California is studying a single payer system. It is doing the homework to make explicit the assumptions that are needed to make the system work. Modern Healthcare has some details: SB562 would guarantee health coverage with no out-of-pocket costs for all California residents, including people living in the country illegally. The state would contract with …
AHCA and Autoenrollment
There has been talk that the Senate is talking about auto-enrollment as the Senate Republican caucus is chewing over the AHCA bill that the House passed. I think there are two major show stoppers to auto-enrollment in a Senate Republican reconciliation bill. Let us assume that any auto-enrollment process looks something like that in Cassidy-Collins. …
Auto-enrollment trade-offs
Sarah Kliff at Vox highlights one area of plausible discussion among liberals and some conservative Senators on health care. She looks at the idea of automatic enrollment with opt-outs from a catastrophic plan. This idea is part of Cassidy-Collins state option. Republican legislators and policy experts are kicking around a novel way to increase health …
Market power strikes again
An interesting paper in Health Services Research by Dr. Seidu Dauda* looks at market power between payers and providers to tease out the effects of increasing concentration on prices. The effect that is actually being measured is how does the changing relationship of market power between payers and providers change prices. The results aren’t surprising. …
Medicaid in the President’s budget request
The Department of Health and Human Services accidentally leaked their own budget this evening. Bob Herman at Axios saved a copy. The biggest aspect of the budget is it laid out another $600 billion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and CHIP over ten years in addition to the $820 billion in Medicaid cuts in the …
Medicaid in the President’s budget requestPost + Comments (56)
Rewind the timer to 90 days
The Cost Sharing Reduction suit, House vs Price, had a status meeting this morning in front of the DC Court of Appeals. Nothing much happened. Both parties asked for another ninety day extension. Yes, House v. Price will be delayed for 90 days. But Congress can still appropriate the money — and Trump can still …
Actually, this is a good bill
The Senate is actually working on a good healthcare bill. No, not the AHCA or the doppelganger of the AHCA. The Chronic Act is winding its way through the committee process. This bill is full of little technical corrections to Medicare and tweaks for experiments. Let’s look at what’s happening in it. Section 101 expands …