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Category: Cost of Healthcare

Monday Links

Posted on June 6, 2022July 25, 2022 by John C. Goodman

Biden’s fix for the “family glitch” would leave members of the same family in different health plans.

Banning menthol cigarettes may do more harm than good.

Treating drug use as a health problem instead of a criminal law problem is working well in some prisons.

Trustees: Medicare will be insolvent in six years.

Did the Biden administration secretly negotiate with foreign governments to obviate the intellectual property rights of Covid vaccine producers?

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Aging Colons a Goldmine for Private Equity Investors

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Devon Herrick

Private equity investors are increasingly buying gastroenterology practices. Around 1,400 of the nation’s gastroenterologists are employees or partners in practices backed by private equity. According to a recent whitepaper, acquisitions of gastroenterology practices by private equity grew by 28% last year. As one investment manager noted:

We are in the Golden Age of older rectums—from a supply side, at least. Elderly people will make up 20% of the population by 2030, and health care costs are projected to approach 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product—the highest in the world, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It would seem a boom time for gastroenterologists.

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Friday Links – 3 June 2022

Posted on June 3, 2022July 25, 2022 by John C. Goodman
  • Biden wants to reinstate the airplane mask mandate.
  • AMA wants physician pay reform: inflation indexing, but no HSA expansion or price transparency.
  • JAMA: hospitals are marking up the cost of cancer drugs by as much as 634%.
  • Three ways the government caused the baby formula shortage.
  • The Covid Health Emergency is over, but politics and pork are keeping it going.
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Can Medical Associations Gut the No Surprises Act?

Posted on June 1, 2022June 1, 2022 by Devon Herrick

The Arizona Medical Association (ArMA) is considering a state ballot measure to remove a key provision of the No Surprises Act (NSA), in order to boost fees of out-of-network physicians. The NSA is a federal law protecting patients from surprise medical bills, which went into effect January 2022. Balance billing is the term in industry parlance for surprise medical bills. Balance billing occurs when out-of-network physicians (who patients could not avoid) charge fees higher than what their health plans reimburse. Prior to the NSA, patients were responsible for any portion of out-of-network fees their insurers did not pay. The ArMA does not wish to gut so-called patient protections. However, the ballot measure would result in higher fees and higher premiums for consumers nonetheless. More on this below.

Surprise medical bills are unfair to patients and health plans alike. Health plans try to steer patients to providers who have agreed to specific terms and have negotiated fee agreements with a network. Selecting network providers reduces patient cost-sharing and in some health plans out-of-network care is not covered at all. Thus, patients have a strong financial incentive to seek care within their network.

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For many years, our health care blog was the only free enterprise health policy blog on the internet. Then, when the NCPA closed its doors, the health blog stopped as well.

During this five-year hiatus no one else has come forward to claim the space. So, my colleagues and I have decided to restart the blog in connection with the Goodman Institute. We invite you and others to use this forum to share your views.

John C. Goodman,

Visit www.goodmaninstitute.org

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