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Newsletters

Our newsletter features a commentary by Grace-Marie Turner on the major developments and issues of the week as well as summaries of writings by participants in the Health Policy Consensus Group and other articles of interest from the health policy world, plus announcements of coming events. It is emailed in an HTML format from the galen@galen.org email address, via Constant Contact, and you may have to adjust your email settings and junk mailbox to ensure that you don’t miss an issue.
August 7, 2009

Fear Factor

I've never seen anything like the anxiety about health reform that is erupting in town hall meetings around the country. To say this is manufactured or organized by anybody totally misses the point of the genuine fear that people are trying to get across to their legislative representatives. On this point alone, I agree with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who writes today that he "can't find any [previous] examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds."
Tags:
The Times, hospitals, NHS, Jessica Ho, Samuel Preston, survival rates, cancer rates, Hudson Institute, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, medical malpractice, William Schiffbauer, mandate, medical costs, PricewaterhouseCoopers, health insurance, Len Burman, Art Laffer, Medical Travel Today, Radio America, Twitter, AARP, tort reform, Charles Krauthammer, The Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel, The Washington Post, Steve Pearlstein, Paul Krugman, New York Times, town hall meetings
Categories:
Health Reform


June 12, 2009

Trouble Brewing

The first Democratic bill in the hopper this week came from Sen. Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, taking 615-pages to turn most of whatever is left of our private health sector over to government. The normally-genteel Sen. Orrin Hatch was quoted in The New York Times this morning as calling the bill "the most liberal bunch of gobbledygook I've seen in my life -- a complete liberal mishmash of ideas." Keith Hennessey, director of the National Economic Council under President Bush, was the first to present a detailed analysis, which you can find here.
Tags:
HELP bill, public plan, mandate, AMA, Senate Finance Committee, Medicare, Patients' Choice Act, Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn, comparative effectiveness research, Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, Massachusetts, Michael Tanner, Cato Institute, tax treatment of health insurance, Robert Helms, American Enterprise Institute, Tom Miller, Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Anderson, Pacific Research Institute, Scott Gottlieb, Coleen Klasmeier, Canada, David Gratzer, Manhattan Institute
Categories:
Health Reform


March 27, 2009

The 80% Rule

So much is happening on the health reform front in Washington this week that our heads are spinning, with legislators jockeying for control over procedures, timing, and the content of reform legislation. A number of key provisions in the legislation are clear. The White House and leaders in Congress want to create a new government health insurance plan. They want to impose a mandate that employers pay for health insurance for their workers.They want to create a new National Health Insurance Exchange as a vehicle for strict federal regulation of private health insurance and for distribution of new subsidies for individuals and businesses. They want to expand access to existing price-controlled government health programs. And they may impose a mandate that all individuals have health insurance.

 

Tags:
health reform, mandate, Natasha Richardson, Canada, medevac, comparative effectiveness, Raynard Kington, Milton Friedman, Phil Donahue, greed, Belleville News-Democrat, stimulus, Center of the American Experiment, Amy Menefee, portability, tax treatment of health insurance, John McCain, The Wall Street Journal, employer-based tax deduction, Massachusetts, Congressional Budget Office, The Washington Post, budget, Medicare, J.D. Foster, The Heritage Foundation, cancer, U.K., Europe, The Daily Mail, Eurocare-4, Karol Sikora
Categories:
Health Reform


February 13, 2009

Surreal Spending

The House is poised to take a final vote on the compromise $800-billion spending bill on, appropriately, Friday the 13th, with the Senate likely to follow soon after. In my 36 years in Washington, I have never seen such a surreal environment, with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed taxpayer money being spent without committee hearings or even meaningful public debate over the thousands of new and expanded programs the bill funds.
Tags:
stimulus, Medicaid, health information technology, COBRA, mandate, comparative effectiveness, William Winkenwerder, federal health board, innovation, President Bush, Newt Gingrich, Jim Frogue, Center for Health Transformation, HSAs, AHIP, Nadeem Esmail, Fraser Institute, Canada, Dennis Smith, The Heritage Foundation, entitlements,
Categories:
Health Reform


January 30, 2009

Stealth Reform

Congressional leaders are arguing over whether they'll get a comprehensive health reform bill passed this year or next. But, in fact, major health reform is speeding through Congress in two bills that are on the fast track to enactment -- SCHIP and the economic stimulus bill. Expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program to children in families well into middle-income ranges passed the Senate yesterday and will likely be signed into law by President Obama early next week.
Tags:
social contract, The Heritage Foundation, Stuart Butler, Dartmouth, Shannon Brownlee, John Wennberg, health care spending, International Policy Network, Philip Stevens, Julian Harris, counterfeit drugs, value, Accountable Care Organization, Mark McClellan, Health Affairs, Medicare, Manhattan Institute, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, George Will, U.S. health sector, innovation, TelaDoc, Aetna, Assurant Health, Grace-Marie Turner, stimulus, HIT, Tom Daschle, comparative effectiveness, COBRA, mandate, entitlement, SCHIP
Categories:
State Childrens Health Insurance Program


December 19, 2008

Follow the Money

All roads to new legislation in Washington run through the Congressional Budget Office, and the CBO yesterday offered health policy makers a menu of 115 choices of reform initiatives, with price tags attached. It's like a shopping list for policy makers, who, using our money, will mix and match ideas and offer new ones of their own.
Tags:
Congressional Budget Office, reform, estimates, tax treatment of health insurance, tax credits, HSAs, play or pay, mandate, reinsurance, Part D, Medicare, Medicaid, rebates, comparative effectiveness, AHPs, cross-state purchasing, U.K., Putting People First, Massachusetts, Boston Globe, private health insurance, Grace-Marie Turner, SCHIP, Joel White, Wyeth, prescription drugs, David Cutler, Health Affairs, James Capretta, Jindal, insurance, Robert Helms, Robert Moffit, federal health board, Ezekiel Emanuel, Ron Wyden, employment-based health insurance, health savings accounts, account-based health plans
Categories:
Health Reform


June 20, 2008

Wake-Up Calls

Key members of Congress got another wake-up call this week about the serious threat that rising government health spending poses to the future of our health sector — and our economy. During a summit sponsored on Monday at the Library of Congress by the Senate Finance Committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told members "The decisions we make about health care reform will affect many aspects of our economy, including the pace of economic growth, wages and living standards, and government budgets, to name a few."
Tags:
federal health board, single-payer, Assurant, TelaDoc, medical tourism, AMA, Bernanke, California, Leavitt, Medicare, Tom Miller, AEI, Grace-Marie Turner, mandate, business, Bob Moffit, Heritage, Medicare Advantage, medical costs, cost trends, PricewaterhouseCoopers, James Capretta, political primer, Canada, prescription drugs, Fraser Institute, Brett Skinner, Mark Rovere, Sally Satel, organ transplant
Categories:
Single Payer