Health plan premiums more than doubled in price since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) made health coverage, well, unaffordable. A 50-year-old with an ACA plan must pay 129% more today than a dozen years ago. During this same period, employee health plans rose in price by about half that amount (68%). This data is based on work by the Paragon Institute.
Category: Affordable Care Act
From a Review of We’ve Got You Covered, by Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein
She estimated that every dollar spent on the program was worth only 50 cents to beneficiaries, and that 60 percent of expenditures merely served to compensate hospitals and physicians for medical care that they had already been providing.
Source: Chris Pope, City Journal
The FDA is Increasingly Skeptical of Therapies for Rare Diseases
The FDA under Trump has consistently maintained its stated goal of removing bureaucratic obstacles to drug approval. FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, announced steps to speed the approval of new drugs, including allowing one well-designed clinical trial rather than two or more trials to show efficacy. Yet, drug companies continue to claim inconsistent guidelines, endpoints changed and a skeptical agency when it comes to rare disease therapies. Recently drugmakers have complained the FDA moved the goalposts, after agreeing to them.
Why Insurers Do Not Negotiate Aggressively to Hold Medical Prices Down
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health News reports that patients often are aghast at the prices of services and wonder why their insurers agreed to pay that much. Me too! I have told the story a million times about my wife almost scheduling a CT scan at a hospital near our home. The hospital had to seek prior authorization for the ($3,000+) diagnostic procedure. A day later the hospital called to say it was approved and her share of the cost would be $2,700. When would she like to schedule? My wife told me the story and within 10 minutes I found a facility with a BlueCross rate of $403.