The Obama Health Care Plan: More Power to Washington
Senator Barack Obama’s health care plan is laden with new regulations and government authority that would leave Americans with even less control of their health care dollars than they exercise today. A better course would be to transfer control of health care dollars to individuals and families, both to empower individuals to make informed choices and to enable the marketplace to respond rapidly to their needs and wants.
The McCain Health Care Plan: More Power to Families
Senator John McCain has proposed an ambitious health care reform agenda that focuses on four key objectives: making health insurance innovative, portable, and affordable; ensuring care for high-risk patients; lowering health care costs; and confronting long-term care challenges. These goals are meaningful, and McCain’s policy measures would advance greater personal choice and control in the health care system.
The Baucus Health Reform Plan: A Starting Point for Serious Discussion
Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has just unveiled a comprehensive health plan. This is a welcome development in that it puts some flesh on the bones of ideas that have been circulating in policy circles.
Consumer Direction in Medicaid and Opportunities for States
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services published a final Medicaid rule that permits Medicaid recipients to self-direct their own health care and supportive services. The rule is a great victory for persons with disabilities.
The McCain Health Care Plan: A Closer Look at Cost and Coverage
John McCain’s health care plan would reduce the number of uninsured and help control costs, yet it would, as currently designed, require considerable increases in federal expenditures.
A Federalist Approach To Health Reform: The Worst Way, Except For All The Others
Support for state action should be part of any strategy to expand health insurance coverage. Decades-long political deadlock in Washington has frustrated national efforts to expand coverage. Some states have already undertaken to do this; others show a determination to do so. Regulatory and legislative flexibility would trigger widespread state action. Whether one thinks that ensuring coverage requires a unified national approach or that diverse conditions require different methods in different states, the likelihood of progress will be advanced if states test out various ways to expand coverage.
How Federalism Could Spur Bipartisan Action On The Uninsured
A way to end the political impasse and make progress on covering uninsured Americans.
Evolving Beyond Traditional Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance
For most working-age families, health insurance coverage is directly connected to the workplace. But because of structural weaknesses in this traditional form of coverage, it is steadily eroding, especially for workers in the small business sector. The health insurance system needs to evolve along a different path if it is to adapt to the goals and needs of today’s workforce. Unfortunately, existing laws and insurance arrangements obstruct that evolution. Three key steps are needed to achieve a gradual transformation without disrupting the successful parts of the system.
Building Public Support for Slowing the Growth of Health Care Spending
The task of moving from policy proposal to successful legislation means navigating the waters of public opinion that influences practical politics. This is true of all areas of policy, of course, but health care waters are especially turbulent. Health care is intensely personal and costly for families, and even small policy changes have potentially huge financial implications for them as well as other stakeholders. If successful ways of addressing the health spending challenge are to be devised, it is critical to reflect on the underlying values and moral choices associated with any policy approach.
Think Small
In this installment of Health Care Watch, Stuart M. Butler and Ezekiel Emanuel talk about what President-elect Barack Obama should and shouldn't do on health care reform.
Exchange We Can Believe In
The president-elect didn't invent the idea of a health exchange. He came up with his own version of an idea that's been refined by people like us at the Heritage Foundation and already field tested. Frankly, we prefer the original.
Candidates' competing prescriptions for health care
Approximately 47 million Americans lack health coverage. It's a huge problem.
Forced Into an Unhealthy Choice
Can you imagine the government forcing you to take benefits you didn’t want? How about a situation where you'd have to sue the government to get out of taking those benefits?
Deflate balloon of entitlements
The Wall Street meltdown has sent shock waves through the economy. But it's nothing compared to what's coming if Washington fails to address - properly and soon - its unfunded obligations for Medicare, Social Security and other federal entitlement programs.
Campaign Stops Blog
Stuart M. Butler - NYTimes.com
Health Care Experts Blog
Stuart M. Butler - National Journal Online
The Massachusetts Approach: A New Way To Restructure State Health Insurance Markets And Public Programs
In April 2006, Massachusetts enacted legislation to reorganize both its health insurance markets and a large portion of its health care subsidy system. In this paper we consider how the Massachusetts approach differs from most previous state health reform efforts, while also noting its antecedents. We examine the policy implications of the legislation’s key elements and discuss how other states might consider altering the scope and specifics of those components. We conclude that both parts of the Massachusetts reform strategy merit consideration by other states and together hold promise for expanding coverage, particularly by addressing the problem of coverage discontinuity.
Not Even Higher Payments Can Help Medicaid
It’s widely known that while there is some variation, in most states Medicaid reimburses physicians at significantly lower rates than private insurers. As we’ve previously highlighted, research indicates that these low rates of payment affect physicians’ decisions to treat Medicaid patients. While low reimbursement is a serious problem in Medicaid that ultimately compromises access and thus Read More...
Just Say No to the Medicaid Bailout
Senate leaders are preparing yet another big bailout package, this time for states in the form of increased federal matching rate for the $350 billion Medicaid program. If enacted, this would be the second time in less than ten years that Congress provided a “temporary” increase in the federal Medicaid match. Rather than increasing Read More...
How Will Election Day Change the Health Care Reform Debate?
National Journal’s health care experts’ blog today asked its contributors how the health care reform debate will change after Americans cast their votes tomorrow. Heritage’s Stuart Butler, vice president for domestic and economic policy studies, weighs in with this answer: It would indeed be wise for all those committed to major health reform to be cautious Read More...
Medicare’s Low Administrative Costs Strike Again
As we’ve documented before, one of the major selling points liberals deploy when arguing for socialized medicine is how much government run health care will save Americans in administrative costs. And it is true: Medicare does not spend nearly as much on oversight as private insurance does managing claims. But that lack of oversight comes Read More...
The Greatest Trick the Socialists Ever Pulled
Attempting to answer whether or not “Barack Obama supports Socialized Medicine?” CATO’s Michael Cannon writes: Socialized medicine exists to the extent that government controls medical resources and socializes the costs. … What matters—what determines real as opposed to nominal ownership—is who controls the resources. The particular decisions that government makes about those resources are likewise irrelevant. Read More...
Health Care Plan 'Crowds Out' Family Coverage
- Health Care Plan 'Crowds Out' Family Coverage
- Percentage of Children with Private Health Insurance
- SCHIP Distribution of Children by Income Level
- SCHIP Eligibility Above 200 Percent of Federal Poverty Level
- SCHIP: No Child Left Off Welfare
- State Children's Health Insurance Program Plan Activity as of January 18, 2007
- States Exceeding 50 Percent Medicaid Threshold
- States that Cover Adults Under SCHIP
- Teens Who Wait Stay in School Longer
- The 'SCHIP Plus' Alternative: An 8-to-1 Win for Kids
- U.S. on collision course to 'socialized medicine'
BUTLER: Exchange We Can Believe In - Washington Times
Health care solutions will come at high price | NewsOK.com
Presidential Debate: Joe the Plumber and Health Care: McCain and Obama Argue About the Impact of Their Health Care Plans on Small Businesses and Families
Two Different Healthcare Proposals
Opinion | Op-Ed Criticizes National Health Board - Kaisernetwork.org
State and federal lawmakers are increasingly focusing on patient-centered health care reform that maximizes value for individuals and families so that they receive more benefit and better results for their health care dollars, both as patients and as consumers. If policymakers are serious about real patient-centered, consumer-driven health care reform, they should ensure that their legislative proposals embody six key principles:
Health Care Reform: Design Principles for a Patient-Centered,
Consumer-Based Market
State Health Reform: Six Key Tests
Another Round in the National Debate on Health Care Reform
While Americans are eagerly awaiting the details of President-Elect Barack Obama's health care reform proposal, it is well to recall the last national debate on health care reform: the debate over the 1993 Clinton Health Plan. While many of the issues are strikingly similar- rising costs, large numbers of Americans without health insurance and gaps in coverage- today the circumstances are different. One thing that has not changed is that popular support for broad goals- a slowing of health care costs and an expansion of health insurance coverage- does not automatically translate into popular support for specific health policy measures, particularly when the trade-offs embodied in those health policy measures are made transparent to the millions of Americans who would be affected by them. It is not “bumper sticker” slogans, but crucial details, that matter. Check out the Heritage Foundation's analysis of the 1993 Clinton Health Plan and its leading alternative, The Consumer Choice Health Security Act, based on major changes in the tax code, the insurance markets and principles of personal choice and competition.
- A Guide to the Clinton Health Plan
- A Progress Report on the Clinton Health Plan
- Consumer Choice Health Security Act S 174
- Issue Bulletin - How the Clinton and Nickles-Stearns Health Bills Would Affect American Workers
- Issue Bulletin - The Consumer Choice Health Security Act
- Lewin - Individual Tax Credit Program Estimate Cost and Impacts 1992
The Center for Health Policy Studies conducts thorough analyses and develops major policy prescriptions to address matters of affordability, insurance, and quality-of-care.
Analysts focus on initiatives that take advantage of free-market principles to expand the options available to patients and their families and provide policymakers with the information and other resources they need to create a patient-centered, consumer-driven health care system.
The Center displays this focus with activities that include:
- Testifying before Congress and state legislatures
- Conducting original research by both in-house and outside scholars,
- Hosting conferences for policy-makers, policy experts, journalists and researchers to discuss the implications of the latest health policy research findings;
- Conducting advanced, data-based simulations and analyses of state and federal health policy proposals in concert with the Center for Data Analysis (CDA)
- Developing an online clearinghouse of health policy information,
- Providing everything from "facts-at-a-glance" issue summaries to monographs, in-depth policy papers and detailed, analytical studies; and
- Working with state-level research institutes and public officials to craft innovative approaches to expand health coverage to the uninsured.
- More Than Hope: Policy for a Free and Just Society
- The Costs of Regulating Carbon Dioxide: What the EPA's Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Really Means
- With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics
- Pirates of the Gulf of Aden: How Piracy Plunders Maritime Security
- The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation
- The Future of Medicare Advantage
Read | Listen | Watch - Health Insurance Reform Elements: A Look at Wellness, Adverse Selection and Consumer Based Health Plans
Read | Listen | Watch - Health Care 2008: Big Government vs. Individual and Family Choice
Read | Listen | Watch - Is Racism the Real Culprit? What the Data Do and Don't Show
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