Health Care Innovation

Healthcare is back on the agenda in Washington. Last week, President Joe Biden released his budget proposal, which includes billions in new taxes and price controls on prescription drugs to help avert Medicare’s fiscal crisis and underwrite billions in health insurance subsidies. But in a divided Congress, it’s unlikely to go anywhere. Instead, lawmakers need ...

What’s the difference between getting an x-ray at the hospital and getting one at the doctor’s office? The former could cost a lot more than the latter. Medicare often reimburses hospitals more than it pays doctor’s offices for the same procedure. Hospitals claim these payment differentials are necessary because they are subject ...

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is now learning fortunes can change quickly in the Golden State. Less than a year ago, Newsom was celebrating a projected $100 billion budget surplus — a fiscal boon that prompted the governor and legislature to craft a budget exceeding $300 billion. Now, California faces a $22.5 billion ...

Experts from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission , and the American Medical Association just released a paper urging Congress to peel back the Affordable Care Act’s restrictions on creating and expanding physician-owned hospitals. Their analysis is correct. Such hospitals inject much-needed competition into the healthcare market. Consequently, repealing restrictions on them could help ...

The House of Representatives returns to Washington this week. Some of the chamber’s Republicans have begun to make noise about health reform. In a recent opinion piece for The Hill, Rep. Michael Burgess, a medical doctor from Texas, and co-author Eric Hargan, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services during the ...

President Biden hit the road last week to castigate Republicans for supposedly proposing to make healthcare more expensive. The president is upset that Republicans want to undo the innovation-destroying price controls on prescription drugs included in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and rein in the billions of dollars in subsidies he’s handing out ...

Should the government put a price on human life? The new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., doesn’t think so. She recently introduced legislation alongside several of her colleagues to ban the use of “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs, in federal healthcare programs. A QALY ...

One month into the new Congress and it’s already clear that neither party will make much progress advancing their vision for healthcare reform. States are grabbing the baton. Colorado, Nevada, and Washington have all passed laws establishing a public health insurance option. Others, such as New Mexico and Minnesota, are ...

Americans are getting squeezed by rising health care costs. The latest numbers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show that patient out-of-pocket spending increased by 10.4% in 2021, a rate not seen for more than three decades. The cost of monthly health insurance premiums also leapt, by 6.5%. ...