Quote of the Day

This report from Canada demonstrates one of the more important functions of a well designed single payer system. To ensure access while preventing impoverishment, financing must be redistributive, because health care costs are unaffordable for moderate and low income individuals and families.

Of those who are serious about health care reform, some want to abandon the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and immediately enact single payer, and others want to abandon the single payer cause and move full steam ahead with implementation of the ACA. But should we really abandon either approach?

Now we know that the private Medicare plans have been overpaid $282 billion in taxpayer funds. The Obama administration has continued to add to the overpayments by expanding eligibility for extra quality award payments to which the plans were not entitled, and by using a bookkeeping gimmick for suspended SGR adjustments. Congress and the administration, in using our taxpayer funds to reward this unprincipled industry, should pay a political price for their misdeeds.

Every expert understands the pressing need to reinforce our primary care infrastructure - a need that grows more urgent with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The inevitable transformation into a single payer system will be much smoother if we already have a high-performance primary care infrastructure in place.

Which comes first, economic theory or policy? Intuitively, it seems that a solid understanding of economics should form the basis for developing policies. The obvious flaw is that economics is not a hard science, allowing you flexibility to choose economic theory that conforms to whatever policy you favor.

The Oregon Experiment unequivocally demonstrates that Medicaid improves access to care and provides considerable financial protection for the low-income population that it serves. Although it was not powered to demonstrate statistically significant improvements in health outcomes, a multitude of other research studies have already confirmed that the health-care interventions studied here are clinically effective.

This newest report on recommending changes to control health care costs is being presented as a "bipartisan" consensus representing "broad agreement" on reform. Those who have followed the national policy dialogue will recognize that the list of authors does, in fact, include representatives of both major political parties. Nevertheless, the views presented in the report confirms the presumption that these Democratic authors have moved into the Republican camp in the policy debate.

One of the most important design features of the Affordable Care Act was that the employer-sponsored sector of health care coverage was to be largely left alone since allegedly it was functioning so well - not only covering the largest sector of our population, but also an important source of health care financing that was already in place. What could possible go wrong with this strategy?

With a major trend expanding in the direction of employer-sponsored consumer-driven health care, this new Aflac report shows that workers are not ready for the change. If you look only at the financial challenge, workers may never be ready. They cannot afford to pay the out-of-pocket expenses that they would face should they or their families develop significant medical problems.