Healthcare

Last week, the Senate voted to continue a filibuster against the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act of 2005. Here’s what the bill would do if passed. Like all significant legislation relating to health insurance in America, this act relates to one of the most incomprehensible laws on the books — the Employment Retirement…

At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru offers his analysis of the Massachusetts healthcare plan, and offers a few suggestions to Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney…The governor has the ability to make modifications to this legislation through a line-item veto. He should use it to eliminate the mandates on coverage, strike the business taxes, and get rid…

Projo columnist David A. Mittell likes the Massachusetts universal health care plan even less than I do. Among other things, Mittell is concerned that using government regulation to force people to buy an inferior quality insurance product seems to be more of a giveaway to big insurance companies than it is good healthcare policy. Here…

According to Pam Belluck in the New York Times…Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to provide nearly universal health care coverage with a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature Tuesday that Gov. Mitt Romney says he will sign.The plan is a complex mixture of mandatory coverage requirements, tax incentives, and although Ms. Belluck…

In Slate magazine, Michael Kinsley responds to a Paul Krugman/Robin Wells article in the New York Review of Books that argues that complete government control of healthcare — where the government is the only insurance company, and maybe even all doctors work directly for the government — is the only system of healthcare delivery that…

The Providence Business News article by Marion Davis on healthcare pricing also discusses legislation introduced at the behest of Governor Carcieri…Gov. Donald L. Carcieri this year is pushing for legislation to require health plans to disclose to patients the negotiated amounts they pay to providers for services, procedures, tests, drugs or supplies that are subject…

Marion Davis has an interesting article in this week’s Providence Business News that discusses the maze of factors involved in healthcare pricing. One section of the article discusses how hospitals seem not to like the health-savings account/high deductible insurance combination because they don’t want to deal with some basic record-keeping that would be involved…Hospital officials…

The next two problem/solution pairs proposed in Steve Laffey’s plan to remedy high drug costs concern different aspects of the problem of regulation. (The first two problem/solution pairs are discussed here) . 1. The first issue is the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration…Today’s Problem: FDA regulates drugs foremost on…

The most difficult part of Steve Laffey’s campaign platform for the traditional Republican base to swallow (so to speak) has been his promise to “fight the big drug companies”. On Monday, Mayor Laffey laid out in detail his plan to remedy high drug costs. (Katherine Gregg and Jim Baron both provide good tastes of the…

…Continued from the previous post. Health insurers saw in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) an incentive to sell as much insurance through employers as possible, because ERISA insulated them from any liability greater than the actual costs of treatments. This aspect of the law was the key factor in making employer-based…