Under Obamacare patient power has only gotten worse. In 2023 I paid nearly $8,000 for a health plan that required I spend a similar amount on medical care before it paid a nickel of my medical bills. The only health care dollars I controlled were the ones I took from my own pocket. Of course, that is how it is supposed to work in other markets. The difference is that government regulates risk. If I want a method to limit my risk of a costly, catastrophic health condition, I must buy Obamacare.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Thursday Links
- Cato: How Joe Biden engineered a 21 percent expansion of food stamp benefits.
- Economic study: Sales of Tesla’s electric vehicles would have been 67 percent to 83 percent higher but for Elon Musk’s politicking.
- Could Guam become our 51st state?
- The United States had 196,000 foreign-born doctors in 2000/01, which was 24.4% of all doctors in the country. By 2020/21, this rose to 291,000, or 29.7% of all doctors in the country. For nurses, the United States had 336,000 foreign-born nurses in 2000/01, or 11.9% of the total, and 736,000 by 2020/21, or 17% of the total nurses in the US.
- Interview with Sachin Jain.
- Hospitals are incompetent monopolists.
Does Your Doctor Need a Boss?
In my early days as a health economist, it became something of a fad for health policy analysts to argue that the U.S. health care system needed more vertical integration. Basically, your doctor needed a boss, who oversaw numerous doctors coordinating your care. I recall reading numerous articles with titles like, “does your doctor need a boss?” The Cato Institute published an article on the topic in 2009, as did many others.
Tuesday Links
- Community Health Centers serve one in ten Americans.
- Even though 90 percent of US prescription drugs are generic, the number of U.S. facilities producing generic drugs has fallen by 27 percent since 2013. (NYT)
- The “worst test” in medicine is driving America’s high C-section rate. (NYT)
- Rising housing costs since 1990 are responsible for 11% fewer children, 51% of the total fertility rate decline between the 2000s and 2010s, and 7 percentage points fewer young families in the 2010s.
- CMS: “The average Marketplace premium after tax credits is projected to be $50 per month for the lowest cost plan in 2026 for eligible enrollees.”