Health Care
Commentary
Medicare Benefits Fall Short of Employer-Provided Health Care Plans
Employer-provided health plans provide more generous benefits to seniors than Medicare does, according to an analysis conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Lincolnshire, Illinois-based Hewitt Associates. The study compared the traditional fee-for-service Medicare benefit package, including the prescription drug benefit, with typical large employer-provided health plans. The study found ...
Commentary
Medical Licensing Impedes Quality, Affordability of Care
Medical licensing is ineffective and inefficient, and patients would be better served by relying on brand recognition when choosing their doctors, writes Shirley Svorny in a new report for the Cato Institute. “In health care, we haven’t used brand names because people have been trusting licensure,” Svorny told Health Care ...
Commentary
Bush’s Final Medicaid Reform Increases Patient Responsibility
The Bush Administration’s (or the Bush “regime’s”, if you prefer) theme in Medicaid reform has been to give states more flexibility in how they operate their Medicaid programs, despite the federal government paying over half the cost. In its (likely) final hurrah, the Administration recently published Medicaid rules allowing states ...
California
House Committee Considers Tax Breaks for Individual Health Insurance
Health Care News (Heartland Institute), December 1, 2008 Members of the U.S. House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee are debating the merits of enacting tax breaks for individuals who buy private insurance, which would put them on equal tax footing with employers who purchase insurance for their employees. The committee ...
Business & Economics
Impact – November 2008
PRI Ideas in Action – November 2008 Policy Update and Monthly Impact Report PRI continues to impact public policy in California, the nation, and abroad. Click below to view PRI’s recent contributions. Read PDF
Business & Economics
San Francisco Tax Hike Cannot Help Public Health Bureaucracy
Don’t get me wrong: of all the various byzantine agencies that comprise the massive (and growing) government intervention in American health care, counties’ public-health agencies are probably my favorite (or, perhaps to assuage the arch-libertarian readers, “the least harmful”). They do things like inspecting restaurants for cleanliness, watching out for ...
Commentary
Medicaid Contributes To Medical Bankruptcy
The Wall Street Journal ran a disturbing story about the increasing number of people unable to pay medical bills. Some are even having to sell homes in a bad market to raise cash. Of course, the health care and political elites always interpret such harrowing tales as signals to increase ...
Commentary
Rx for healthcare: Do no harm
Caroline, an American, met her soul-mate in graduate school. After she and her beloved earned their degrees, they married and decided to begin their life together in her husband’s native Germany. That was last year. Caroline has dealt, all her life, with a condition known as interstitial cystitis. An extremely ...
California
The Folly of California’s Taxpayer Funded Stem Cell Research
The Sacramento Bee has editorialized on a topic near to our hearts at PRI: stem cell research. Actually, stem cell research itself is “above our paygrade” as the President-elect might say. Nevertheless, we have an intense interest in the whereabouts of $3 billion that Californian voters approved to fund embryonic ...
Commentary
Arizona’s Prop 101: It’s Always Darkest Before It Goes Totally Black
Before the election, I concluded that Sen. McCain had a health care plan which would have allowed states and families more freedom to choose health care that they prefer, instead of that which the federal government prefers. Sen. Obama’s choice of Dr. Tom Daschle as the next U.S. Secretary of ...
Medicare Benefits Fall Short of Employer-Provided Health Care Plans
Employer-provided health plans provide more generous benefits to seniors than Medicare does, according to an analysis conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Lincolnshire, Illinois-based Hewitt Associates. The study compared the traditional fee-for-service Medicare benefit package, including the prescription drug benefit, with typical large employer-provided health plans. The study found ...
Medical Licensing Impedes Quality, Affordability of Care
Medical licensing is ineffective and inefficient, and patients would be better served by relying on brand recognition when choosing their doctors, writes Shirley Svorny in a new report for the Cato Institute. “In health care, we haven’t used brand names because people have been trusting licensure,” Svorny told Health Care ...
Bush’s Final Medicaid Reform Increases Patient Responsibility
The Bush Administration’s (or the Bush “regime’s”, if you prefer) theme in Medicaid reform has been to give states more flexibility in how they operate their Medicaid programs, despite the federal government paying over half the cost. In its (likely) final hurrah, the Administration recently published Medicaid rules allowing states ...
House Committee Considers Tax Breaks for Individual Health Insurance
Health Care News (Heartland Institute), December 1, 2008 Members of the U.S. House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee are debating the merits of enacting tax breaks for individuals who buy private insurance, which would put them on equal tax footing with employers who purchase insurance for their employees. The committee ...
Impact – November 2008
PRI Ideas in Action – November 2008 Policy Update and Monthly Impact Report PRI continues to impact public policy in California, the nation, and abroad. Click below to view PRI’s recent contributions. Read PDF
San Francisco Tax Hike Cannot Help Public Health Bureaucracy
Don’t get me wrong: of all the various byzantine agencies that comprise the massive (and growing) government intervention in American health care, counties’ public-health agencies are probably my favorite (or, perhaps to assuage the arch-libertarian readers, “the least harmful”). They do things like inspecting restaurants for cleanliness, watching out for ...
Medicaid Contributes To Medical Bankruptcy
The Wall Street Journal ran a disturbing story about the increasing number of people unable to pay medical bills. Some are even having to sell homes in a bad market to raise cash. Of course, the health care and political elites always interpret such harrowing tales as signals to increase ...
Rx for healthcare: Do no harm
Caroline, an American, met her soul-mate in graduate school. After she and her beloved earned their degrees, they married and decided to begin their life together in her husband’s native Germany. That was last year. Caroline has dealt, all her life, with a condition known as interstitial cystitis. An extremely ...
The Folly of California’s Taxpayer Funded Stem Cell Research
The Sacramento Bee has editorialized on a topic near to our hearts at PRI: stem cell research. Actually, stem cell research itself is “above our paygrade” as the President-elect might say. Nevertheless, we have an intense interest in the whereabouts of $3 billion that Californian voters approved to fund embryonic ...
Arizona’s Prop 101: It’s Always Darkest Before It Goes Totally Black
Before the election, I concluded that Sen. McCain had a health care plan which would have allowed states and families more freedom to choose health care that they prefer, instead of that which the federal government prefers. Sen. Obama’s choice of Dr. Tom Daschle as the next U.S. Secretary of ...
