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Obama Defends Bailouts, Handouts and Cop-Outs
1.26.2012
State of the Union addresses provide insight into the vision of America embraced by the president, and in that regard Tuesday's address by President Barack Obama didn't disappoint.
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Stop Rewarding Irresponsiblity
1.26.2012
During the State of the Union, President Obama called for a new era of responsibility, and declared that there will be “no bailouts,” yet he offered a supposed solution for the ongoing mortgage crisis that rewards irresponsibility by promising even more bailouts for “underwater” homeowners.
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Failure to Discuss Healthcare Reform Was Purposeful Lapse
1.26.2012
President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address included many important topics, but as far as physicians were concerned, he missed a key one: healthcare reform.
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Local Governments Face Bankruptcy Quandary
1.26.2012
Bankruptcy is the boogeyman haunting governments across America. It’s not a question of whether more cities will file for bankruptcy, but how many.
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What Are The Costs And Benefits of Patents for Prescription Drugs?
1.26.2012
On January 23, the Wall Street Journal hosted an interesting debate between Josh Bloom, Phd, of the American Council on Science and Health, and Dr. Else Torreele of the Open Society Foundation.
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California Schools Behind the Curve
1.24.2012
Gov. Jerry Brown said in his State of the State address that the so-called "declinists," those who worry about California's place in the nation and the world, are wrong. He pointed to areas where the state is supposedly ahead of rivals, like Texas, Massachusetts and New York.
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American Soldiers Deserve Cutting-Edge Health Care
1.24.2012
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently expounded upon the tough choices policymakers will face as they attempt to scale back the Pentagon’s budget. As Panetta put it, our leaders will have to consider not just the “weaponization, modernization side” of the military but “the human side” as well.
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National School Choice Week: The Middle Class Needs Choice, too
1.24.2012
It’s National School Choice Week and governors and legislators in a number of states have proposed increasing schooling options for low-income students attending low-performing schools.
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The road ahead on Obamacare repeal
1.20.2012
There's a case to be made that President Obama's reform package is not just bad policy, it's also of questionable constitutionality.
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Why is repealing Obamacare landing Republicans backburner?
1.20.2012
Amidst the flurry of political jockeying leading up to this week's GOP primary in South Carolina, a funny thing has happened: the importance of repealing Obamacare has faded from public attention.
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Big Government and Health-Care Stocks: A Happy Marriage?
What with the underwhelming market response to my previous article discussing the effect of the 2010 federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) on health insurers, I was pretty astonished (and relieved) to see Citigroup equity strategist Tobias Levkovich state many of the concerns which have occupied me.
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Leavitt: Most States Won't Have Exchanges By Deadline
Former U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services Mike Leavitt has announced that most states will not have Health Benefits Exchanges up and running by January 2014, when PPACA requires that they be covering patients who will have lost their employer-based benefits.
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Path Dependency in Medicare Reform
I first learned about path dependency when studying physics — but it surely applies to public policy, too. Despite the scholarly disputations about health reform, what drives most voters are not questions about the solvency of Medicare or beneficiaries’ access to care, but fear of change.
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Grim Reality of Medicare Reform
As one of the first conservatives to criticize Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform, I was pretty excited to read Andrew McCarthy’s spirited attack against the very existence of Medicare. According to McCarthy, it’s a wholesale scam, and he doesn’t mind telling everyone because he’s neither running for office nor responsible for getting anyone else elected.
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Politicizing Premiums Does Not Control Health Costs
Last week, an overwhelming majority of Connecticut legislators passed a bill, SB-11, that would give the executive branch the power to decide whether health plans should be allowed to increase their premiums at rates that keep pace with medical costs. Health plans may be a politically attractive target, but giving politicians the power to approve premiums causes other problems – and doesn’t even hold down rate increases.
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Will There Be Health Benefits Exchanges By 2014?
Despite advice from most free-market analysis, some Republican governors are executing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) by establishing Health Benefits Exchanges. These governors dislike PPACA, but they believe that exchanges can be vehicles for more choice than the federal law anticipates. But I think that the real news is how much difficulty states that want to implement PPACA as fast as possible are having. Read the entire article here.
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A Pfizer Break up? Maybe Not Such a Great Idea
In my second Forbes.com The Apothecary blog, I look again at the argument (supported by almost everyone on Wall Street) that Pfizer should be broken up. Certainly, there's a credible contrary view.
Read it here.
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Will Kathy Hochul Vote to Repeal Obamacare?
The surprise victory of the Democratic candidate in NY-26’s special election yesterday teaches a curious lesson: Seniors who rose up against Obamacare’s Medicare cuts at town-hall meetings in the summer of 2009 appear to have risen up against Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan in the spring of 2011.
Or maybe they didn't. Read more at National Review Online.
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Comparative-Effectiveness Research: How Many Lives Will It Cost?
I write a lot over at John Goodman's Health Policy Blog. For every original post, I also write about half a dozen comments on others' posts. I don't usually share the latter here.
However, I was interested to see Dr. Goodman's take on a new paper published by the Center for Medicines in the Public Interest, an outfit which is often tagged as simply a mouthpiece for Big Pharma. Here's what I wrote:
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A Pfizer Break Up? That Would Be Something
I have been afforded the great privilege of writing at Forbes Online. Avik Roy, an equity research analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. in New York City, has invited me to collaborate with him on his blog, The Apothecary, which has been hosted by Forbes for a few months.
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