health-care reform needs to address a number of other key issues, we believe that personal responsibility and financial incentives are the path to a healthier America. By our calculation, if the nation had adopted our approach in 2005, the nation’s direct health-care bill would be $550 billion less…
Who knew finding twelve digits of savings in the healthcare industry would be this easy? The administration expects to achieve the lowered hospital payments in two major ways. First, said Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, payments to hospitals will be reduced to try to encourage them to work more productively and efficiently. Orszag said hospitals…
James Poulus observes: I’ve said elsewhere that our vision of politics is being corrupted by a well-meaning but misguided epistemology of compassion: increasingly, we consider the person or group demanding a right to be the most trustworthy source of information about whether they deserve it. Anyone aggrieved, we think, must really be suffering grief, and…
That’s being a Congressman, for ya. Patrick Kennedy hopes to get back to work from a mental health retreat “in time for the… debate on a national health-care overhaul later in the summer.” Presumably, he needn’t expend any hope on whether the checks from his $174,000 salary will keep arriving, whether or not he manages…
Blogger Keith Hennessey, a former White House Senior Economic advisor, has been providing details of the various Federal healthcare reform proposals under consideration, as they become available. His summary of what he’s seen so far is…The government would mandate not only that you must buy health insurance, but what health insurance counts as “qualifying.” Health…
It isn’t difficult to predict the effects of this. On one side: A first-ever tax on employer-provided health benefits also figures prominently among options under consideration in Congress, but Obama campaigned against that last year and its inclusion in the bill would require him to reverse course. … … Private companies would be barred from…
Long wait times will likely be more characteristic than lotteries, but somehow this strikes me as an extreme vision of the future of healthcare for the average American in a government-run system: At 4 p.m., volunteers from the clinic came out with a roll of carnival-style paper tickets. They handed each person a ticket and…
What’s vexing is that Herchell Talan of North Kingstown has the basic principle right but comes to a statist conclusion anyway: In the past 13 years, health-insurance companies have merged with each other at a frightening rate, and now a small number of companies dominate local markets. Rhode Island basically has two insurers: Blue Cross…
Our healthcare system is on life support. While the career politicians in Washington have done little, too many Rhode Islanders remain underinsured or uninsured. The system is characterized by rising costs, quality concerns and a lack of patient control. These problems hit the poor and the elderly hardest. One of the chief reasons is that…
Remember that big announcement by President Obama earlier this week that got a ton of coverage? Barack Obama praised the health care industry’s promise to cut $2 trillion in costs over 10 years Monday, taking a sharply different course than President Bill Clinton did 16 years ago in an opening bid to overhaul the U.S.…